More On The Topic of Art and Clarity

In my previous post, I talked about how clarity can be the enemy of art, or perhaps more accurately the enemy of those who desire to be viewed as important artists.

This is not a new idea. Sorting through some old clippings, I came across a "Bookends" feature from the Aug. 30, 2015 issue of the New York Times weekly book review section.




Entitled "Do we mistake inaccessibility for brilliance?" it featured two authors, Zoe Heller, and Leslie Jamison offering somewhat differing answers to the question.

Well, one immediately thinks of "Ulysses," by James Joyce in this context. Often cited as the greatest English language novel, it is pretty much impenetrable  by the average reader without expert guidance, and deliberately so. That's even more the case with Joyce's last novel, "Finnegans Wake" as per this well-argued posting on a blog called Rilaly.

And then there is T.S. Eliot's poetry, most famously "The Waste Land."

Equally impenetrable, as to what it means, at any rate, Wikipedia says it is "widely regarded as one of the most important poems of the 20th century and a central work of modernist poetry."

Neither Joyce nor Eliot were inclined to explain their writings, which brings me back to a thought from  my last posting: that the point is to leave readers feeling inferior to the two great writers/artists if they "can't get it."

Ms Heller, in the "Bookends" feature mentioned above made note of that idea. "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 [such a reader] is  also liable to end up praising works that confound her, for fear of being revealed as a dimwit if she confesses her perplexity."

The other "Bookends" commentator, Ms Jamison, focused her comments on "Infinite Jest," a 1996 novel by David Foster Wallace known for it's unorthodox style and it's complexity.

Ms Jamison, who said that she eventually came to love the book "for the complicated visions of  intimacy and self-destruction that constitute it's multichambered beating heart," couldn't get past a couple hundred pages during her first attempts to read it.

"I took it to be my failure, and not the book's -- its inaccessibility was simply a test I hadn't past." Because she had "proved herself inadequate to it" Jamison said she "feared my tastes were pedestrian to the core."

A few years later, she read it again "because someone had told me its portrait of recovery was incredibly powerful and I needed a powerful portrait of recovery" and by forcing herself to get through 50 pages a day, eventually finished it. Difficulty, she decided, "often becomes an engine forcing intimacy between a book and its reader."

Well, "Ulysses," too, definitely has it's fans and, to be fair, if one strips away all Joyce's deliberate complexity, the plot, or story for those who maintain it doesn't have a plot, is pretty straight forward. Not so "The Waste Land."