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Do We Mistake Inaccessibility For Brilliance? (7/11/21)
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Marc
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Jul 12, 2021 06:57AM
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I think Finnegans Wake is actually both. Inaccessibility for its own sake but also great fun.
I think The Sound and the Fury is initially inaccessible and thoroughly brilliant. You have to read it at least once just to begin to understand what's happening, when did it happen, who is saying what to whom, and when was it said. I must have read that novel at least 30 times. I still love it!
I would have thought so for Demons by Dostoevsky , if last two chapters were not ‘accessible ‘ to me . But it is a classic which never ceases to say what it has to say. Another such book is Ulysses which I hope to tackle in October this year.
Marc, your question made me think first about academic writing, which seems to derive value from inaccessibility, almost as if the more awful it is the better--obfuscation seems to be the way people choose to project erudition, just now.But I have a different feeling about creative writers who write difficult books. It seems to me they're writing their creative vision truthfully, and what we readers think about it, or how much we miss of it, isn't on their minds as they write. I think for the most part they're punished for it, either by not finding a publisher or publishing with a small press. The way Ulysses was first serialized in a very small lit magazine and then only found a publisher in Paris, I believe. (?)
I was expecting someone to say The Pale King or infinite jest
Depends on what's being considered acceptably inaccessible, and for what reasons. If someone shames others for not being interested in any sort of "Western" echelon of convoluted prose and endless references à la Women and Men, but also sniffs and sneers at works such as A Brief History of Seven Killings for being "written in dialect", it's less a question of inaccessibility and more one of status quo. Quality literature that pushes the boundaries of language and the printed page as creative piece doesn't stop being so just because the methods in which it achieves such don't conform to what typical readers are commonly trained to appreciate.
Aubrey wrote: "Quality literature that pushes the boundaries of language and the printed page as creative piece doesn't stop being so just because the methods in which it achieves such don't conform to what typical readers are commonly trained to appreciate. ..."Aubrey I've been thinking about your comment a lot, because any value placed on erudition and inaccessibility in literature does seem to bring with it an aura of white-maleness. But I hate to always be seeing things through a lens of race and gender and privilege so I was trying not to go there right away. Even so I was thinking of how inaccessible female writers are sometimes made fun of for their inaccessibility (Gertrude Stein and Susan Sontag come to mind) whereas men seem to have the balls to get away with it.
I'm reading at the moment a spoof biography of a major post-modern titan of literature Ezra SlefThe fictitious Slef (a white European male), is definitely one who correlates inaccessibility with brilliance:
The reader who comes to Slef expecting entertainment is in for a disappointment. The acclaimed author’s aims are far loftier than mere diversion. His objective is not to entertain or educate, or even to enlighten. His purpose is nothing less than to challenge the reader.
A lesser writer would have pampered to the whims of the public by making his work accessible to the point where it might actually be readable; not Ezra Slef. He has far too much in the way of literary integrity.
His is a style characterised by gargantuan sentences lacking in punctuation. Readers fall on the full stops in his work as eagerly as parched and weary travellers crossing a vast desert fall upon an oasis.
Slef hopes to one day write a novel so good no publisher will touch it with a barge-pole.
(has to be said the book is an affectionate dig at inaccessible writers - the author of the novel admits he is a big fan of many of them)
lark wrote: "I think for the most part they're punished for it, either by not finding a publisher or publishing with a small press. ."In the UK obvious novels there, both my female (but white) writers are A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing and Ducks, Newburyport. Both were deemed almost unpublishable - both picked up by the same two-person small press, Galley Beggar, and both went on to achieve huge critical acclaim and success in mainstream literary prizes.
In a sense small presses aren't a punishment here as a necessary conduit (although I know what you mean in terms of sales/publicity budget). Interestingly McBride (author of Girl Is...) parlayed her success into a publishing contract with a major, and had a slightly bitter split with her small press as a result, while Ellmann (Ducks) has stayed loyal.
Paul wrote: "In a sense small presses aren't a punishment here as a necessary conduit (although I know what you mean in terms of sales/publicity budget)...."Oh gosh, I can't believe I wrote that sentence about getting published in a small press = 'punishment.' Thanks for your translation of what I meant, Paul.
"Inaccessible" to me is closely aligned with the idea of "unreadable," at least in a metaphorical sense--that a given reader can't make sense of what's there on the page, that it's nonsense to them, and provokes frustration, and makes them feel like there's something wrong with them, or alternatively that they are the smart one and everyone who says they like the book is just pretending to like it.
I'm having all these feelings as I'm reading The Other Black Girl. Even if it's a summer blockbustery literary hit in the U.S., it's inaccessible to me, because nearly every sentence has a cliché in it that slows me down. And yet so many readers just now are delighting in this book. They don't seem to notice its inaccessibility. I don't think they're just pretending to like it but I'm feeling left out and strangely deficient as a reader. Seriously.
lark wrote: "Paul wrote: "In a sense small presses aren't a punishment here as a necessary conduit (although I know what you mean in terms of sales/publicity budget)...."Oh gosh, I can't believe I wrote that ..."
The Other Black Girl has several elements the make it difficult to access, they include the cultural and workplace elements includiing fashion and slang, but the big issue is the satire. Unless the humor and absurdity is translating, the novel won't work. For me it was a great read. Leone Ross's new work This One Sky Day has a similar accessibiity issue.
On the actual topic question, I agree with the initial question, which Marc worded so delicately, but I am not sure. It is a bad thing. I think it becomes an issue when we either elevate the inaccessible without question or elevate it while denigrating the accessible in all cases. Using Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury is brilliant. Sanctuary is not, though Sanctuary has reputation among the elite and I might be stoned for challenging that. And on my second point, I can agree with many of Bloom's criticisms of Harry Potter, but still find the series brilliant in its own way.
Sam wrote: "lThe Other Black Girl has several elements the make it difficult to access, they include the cultural and workplace elements includiing fashion and slang, but the big issue is the satire...."I'm really just reacting to the language. The writing pulls me out of the story. Personally, when I read many sentences in quick succession that have phrases in them like "Once she was sure the coast was clear" or "Her thoughts were cut short" or "Nella's heart fluttered" or "Nella groaned inwardly," or "Nella sighed and looked around aimlessly," or "Sophie rolled her eyes," or "Sophie tossed her head," then I start to feel the story is inaccessible to me. It feels like I'm getting poked with a small stick as I read along and it's difficult for me to keep reading.
I'm aware that most readers can read right over these phrases and not feel poked. The only way I can get through this book myself, though, is to underline a phrase that's bothering me--and then I can put aside the feeling of being poked, and move on.
I imagine this feeling is analogous to what other people feel when they're reading a book and they get to a phrase written in a foreign language they don't know, like the page of Greek in Seiobo There Below. (Which in my case also made that book slide into "hopelessly inaccessible" territory, and it was the page when I stopped reading!)
I like the way you put it Sam. I don't have too many issues with people appreciating and respecting a challenging book, even if I didn't get all the references or the brilliance of it (I'm looking at you Red Pill). But I really hate it when the industry deems really good, really accessible books as "less than." Similar to the way books with humor aren't respected as much.
Mod
So far...
WRITING STYLE
- Density
- Odd Sentence Structure
- Incomplete Sentences
- Little or No Punctuation
- Stream of Consciousness
- Strong Reliance on Poetry/Verse
- Lack of Chapters and/or Paragraphs
- Long Sentences or High Page Count
LANGUAGE/DICTION
- Words/Phrase/Whole Passages in Language Foreign to the Reader
- Large, Eccentric, or Antiquated Word Choice
- Niche or Narrow References/Vocabulary
- Over Use of Jargon/Technical Terminology
LAYOUT/STRUCTURE
- Extremely Large or Small Typography
- Complicated Jumps in Narrative Time
- Complicated Jumps in Reading (requiring the reader to bounce around the book, skipping and returning to sections/pages)
- Experimental Formatting (complicated use of color, italics, symbols, capitalization, acronyms)
Lark, what you're describing sounds like an allergic reaction to clichés! I once had a roommate who intentionally wrote letters back and forth with her sister where they both attempted to write using ONLY clichés. It was like an Oulipo constraint filtered through '90s America...
lark wrote: "Sam wrote: "lThe Other Black Girl has several elements the make it difficult to access, they include the cultural and workplace elements includiing fashion and slang, but the big issue is the satir..."I get you now Lark. I wasn't bothered by that in the book because I felt those clichěs reinforced her theme and that the originality was not in the individual sentences but in the overall plot structure. Rather than take up the thread with this, let's plan to debate the book in another topic if it is picked up for prize, but to clarify, I didn't realize you were considering clichěs as inaccessible.
What books receive the "oh you couldn't have actually disliked it you simply just didn't understand it" treatment and which ones get the "this book is pretentious nonsensical dribble and everyone who likes it is just mindlessly joining the 'emperor's new clothes' bandwagon" treatment? Things to consider.
Sam wrote: "I didn't realize you were considering clichěs as inaccessible. ..."I shouldn't have said 'cliché' because it's a judgment word, and what Harris writes is perfectly fine language, words in a line. Without any need to judge those words I can say that some of her choices jar me out of my reading flow, and in that sense, they make the book less "accessible" to me.
As Marc points out above, we're all defining "inaccessible" in slightly different ways. At the top of the thread I was thinking "inaccessible" had to do with an author writing at a level of formal education that is above most readers--a "how the book rates on the Flesch–Kincaid Scale" sort of conversation.
But then I began to think about how "accessible" and "inaccessible" in some contexts has to do with the language of disability. I'm autistic, and I read differently because of it, and it's in this context that The Other Black Girl is inaccessible to me because I can't not-see the phrases I mentioned above.
And then there is a whole other area where own-voices authors are choosing to add non-English phrases in their work without translating it--reaching out to one reading audience (bilingual people) while simultaneously making their words less accessible on purpose to another audience (English-only readers). That's interesting to me.
I've been trying to decide whether to chime in. I think I have some idea what Marc has in mind. But even with his taxonomy, we might disagree on what's accessible/inaccessible. And what's brilliant or not. (I'm also not comfortable with the word "mistake" in the question, but let's just ignore that for now.)I'm just going to make a few very specific, personal remarks. Multi-page paragraphs (and sentences) are tough for me (i.e., "inaccessible"). But there are books I love, and ones I don't love, that are inaccessible to me in this way. For example, I love Robert Lopez's Good People, which has long paragraphs, and I complained mightily when I read it. Then there are books with multi-page paragraphs that I quickly gave up on.
I think, ultimately it's all a matter of timing. I can only speak for myself but take Anna Burns Milkman. When I first read it, I found it difficult and a slog due to the writing but then when I picked it up 6 months later, I loved it and to this day I think it's one of the strongest Booker winners I've read. To repeat: True we have different ideas of the inaccessible/brilliance gap but I think it's all down to when you read that book and the circumstances.
It's also the reason why I don't like it when people create lists of things they dislike about books. One day you'll read a book with all those elements at the right time and that might change your perspective.
Mod
A lot of the literature I like has elements of that list I pulled together above.
There might have been a time when I was younger where I would think I wasn't smart enough for something if I didn't understand it, but I would say, now, it's more of a case-by-case situation. I haven't gotten past 3 or 4 pages of Only Revolutions (Danielewski) because I'm not ready to put in what I perceive to be a lot of work for a book that has driven many others nuts. I do think he's a brilliant writer, but I don't like all his experiments. Something can be complex, experimental, or extremely well-thought-out and still be a lame read.
FWIW, this question came from a now defunct NY Time column called Bookends where they asked two writers a question (you may see others of these questions stolen and used here from time to time). Zoë Heller and Leslie Jamison discuss their answers here: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/30/books/review/do-we-mistake-inaccessibility-for-brilliance.html
A Book I Found Difficult But Brilliant But I'm Not Sure I Understood It: Foucault's Pendulum
A Book I Found Difficult But Not Necessarily Brilliant: Ulysses
In the NY Time column, Heller rephrases the question as to whether "we overvalue difficult books"? For me, I would say, I probably do have a knee-jerk reaction to think that if something is difficult or somewhat inaccessible, it might have more artistic merit or lit value than something that isn't. It's not that I don't appreciate the simple, it's that I assume the harder one holds more possibility (like I assume a toaster with 4 buttons must work better than a toaster with 1 despite repeated experience mostly proving otherwise).
Margaret wrote: "New is also a fetish."Every time I see a similar statement, I feel bad for all those writers who have to slave away in obscurity for years, before they transition from "fetish" to being taken seriously.
I withdrew my earlier comment. It seems I was either misunderstood or loaded my statement with a word that did not serve to advance a discussion. I apologize, Marc. My view is that I feel it a danger to excessively elevate inaccessible works of literature, whether they have artistic merit or not. I realize art requires standards, but I think in working these out, an impression is created that people who want to benefit from art cannot because they don't get it or they can't read the less straightforward stuff or they don't have the time or the educational background to help them ramp up to such an understanding.
Quite brilliant art is also found in the accessible and the simple. If art changes lives, shouldn't we all have the chance to experience that and shouldn't artists who strive for that also know what they do is also important.
Marc wrote: "Despite us all defining "inaccessible" or difficult books differently, I think the question is really whether one assumes that because something is difficult or hard that it must have value..."Of the books Marc mentioned in that post, I think I gave up on Only Revolutions after <20 pages (and I loved House of Leaves). I don't remember thinking Foucault's Pendulum was difficult; my memories are of a fairly straightforward thriller, with lots of digressions into conspiracy theories, historical curiosities, and quirky characters. Sure, not everything was explained completely, but I usually appreciate the opportunity to interpret. But maybe open-ended narratives are considered "inaccessible" by some.
Perhaps I'll give Ulysses another try sometime.
Again, we probably all have different notions of "accessible" and "straightforward". But some relatively accessible and straightforward books that I've loved this year (that may or may not be "brilliant", haha):
Patricia Lillie, The Cuckoo Girls
Joel Lane, From Blue to Black
Isabel Yap, Never Have I Ever
No weird or overlong sentences! No narrative jumps! No crazy formatting! Ok, the Yap collection has some Tagalog words that are not hard to figure out in context. And there are details that are not (over)explained.
Margaret wrote: "Quite brilliant art is also found in the accessible and the simple. If art changes lives, shouldn't we all have the chance to experience that and shouldn't artists who strive for that also know what they do is also important. ..."Marc's question turned out to be more complicated for me than I thought it was at the beginning of the thread.
I've also been thinking about the strain of anti-intellectualism (in the U.S. at least) and how the feeling that some books are 'beyond me' prevented me, literally for decades, from even attempting to read Ulysses, Moby Dick, and War and Peace.
When I finally did pick them up (expecting it to feel like work to read them) I discovered that Moby Dick is full of nearly-slapstick humor, and Ulysses can be read joyously without knowing a thing about its deeper allusions, and War and Peace is a riveting page-turner with the best 'frat party' scene I've ever read in its first pages.
Margaret wrote: "Quite brilliant art is also found in the accessible and the simple...."Oh, Margaret, I also wanted to mention that what you wrote here was exactly what I was thinking as I was reading the first few pages of our August group read, Mr. Loverman. It's written in a deceptively easy style, including just the right amount of hints toward a dialect, and yet at the same time the writing feels so deliberate and artful.
I think it was Finnegan's Wake that my literature professor read out loud to us during a tea party at her house. I was ungrateful and spoiled, so I didn't have an appreciation for this. But it also felt so removed from anything I might be able to grasp. I loved Joyce's Dubliners which in and of itself is rather dense if one is trying to grasp the allusions. I also loved Portrait of An Artist as a Young Man.I think classics are classics because, over time, they do have a certain coherence, whether it be an internal logic, artistic vision, or something, but something about them makes sense though they seem to exist in some ineffable realm. They can reach past our logic-brain and touch something in the place where dreams live. I don't think stream of consciousness or inaccessibility has to exist in these works for this to kick in, but to me, great work has a way of marching right past our defenses and right into where our heart lives.
I think, over time, there may be general agreement as to whether some do not reach that standard, and though these works may be remembered for a generation or two, they may not endure. I'm not sure. I'm just talking.
I want to take a look at those books you speak of, Bill.
And now, I think I must read Mr. Loverman, Lark.I'm reading Thomas Man's Magic Mountain which does require more of me. I like having something like that in rotation along with other books, juggling "accessibilities" as it were.
Margaret wrote: "I want to take a look at those books you speak of, Bill. "Thanks Margaret. I should point out that the Joel Lane novel is heavily enmeshed in the '90s Brit indie rock scene. It's lovingly detailed and realistic, but might be a slog (or "inaccessible") if that's not your thing.
Margaret wrote: "I'm reading Thomas Man's Magic Mountain which does require more of me...."That's too funny--I'm also reading The Magic Mountain.
An interesting topic, because there are books that are made slightly harder to read by the style adopted by the writer. For example before Ducks Newburyport which took things to a new level, I read lots of Jose Saramago, who runs whole chapters into continuous single paragraphs (For example Seeing or Blindness). Twenty pages without any white space on the page is hard.A book I struggled to read was The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth where he recreated a language, a 'shadow tongue' of Old English, to make the book more authentic. It made reading inaccessible to me, even though I absolutely love this period of English history and studied Hereward the Wake as part of my history degree. When I see a writer I enjoy describe the book as "A literary triumph" I feel that I have failed. One day I will try again.
We are not all the same.
But that leads me to another thought. How hard we have to try to read a book or engage with it. Some books are 'light' and you can skim through and enjoy them in no time. Others are heavy going and we have to give 100% concentration to the words on the page to really understand and get the most out of them. Both such books have their place and I love both, but the latter wouldn't work on a train journey, for example, where there are frequent interruptions and changes of scenery that require us to jump in and out of the book.
So Marc, to your Taxonomy of Inaccessibility I would add the reader's frame of mind, distraction and concerns at the time of reading.
Marcus wrote: "So Marc, to your Taxonomy of Inaccessibility I would add the reader's frame of mind, distraction and concerns at the time of reading."Umm, how would the taxonomy even be meaningful with those additions?
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Umm, how would the taxonomy even be meaningful with those additions?"
I don't know if Marcus had this in mind, but I think it at least implies that it's a subjective experience. In my twenties I adored Borges, read most of his translated fiction and a good amount of nonfiction. I remember how thrilIed I was with everything he wrote. I recently wanted to re-read him after so many years and found myself puzzled that it just didn't resonate with me the same way and, moreover, I find some of his stories a challenge which was not the case when my younger self read him. Still can't explain it but it's probably, to use Marcus' words, that my "frame of mind" must be different now at least in case of reading Borges.
Bill wrote: "Margaret wrote: "I want to take a look at those books you speak of, Bill. "Thanks Margaret. I should point out that the Joel Lane novel is heavily enmeshed in the '90s Brit indie rock scene. It's ..."
I hope not to give the impression I don't like difficult. Au contraire. And I love rock, so...thx!
I was thinking that alongside Marc's list of Writing style, Language/Diction, Layout/Structure we also have ourselves, the reader, with all our moods and concerns. One day you can read a book and make nothing of it, while on another you will see perfectly what the author means.And yes, Vesna, we do change over time as well. Something that caught our mood and thinking at one time in our lives may no longer resonate at another.
That is the joy of coming back to a book a second time - will it have stood the test of time?
I like this, Marcus, which is why I prefer not to give up on myself if something that is considered one of the greats isn't jibing with me at a certain point. Also Vesna, Borges: Yes. His work does have a certain abstracted quality. I wonder how I would feel about his writing now.
Leaving aside "accessibility" (which as I've mentioned before, is a tricky term), Marc's taxonomy seems essentially to be a list of prose characteristics. Sure, some readers may consider a sentence to be too long, others may think it's not so. Of course the reader is an important component of the experience. But I would still have reservations about including the reader's mood etc in something like Marc's taxonomy.Now I'll be frank and say that I'm not all touchy-feely, everything is subjective etc, when it comes to books. There is writing that I consider just bad. But I tend not to be specific about this in public.
Being that literature is the humanities one sometimes tend to engage the self in reading and judging, and from the writer's point of view, writing. But yes, I suppose there are "prose characteristics" to judge, but it all does seem subjective for I see no scientific criteria here by which to measure anything. Ergo, some touch, some feels. Which is not to say there is no thing as practitioners of criticism. They shape the field, or at least give it direction. This is my take at this moment, though I'm open to criteria, a source for this, etc.
I don't want to seem difficult. I'm just not sure I agree that literature can become some field whereby everything can be mapped scientifically, with no subjective response and perception. Though yes, Marc's working taxonomy is fairly specific so I guess, applied on a scale, works would fall along these gradations of qualities. Still, these say nothing about the combined effects of the qualities on the reader or on readers.
Margaret wrote: "I don't want to seem difficult."Not at all!
This is how I'm reading Marc's taxonomy post. (I'm trying to sidestep what I think are the tricky issues, and stick to very specific and personal comments. At least in public :-))
Suppose a piece has several of the characteristics listed in the taxonomy (unusual sentence structure, narrative discontinuities, formatting weirdness etc).
1) Would I consider the piece to be accessible/inaccessible?
2) Do a lot of my favorite pieces have these characteristics?
3) Do I tend not to admire pieces that do not have inaccessible characteristics?
Margaret wrote: "I'm reading Thomas Man's Magic Mountain which does require more of me. I like having something like that in rotation along with other books, juggli..."When I was 20 I went on a bike trip down the west coast of the US and I brought The Magic Mountain with me because you never know when you'll have some down time. Needless to say I never opened it, but given the state it was in by the end of the trip, it looked like I read it 20 times :)
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I guess that’s payback for the onslaught of puns I torture her with.
Nadine: That counts, you read it! ha.Marc: Ok, that's hilarious!
Marc wrote: "I was talking about this question at the family dinner table and my smartass wife says, “Is an inaccessible book one that’s hard to find or one you can’t get your wheelchair up?""Hahaha... better add those to the taxonomy!
Mod
- Readers Who Have Short Attention Spans
- Readers Who Only Like to Buy Books Not Read Them
- Readers Who Are Easily Distracted
-Readers Who Have Very Small Vocabularies & Don’t Like Learning New Words
- Readers in A Bad Mood
- Lazy Readers
- Audio Book Readers (just kidding! Although it would be hard to reach these folks if layout, typography, or illustrations are key to the story)
- Readers Who Have Strict Expectations About Plot/Genre/Structure/Style
Meg: I thought so, too!
Much like Lark said early on, academic writing always seemed inaccessible to me and I think I did often mistake this automatically for brilliance (especially with French theorists like Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze… ).
Mod
:D
I tend to blame cultural values, weak educational systems, socioeconomic inequality, unhealth. Certain countries really do value reading and have national traditions based on books and reading books. Like Iceland, I believe? Around the turn of the new year? Anywho, I know you're joking. Fascinating topic. I'll try to be quiet now.
Marc wrote: "We can have a separate List of Inaccessible Readers:- Readers Who Have Short Attention Spans
- Readers Who Only Like to Buy Books Not Read Them
- Readers Who Are Easily Distracted
-Readers Who Hav..."
Readers Who Judge Other Readers :P
Mod
And I love randomly opening Finnegan's Wake and reading a brief passage or two, but no way I'm reading cover to cover.
For anyone wanting to give Ulysses a try with a little help, this annotated version from Columbia University is brilliant. It color codes the text so you can tell what's internal monologue versus spoken word, as well as who the speaker is. So it maintains the necessary stream of consciousness flow while decreasing the confusion. It also has hyperlinks for annotations which is far superior than trying to read along with a reference book. I'm sure there must be purists who hate this site. http://www.columbia.edu/~fms5/ulys.htm
I wish I could remember the book that had an introduction dealing with people's disdain for 'inaccessible' books. The writer compared books to jigsaw puzzles and those who love them. Some advanced puzzlers like to do super complicated puzzles with blank pieces, or nearly identical pieces, or a 3d structure. No one declares these puzzles pretentious or abusive, they just choose not to do them. And advanced puzzlers can certainly enjoy a straight forward barnyard scene as well.
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