Out of all the indifferences

Difficult writing in novels and poems

BDM has a typically excellent piece about the question of reading difficult novels. Some of the piece is about internet discussions (someone said something on Twitter about Toni Morrison) but the real interest is the topic of what counts as “fun” or “pleasure” or “difficulty” in reading.

What I would not say, though, is “Ulysses is not hard to read.” Some parts of Ulysses are not hard to read once you catch the rhythm and some parts remain hard to read even once you know what’s going on. And that’s fine. Being easy to read is not the only virtue a book must possess to be enjoyable. If something is not easy to read, that is not a sign that the reader is stupid. Sometimes it is the knowledge that you will need to return to a text over and over that forms the basis of your enjoyment. You are encountering something that cannot be grasped in a single experience.

The idea of “not being grasped in a single experience” is essential to literature.¹ That sense of coming to something new in the world, something not quite within your comprehension, or, as writers are always saying, not quite within the capability of language to express, is a significant part of what literature is doing. This idea of tacit awareness is explicitly present in writers like Henry James, and it offers a much more comprehensive account of what literature is “doing” than the idea of defamiliarization (at least in Shklovsky’s initial account: he saw the light later in life). Literature, almost by definition, works at the edge of what we can understand. It puts us in the place where words don’t quite work, where we feel the ache of memory, sensation, desire, tantalising possibilities of understanding, of words making us aware of something previously unthinkable, like Desdemona listening to Othello—she swore ’twas strange, ’twas passing strange.

To some people, that feeling is enticing. To some sub-set of those people, that enticement leads them into raptures about The Golden Bowl and The Wings of the Dove. To others, this is beside the point. (This is similar to Lewis’ arguments about science fiction and fantasy in, I think, An Experiment in Criticism.) I suspect that everyone has some margin at which this feeling is enticing—and The Wings of the Dove is not, on any given day, going to be that margin for the median reader—and that the generalised arguments are off-putting, and pointless, because they don’t get at the fact that everyone has a different level of appreciation for this sort of experience. The woman who rolls her eyes whenever James gets “Jamesian” in Portrait of a Lady (i.e. at the sections he revised—to my mind, almost the only interesting parts) will nonetheless be attracted to, for example, Arthur Waley’s translations of Japanese poetry or the work of Robert Hass.

I mention poetry because it is there that we are most likely to meet “difficulty”. There is no single reading of a poem. We cannot be done with it in a single pass as we might with a novel. (I don’t mean later re-reading, but the initial or single encounter.) Even a joke poem, a limerick, a short form, a couplet, requires more than a single read: it lingers and echoes in memory. Something about itself is always drawing our attention. Most verse is dross because it lacks this quality, not for any merely formal reason. When I first read ‘Filling Station’ I did not understand it in a literal sense. Some barrier existed because it is American and the lingo was obscure; some words needed looking up; some of it is simply difficult, not the sense that it is hard but in the sense that you must mull it before you “get” it. Not all difficulty makes itself known on the surface.

Late James is poetry in this sense. There is this sort of poetry in the heart of Austen, too, whose sentences roll in our minds. Not poetry in the way Dickens drops into pentameter, but in the lilt of her prose that becomes almost like the long lines of the Psalms. The family of Dashwood had long been settled in the country of Sussex. Their estate was large, and their residence was at Norland Park, in the centre of their property… We might hear Cowper behind this as well as Addison. We might have to read the novel several times before we think to ask why it matters that the residence is in the centre of their property.

Austen can be read as an easy novelist or as a difficult one, not difficult in the way Joyce is difficult, but not easy in the way Wodehouse is easy. Some novels have their difficulty submerged, like Brideshead, which I read three times through on first encounter. Just as the first time we read a great poem and it will require lots of attention, so we might need to read a novel that looks easy. But the “standard” way of reading a novel is straight through, maybe going back a little, but mostly linear. If we rate literature according to pleasure, the more linear the better. Zing! So when people discuss difficulty, a lot of their arguments might depend on how “poetic” they like their literature.

For some poets, like A.R. Ammons and Wallace Stevens, keeping you in the state of difficulty is almost the point. To reach a full explanation is almost to miss the point—these poets are trying to put something into words that cannot, fully, be expressed. The sense of difficulty should be where we understand that. We will only ever be able to get so close to reality through words. After that, we must accept the sensation of difficulty as the next best thing—the next true thing—

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one...
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.

1. I have my own gripes with the idea of “reading for pleasure”—it begs the question of what we mean by pleasure.