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“I see fiction as being divided into two categories. Work that confirms and celebrates and panders and work that confounds and perplexes and challenges."
This type of thinking is toxic, akin the bullshit aphorisms spouted by politicians ("you're either with us or against us") or smug VCs ("if you're not working 14 hours per day, you're not an entrepreneur").
It forces authors and audiences to contort themselves into this black/white view of literature that tosses anything that's not "difficult" into a pile that's not worth creating or reading.
Even worse, it encourages cargo cults. Conspicuous busy-ness. Jargonized writing styles. Watches that are expensive because no one wants a cheap watch.
The writer is observing something, but the causality is wrong. People read hard to read stuff because it's good. It's not good because it's hard.
Do you not see the irony in calling something toxic? Your not saying its merely wrong - but that its on par with poison.
The most interesting quote in the article:
‘Are you trying to reward the book that pushes literature forward the most; or are you wanting to select the book that you most want to push into the hands of people all round the world?’
That's a darn conundrum. An interesting problem. It's almost having to corrupt the purpose of the award in order to maintain its value. If an amazing work of literature requires a university education in languages just to understand, it'd be self-defeating to award it the prize because the prize then becomes of interest only to those with a university education in languages.
For the article overall, I feel like it can relate to any form of art by replacing specific books and authors with their analogies in other artistic fields. But then it occurred to me that literature / books / novels are adjudicated differently to music and film for example.
Literature awards are much less a popularity contest than music and film (movie) awards. Higher-brow by the fact that there's a higher barrier to entry (ie. reading).
Fundamentally, however:
We need difficult music. We need difficult movies. We need difficult personalities. We need difficult engineering.
Because easy is for the birds. Easy isn't progress.
I agree that film is a different beast than literature, but if anyone is looking for mentally and artistically challenging films, I recommend anything by A24 Studios (https://a24films.com/films). I would argue that we're seeing a small/low-budget film renaissance, A24 is evidence of that.
"Literature awards are much less a popularity contest than music and film"
The scale is smaller, but lit awards are as much a trade event indulging in the vainglory of supply-side driven trends, celebrity, fashion cycle...
As is often the case, the word "Books" is used when they apparently just mean "Novels".
Tristram Shandy difficult?! Strange. Would you call Monty Python 'difficult'? It is, however, hilarious, and still seems very modern, despite the first part dating from 1759. The humour is quite Pythonish, but goes further in every direction. Including mocking 'difficult' scientific and philosophical writers, real and imagined, on (probably) most of its pages. Very highly recommended. As is Sterne's second (and last) novel A Sentimental Journey, much shorter and less crazy than Tristram. The less that happens, the better it gets.
Plowing my way through Tristram Shandy at the moment, and I would definitely agree that it's "difficult".
Not so much the contemporary vernacular (though that doesn't help), but rather the discontinuous hyperactivity with which the author jumps back and forth between time periods and characters. It's also pretty long-winded and Sterne takes his time to labor his point.
It's definitely enjoyable, but it's not an "easy" read.
I think the goodness or badness of hardness hinges on the reason for the difficulty.
Sure, doing hard things is a good thing for satisfaction and character building. That doesn't mean a math book that's harder to understand is better than one that's easy.
I think Finnegan's Wake (mentioned in the article) is a good example. It's difficult and good, but for different reasons. Joyce was being expiremental. He wrote from inside a characters head, a POV style that's very common in modern novels. So, the expirement worked.
So, in a sense, it's hard in the way driving an early, expiremental car is probably hard.
Trying to read Joyce for entertainment is like trying to learn physics from "Principia." Cute, but probably a terrible idea. Reading either to engage with the history of novels or physics... this is why people still read these today.
People might get a sense of satisfaction frim the difficulty, but this does not mean we need people to write like Joyce or Newton.
There needs to be an honest reason for difficulty, and the problem with most difficult writing is bad reasons. Poor technique. Partially formed thoughts. Intentional obscurity. Orwellian use of jargonized dialect...
Finnegan's wake would have been a better work if it was written easier. The difficulty is a flaw.
it sounds like a parallel with the paradigm of essential vs accidental complexity in software design. A good book is one that minimises accidental complexity, a good+hard book is one that also has high essential complexity.
A guide to having fun with the wake: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rpeq91hK1Gk
But, on the other hand, the math books that are hard to understand often are better once you’ve got the skills to read them.
'written easier'?
Years ago I talked to the local head librarian about donating some programming books and stuff. She had requested that they can't be difficult or hard...
Part of the reason I patronize my library is because to me it is like a mental gymnasium, where all this great equipment there to test my intellectual flexibility and endurance, too tough? I go for easier, but I appreciate the hard stuff because at some point, I, or someone else will find them useful.
Yes, we all NEED access to difficult books (and old books before they refined the such subjects and made them so difficult), don't make our libraries and book shops into mere mental playgrounds.
And difficult newspapers! And difficult news!
Our journalist class has somehow got into this ELI5 routine, where they feel obligated to turn every complex subject into something a fifth grader can debate about.
I would've thought they request they're not older than a year; libraries and secondhand book shops / charities often have a shelf of e.g. Office 2003 for dummies lying around still.
Some books are timeless though; Tanenbaum, Knuth, etc.
Well easy books are difficult for a substantial minority of users.
This seems silly to me--if an idea or subject _is_ difficult, then so be it. If something difficult to read is worth it to somebody, then that person will read it. I don't understand the fascination with difficulty--whatever that means, as an independent metric. To me, the value of writing is the idea or set of ideas the writing expresses.
I think it is important not to boil fiction down into the 'idea or set of ideas the writing expresses' because if the author could so well articulate their 'idea' then wouldn't they be better off writing an essay rather than a narrative?
Instead, I think the fascination with difficulty is exactly this -- the idea that some ideas are amorphous and difficult to express directly, and that authors have tried (successfully and less so) drastic measures to try and, in their own way, do exactly what you said in your comment.
And there is something, for some, inherently interesting in the different contortions of text that experimental writers have come up with.
The issue I think is that difficulty and complexity get conflated: in an effort to simplify, they reduce both depth and difficulty, which reduces the total value of the subject. The problem primarily being that this conflation isn’t widely recognized, so usually efforts towards broader reach produces worse outcomes. Even worse, these efforts (stripping difficulty while maintaining depth) often assume their own success, and remove access to the difficult (and deeper) material.
You see this in software as accessible vs power users
Frameworks to simplify web development
Libraries do it gp’s example
Schools do it by simplifying the literature selection/ topic breadth
Etc
Anytime you have management without a minimum “gate”, the issue occurs, because the conflation exists but no one admits it, and with the goal of widespread accessibility, it gets further embedded each iteration.
In other words the quote “if you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it” is misread to “if you can’t explain it in six minutes, you don’t understand it”, and then everything gets “simplified” right out of existence
It seems a bit silly to me from the other angle, in that the author has chosen to write it in a particular way because that's the way they felt it best to convey their story.
I'm about a million miles from being an author, but I'm old enough that I have, what I would think, is a recognisable style that I'm comfortable with, and changing my approach would end up negatively affecting the quality of the writing because it comes less natural to me.
Authors will find their own level as much as readers will.
I think you're agreeing with the article if I understand your point correctly?
There was a recent post about a difficult book I'd never heard of, and probably won't read, but the article was fascinating.
I am 120 pages into Miss MacIntosh, My Darling because of that article. It is definitely challenging. But two or three of the (very long) sentences I've encountered are without a doubt among the most beautiful I've ever read.
Great article indeed – thanks for the link.
Somebody once said, "Bad teachers prepare kids for bad bosses, which they are likely to encounter." While I agree with that to some extent based on actual experience, taken too far it can hamper education. If you flunk math or English because of a bad teacher, it can set your entire education behind schedule. Perhaps make sure the difficult teachers are not in key subjects that have course path dependencies. Similar for books. (You will encounter poorly-written instructions in the work-place, which difficult books prepare you for.)
Random anecdote. I once had a terrible English teacher. I was transferred into the class midstream (for unrelated reasons). After my first class I went to my new teacher and said, "I really love writing. In the previous class the teacher was planning on having a creative writing section. Will we have one in this class?" At which point the English teacher replied, "Writing has nothing to do with English and only one teacher in this school thinks otherwise".
I was a bit disheartened, but as English was my favourite class, I decided to just enjoy the other aspects of the class. We had a midterm exam for which half of the grade was an essay question on a novel we had been reading. I admit that I wanted to impress my teacher, so I read the book over and over again, practically memorising it. When I wrote my essay, I was able to quote passages of it. I was reasonably proud of my effort.
Imagine my shock when my paper was returned and I received a 0 for the essay! The only comment on the paper was "Terrible". In tears, I went to my teacher and asked, "What's wrong with the essay? I studied really hard and even added a lot of quotes". The teacher seemed surprised. "Oh. You actually care about this. Well, your essay was badly written. The quotes were nice, but everything else was terrible. I couldn't give you any marks".
Very frustrated, I went back to my parents and complained. They read my paper and to their credit they said, "Well, I wouldn't have given this a zero, but it could use some improvement". Then they taught me how to write. I spent the next 3-4 months writing essays every day because I was so frustrated.
Fast forward a few decades and I still love writing, thanks to my parents. I have mixed feelings about that teacher. Truly, she was messed up in serious ways. She tended to give high marks to cute boys that she tried to chat up after class. She would also randomly form some kind of hatred for individual students and would do her best to crush them under her heel. However, she was the first teacher who ever told me that my writing sucked. All my other teachers were so focused on my enthusiasm that they forgot to give me criticism. Without my terrible teacher, my parents wouldn't have intervened and I think I never would have learned to write.
It's a weird world.
But what you need to do to bad bosses is fire them, or leave them. That's hardly what a school teaches you to do in case you end up with a bad teacher.
Yes! Thomas Mann was in the list of difficult books. I remember marveling how he set up a joke in Buddenbrooks 50 pages before springing the punchline. He's an incredibly disciplined and patient storyteller.
Who is your favorite 'difficult' author?
I've been very gently dipping into Proust for the last year or so: I find it hard to read more than a few pages of À la recherche... at a time (mostly due to the exhaustions of work and children), but when I do, I always enjoy it. Just the other day I realised I'd read a number of pages which did nothing more than describe a man waking up and getting out of bed; when I realised this, I laughed out loud at the preposterousness of it.
I've had Buddenbrooks on my Kindle for ages and I was just starting to think my German had improved enough to give it another attempt, but I struggle with that kind of thing even in my native language.
I think "difficult" is the wrong word. I think "challenging" is a better one.
In many cases, books (and other forms of expression/art) are acclaimed for being difficult -- but they're difficult for the sake of being difficult. There's difficulty but no reward. After having read some of these books (or attempted to), I think they're pointless.
However, we do need challenging books/art. Challenges are how we grow, develop, improve, etc. Something can be challenging without being difficult/impenetrable.
Also, challenges come in various forms: they can be stylistic (difficult prose) as well as moral or intellectual or political. (One common complaint I hear about fiction is: "I don't like the characters." Well, yeah, that's sort of the point: you probably wouldn't like a lot of people if you knew them.)
Some concrete examples:
Novels:
Joyce's Ulysses: I actually really like Ulysses. As a whole, it's a slog. But there are wonderful passages throughout. It's also very funny.
Wallace's Infinite Jest: same as above, often even funnier as the humor is more contemporary.
Films:
Malick's The Tree of Life: a wonderful, slow, all-encompassing film that doesn't rely on the conventional approach to narrative
I had a conversation once with a friend about a book I was reading. She asked what it was about, and I told her.
She said, and I quote, "that sounds like one of those thinking books. I don't like them."
I miss her.
The real important question: is it a good story?
Booker winners, in my experience have been often pretentious garbage masquerading as high art.
Examples:
Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam (1998) Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1991) Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils (1986)
While the Pulitzer Prize for fiction is American only, the list of winners is far more justifiable as prize-worthy.
While the Pulitzer Prize for fiction is American only, the list of winners is far more justifiable as prize-worthy.
Now that is an interesting thing for someone to say. Are you American, or do you live in America? Where that question is leading is that I wonder if you find American fiction more accessible because it's written by and for Americans, and thus you already have the context to understand and appreciate it.
This discussion has already been had and will continue to be had forever. See Why experimental fiction threatens to destroy publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and life as we know it[1] on this discussion since 2005, which is no doubt just a continuation of existing conflicts in the discussion of "what is literature vs what should literature be".
1. https://harpers.org/archive/2005/10/why-experimental-fiction...
The best way to write to convey meaning is to be as absolutely clear as possible, whether you are writing esoteric scientific papers or mass market non-fiction. This is why Yuval Noah is such a popular author - he takes complex subjects and makes them easy to understand without losing their meaning.
Literature may be different, but I still prefer fiction that tells its story without me having to scratch my head for hours.
Conveying meaning as clearly as possible implies direct, simple prose when you assume the reader shares a language game (per Wittgenstein) with you. Thus a theoretical physicist can communicate a fact about field theories to a colleague very directly, but that communication is hardly clear to a layman.
What do you do if what you are working on is meaning that doesn't fit the usual language game, and part of the work is seeing what varying the language game can do to meaning? Then there is no direct prose. There is a fabrication of an artifact that leads the reader experientially to this new language game in all its nuance.
Writing is an art, even non-fiction writing, and it is the art part that I work-on and worry most about in my own writing (all of which is non-fiction).
Difficult books, yes. That doesn't mean books without stylistic beauty or felicity. It doesn't mean books that have been poorly edited (IMO the largest failing in many books, which could easily be 25% shorter with better editing).
The most difficult books I have read were just bad translations.
Really getting sick of using the internet with all these cookie, gdpr, paywall, newsletter, and ad popups. Starting to feel much more drawn to getting most of my knowledge from (pop-up free) books.
Impenetrability creates an illusion of truth. The act of deciphering meaning produces the same endorphins as solving a puzzle. The end result of reading such a text is that you see something new from a different angle but that thing may not be real.
It is the catharsis one feels at the end of the journey of decoding an impenetrable text that may mask the fact that the core message is a lie. The bible is a good example of this.
Easy to read does not mean easy to write. I submit the best literature is a fairly easy read, but the construction is quite laborious.
All of highbrow literature and art is a million emperor-has-no-clothes scenarios.
Everybody is terrified to say that a book is drivel or a painting is just some random drips of paint, in case it burns bridges or makes them look unsophisticated.
The username matches.