Homage to catatonia

As a boy Josh Cohen was passive, dopey and given to daydreaming. Now a practising psychoanalyst and a professor of literature with several books to his name, he retains ‘a long and deep intimacy with lassitude and aimlessness’. Cohen believes the special affection reserved for pop culture’s fictional slackers, slobs and reverists — think Jeff Lebowski, Homer Simpson, Snoopy — suggests that humans are fundamentally inclined towards idleness: people are ‘as much given to saying no as to saying yes, as much to rest as to motion, as much to being as to doing’. Not Working: Why We Have to Stop explores the relationship between inertia and the life of the mind by revisiting the lives and works of several giants from cultural history. It is a curious blend of personal memoir, arts criticism, literary biography and psychoanalytic sleuthing.

Jorge Luis Borges once described Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane as ‘a labyrinth with no centre’, and Cohen suggests this may well have been true of Welles himself: that his preternatural bombast and legendarily prodigious work rate were sustained at the expense of a healthy interior life. He is more understanding about Emily Dickinson’s extreme reclusiveness, which he characterises as ‘a bid for radical personal and literary independence and imaginative freedom’. Her unconsummated flirtation with Otis Phillips Lord showed that self-imposed isolation could be a ‘means to the deepest expression of love, doubt and defiance’. In their differing ways, Welles and Dickinson exemplified a vision of what Cohen terms ‘pure selfhood’, sustained by an indifference to social convention.

Andy Warhol took apathy very seriously indeed. ‘Indifference,’ writes Cohen, ‘insinuated itself into his gaze, his voice, his comportment: in the texture of his everyday being.’ His blithe, aestheticised rendering of mass media’s mind-numbing effects — encapsulated in his customary refrain: ‘Who cares?’ — anticipated the desensitising overload of today’s 24-hour rolling news.