What does “boring” mean?

In what is probably a pattern for me, I’ve talked about how I was disappointed with Redburn even though there was a bunch of stuff in it I liked (my other pattern is to talk about stuff I didn’t like while saying something is good; this is how I get a reputation for ambivalence, I guess). So what was the problem? This is certainly blasphemous, but…it was boring.

It hit me when, after finishing the novel and preparing to blog about it, I was reading the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition by Harold Beaver*, which noted that the book is full of anticlimaxes:

The forward momentum is continually stalled: by Wellingborough’s failure to find his father’s hotel; by his failure to see the beauties of London; by his failure in the end even to be paid his wages. The quest is deliberately frustrated. Redburn moves from anticlimax to anticlimax as pastoral innocence is trasformed to experience, which means disenchantment and disillusion.

Still, does this even sound like something that would bother me? While I was actually reading it, I ascribed my boredom to the fact that this isn’t “really” a sea narrative. I should be able to explain what I mean by that by now, yet in this case I’m not sure. And my feelings are all muddled: sea novels and Bildungsromane are both grail quests, generally speaking, and I like sea novels, though not so much Bildungsromane… But anyway, I think it is all the hay-seed in Wellingborough’s hair; he is not a sailor and while he grows and changes he does not become a sailor. (Of course, he does, in fact—the older narrator is careful to tell us that this is only the first voyage of many. But that’s hard to imagine. More fodder for my post on the narration, really.)

With White-Jacket we’ll get back to a “real” sea novel, and I enjoyed it much more. Amusingly, though, I read complaints via Amazon of how boring it was—for basically all the things that make it (in many ways) a straight sea voyage narrative. This kind of story is anecdotal, and includes lots of portraits of singular characters and description of quotidian life on a vessel. So, no, there is not really a single unifying plot, or only a loose one of the voyage itself. But so much more charming to read!

*You’ll note that this is not my usual Northwestern-Newberry edition, because for whatever reason they haven’t published the reasonably priced trade paperback version of Redburn (yet). Hrmph. Of course, those don’t have introductions, and have very little material at all other than the text (unlike the expensive green editions), but I really like the covers and am into matching.