In Praise of Difficult Literature
No one has ever convinced a friend to read a book by talking about how difficult it is. Check the fiction bestseller list and you’ll find cozy mysteries, spy thrillers, and sweet romances. We talk of “beach reads” or “airport novels,” books that exist to fulfill a specific function, rather than being valuable for their artistic quality. These books are not so brainless as to provide no mental stimulation, but they are books our minds easily process. Actions lead to reactions, the plot develops, and the novel eventually culminates in an ending that may not be altogether happy but is still satisfying.
Literature considered “difficult” has largely disappeared from the popular consciousness, at least in the English-speaking world. There were of course past equivalents to beach reads, but writers like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce were in their era prominent cultural figures. The average well-informed citizen was familiar with their work. This disappearance is unfortunate, as difficult literature serves an important function. It shocks us from our complacency and forces us to reckon with murky ambiguity that refuses to fit into our existing worldviews. Difficult literature rejects our attempts to reduce it to a simplistic series of messages and morals. It is a desperately needed antidote to the increasing prominence of online echo chambers that merely reaffirm what we already believe.
The typical reader these days only encounters difficult literature as a section of the literary canon we “have to read” for school. Even that phrase, “have to read,” implies a kind of obligation, as though muddling through Ulysses were no different from taking out the garbage or filing taxes. Say that you genuinely enjoy navigating through “The Waste Land,” and the responses you will receive will range from disbelief to a strange flavor of resentment, as though by announcing your preference for T.S. Eliot, you are implicitly scorning fans of Sally Rooney.
The tension between literature that seeks to entertain and delight and literature that at least attempts to make the reader stop and question the decisions made by authors is nothing new. When nineteenth-century industrialization and urbanization led to the development of mass-market commercial literature, a gap developed between those who wrote popular, if superficial, books and those who wrote serious, challenging literature for a smaller, sophisticated audience. The former group called the latter snobs, and the latter called the former hacks. Both groups were arguably right. The innate value of reading difficult works, books that were either formally daring or refused to provide tidy emotional resolutions, thus faded to the background, where it has remained.
Reading difficult books is not an assertion of cultural or intellectual superiority, though both detractors and supporters of it have viewed it as such. The truth is quite the opposite: delving into difficult literature requires no small amount of humility. These books do not offer easy reassurance about love overcoming all or noble heroes banding together to vanquish villainy. They do not provide moralistic lessons or endorse a clear set of values.
The likes of Pride and Prejudice or The Picture of Dorian Gray contain oceanic depths, but they can be simplified to basic ideas and messages. We can describe these novels in several sentences and believe by doing this, we’ve captured what the novels are about. Confidently, we can discuss these books with others and say that we “get it.” By “getting it,” we feel a rush of delight and satisfaction. Ambiguity disappears, replaced with clarity. We can return to our daily routines, assured that we’ve understood the lessons of the book.
There is nothing innately wrong with taking this perspective, but it reduces novels to lectures we must study or puzzles we must solve. What makes difficult novels important is that they make this kind of viewpoint impossible. This is not merely to say “The Waste Land” is more confusing than a Percy Shelley poem, though that’s true, but that the refusal to be reduced down to a few clear messages is part of the ethos of “difficult literature.” It is not incidentally difficult, but purposefully difficult. The author could have written the same story in a more straightforward way, but they chose to revel in ambiguity because of the obstacles it provides to dogmatic, superficial interpretations.
Wallace Stevens, in his “Man Carrying Thing,” argues that poetry “should resist the intelligence almost successfully.” Flannery O’Connor excoriates in her landmark essay “The Nature and Aim of Fiction” those who view fiction as a series of symbols to be unlocked in order to attain “an elaborate sense of satisfaction” and the feeling that they have ‘understood’ the story.”
What both writers objected to is the privileging of ease and comfort in writing. They lamented a literary milieu in which both writers and readers believed literature should provide clear, direct answers. Instead, they wrote difficult poems and stories. Defiant modernists, they cared as much about form as content, as much about how they told their stories as what their stories were about. They favored fractured narratives and ambiguity over precision and clarity. They refused to make narratives that could be reduced to a list of plot points and broadly defined themes that could be easily taught to a high-school English class.
Why would they do this? Postmodern critics like Raymond Williams, echoing the mass-market writers of the nineteenth-century, argued modernists prized difficulty because they wanted to insulate themselves from democratic mass society. There is partial truth to this sentiment. T.S. Eliot was an unrepentant elitist, and even Virginia Woolf received enough accusations of snobbery that she wrote an essay for her Bloomsbury friends playfully titled “Am I a Snob?” Yet to constrain discussions of difficulty to the binary of “elitist snobs versus commercialist hacks” ignores that the likes of Stevens and O’Connor chose to write difficult work because they sought to prevent interpretations of their art that simplify it to a few pretty ideas to which no reasonable person would object.
These writers forced readers to become uncomfortable and question themselves, to engage with the nuances of the work itself, to wrestle with the murky, even contradictory viewpoints contained within. When we lose difficult books, we lose that stirring rejoinder to complacency.
The Waves is not necessarily a better novel than Pride and Prejudice, but it demands more comprehensive engagement. It requires us to question ourselves as we question what we read. It makes us reconsider our pre-existing beliefs, or at least think about them differently. We could all use more of that.
Joshua Fagan is a writer and critic currently residing in New York City. His creative work has previously been published in venues including Daily Science Fiction, The Fantastic Other, and Columbia Quarto. He is the author of the Amazon bestseller The Philosophy of Avatar, an extended study of Avatar: The Last Airbender in the context of the Western philosophical tradition. As an academic, his work focuses on the intersection of literature, myth, and technology in the aftermath of Darwin, and his critical work has been published in The Robert Frost Review. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of the literary speculative-fiction publication Orion’s Belt. His YouTube channel has received over 1.6 million views.