Back in 2009, The Millions started its
"Difficult Books" series--devoted
to identifying the hardest and most frustrating books ever written, as
well as what made them so hard and frustrating. The two curators, Emily
Colette Wilkinson and Garth Risk Hallberg, have selected the most
difficult of the most difficult, telling us about the 10 literary Mt.
Everests waiting out there for you to climb, should you be so bold. If
you can somehow read all 10, you probably ascend to the being
immediately above Homo sapiens. How many have you read? What books would
you add? Let us know in the comments!
Emily
Colette Wilkinson is a critic living in Washington, DC. Her reviews have
received commendations from The Society of Professional Journalists and
The Virginia Quarterly Review.
Garth Risk Hallberg is the author of A Field Guide to the North American Family and is a contributing editor at The Millions.
Emily's Picks
Nightwood by Djuna Barnes - Dylan Thomas called
Nightwood "one
of the three greatest prose books ever written by a woman,” but in
order to behold this greatness you must master Barnes' tortuous, gothic
prose style. In his introduction to the novel, T.S Eliot described
Nightwood’s
prose as “altogether alive” but also “demanding something of a reader
that the ordinary novel-reader is not prepared to give.”
Nightwood
is a novel of ideas, a loose collection of monologues and descriptions.
What will keep you going: The cross-dressing Irish-American "Dr.
Matthew-Mighty-grain-of-salt-Dante O'Connor," who, when not wandering
Paris, drinking heavily, or dressing in nighties, rouge, and wigs of
cascading golden curls, is expounding great rambling sermons that fill
most of the book. These are funny, dirty, absurd, despairing,
resigned—even hopeful in a Becketty I-can't-go-on-I'll-go-on kind of
way.
A Tale of A Tub
by Jonathan Swift - The first difficulty: The superabundant references
to obsolete cultural squabbles (some obscure even in Swift’s
eighteenth-century England) and then there’s the narratorial persona: an
impoverished, syphilitic madman who cuts pieces out of his manuscript
and his fellow citizens remorselessly. His compulsive digressiveness is
deliberately baffling, but more baffling still is that this satire,
aimed at “the Abuses and Corruptions in Learning and Religion” and
written by a conservative, Anglican clergyman, ends finding nothing
sacred. If you can bear it (and the 100s of footnotes you’ll need to
understand its historical context), it’s the ultimate expression of
cultural alienation and despair.
The Phenomenology of the Spirit
by G.F. Hegel - Do you enjoy a good intellectual gobsmack every now and
again? If so, Hegel’s your man and this book, a classic of German
idealism and unquestionably one of the most important works of modern
philosophy, is a fine place to start. Hegel’s refutation of Kantian
idealism, history of consciousness, and quintessential explanation of
the process of the dialectic is hard to understand and harder still to
retain (“goes through you like lentils,” as one Stanford professor
described it to me), due first and foremost to the breadth of its
subject and its terminology. The book’s nearly impenetrable without a
good edition and guide or two: The Oxford UP edition is widely
considered the best (and don’t skip the notes and foreward) and the
Routledge Philosophy Guidebook’s commentary by Robert Stern makes good
warm-up reading; also good (and free) are J.M. Bernstein’s lecture notes
for his UC Berkeley graduate course on the Phenomenology, available at
BernsteinTapes.com.
To The Lighthouse
by Virginia Woolf - In its intermingling of separate consciousnesses,
Virginia Woolf’s fiction is both intellectually and psychically
difficult. Not only is it hard to tell who’s who and who’s saying or
thinking what, it is also disconcerting—even queasy-making—to be set
adrift in other minds, with their private rhythms and associative
patterns. It feels, at times, like being occupied by an alien
consciousness. Some readers don’t ever find their sea-legs with Woolf.
The trick is to surrender yourself (true with other high modernists
too), to let the prose wash over you and take you where it will—not to
worry too much about understanding a dogmatic way.
Clarissa, Or the History of a Young Lady by Samuel Richardson - Richardson’s
Clarissa
is a heavyweight in more ways than one. The novel’s physical heft is
part of its difficulty (she weighs in at just under three pounds in
Penguin’s oversized edition), especially as her 1500 pages are light on
plot (Samuel Johnson said you’d hang yourself if you read
Clarissa
for the plot). But what the novel lacks in plot it makes up for in
psychological depth. Richardson was the first master of the
psychological novel and he hasn’t been bested since. These depths are
also dark and psychically wrenching: Clarissa's rejection and
dehumanization by her monstrous family and the sadistic torments she
undergoes at the hands of her rescuer turned torturer, the "charming
sociopath" Robert Lovelace, offer some of the most emotionally harrowing
reading experiences available in English.
Garth's Picks
Finnegans Wake by James Joyce -
Finnegans Wake
is long, dense, and linguistically knotty, yet hugely rewarding, if
you're willing to learn how to read it. By this, I don't mean wallowing
in the froth of scholarly exegesis the Wake churned up in its wake. Not
the first time out, at least. (I take Joyce's talk about setting traps
for his readers as an expression of hostility born out of years of
frustration.) Rather, I mean surrendering to Joyce's music. Meaning here
is more a question of effect than of decoding; in this way, this
Difficult Book is paradigmatic of great literature more generally. Try
reading 25 pages a day, out loud, in your best bad Irish accent.
(Seriously - some of what seems like idiolectic obscurity is just a
question of how you pronounce your vowels.) You'll be maddened, you'll
be moved, and you'll be done in about four weeks.
Being & Time by Martin Heidegger -
Being & Time
is probably the hardest book I've ever read. To contradict what I said
vis-a-vis Joyce, I don't feel comfortable as a reader of Heidegger
letting things wash over me. Literary meaning and philosophical meaning
are different beasts, and
Being & Time, with its
intentionally obtrusive neologisms, isn't meant to be dreamlike. It aims
instead to be, among other things, a new kind of science, or a new
foundation on which to build the sciences - an understanding of what it
means "to be." Heiddeger gets a lot of things shockingly right, and yet
the book's abstractness and rigor mean that most of his discoveries
remain well-kept secrets. Even reading the first half in a
graduate-level seminar, it took me over a year to get through this one.
Was persevering worth it? Well, it changed my life. I don't know how
much more a reader can ask for.
The Faerie Queene
by Edmund Spenser - The difficulty and the pleasure of reading
Spenser's masterpiece arise from a common source: its semiotic
promiscuity.
The Faerie Queene is allegory to the power of
allegory. Or it is allegory drunk out of its mind on sugary wine,
dressed up in layers of costumery, made to run singing through the
garden of Eden at four o' clock in the morning before falling down in a
heap at sunrise to make silver love to itself. Or it's the product of
that lovemaking, tenor and vehicle copulating so variously and complexly
that each becomes the other. There is much madness here, not least in
the sheer hubris of Spenser's plan. (Like Heidegger, he only finished
half of his magnum opus.)
The Faerie Queene is also, bizarrely,
a work of exquisite poetic control, hundreds upon hundreds of perfectly
turned stanzas. I read it in college. It was hard as hell, and I forgot
the plot even while I was reading, but many of its images remain burned
into my brain ten years later.
The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein - I've been working my way through
The Making of Americans
for many summers now. I keep getting several hundred pages in,
switching to something else, and then, as with Heidegger, returning to
find I've lost the thread. But what Heidegger describes, Stein evokes;
to read even a page of
The Making of Americans is to be thrown
into a unique state of attunement. The fineness of attention its
exquisite narrative tedium promotes is like an antidote to the shallows
of the internet. Beyond the page, birds sing louder, sunlight grows
thicker, car horns bare their souls. "The first stunningly original
disaster of Modernism," someone wrote about this book, and while I'm not
sure it was intended as a compliment, it makes me wish there were more
disasters like this.
Women & Men
by Joseph McElroy - In this space I could put any number of postmodern
meganovels - a subgenre I've been smitten with for many years now.
There's William Gaddis'
JR, which is easier than people make it out to be, and Pynchon's
Gravity's Rainbow, which is harder. There's
The Recognitions and
Mason & Dixon. There's William H. Gass'
The Tunnel - verbally lucid, but morally arduous. Of the lot, though, I'd like to shine the spotlight again on Joseph McElroy's
Women & Men.
It is longer than any of the foregoing, and, in the idiosyncracies of
its prose, on par with the hardest.
Parts of it, anyway. Its
temperament, though, is completely sui generis - warm, humanist,
synthetic rather than analytic. As I wrote for the
L.A. Times a
few years back, it's like an entirely different version of what comes
after Modernism. It's a weird and wonderful book, and I can't wait to
dive into it again.
By Emily Colette Wilkinson & Garth Risk Hallberg
sursa: publishersweekly.com
