Boredom and Bedroom: The Suppression of the Habitual

from Intumus: Interior Design Reader Edited by Mark Taylor and Juleanna Preston 2006 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Georges Teyssot

psychological ● 1996

Psychological disturbance, whether from disease, deprivation, or suppression of the comforting habitual and repetitious nature of everyday life, forms the subject of Georges Teyssot's essay. In this critical theorised historical account he discusses privateness and inwardness through painterly representation, in which the world outside the window is clearly distinct from the interior, the inner world of inner consciousness. Windows, mirrors and reflections acquire similar status when the mirroring of interior life, as an exaggeration of introspection, turns into boredom.

19th–20th century

Happiness enjoys itself completely only if it doubles its own image in the mirror of reflection. Happiness wants to be both subject and object: the subject of its object and the object of its subject. There is no happiness if one is alone; happiness must be shared, it needs a public. If there is no one else, one needs a mirror to reflect the self. The nineteenth-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, living in a small apartment, regarded the subject as the only truth and believed that reality consisted only of his thinking within his room. Anything that happened outside his window, any public representation, was merely an illusion – exactly contrary to what Hegel had been saying in Berlin. Kierkegaard was perhaps the first theorist of privateness, the first theorist of the inwardness that the German had defined under the word Innerlichkeit. This 'inwardness' is usually associated with the interiors of middle-class households, which, from a stylistic point of view, described the Biedermeier period between 1820 and 1850.

One might consider the watercolor Drawing Room in Berlin, circa 1820–1825, by Johann Erdmann Hummel, a contemporary of Caspar David Friedrich. During this period in Germany, a genre was developing within painting that represented the space between an interior and what is outside, seen through a window. Within this space is an 'inner world,' the world of the 'inner conscious.' Occurring in this inner world are both personal feeling and private thinking, moments traditionally identified by idealism as 'reflection.' Thus inner space becomes the space of reflection. In the seventeenth century, private space was often defined as the place of the relationship between an individual and God, the place of prayer. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this place was transformed into a space of intimacy. Intimate spaces, then, are those where the

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individual may have his own reflections and feelings. Were one homeless or without 'a room of one's own,' one could not belong to this world of reflection.

Hummel's painting makes a clear division between the interior and the world of things outside the window. The large room is like a box, on one side of which the viewer is situated. A mirror centered between the two windows reflects the closed door on the opposite wall, the wall where the observer, or the painter, should be. But the observer is absent. The viewer of the painting looks into a room that looks back at him through a mirror; but he does not appear. One might interpret this absence as an inclusion of the subject in the room. Because he is not represented within the room, it is as if the subject has become part of the room itself. One might also note the manifold reflections within the room: not only the reflection along the central axis, which emphasizes the general symmetry of its boxlike aspect, but also the reflections that occur among different mirrors. The windows, too, are reflected in the mirrors, by which an important transformation takes place. Both mirrors and windows, because they acquire the same luminosity and chromatic weight, become the same kind of object within this painterly representation. And, if the windows are mirrors, perhaps the exterior is a total illusion: there is no outside world. Here, the outside world is but a kind of representation. One exists only within this Innerlichkeit, this inwardness. It has been written that German interiors are ruled 'by the principle of mirroring and doubling.'¹

Consciousness is recognizing one's image in the mirror; but at the same time, as the individual approaches the self reflected upon the glass, the mirror fogs with one's own breath. The self disappears; an attempt is made to wipe the mirror, yet one cannot help breathing. The image is blurred by a covering mist. This interior refers to happiness, to protection; but it contains as well the seeds of boredom. Perhaps because it protects too much, this mirrored interiority leads to a kind of excess of interior life, an exaggeration of introspection.

The refuge of the interior apparently offered an alternative to boredom, as Benjamin described in his notes on the arcades of Paris: 'Boredom is a warm gray cloth that is padded on its inside with the most glowing, colorful silk lining. Into this cloth we wrap ourselves when we dream. Then we are at home in the arabesques of its lining. But the sleeper looks gray and bored under it. And then, when he wakes up and wants to tell what he dreamt of, he communicates often only this boredom. For who would be able to turn inside-out in one motion the lining of time?'² Perhaps it is possible to turn inside-out this lining of time, which is not only the arabesque of the box, but also the design of the carpet, of the wall, and of the reflection between the mirrors and the windows. To understand this relationship between the subject and the mirror, one might examine Léon Spilliaert's washed pastel drawing Self-Portrait at the Mirror of 1908 or observe Max Klinger's etching The Philosopher of 1909, from the series Of Death, illustrating the tense relation among the notions of interior, reflection, and introspection. These images might,

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in turn, be associated with the mirror in which Igitur, a literary creation of Stéphane Mallarmé, sees himself. Here, in one of his most obscure and interesting texts, the poet describes a collapse among the past, the present, and the possibility of a future. At the moment of his suicide attempt, as Igitur sees himself in the mirror, past, present, and future merge to form the pure time of boredom, crystallizing only at the instant of death: 'The understood past of his race which weighs on him in the sensation of finiteness, the hour of the clock precipitating this ennui in heavy, smothering time, and his awaiting of the accomplishment of the future, form pure time, or ennui.' As he dies, Igitur searches for himself in vain in 'the mirror turned into boredom.'³

Two kinds of experience have been defined: First is that of the dandy or flâneur, the man who has time to waste. He strolls in the streets, stopping at anything that happens, any event, any accident. The city and the crowd are a huge spectacle for him. Second, on the other side, is that of the philosopher, best personified by Kierkegaard, or the man within the bourgeois intérieur. Theodor Adorno called Kierkegaard the flâneur who promenades in his room: 'the world only appears to him reflected by pure inwardness.'⁴ For the philosopher, 'inwardness' and 'melancholy' are the constituents, 'the contours of "domesticity," which … constitute[s] the arena of existence.' Adorno continues: 'He who looks into the window mirror, however, is a private person, solitary, inactive, and separated from the economic processes of production. The window mirror testifies to objectlessness – it casts into the apartment only the semblance of things – and isolated privacy. Mirror and mourning hence belong together.'⁵ In Adorno's reading of Kierkegaard, one finds this remarkable connection between the mirror and the notion of boredom. (… p 53)

Notes

1 Ulrike Brunotte, 'Innerwelten/Inner Worlds', Daidalos, 36, June 1990, speaks of 'Prinzip der Spiegelung und Verdoppelung'.

2 Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, Rolf Tiedemann (ed), vol 5, bks 1 and 2, of the Gesammelte Schriften, Suhrkamp Verlag (Frankfurt am Main), 1982, bk 1, D2a, p 1.

3 Stéphane Mallarmé, 'Igitur ou la folie d'Elbehnon', Oeuvres complètes, Gallimard (Paris), 1985, p 440: 'Le passé compris de sa race qui pèse sur lui en la sensation de fini, l'heure de la pendule précipitant cet ennui en temps lourd, étouffant, et son attente de l'accomplissement du futur, forment du temps pur, ou de l'ennui;' English trans in Grange Woolley, Stéphane Mallarmé, 1824–1898, Madison (New Jersey), 1942, p 161.

4 Theodor W Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic [1933], trans Robert Hullot-Kentor, University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis), 1989, chap 2, 'Constitution of Inwardness', p 41.

5 Adorno, Kierkegaard, p 42, 'Spiegel und Trauer gehören darum zusammen'.

Georges Teyssot, 'Boredom and Bedroom: The Suppression of the Habitual', Assemblage, no 30, 1996, pp 44–61.

(Excerpt pp 50–3)

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