Why We Need Difficult Books
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
This type of thinking is toxic, akin the bullshit aphorisms spouted by politicians ("you're either with us or against us") or smug VCs ("if you're not working 14 hours per day, you're not an entrepreneur").
It forces authors and audiences to contort themselves into this black/white view of literature that tosses anything that's not "difficult" into a pile that's not worth creating or reading.
The writer is observing something, but the causality is wrong. People read hard to read stuff because it's good. It's not good because it's hard.
I can't really take this article seriously as a comment on literature because it uses ugly language like "attitudinal" and "outright funny". Articles in The Guardian usually reflect a particular part of English society that is highly privileged, politically centrist and conformist, and not as smart as it thinks it is. Those attributes probably also characterize the UK audience for literary fiction. It's annoying and smug, and I guess maybe saying that is ugly itself.
Surely we should sometimes try to diagnose in good faith where thinking goes wrong. Most people have encountered toxic personalities who they have needed to exclude from their life, for example. You might claim that toxicity is always relational, that it takes two. But there is such a thing as pathology when it comes to personality and mental health. To call something toxic is to call out a pathology for having a seriously negative impact on other people, whether those other people are themselves healthy or not.
I don’t think that is very common at all. There are people we get along with better but active exclusion is extremely rare. This modern trend of throwing away people we don’t like is very unhealthy and not what a community is about.
Maybe you're saying that you think there's no such thing as an abusive relationship. Maybe you think that whole concept is a modern invention. How likely do you think that really is?
Consider the origin of this thread - an idea was toxic not an action.
Abusive interactions don't necessarily or even usually involve physical violence. The fact that you don't seem to appreciate that reinforces my impression that you've never really had to deal with this stuff. It's hyperbole to assume that when I said "abusive relationship" I meant physical violence.
I'm in my 40s and I wouldn't have understood this stuff at 20. I'm also, as a victim of mental illness, someone who has in some ways been discarded by society. So I'm inclined to trust my perception that there is genuine suffering out there caused by toxic thinking and toxic ideas. "Toxic Psychiatry", for example, is the title of a book. You seem content to justify the way things are and minimize negative social phenomena. All I can say is that for a significant number of people, that kind of talk rings false, because their experience shows how empty it is.
I fear we are regressing to a new dark age.
There are probably some walks of life (e.g. fine art) where unbelievably bad behaviour, narcissism, sociopathy etc. have always been prevalent. Now we're seeing awareness of those traits across the whole of society. "Toxic" may be a bad word to use; it's better to be more precise, within the constraints of what we know about personality. It's good to consider every interaction as the product of its constituent personalities, not the "fault" of one party.
But it's not an emergency if the word toxic is over-applied to mildly dysfunctional behaviour. Have you heard about global warming?
We found the tools to break this cycle in the enlightenment. This has led to the largest expansion of freedom and prosperity in world history.
Now I fear we are about to throw it all away. By your logic I should label you “toxic” for promoting this. But that fundamentally goes against these values I hold dear.
The Enlightenment wasn't the last word in intellectual progress. Neoliberal capitalism hasn't decreased inequality in the last 30 years—it has increased it.
I think you might be projecting a bit when you talk about "shielding oneself from uncomfortable ideas". If you think the Enlightenment/classical liberalism is the last word in "thought", maybe that's what you are doing, too.
A lot of PhD students apply Foucault (to take one example) in frivolous, non-constructive, self-absorbed ways. But Foucault wasn't some crazy guy, he was part of the establishment, trying to sharpen our understanding of the dynamics of power and intellectual life. A lot of his contemporary academic followers certainly don't identify with the progress of Western culture. They could be called "wreckers", but it's hard to say that with a straight face while Trump is in the White House.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that there will always be maladjusted kids, freaks, weirdos, and attention seekers. It might feel to you like they are taking over the show these days, because everyone seems to be frivolously labelling everyone else as toxic, like some retro high school clique drama of teenage girls gossiping on the landline.
But even if widely implemented, their exclusionary attitudes won't stick if they don't work in practice. The mass of "normative", i.e. "healthy" people tends to plough through in the long run, for better or worse.
Millennial culture contains a big dose of self-righteousness, but a lot of fashion and trendiness too. The judgemental side of it will surely blow over, if you want to see things that way. We can only hope that the heightened awareness of psychology will stick.
‘Are you trying to reward the book that pushes literature forward the most; or are you wanting to select the book that you most want to push into the hands of people all round the world?’
That's a darn conundrum. An interesting problem. It's almost having to corrupt the purpose of the award in order to maintain its value. If an amazing work of literature requires a university education in languages just to understand, it'd be self-defeating to award it the prize because the prize then becomes of interest only to those with a university education in languages.
For the article overall, I feel like it can relate to any form of art by replacing specific books and authors with their analogies in other artistic fields. But then it occurred to me that literature / books / novels are adjudicated differently to music and film for example.
Literature awards are much less a popularity contest than music and film (movie) awards. Higher-brow by the fact that there's a higher barrier to entry (ie. reading).
Fundamentally, however:
We need difficult music. We need difficult movies. We need difficult personalities. We need difficult engineering.
Because easy is for the birds. Easy isn't progress.
> But while American Honey exudes ample energy, this episodic piece doesn’t muster much narrative drive over its daunting running time of two and three quarter hours. There’s probably a stronger, tighter film in here, but fair game at least to Arnold in her commitment to following the winding back roads of filmic experiment rather than the well-mapped highway of storytelling.
Here are three films, but i've watched loads and I like most of them:
A Prayer Before Dawn is a better version of a film we've seen before - westerner goes to a harsh prison in a foreign country. It's not pretentious and the film avoids being too sympathetic to the lead. Metacritic gives it 76. https://www.metacritic.com/movie/a-prayer-before-dawn
Eighth Grade is I think amazing. A really difficult watch of a young person struggling to be a young person. It captures the awkwardness and cliques. The lead actress is brilliant. Metacritic gives it 89, but that has been pulled down by one reviewer who clearly hates the film. All the other scores are over 75. https://www.metacritic.com/movie/eighth-grade
How to Talk to Girls at Parties is a film that I didn't enjoy. But I'm glad they made it and some people do like it. MC gives it 50, but there's a mix of high and low scores. https://www.metacritic.com/movie/how-to-talk-to-girls-at-par...
To other comments who might be wondering: I do not live in the USA, so I do not think I can find Eighth Grade at the library. I can find many books. So I prefer asking for clarification over spending an hour or more to set something up.
For example, after watching It Comes At Night I felt strung out and miserable, but it's a very competent, well shot movie with a vision, and I'm glad I watched it, even though I don't want to watch it again. That's an example of what challenging means to me.
The scale is smaller, but lit awards are as much a trade event indulging in the vainglory of supply-side driven trends, celebrity, fashion cycle...
Tristram Shandy difficult?! Strange. Would you call Monty Python 'difficult'? It is, however, hilarious, and still seems very modern, despite the first part dating from 1759. The humour is quite Pythonish, but goes further in every direction. Including mocking 'difficult' scientific and philosophical writers, real and imagined, on (probably) most of its pages. Very highly recommended. As is Sterne's second (and last) novel A Sentimental Journey, much shorter and less crazy than Tristram. The less that happens, the better it gets.
Not so much the contemporary vernacular (though that doesn't help), but rather the discontinuous hyperactivity with which the author jumps back and forth between time periods and characters. It's also pretty long-winded and Sterne takes his time to labor his point.
It's definitely enjoyable, but it's not an "easy" read.
The point is that there's no "point" to be labored at.
Sure, doing hard things is a good thing for satisfaction and character building. That doesn't mean a math book that's harder to understand is better than one that's easy.
I think Finnegan's Wake (mentioned in the article) is a good example. It's difficult and good, but for different reasons. Joyce was being expiremental. He wrote from inside a characters head, a POV style that's very common in modern novels. So, the expirement worked.
So, in a sense, it's hard in the way driving an early, expiremental car is probably hard.
Trying to read Joyce for entertainment is like trying to learn physics from "Principia." Cute, but probably a terrible idea. Reading either to engage with the history of novels or physics... this is why people still read these today.
People might get a sense of satisfaction frim the difficulty, but this does not mean we need people to write like Joyce or Newton.
There needs to be an honest reason for difficulty, and the problem with most difficult writing is bad reasons. Poor technique. Partially formed thoughts. Intentional obscurity. Orwellian use of jargonized dialect...
Finnegan's wake would have been a better work if it was written easier. The difficulty is a flaw.
Part of the reason I patronize my library is because to me it is like a mental gymnasium, where all this great equipment there to test my intellectual flexibility and endurance, too tough? I go for easier, but I appreciate the hard stuff because at some point, I, or someone else will find them useful.
Yes, we all NEED access to difficult books (and old books before they refined the such subjects and made them so difficult), don't make our libraries and book shops into mere mental playgrounds.
Our journalist class has somehow got into this ELI5 routine, where they feel obligated to turn every complex subject into something a fifth grader can debate about.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/mar/16/what-happens...
Well maybe that and lowest common denominator marketing. Or the need to pander to social media users, most of whom have at best about five minutes to read an article and not much knowledge of its background.
Some books are timeless though; Tanenbaum, Knuth, etc.
Instead, I think the fascination with difficulty is exactly this -- the idea that some ideas are amorphous and difficult to express directly, and that authors have tried (successfully and less so) drastic measures to try and, in their own way, do exactly what you said in your comment.
And there is something, for some, inherently interesting in the different contortions of text that experimental writers have come up with.
There's an interesting quote by Eliezer Yudkowsky, who is best known for writing the fan-fiction Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.
"Nonfiction conveys knowledge and fiction conveys experience. If you want to understand a proof of Bayes’s Rule, I can use diagrams. If I want you to feel what it is to use Bayesian reasoning, I have to write a story in which some character is doing that."
https://intelligence.org/2016/03/02/john-horgan-interviews-e...
It's interesting to note that he wrote HPMoR with a specific purpose in mind, namely to teach the specific skills of "rational" thinking he wrote about on the LessWrong site.
In his case it seems he saw fiction as something complementary to his essays, a means of conveying "experience", a simulation of living through situations in which the concepts could be used.
This is, of course, far from the only use of fiction, but I think it at least provides a specific example of a way in which fiction can be used to convey something in a way that cannot be (easily) done using dry prose (even if you are considering it purely from a practical standpoint without any reference to artistic merit).
Not necessarily. It's a lot easier to empathize with characters and a novel can capture something more ephemeral. Camus would write a novel first then turn it into an essay.
I have pages and pages of what I think are well-articulated ideas that would be relatively easy to turn into essays. My challenge is finding a narrative that ties them all (or at least some of them) together.
You see this in software as accessible vs power users
Frameworks to simplify web development
Libraries do it gp’s example
Schools do it by simplifying the literature selection/ topic breadth
Etc
Anytime you have management without a minimum “gate”, the issue occurs, because the conflation exists but no one admits it, and with the goal of widespread accessibility, it gets further embedded each iteration.
In other words the quote “if you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it” is misread to “if you can’t explain it in six minutes, you don’t understand it”, and then everything gets “simplified” right out of existence
I'm about a million miles from being an author, but I'm old enough that I have, what I would think, is a recognisable style that I'm comfortable with, and changing my approach would end up negatively affecting the quality of the writing because it comes less natural to me.
Authors will find their own level as much as readers will.
I was a bit disheartened, but as English was my favourite class, I decided to just enjoy the other aspects of the class. We had a midterm exam for which half of the grade was an essay question on a novel we had been reading. I admit that I wanted to impress my teacher, so I read the book over and over again, practically memorising it. When I wrote my essay, I was able to quote passages of it. I was reasonably proud of my effort.
Imagine my shock when my paper was returned and I received a 0 for the essay! The only comment on the paper was "Terrible". In tears, I went to my teacher and asked, "What's wrong with the essay? I studied really hard and even added a lot of quotes". The teacher seemed surprised. "Oh. You actually care about this. Well, your essay was badly written. The quotes were nice, but everything else was terrible. I couldn't give you any marks".
Very frustrated, I went back to my parents and complained. They read my paper and to their credit they said, "Well, I wouldn't have given this a zero, but it could use some improvement". Then they taught me how to write. I spent the next 3-4 months writing essays every day because I was so frustrated.
Fast forward a few decades and I still love writing, thanks to my parents. I have mixed feelings about that teacher. Truly, she was messed up in serious ways. She tended to give high marks to cute boys that she tried to chat up after class. She would also randomly form some kind of hatred for individual students and would do her best to crush them under her heel. However, she was the first teacher who ever told me that my writing sucked. All my other teachers were so focused on my enthusiasm that they forgot to give me criticism. Without my terrible teacher, my parents wouldn't have intervened and I think I never would have learned to write.
It's a weird world.
The boy he was talking about was Anatoly Karpov [2]. Karpov would go on to become world champion once Bobby Fischer failed to defend his title. But far from winning by default he took the title and held onto it for many years becoming one of the most dominant and active world champions of all time. He ceded his title only once once Garry Kasparov came onto the scene.
And really I think these sort of anecdotes are rife among many who go onto achieve great things. One of the many reasons I think the current trends in school of trying to encourage and reward children, particularly taken to the extreme with things such as participation trophies, are likely deeply misguided and being driven by intuition rather than data in an area where the latter often contradicts the former.
I think that this sort of thing happen because it is hard to impossible to determine future development of child. Misjudging happen to both future winners and future losers. Same kid is often judged differently by different adults and same kid can perform differently one year then the other. Same adult can have bad day and badly judge kid or simply badly judge most of them.
Being told that you are bad by authority sux and you will remember it. And for winners it is good anecdote to tell later on, when they know it turned up false.
Ultimately the preponderance of these 'driven by adversity' anecdotes is something that I do not think is a coincidence. It certainly also worked as a motivator in my life. Had Karpov been openly praised and supported from the start would he have become the person he did? Had Karjakin not been hailed as imminent world champion from his youngest years, might he now stand above even Carlsen?
And these are genuine questions. I don't know the answer and I don't think anybody does. But it's something that I think is important since, if this turns out to be the case, it could mean that the educational path places such as the US have set upon could be entirely regressive.
That is false dichotomy. Not just that you contrast complete extremes, you ignore options like "say what you really think". There is also massive difference between who says it, whether that talk is same as other say or rather outlier.
For example, in here, we are talking about kid meeting high level person in a chess official situation organized by school or camp. Bad chess players would not even go to that meeting to be evaluated. Quite clearly the kid was already in program, already seen value in chess and likely was once in a while praised by others.
> Does actively praising individuals, regardless of whether they 'truly' deserve it, encourage them to work harder or does it encourage complacence? Some research I've read has indicated that the praise itself is what ends up being desired, with a diminishing interest on the field from which the praise was derived.
How old the individual? What stage of learning the individual is? That matters a lot. Never ever believe anything nuanced about child raising and treatment unless age is specified. Are we talking 16, 12, 7, 3 years old? Are we talking about someone new to activity, trying to figure out whether they like it and whether they could be good? Or rather experienced player who already like it and all his socialization and identity centers about that activity? There are massive differences.
> Ultimately the preponderance of these 'driven by adversity' anecdotes is something that I do not think is a coincidence. It certainly also worked as a motivator in my life. Had Karpov been openly praised and supported from the start would he have become the person he did? Had Karjakin not been hailed as imminent world champion from his youngest years, might he now stand above even Carlsen?
Do you know that Karpov was not openly praised as he learned? There is an anecdote of a single criticism. Was the "you dont have what it takes" really the only feedback he got? That is unlikely, because such kids would never ever met Mikhail Botvinnik. Such kids would be removed from chess program and redirected elsewhere.
> And these are genuine questions. I don't know the answer and I don't think anybody does. But it's something that I think is important since, if this turns out to be the case, it could mean that the educational path places such as the US have set upon could be entirely regressive.
It is not that US is flawless, but they do have good results in education in a lot of places. They are country of differences, with both awesome results in some places and pretty bad results in others.
Who is your favorite 'difficult' author?
That's exactly how some of Mann's jokes work. I've had the same experience with A la recherche. After a while you realize the author is kind of having you on. (Not always of course but there's definitely satirical humor in these accounts.)
In many cases, books (and other forms of expression/art) are acclaimed for being difficult -- but they're difficult for the sake of being difficult. There's difficulty but no reward. After having read some of these books (or attempted to), I think they're pointless.
However, we do need challenging books/art. Challenges are how we grow, develop, improve, etc. Something can be challenging without being difficult/impenetrable.
Also, challenges come in various forms: they can be stylistic (difficult prose) as well as moral or intellectual or political. (One common complaint I hear about fiction is: "I don't like the characters." Well, yeah, that's sort of the point: you probably wouldn't like a lot of people if you knew them.)
Some concrete examples:
Novels:
Joyce's Ulysses: I actually really like Ulysses. As a whole, it's a slog. But there are wonderful passages throughout. It's also very funny.
Wallace's Infinite Jest: same as above, often even funnier as the humor is more contemporary.
Films:
Malick's The Tree of Life: a wonderful, slow, all-encompassing film that doesn't rely on the conventional approach to narrative
She said, and I quote, "that sounds like one of those thinking books. I don't like them."
I miss her.
Booker winners, in my experience have been often pretentious garbage masquerading as high art.
Examples:
Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam (1998) Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1991) Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils (1986)
While the Pulitzer Prize for fiction is American only, the list of winners is far more justifiable as prize-worthy.
Now that is an interesting thing for someone to say. Are you American, or do you live in America? Where that question is leading is that I wonder if you find American fiction more accessible because it's written by and for Americans, and thus you already have the context to understand and appreciate it.
1. https://harpers.org/archive/2005/10/why-experimental-fiction...
Literature may be different, but I still prefer fiction that tells its story without me having to scratch my head for hours.
What do you do if what you are working on is meaning that doesn't fit the usual language game, and part of the work is seeing what varying the language game can do to meaning? Then there is no direct prose. There is a fabrication of an artifact that leads the reader experientially to this new language game in all its nuance.
I agree with this, except that I think that it is important to understand the caveat "as possible". It may be (I assert, though some argue) that the absolute clearest possible way to express something is not very clear.
> This is why Yuval Noah is such a popular author - he takes complex subjects and makes them easy to understand without losing their meaning.
I take issue with the idea that evidence for the best kind of writing is adduced from the popularity of that writing; I think that popular writing can be bad, and (perhaps less commonly) good writing can be unpopular. Nonetheless I think that the end of your sentence expresses the important idea very well: "… without losing their meaning." I think that there is too much of a trend in modern expositions to achieve the appearance of clarity and accessibility by dumbing down subjects enough to give readers only the feeling of understanding—which is not only probably bad on its own, but can also make the same readers resistant to later learning the subtleties, because discussing them sacrifices what they see as the clarity and accessibility of their preferred (incomplete) exposition.
Agreed. Clear and concise writing hard, and takes time. The writer needs to revise, revise, and revise again.
There is a great anecdote in "On Writing Well" where the author remembers taking students first drafts and telling them to cut them in half.
Difficult books, yes. That doesn't mean books without stylistic beauty or felicity. It doesn't mean books that have been poorly edited (IMO the largest failing in many books, which could easily be 25% shorter with better editing).
It is the catharsis one feels at the end of the journey of decoding an impenetrable text that may mask the fact that the core message is a lie. The bible is a good example of this.
I feel as if he went out of his way to be hard to understand.
Everybody is terrified to say that a book is drivel or a painting is just some random drips of paint, in case it burns bridges or makes them look unsophisticated.
I'm also pretty sure that given a famous "highbrow" literature or art work, you could easily find plenty of respected critics who think it's shit, and vice versa for "lowbrow" works.
"Philistines say these unreadable books are garbage, but sophisticates like me say they have great merit."
(Speaking of which, please don't post low-information rants to HN.)
(And while I'm not claiming to know your own views on the subject) I interestingly find this most commonly expressed by people who also happen to be deep believers in free-market-solves-everything. And one of the biggest complaints so many people have is the money aspect, whether it be how much actors or sports players are paid or, in this case, artists. Ostensibly, that by definition, pay in a free market would flux, that is, that there would be no baseline. But that seems to be the problem. They, often, tend to also complain about things like popular music. Yet, popular music is directly the result of driving to produce more of what the listener wants (as dictated by actual buying patterns, and not people say they want)(we could talk about influencing of fads and the priming of consumers, but why shouldn't that just as easily have its place in the market?). But in returning to remuneration, isn't it possibly that the exact fear expressed here the fear of the very core of free market enterprise, that there is no standard value, and that by definition, my value (which is, obviously, probably what I'm most immediately concerned with, as it determines my very ability to survive in the modern world) can fluctuate from positive to zero to, even, negative. So the desire seems to be to have the free market aspect, and what ever is seemingly being gained from it, which is whole other problem, but import into it some sort of universal standard base value that exists out there as some sort of Platonic ideal, therefore to know the 'value' of anything requires only a conversion from this universal base value to any specific real-world exchange, more or less. But, obviously, this is in direct opposition to the core of free markets. So, then, is it merely an expression of anxiety related to relativism?
Those arguing sometimes try to get around this by investing 'effort', that is, Caravaggio supposedly takes more effort than Pollock, say, to render a given painting, so therefore one is 'worth' more than the other. But, really, isn't this just the idea of a universal base value being snuck in under cover? After all, it does not depend on how much work is involved in anything, it only depends on what amount of value someone (and how many someones) is willing to offer in exchange for it. Indeed, isn't the desire always to spend less in development and deliver than theoretical competitors? Isn't that the core way in which the free market is supposed to deliver unto us everything we never knew we wanted?
The problem is that, fundamentally, art is probably much like the law, is probably fundamentally tautological. That is, what is art, and what is great art, more exactly, is that which which we say is art and that which we say is great art.