There are some novels that are notoriously difficult to read and require quite a bit of time and effort to penetrate, and may need the assistance of commentaries by scholars. James Joyce and William Faulkner are authors whose books tend to fall into this category. These books tend to be highly regarded by. scholars and are the ones often chosen for literature courses. I have attempted in the past to read some of those books and usually gave up without completing them.
In past posts, I have been somewhat harsh in my criticisms of this kind of writing (see here and here) and these cartoons captured some of my sentiments.
Here is another cartoon from back in 2021.
But recently the political news has been so depressing that I do not follow it as much as I used to. On the plus side, this has freed up a lot of time for reading books and I have been doing quite a lot of that. I had been neglecting reading fiction but have now got back into it, reading a wide range of genres. I recently decided to give Faulkner another shot and took up Absalom, Absalom!, one of the books cited for his Nobel Prize.
Faulkner is tough going, since he writes in a stream-of-consciousness style with multiple narrators giving different versions of the same events and going back and forth in time. In 1983, he even entered the Guinness Book of Records for having the longest sentence in literature, 1,288 words, that appears in this book (the record has since been broken). The sentence spans pages 148-150 in the book. But since much of his writing consists of long run-on sentences, I breezed right past that record-breaking sentence without even noticing it. (If you want to read just that sentence, you can do so here.)
Brianna Rennix, in an entertaining essay about Joyce, said that part of his book’s reputation for pretentiousness and deliberate obscurity was caused by the way that Joyce himself talked about the book.
Even after the publication of Ulysses cemented Joyce’s public reputation as a literary giant, he often talked about the book as if it were a kind of long con. “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant,” Joyce told one reader, “and that’s the only way of ensuring one’s immortality.” To another, he declared: “The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works.”
So: Ulysses isn’t meaningless, but its own author seems to acknowledge that it is, at least partly, a book designed to frustrate easy comprehension. So what about this other claim that Ulysses fans often make, that it’s really just a Normal Book anyone could read if they tried? This, I think, is also overstating the case a bit. Ulysses is an incredibly dense and bizarre book: Even the more “realist” opening chapters aren’t especially straightforward, as the characters’ minds jump fluidly from one topic to the next, sometimes lighting on fragments of memory whose full context won’t be revealed until later, sometimes on an obscure literary reference, sometimes on a popular ad jingle or long-gone Dublin landmark that no one outside turn-of-the-century Ireland could possibly be expected to recognize.
The fact that these authors deliberately made the books difficult is what had made me peevish earlier. Why didn’t they, I felt, simply say clearly what they wanted the reader to know, rather than make them work for understanding? But while reading Absalom, Absalom! I had an epiphany of sorts that made me view these books differently. I realized that these authors are not the only ones who try to obscure the basic narrative. In fact, one of my favorite genres, the murder mystery, does that all the time and I enjoy them precisely for that reason.
After all, in a murder mystery, the basic story is simple. Someone kills someone else for some reason. But the author then deliberately obscures that basic story, introducing a lot of other characters and motives and storylines, all in order to obfuscate things. The reader is expected to be able to distinguish between the real clues and the red herrings and so attempt to gain an understanding of what really happened. This is little different from what Joyce and Faulkner do. The main difference is that in the mystery genre, what is being obscured is the basic plot while the language is kept simple and straightforward, while in these other works, the authors are experimenting with different narrative styles and techniques and language, and the plot is relatively inconsequential.
What is important in either genre is that at the end the reader should not feel cheated. In the mystery genre, a good ending is where the revelation is surprising but the reader feels that they were given the necessary information to work it out even though they were fooled. That requires considerable skill by the author. Unfortunately, some mystery writers take the lazy way out and tend to throw in new characters and backstories at the end in order to provide the requisite surprise and that seems to me to be breaking the rules of the genre.
In the case of Joyce and Faulkner, the ‘mystery’ that we are seeking to understand is not the basic plot but the nature of the characters and their motivations around the events that have been narrated by them, many of whom recount their version of events in the confused and somewhat incoherent way that real people do and which the authors are trying to capture in the rhythms of real speech.
In these other forms of literature, the reader can feel cheated too. For example, I gave a scathing review of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose partly because there were lengthy untranslated passages in Latin. Recently I also read Villette by Charlotte Bronte, the story of an English girl who teaches in a girls’ school in France. There are extended conversations that take place entirely in French. Using a different language without translations is, in my opinion, breaking the rules, because there is no way that a reader could make sense of it unless they were bilingual.
As a result of this new appreciation for what the author was trying to achieve, I enjoyed Absalom, Absalom!.
The Villette case makes another point. It is a novel written in two languages. So what would the author or most experts think about translation? Would translating it into another language require that it is translated into TWO other languages? What about a translation into French? To get the author’s intent, would they have to translate the original French parts into English?
And would a purist say that the book should only be read by people fluent in both languages?
Would such a purist say that Beowulf should only be read by persons fluent in Middle English? That is, only read by a small minority of top scholars?
And if Beowulf can be translated into modern English, then shouldn’t Villette also be FULLY translated from Brontë’s words to 100% English?
Are books for experts or for people?
Maybe the book-buying public of Brontë’s day were all upper class bilingual people? Would she have wanted her book to stop being read, now that reading French is rarer among English speakers?
I don’t think any author hopes that future generations will NOT read their work for such reasons.
Obviously, Chaucer and Homer never had the choice of writing their books in the 2025 versions of their languages.
I think Faulkner was trying to express a stream of consciousness feeling, like people have in their minds, which is inherently a run-on situation, and he would want that aspect preserved in translations. But if English changed in the next 1000 years as much as in the past 1000 years, I bet Faulkner and other authors would want their works to be available in modern translations, if that stream of consciousness feeling could be preserved in the new language.
To me, there are two kinds of books: books I value because of what they make me think, and books I value because of what they make me feel. The two are not mutually exclusive, but it’s been my observation that I can read a book that causes me to feel a certain way without necessarily being particularly effective at making me think, and vice versa.
For instance: I like hard sf. Top recommendations in that vein include things like Tau Zero by Pould Anderson, the Known Space books and stories by Larry Niven, the Xeelee sequence by Stephen Baxter and more recently the Dark Forest trilogy by Cixin Liu. There are characters in these stories, but I can’t say I ever felt anything about any of them. The essence of the stories were the ideas being elucidated, and the plots were generally a way of illustrating those ideas. These books require me to think, but don’t in my experience at least engage any emotional response. If I were to liken them to visual art, they’re photographs or photorealistic drawings of things I’m invited to take as real.
Other books strike me differently, and I value them as much for their ambience, the quality of the characters or the details of the world they build. They don’t need even need to make sense, per se, so long as their prose can hold my attention and the experiment they’re trying is interesting enough. These sorts of things are the textual equivalent of something by Salvador Dali or Hieronymous Bosch. I’d put “Ulysses” into this category. I can’t say I follow it fully, any more than I can recognise all of the arcane imagery and reference in a Bosch painting, references a contemporary would have taken for granted -- but I can still appreciate it for what it is.
There’s a third class of book, however, that I see described by people who are supposed to know what they’re talking about as being like the second one above -- “challenging” or “experimental” are words you see often, and the narrative is that they’re supposed to be “good”. Quite a lot of modern literary fiction falls into this category, and I place on the mental shelf next to the art of Mark Rothko or Gilbert and George -- I assume the perpetrators are joking, but I don’t get the joke, or if they’re not, then to my ignorant eyes their “work” is indistinguishable from a parody of what it claims to be. Call me a philistine, but in the modern world there’s such an overabundance of actually obviously good stuff in categories 1 and 2 that I can’t understand why anyone would waste their time on this stuff. Life’s too short and I don’t like the feeling they give me of being made a mug of.
(There’s also obviously a fourth class -- stuff that is just dogshit on its face. Dan Brown and EL James spring to mind. I’ve said all I think needs saying about that.)
A couple thoughts.
First, in a lot of re-prints of books in the public domain I’ve found that they include a translation of the foreign language text used by the author. For example, if the primary language the author writes is English, but the author intersperses French phrases, the editor of the edition will put an English translation of the French as an indented paragraph after the French text. Now I’ve only regularly seen this done on older books. So maybe this has fallen out of fashion in modern publishing. As a humorous aside, when I read Kraft-Ebbing a while ago, he clearly understood that some readers may be reading his book on abnormal sexuality out of a prurient interest, rather than as a medical researcher. So he wrote any really explicit passages in Latin, clearly recognizing that readers who are not reading the book out of serious interest probably wouldn’t be able to read that language. Or possibly, Kraft-Ebbing used this technique to get around the Comstock Laws.
Second, if you are getting interested in stream-of-consciousness style of writing, I think the author who succeeded the best (of what I’ve read) in this style is John Brunner in his epic, Stand on Zanzibar. It’s hard science-fiction, but it’s also quite dated now. Written in the 1960’s, the world is dominated by large corporations, the type which existed before hostile-takeovers became a thing. Computers are mainframes. The underlying theme of the novel is overpopulation. I would say that it’s probably the most ‘difficult’ novel Brunner ever wrote, but it’s not inaccessible.
I read constantly, and there are few authors which have failed to provide me at least some level of enjoyment. I am a huge fan of Umberto Eco, I think I’ve read everything he’s published in English, including the more technical stuff on semiotics or medieval aesthetics. I just like how he writes. I stayed out of your recent discussion of Eco because I know I’m just a gushing fan-boy and couldn’t really add anything. However, my favorite stylist is probably Jorge Luis Borges, with Lord Dunsany close behind (in third would be Gene Wolfe). My favorite satirist is Saki. My favorite fantasy author is Jack Vance. I think I’d pick Brunner as my favorite SF novelist; but Frederic Brown as my favorite SF short story author (with the writing pair Henry Kuttner and Catherine Moore close behind). In my opinion Forester beats out O’Brian in the English Navy in the Napoleonic Wars category, which seems like a niche, but it’s surprising how many novels are written in this very specific genre. Austen writes with precision and joy. Orwell and Capek write truth, they have a clarity of vision which astounds me. I only recently discovered Capek, but his works stay on the shelves and will not get moved to the basement when I need more space.
sonofrojblake @ 2
The novels by Stanislaw Lem are very rewarding in terms of ideas, but there are also plenty of references hidden in them. He is my favourite at what Brian Aldiss called ‘the thinking pole’ of science fiction.
Jack Vance is at the ‘dreaming pole’ .
Proust also has a reputation to English speakers as being a difficult read, which might not seem surprising as he’s not too far in time and literary development from Joyce and Faulkner. But, this is largely due to the “classic” English translation by Moncrieff, which is much more incomprehensible than the original French. I discovered this after wanting to quote a passage in English to someone after having read it in French and picking up Montcrieff’s translation, and one one can also find many articles about this in the last few years in various newpapers or literary reviews.
Some of Proust’s sentences in French are a bit long, but otherwise his language is fairly straightforward with precise meaning. In fact to me Proust’s clarity in his descriptions of complex ideas and feelings is his charm. But Moncrieff more or less turned it into something more like Joyce. Be Warned! I quite enjoyed Proust, while I did not Joyce (yet).
I would not be surprised to learn that Umberto Eco and Charlotte Bronte simply expected their initial target audiences to be reasonably fluent in those languages.
I’m Anglophone Canadian but I did have four years of Latin and I was growing up at the tail end of Latin instruction in Canada. I, at one time, was fairly fluent in French. Again four years in high school plus further classes independently and at work and so on.
FWIW, the ebook edition of Villette which I recently read does have footnotes translating the French.
Jane Austen was born in the 1700s, at a time when people with the time to read books were the educated in French as a matter of course, so a short passage in French wouldn’t trouble them. Like Cervantes a century before, beginning to the book starting with a greeting to the “desocupado lector”--that is, to someone of the upper classes with the leisure time to sit and read. Books were expensive.
As for Charlotte Bronte and Jane Austen, their books are full of references to manners and customs that modern readers just wouldn’t understand, anymore than a child born in the 2000s would understand a dial payphone. I one took a course in college on the references in classic books and was surprised how much more enjoyable the books were when you understood the nuances.
I like reading stories that make me think but I don’t really appreciate when the form of the literature itself is what requires considerable thought. For example, I was idly curious about that lengthy sentence that was linked but by the time I identified the third new thought and therefore new sentence that was mashed into it by the simple expedient of excluding punctuation, I rolled my eyes and stopped reading. Frankly, any idiot can do that and do it to an arbitrary degree.
I think this preference partly stems from reading growing up reading a lot of Piers Anthony novels. While quite a few of his novels are written for young adults they often include logic puzzles or topics that are difficult but relevant to the intended audience such as self-harm or family problems. The overall tone in his writing isn’t a dark one but there is a lot of care given to presenting these things to the reader in a nuanced and respectful fashion. The reader is generally left to form their own ideas about these things alongside the characters.
I find that sort of thing generally fulfills my desire for thought-provoking literature. Although I do concede that there isn’t always a “right” answer as there can be in a murder mystery. But that’s more about the topic than the presentation. Some problems are worth thinking about even if there isn’t a single correct answer.
lanir @#9,
To what extent Faulkner’s idiosyncratic punctuation was due to carelessness or was deliberate is apparently a matter of contention. In the version I read, there was an appendix where the publisher explained where they had introduced punctuation not in the original, if they thought it was due to simple errors.
I am sure that it gave his editors many sleepless nights.
sonofrojblake: If you’re into hard(ish) SF, I suggest you add Kim Stanley Robinson and Neal Stephenson to your list, if you haven’t already. Although the latter’s quality of writing can be inconsistent, and he’s sometimes had trouble ending his stories.
Also, a minor correction: the Cixin Liu trilogy is called “Earth Remembered;” “The Dark Forest” is book 2 in the trilogy. I really liked book 1 (“The three-Body Problem”), not sure if I’ll start book 2.
I’ve made two attempts at Ulysses -- I’m undecided about whether to make a third. These days, my fiction reading is usually for relaxation, for which I want a strong narrative, so I avoid novels that are more about experiments with the form. Most of my reading now is history, which usually escapes such experiments -- but I’ve just recently been the victim of one! I’ve been reading Silvia Ferrara’s The Greatest Invention: A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts. It isn’t a history of the world, but I can forgive this over-ambitious claim, because it’s about topics I’m very interested in: the history of writing, and the techniques of deciphering unreadable scripts. Much of the content was indeed of great interest, but the style constantly set my teeth on edge: verbose, digressive, and giving me a constant feeling of somehow having my personal space intruded on, or being nudged in the ribs -- remarkable for a written text. I nearly abandoned it on several occasions. Right at the end, the author explained what she had been doing -- although surely not with the intention of producing the effect she had on me:
I find it remarkable that a person with Ferrara’s expertise should not realise that spoken and written language are necessarily different things, and that the structure and style appropriate to one are quite inappropriate to the other.
I have made it through ‘Ulysses’ a couple of times and have listened to an audio version. I enjoy the intensity of the prose. That large passages make little sense to me is not a problem as linear narrative is not why I pick up a book like ‘Ulysses’. Or ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ by Thomas Pynchon.
But if you like straightforward, beautifully written prose, try Joyce’s ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ and his short story collection ‘Dubliners’.
Whatever else was true about Joyce’s motivations, I feel that he pretty much reached his limits when it came to straightforward narrative and he wanted to challenge himself. ‘Finnegans Wake’ is so far beyond me that I have never made it more than about a half page.
I have found decently enjoyable, competently written books are the ones I read fastest; the ones that take me a long time to read are either awful or excellent -- the extremes. It is easy to see why a bad book might cause this. A weak plot with weak or obnoxious characters will fail to engage my interest, clumsy passages will be unclear in meaning and may need a re-read, and motivation to even pick the book up may flag. The Hunger Games series is excellent example of this sort of mediocrity; I came close to abandoning the books but persevered as they had been bequeathed to me by an acquaintance.
But as I said, an excellent book is also slow for me to read. A gripping passage will get my imagination up at a gallop, and I will daydream and self-insert into the scene while my eyes scan the page without taking in the words on the page. I’ll reach the end of the page only to realise I haven’t even seen the words in front of me, so busy was I with the movie running in my head. And so I begin that passage again. The gripping passage that got my imagination going once already…
The situation can repeat several times before I clear the page. I have read LotR many times, and passages like Theoden’s speech and charge across the Pelennor Fields still do this to me every time.
I read fiction because I want to inhabit that world and become personally entangled in its events and characters. Having read a few random snippets of Ulysses, and starting -- but not finishing -- the linked record sentence, I can see very quickly neither work comes close to achieving this. We could talk about stylistic preferences and pet hates and mismatches between author and reader, but to me the reason for the antipathy is clear. The authors have taken pains to make reading their books a chore and it shows.