This was a surprisingly interesting (if long) read, which I'll summarize briefly here.
The essay starts with Jonathan Franzen taking offense with a reader accusing him of elitist writing, and turns into an overview of William Gaddis and his elitist writing. Franzen presents the idea that great fiction writing is great art, and great art may take some work on the part of the reader to properly appreciate. In this light, he talks about reading and appreciating Gaddis's impenetrable first novel, The Recognitions, which was "great art" but also a commercial flop. This failure forced Gaddis to take a 20-year hiatus before returning with a second novel, which was even more impenetrable, but which, thanks to some PR, achieved commercial and critical success. Franzen reviews this and the subsequent novels, none of which he was able to finish reading; his conclusions about Gaddis as a writer are basically summarized in the last paragraphs:
> Literary difficulty can operate as a smoke screen for an author who has nothing interesting, wise, or entertaining to say. You'll find not one reference (in Gaddis's own essays about writing) to the pleasure of reading fiction. [After] "The Recognitions," however, something happened to Gaddis. Something went haywire....he gave the grownup world one chance to recognize him. When the world, inevitably, failed this test, he took his talent to the archetypically phony work of corporate P.R., as if to say, "You'll never catch me hoping again."
My wannabe literati days are long behind me, but I suspect this approach to marketing literature (if enough of the "right people" say it's good, people will buy it like it is) still applies in force today. I wonder how people find actually good new literature, if none of the usual discovery avenues are trustworthy.
Target audience: "The elite of New York, the elite who are beautiful, thin, anorexic, neurotic, sophisticated, don't smoke, have abortions tri-yearly, are antiseptic, live in lofts or penthouses, this superior species of humanity who read Harper's and The New Yorker."
I used to know someone who wrote for that audience. She was fired for writing this:[1]
I took a course on Ulysses at Stanford Extension. All the students were people who wanted to be there, and I had a teacher who'd been teaching it for 50 years. You can't get a much more ideal environment than that.
This is the canonical Difficult Book. So I was hoping to have that elusive pleasure of finally cracking it. You can't call me unwilling.
Nope. I was unimpressed. I thought that stream-of-consciousness was novel at the time, but now it's routine. Showing how people's minds really work (fragmented): same thing, who cares?
Oxen of the Sun: the use of 14 or whatever different English prose styles to say the same thing: who TF cares? The teacher enthused, "He can do whatever he wants with the English language!" I thought, "Yeah, so what?"
So I don't think "difficult" is automatically bad, but it's not automatically good, either. "To what end?" is the question I'd ask.
My experience with Ulysses was just reading Dubliners followed by A Portrait of a Man then Ulysses.
I've always enjoyed reading classics and "arty" books, like buying works by Salinger, Plato, Pynchon, whatever. I'm by no means an impressive reader but I like just letting them wash over me. Like sticking a great movie on - maybe I don't know all the nuances of Stanley Kubrick but it's just a movie at the end of the day. You watch it. Reading, watching, listening to "challenging" or highly rated/influential art....worst comes to it, you don't really like it.
Anyway, Joyce literally wasn't aiming to write a difficult book. He famously said "this is for them" while gesturing towards the general public in Dublin. It's an ambitious novel and a misunderstood one, but it's a funny, goofy work with something for everyone. There's dogs, pubs and trad music in it
Finnegan's wake is genuinely an essentially cryptographic novel. But I'd honestly recommend anyone who reads a lot to read Ulysses
I can live with that. I'm not on a campaign against the book, except maybe to say, "Hey, if you don't care for it, there's nothing wrong with you."
I don't know the exact quote, but I think Joyce also said that it was just a funny book. I didn't find it all that funny, and especially, didn't find any of the three main characters at all interesting. But YMMV. Check it out.
Odd. I wasn't crazy about The Corrections, but it struck me as straightforward reading. Moby Dick, The Man Without Qualities, and Don Quixote are long, but to my notion very readable in a way that Remembrance of Things Past or The Golden Bowl are not.
I strongly feel this is off base, frankly I’m a bit surprised at seeing your objection. To be clear, I don’t intend this to have a tone of hostility, just confusion.
His post absolutely added value to this thread. If it was just the quote, then yeah I could kinda see it as pithy… but not really enough to make a fuss about.
What I actually see though is a perfect summary of the link following it, which I’ve not come across before and does a fantastic job of putting into words the almost instinctual disrespect/disdain I feel for certain types of writing. In fact I find it coincidently mirroring the recent thread on what the goals of open source
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39253117) regarding the question “are you actually accomplishing what you wanted to with your actions”. The answer here of course depends on if the authors want to convey ideas/emotion, or just want to display status with the literary equivalent of “bling”.
In short, I’m glad they dropped that link, and hope they are not discouraged from doing so in the future.
I'm not sure what the author really wants to tell me. Is it a reflection of himself, or a review of a book, a advert of an author, I lost interest as he lost interest while reading J R. Perhaps everything worth telling had been told already for that moment.
I wasn't dismissing though, it's a beautiful quote on the problem of hard-to-read books, from one of my favorite essays written by the creator of Hacker News. After I read the author's post I realized the quote elegantly sums up their frustration, and the essay is great "further reading" for fans of the idea. Not all short comments have to have a thought-terminating purpose. I also immediately replied to the short comment with a long comment of my own, but since the quote stands well on it's own I didn't want to combine my thoughts with it.
I can slog through hard-to-read novels. I can decrypt your linguistic puzzles. I sometimes write in a hard-to-read way, but never on purpose. The only people who write that way on purpose are imposters, who camouflage their lack of ideas in infinitely-interpretable word salads. I truly don't believe there is any idea, thinkable by any human mind, that can't be communicated in simple writing. It might take more words, since you aren't taking jargon shortcuts, but it forces you bring your ideas into the full sunlight to face judgement. In all that re-drafting work to communicate simply, entertainingly, and smoothly, the author is forced to improve their ideas.
> I truly don't believe there is any idea, thinkable by any human mind, that can't be communicated in simple writing
I have sympathy with this point of view when it comes to journalism, corporate writing, manuals and explanatory books. But novels (can be) more than that. Imagine a poem that followed your rules - yes, you could get the ideas across, but would it be poetry? It might be, but poems don't have to be simple - part of their joy can be their ambiguity, their multi-layered nature that tickles your brain without being direct about it.
Novels can have this aspect too. The English language is a rich, nuanced, complex thing and it feels sad not to be able to take it out for a spin sometimes. That doesn't mean being deliberately obfuscatory (too fancy?) but it does mean allowing the novelist to tell a story in their own way.
I think every reader has their sweet spot. I've certainly attempted to read novels that were too hard for me. I've read some where the prose was uninspiring. There is a happy medium which is readable and yet the language itself delights, stretches you just a little bit - where you come out feeling just a little smarter. The trouble is, everyone's 'happy medium' is a bit different... also that sweet spot can vary with time and mood. It's like music. Sometimes you might want something challenging, at other times something familiar and 'easy'
I'm right now reading Hitch-22 (Christopher Hitchens) and being, as you said, delighted by the language. Here's an example:
(the context is his first meeting with Martin Amis, a lifelong friend)
Lovers often invest their first meetings with retrospective significance, as if to try and conjure the elements of the numinous out of the stubborn witness of the everyday.
Now that, I admire, and yet I can't imagine writing it. The only word that's at all unusual is "numinous."
> truly don't believe there is any idea, thinkable by any human mind, that can't be communicated in simple writing
I don’t see why this would be true at all. Language is an extremely recent innovation, with most biological and conscious experiences happening nowhere in the vicinity of it. Also we know there are ideas that can be expressed in one language and not in another, largely due to the need for cultural conditioning (i.e. repeated firsthand sensory experience)
Here’s a trivial example: describe the color blue to someone who has never seen it themselves.
I never understood this statement about the color blue like it has been claimed that ancient cultures may not have known it because they were not able to reproduce it and therefore were not able to knowingly see it. It reads nonsense to me as the sky is blue. It is a good example but I think describing sensory experience is not that difficult or impossible, for example I have never tried cocaine, regardless I have pretty good idea what it might feel like. But imagine if your language lacks some grammatical concepts like future.
I added this nuance because it is very difficult to imagine somebody who (on Earth) has not seen the blue color. But it is still a good examples, as I have also admitted.
The essay starts with Jonathan Franzen taking offense with a reader accusing him of elitist writing, and turns into an overview of William Gaddis and his elitist writing. Franzen presents the idea that great fiction writing is great art, and great art may take some work on the part of the reader to properly appreciate. In this light, he talks about reading and appreciating Gaddis's impenetrable first novel, The Recognitions, which was "great art" but also a commercial flop. This failure forced Gaddis to take a 20-year hiatus before returning with a second novel, which was even more impenetrable, but which, thanks to some PR, achieved commercial and critical success. Franzen reviews this and the subsequent novels, none of which he was able to finish reading; his conclusions about Gaddis as a writer are basically summarized in the last paragraphs:
> Literary difficulty can operate as a smoke screen for an author who has nothing interesting, wise, or entertaining to say. You'll find not one reference (in Gaddis's own essays about writing) to the pleasure of reading fiction. [After] "The Recognitions," however, something happened to Gaddis. Something went haywire....he gave the grownup world one chance to recognize him. When the world, inevitably, failed this test, he took his talent to the archetypically phony work of corporate P.R., as if to say, "You'll never catch me hoping again."
My wannabe literati days are long behind me, but I suspect this approach to marketing literature (if enough of the "right people" say it's good, people will buy it like it is) still applies in force today. I wonder how people find actually good new literature, if none of the usual discovery avenues are trustworthy.