The Grave (1981)

Approaching Charles L. Grant (1942-2006)

“There were shadows here in broad daylight that he did not like to see.”

The Grave

Readers unfamiliar with The Grave may prefer to read these notes only after reading the novel.

[....] In both the Freudian and the Marxist traditions (for the second, Lukacs, but also Sartre's discussion of "stupidity" in Journal of the Phony War), "boredom" is taken not so much as an objective property of things and works but rather as a response to the blockage of energies (whether those be grasped in terms of desire or of praxis). Boredom then becomes interesting as a reaction to situations of paralysis and also, no doubt, as defense mechanism or avoidance behavior. Even taken in the narrower realm of cultural reception, boredom with a particular kind of work or style or content can always be used productively as a precious symptom of our own existential, ideological, and cultural limits, an index of what has to be refused in the way of other people's cultural practices and their threat to our own ratio…