Book Discussion Time!!!! ON DIFFICULTY.
So, dudes, as I wrote in another thread, my final year dissertation is on difficulty in literature.
This has very very rarely been tackled before. George Steiner wrote an essay on difficulty, but apart from that and a few books on pedagogy, not much has been written on the subject.
Therefore, I'm starting almost from scratch. I wrote a draft of my introduction, which I'm posting here, even though it's a bit raw. You know you don't have to read it. The reason I post it is so that if you don't really know what I mean by difficulty in literature, the introduction to my dissertation should clear that up for you a little bit.
Now, what I want to know is what YOU think makes a text difficult. Sine Qua Non, a new member who's made some good contributions to the book club, has some interesting things to say about the difficulty of Ulysses, for example. I'd like to know which other novels you found difficult, and why.
Here's the introduction.
What makes a text difficult? Surely it is not sufficient to use certain formulas, like the Flesch-Kincaid index, to determine that elusive thing called “readability”; nor is it enough to say that there are “easy” texts and “difficult” ones and to assume that it is purely a matter of the reader’s education or intelligence that affects his response to a given text. Some argue that difficulty is little more than a social construct , enforced by educational establishments. This seems an insufficient argument on many grounds, some of which will be presently discussed. The notion of difficulty is an important one, since it permeates all of literary studies; yet there is a surprisingly modest literature on the subject. Arguably the most enlightening elaboration of the concept is found in George Steiner’s little-known book, On Difficulty and Other Essays. There are others; but as will be argued here, they each provide an approach to difficulty which, for one reason or another, seems unsatisfying. Writing about difficulty is in itself difficult, and it is little wonder nobody has succeeded in giving a complete answer to the problem of what makes a text “hard”.
To begin, then, it will be useful to consider some of the approaches taken to difficulty in the small body of literature dedicated to its exploration. Wallace Chafe, taking a purely linguistic interest in the topic, includes the following categories in his anatomy of the difficult: readability, ease of processing, differences of language and culture, interruptions in information flow, problems with reference, and paragraphing. As Steiner claims, it is often something other than conceptual difficulty that people complain about when they say a text is difficult. The language used can easily be considered “difficult” if it is not a kind of spoken writing, or the type of language employed in everyday speech. Yet Chafe’s essay is particularly good at showing that although linguistic difficulties play a major role in a reader’s reception of a text, they are not the only factor at work. “Language has many dimensions, and it surely would be wrong to view ease of processing as a goal that overrides all else.” Literary value clearly does not correspond directly to the ease with which one processes a text. If that were so, then one would be able to argue that Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare are of greater value than the actual plays of William Shakespeare.
Chafe’s claim that there is an “obvious and demonstrated commercial, not to mention political, value in being able to say that one piece of writing is more readable than another” is interesting, insofar as it highlights some of the ways in which Western society has evolved to strive for simplicity in communication. When trying to explain what I aim to do in this essay to a friend, for instance, I am tempted to simplify my argument in order for him to “get the gist” of things, and, if he declares himself interested, I feel more comfortable letting him in on the complexities of my argument. This is, supposedly, good pedagogy. The West, and the English-speaking West in particular, has little patience for the esoteric. Still, “ease of processing is not to be confused with literary value.” Some authors and philosophers have purposefully avoided the pedagogical clarity so cherished in the analytic tradition. Their motivations may be legion, but some commonalities exist. Jacques Lacan is undoubtedly one of the more “difficult” French thinkers of the twentieth century, and Thomas Pynchon, arguably America’s foremost literary problem child, writes novels so erudite that voluminous guides have been written to help the first-time reader of novels such as Gravity’s Rainbow. What Lacan and Pynchon have in common is their refusal to allow their readers easy access to their ideas. This can be infuriating, and some, like Sokal and Bricmont, decry Lacan’s work as little more than an orgy of obscurantism carrying little intellectual weight. More on this later. For now let it suffice to explain the goals of this essay. There are two main tasks at hand. The first is the most straightforward, and consists of a dissection of the various facets of the concept of “difficulty” in literature. This means pitting the few thinkers who have dealt with “difficulty” against each other, to see if it is possible to arrive at a solid definition of the term. This will have to involve a certain amount of pedagogy, not least because almost every book written on difficulty is meant to be used in a didactic context. The second task involves a close reading of some parts of Pynchon’s work, particularly Gravity’s Rainbow; for the novel is so overwhelming and resistant to interpretation that it serves as a perfect example of a difficult text.
thanks for sharing.blackhawk tactical pants.
— Spambot
"I could have done worse!" exultantly cried the murderer Lebret, sentenced at Rouen to hard labor for life. — Félix Fénéon
This sounds promising. It's an idea that I've given some thought, though not in any really systematic way, and usually with regards to writing, not reading. However.
Difficulty is hard to define. I agree that Pynchon is one of the more difficult English-language writers going, and probably the most infamously so. That said, the more I read of him, the easier it's gotten to read him. So perhaps there's a sort of learning curve aspect to the difficulty of a work or an author's oeuvre? Maybe part of difficulty is the time it takes for a new reader to get acquainted with the writing style.
I like the assertion that difficulty does not equal literary merit. I've been on a massive noir fiction kick lately, and most of that is very easy to read (though David Goodis is probably the most difficult I've come across), though I'll argue to the death that the best of the genre has at least as much literary value as "canonical" works (and, given my intentions of being a professor at some point, the arguing to the death part is probably going to be exactly what happens).
More as it occurs to me.
Having said that, I'd at least like to hear what you arrived at as your working definition of "difficulty", and I'd love to read this full paper.
I can't post the full thing yet, because there's a lot of work to be done, but here's some of the work I've done towards defining the concept. Obiesly not much of this will actually go INTO in final product, but it's a start.
“There is more”: Resistance in the story
Hazard Adams suggests that the history of difficulty in literature begins with the very first interpreter. Biblical stories, Homeric epics and other ancient texts already present us with many problems. What is meant to be literally “true” and what should we view as allegorical? How to interpret Jesus’ parables? How do literality and allegory work with or against each other? These questions are as much philosophical as they are literary. The first thing to note is that allegory, unlike literality, is resistant: that is, it “refuses” to allow easy access to its “truth”, if indeed it contains any truth at all. When we deal with allegory in a sophisticated way, we are operating on at least two levels: first, we are processing the words in a way that allows for a narrative to occur in our minds in a manner prescribed by the text, and second, we are wondering just what this narrative actually means. It isn’t a simple matter of reading and grasping; the words themselves “resist” easy interpretation, but promise to yield worthwhile surprises once deciphered.
Resistance, then, is a foremost feature of allegory, and one of the faces of difficulty. “Easy” texts surely would not allow for such a plenitude of interpretations. If the Bible were easy to read and to understand, it is doubtful that so many divergent opinions would exist as to what the Bible’s message really “is”. Discussing the Bible, Hazard Adams claims that “readers have over the centuries developed complex interpretations that have frequently been based on the assumption that there is in the text more than meets the eye.” To take only one of the most obvious examples: on a literal level, the story of the binding of Isaac is about a father who is ordered by God to murder his own son, and who sets off to do so in what can only be called a soulless way. In other words, in quite literal terms, Abraham is basically a murderer. Yet an entire collection of books, to which Kierkegaard is an important contributor, exists to point out the many allegorical readings that could be made of the story of Isaac. The idea that there could be more to the text than the text’s immediate content itself is a potentially dangerous one: once we begin to think beyond the literality of the text, where do we stop?
“What?”: Resistance in the words
Sometimes we read a text whose meaning appears to elude us entirely before we can even reach allegorical thinking. Let us peel back the layers a little bit and focus on the difficulty we face when dealing with a text whose syntax and vocabulary are so complex that we cannot even make sense of the words themselves. This type of difficulty is also one of resistance, but this resistance is one that can be overcome through careful reading and dutiful research: in other words, the ease with which we can process a text is one that can be enhanced through practice. It is for this reason that unlike allegorical thinking, the thinking required to destroy the difficulty of mere reading relies less on imagination and more on intellectual rigour. The following extract from The Illuminatus! Trilogy exemplifies the kind of text which could be called “superficially” difficult, but not conceptually so:
“When the Pineal Eye opens — after fear is conquered; that is, after your first Bad Trip — you can control the energy field entirely,” Simon went on. “An Irish Illuminatus of the ninth century, Scotus Ergina, put it very simply — in five words, of course — when he said Omnia quia sunt, lumina sunt: ‘All things that are, are lights.’ Einstein also put it into five symbols when he wrote e = mc2. The actual transformation doesn't require atomic reactors and all that jazz, once you learn how to control the mind vectors, but it always lets off one hell of a flash of light, as John can tell you.”
Someone who knows little to nothing about the beliefs Descartes held concerning the pineal gland, nor about the Illuminati, the numerological Rule of Fives, Latin, Einstein, and vectors, will have trouble understanding this passage. The same is true if he doesn’t understand colloquial expressions such as “all that jazz” and “one hell of…” But give him an encyclopedia and a bit of time, and the baffled reader should be able to understand, at least, what references are being made. The first veil of difficulty will have been lifted. Then it is simply a matter of placing the passage in context and following the storyline: determining who “Simon” and “John” are, and so on. As we will see when we discuss Gravity’s Rainbow, part of eliminating the incredible difficulty of reading Pynchon’s novel involves becoming acquainted with the innumerable allusions to popular culture, history, high and low art, literature and religion that Pynchon makes throughout the text. Once our homework is done — “Homework which is, in a real sense, interminable, as there is always more to look up…” — we can proceed to the more rewarding task of figuring out just what the story is about.
The above example is not particularly hard to read in a syntactical sense; but the following one, from Henry James’s novel The Ambassadors, certainly could be considered it:
They remained with him, these words, promising him, in their character of warning, considerable help; but the support he tried to draw from them found itself on each renewal of contact with Chad defeated by something else. What could it be, this disconcerting force, he asked himself, but the sense, constantly renewed, that Chad was — quite in fact insisted on being — as good as he thought? It seemed somehow as if he couldn't but be as good from the moment he wasn't as bad. There was a succession of days at all events when contact with him — and in its immediate effect, as if it could produce no other — elbowed out of Strether's consciousness everything but itself.
All those commas, all those parallelisms: James’s prose is so far removed from normal speech that unless we are well acquainted with high style, we are likely to struggle with it the first time round. Steiner puts it succinctly: “Lexical resistance is the armature of meaning” guarding the text from “the necessary commonalties of prose.” Still, this kind of resistance is no doubt the easiest to surpass: “Do your homework.” Practice is essential to the art of reading, and the feeling of having “mastered” a text is unique and one worth striving for. The trick is not to “fight” the words — this would be a stupid and unwinnable battle — but to allow oneself to be pushed along with them, once the proper research has been done and every word makes sense in its relation to every other word. This “superficial” difficulty is no doubt the most common. To read and to understand Shakespeare one must know the basics: blank verse, historical background, the definitions of archaic words… Likewise with James, the reader must acquaint himself with the text in rough terms before being able to appreciate its subtleties. There is satisfaction to be found in the working-through of a text, in the discovery of its inner logic. Highly pedantic though it is, the process of mastering “superficial” difficulty is often rewarding, provided that the text in question is more than a mere amalgamation of allusions, lexical ostentatiousness and fancy imagery with no point other than to astound the reader into bewildered submission.
“Nonsense”: Ideas that make no sense (at first)
If “superficial” difficulty is the enemy of ignorance, then “deep” difficulty is overcome through the dialectic. Consider the following, lifted from Lacan’s Ecrits:
Le désir est ce qui se manifeste dans l’intervalle que creuse la demande en deçà d’elle-même, pour autant que le sujet en articulant la chaîne signifiante, amène au jour le manque à être avec l’appel d’en recevoir le complément de l’Autre, si l’Autre, lieu de la parole, est aussi le lieu de ce manque.
[Desire is that which manifests itself in the interval that demand excavates just shy of itself, insofar as the subject, who articulates in the signifying chain, brings forth his lack of being with his call to receive the complement of this lack from the Other, if the Other, the site of speech, is also the site of this lack.] (my translation)
We cannot be faulted for wondering just what on Earth any of this means. This is “deep” difficulty, which creates the kind of resistance that even the most erudite of us cannot but find a little baffling at first. Not only is the syntax needlessly convoluted, but the conceptual difficulty in this passage is so great that it is no surprise that Lacan is often called impenetrable. There is, first of all, the curious use of metaphor (“the interval that demand excavates just shy of itself”) that “could” (let’s use this word carefully) have been avoided for the sake of clarity. Secondly, there is the sheer complexity of the argument. Lacan, as those familiar with his thought will have understood, is saying here, firstly, that a subject who demands necessarily signals a certain neediness; secondly, that this same subject hopes to find what he believes he needs in the Other; and thirdly, that the Other itself is lacking. Okay, one might say, but why make everything so difficult? In truth, one is right to wonder why Lacan could not have simply stated at least some things in layman’s terms, to minimize the use of jargon and encourage familiarity with his thought. To Sokal and Bricmont, he is a charlatan, and they note that his writings, over time, became “increasingly cryptic — a characteristic common to many sacred texts — by combining plays on words with fractured syntax; and they served as a basis for the reverent exegesis undertaken by his disciples.” This is a little harsh; but their criticism is a good example of the impatience with which even intelligent people can greet a “difficult” text.
thanks for sharing.blackhawk tactical pants.
— Spambot
"I could have done worse!" exultantly cried the murderer Lebret, sentenced at Rouen to hard labor for life. — Félix Fénéon
All of Joyce's stuff tend to blur for me, which one is the one he's supposed to have written badly on purpose again?
Anyways, a "difficult" book, i would think, is just one written in an unconventional way. To where you have to read between the lines, so to speak, to decide what's going on or what the characters intentions might be. It's a way for an author to make the reader come around to his way of thinking instead of aiming a story towards the reader's way of thinking.
I don't think I've ever read anything i'd consider to be difficult. A lot of people seem to have trouble with Moby-Dick, with the archaic and fanciful style it's written in, but, man, that thing just poured off the page for me like poetry. And I hate poetry. But reading that book made me realize why people get all googly-eyed for poetry.
I like this definition you're defining. Seems quite reasonable and spot on.
Hard to say which books i thought were particularly difficult. Ulysses comes to mind. The Waves by Virginia Woolf. Only Revolutions seemed nonsense until you get about fifty pages into it and everything just kind of makes sense. Usually the difficulty is all the fun of reading the book. The Book of Lazarus by Richard Grossman contains a seventy page sentence fragment which is probably my favorite piece of writing in the history of forever.
"Difficult" just seems another way of saying a puzzle. Where putting it all together is more of the point than just the story presented.
There are some books that almost beg a lifetime of study and interpretation. Those treasures of philosophy and literature which are considered difficult are usually the books which continue to give on multiple readings.
Is the difficulty in the work required of the reader? Your notion of resistance was also curious. A reader develops a resistance to a work when they are confronted with the difficulty. However, I suggest an alternative view of resistance. Resistance to the idea that those who write difficult books have a level of intelligence above the average reader. Many people who are turned away from reading by being intimidated by hard texts develop the opinion that they are perhaps not as intelligent as the author. Resistance to letting authors "get away" with intellectually bullying. Resistance to difficult texts by analytic reading and critical exegesis of them.
Another difficulty arises when a reader begins seeking out help with understanding texts. Lets be honest, people make careers and write volumes on these texts, and not everyone enjoys competition.
"For I know that all things have their price especially when they are advertised as being free."
- Bukowski
Great job and I would like to read the paper when you are done.
I would say that a great many books are 'difficult' when the reader first picks the book up but that the 'difficulty' is excused (forgiven?) once the reader gets a sense that the work being put into the reading is worth the effort. "Crime and Punishment" immediately comes to mind.
Of course, once a reader realizes that the input/output ratio is not in the reader's favor, a book becomes more difficult. Rivka Galchen's "Atmospheric Disturbances" would be, to me, an example of a truly difficult book. Galchen's writing style itself was difficult but served the ongoing mental decline of the character. I guess I would call that 'appropriately difficult'. But Galchen, an M.D., used her medical background to push the story. This left me feeling that the amount of side work I needed to truly follow the author was not worth the effort.
Love,
Joe Tonigh
you can use my "baby food" metaphor (about how you don't give young/new readers particularly dense books to start out, but, instead, build them up with the proper diet of good books to where they can then appreciate difficult books later)if you want.
This is extremely fascinating to me. Personally, I enjoy reading the occasional book that requires study guides or some form of outside explanation. I think it engages your mind on several levels at once, keeping you intensely aware fo the book, so that you're almost "experiencing" it rather than reading it. It's one of the reasons I love epic theatre, Brecht in particular. Rather than being obtuse, it's almost as if the author is doing his best to get out of your way and encompass you in the world of ideas.
Having said that, I'd at least like to hear what you arrived at as your working definition of "difficulty", and I'd love to read this full paper.