Does Brilliance = Inaccessibility?
Wait a minute: are these difficult poems actually brilliant? Zoë Heller and Leslie Jamison "discuss whether we overvalue difficulty in literature" at The New York Times's "Sunday Book Review." We'll start with Heller's contribution:
At school, we’re taught to approach difficult literature in a spirit of humility. When we encounter a word we don’t understand, or a snaky paragraph that we find hard to follow, we’re urged to hesitate before throwing up our hands and denouncing the language as willfully obscure. We’re told to take it on trust that the author has something interesting to say and that with enough persistence we can make his language surrender its meaning.
By and large, this is useful counsel. Without it, few adolescents would make it through “As I Lay Dying.” And none of us would ever make it through a Jorie Graham poem. Naturally, it doesn’t follow that all challenging, complicated literature will reward our effort. Some writers compose convoluted, hard-to-read sentences because they don’t have the chops to make simpler ones. Some use 10-cent words just to show that they know them. The reader who assumes that abstruse prose is clever prose, or that there is a reliable correlation between opacity and depth, is bound to waste a lot of time on writing that doesn’t deserve it. She is also liable to end up praising works that confound her, for fear of being revealed as a dimwit if she confesses her perplexity. (As a college student I would rather have died than admit how few of the jargon-filled sentences in Fredric Jameson’s “The Political Unconscious” I really understood.)
Still, I don’t see knee-jerk deference to phony cleverness being a very widespread problem in contemporary culture. On the contrary, in these focus-impaired times, we seem a lot less likely to overvalue abstruseness than to prematurely dismiss it as not worth the trouble. (The mission statement of the Baileys fiction prize actually specifies “accessibility” as one of the literary virtues it seeks to champion.) We like to think that we live in an emperor’s-new-clothes world — full of pretentious people lavishing praise on high-toned fakes. But we actually live in a sour-grapes world — full of people scoffing at what they can’t, or can’t be bothered to, reach. [...]
Read the rest of her response, and Jamison's in its entirety, at NYT.