The Virtues of Difficulty

I had intended this, my first post here, to address the literary economy in some way. As co-director of the Pages & Places Book Festival in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and as we’re deep into the planning for the 2010 festival, our second, I'm now contending with all the expected difficulties regards, for example, convincing government officials and even grant-giving foundations to support a celebration of books. So I have plenty of opportunity, let’s call it, to realize to what degree lovers of books and reading are but a tiny minority.

But as I planned out my thoughts I couldn’t disentangle them from my thoughts on other, concurrent and overlapping concerns:

(a) preparing for classes that begin next week;

(b) trying to make good on a request for an essay on the nature of literary influence (no simple task, I assure you);

(c) reading Sue’s entries on difficult reads.

So I’ve decided that what I want to do here is offer up a defense of reading by way of a defense of difficult reads especially.

What distinguishes the pleasure of reading from, say, the pleasure of film is the degree of intimacy which we share with a single mind—the mind that is the sole creator and sovereign of the world we inhabit as we read. Further, because we think in language, reading becomes a kind of thinking in which we think the thoughts of the writer; even if our thoughts drift from time to time, they drift away from and then, in the next sentence, return to the writer's anchoring, catalytic thoughts. In short, reading doesn’t just give us access to another’s worldview; it asks us to live, if temporarily, according its rules and prejudices.

Worldviews differ one to another, naturally, and some are simpler and some are denser and so more difficult to absorb in their entirety. But my thesis here is that the worldview takes up residence in every facet of a work, providing sensitive readers with a manifold opportunity to experience an alternative—sometimes a wildly alternative—universe.

Since I'm audaciously defending difficulty, I’ll jump right into the deep end and try to illuminate something essential about T.S. Eliot and his work. Before I’m done with this subject I’ll circle back in a later post and try to do the same for William Carlos Williams, who stakes his pride on the virtues of simplicity.

But to Eliot . . .

I’ve chosen as an example one of Eliot’s more notoriously difficult poems, “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service,” which begins with an absurdly Latinate neologism of Eliot’s own, polyphiloprogenitive, only to become even more complicated, obscure, and allusive. And yet the poem, in the end, asserts the importance of the common. Having fought through all the poem’s obstacles of complexity and erudition we arrive, in the final stanza, at the image of Sweeney, the lower class Boston Irishman who taught Eliot to box at Harvard, shifting from butt cheek to butt cheek—“ham to ham”—in the bathtub.

Maybe it’s a little like banging your head against the wall in order to experience the pleasure of stopping, but attending the sudden simplicity of this image is a feeling of relief, and that feeling (the cathartic breakdown of the poem’s tension) is the poem’s meaning. More precisely, Sweeney’s bath is juxtaposed to another bath, Christ’s baptism in the Jordan River as described in the third and forth stanzas, so discovering the second bath at precisely the moment of catharsis transmits to us the feeling that a natural man—one of the “common people—people of normal comprehension”—is more Christ-like than the poem's learned theologians (“The sapient sutlers of the Lord”) whose job is to bring Christianity to people like Sweeney.

I’ll leave the hard work of close reading to you, but let me just summarize the crucial opening stanzas this way: the poem begins by describing the great Christian theologians as productive of many offspring (polyphiloprogenitive) and so responsible for a series of twins, including, most importantly, the “superfetation” of the original one-ness of God (that’s what the Greek term of the second stanza means). With each new theory of God, one falls further and further from God’s original and rightful one-ness. This is the problem that the natural, uneducated—and so uncorrupted by theory—Sweeney simply and laudably ignores.

The question I want to try to answer (if less than comprehensively) is, Why does a poem that privileges the simple have to be so difficult to read?

Much of what makes Eliot Eliot is available in his insistence on the primacy of European traditions extending to, indeed privileging, Aristotle and other ancient Greeks, concluding that the poet “must be aware that the mind of Europe”—a metaphor borrowed from Nietzsche—is “much more important than his own private mind." Accordingly, Eliot argues that “anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year” should by that age have consumed the Western canon, a claim which lays the groundwork for another, bolder claim, that the poet does not rely upon individual talent to create significant new works of art but rather her knowledge of the genre of poetry, by which he means “the whole of the European literature from Homer.” It follows, then, that we “cannot value [a given poet] alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.” More audaciously, the greatness of “a new (a really new) work of art” is measured by its ability to alter “the whole existing order” of the genre, that is—and think of Ulysses’ impact on Homer's The Odyssey—after encountering a great work we can never again see the literature that precedes it as we did before that encounter.

But in the end, these are fairly superficial characteristics of Eliot’s work, manifestations, in fact, of the scrupulous and radical relativism that underlies the whole of his poetics.

In 1917, ten years before his conversation from agnosticism to Anglicanism, Eliot converted from philosophy to poetry, but not before delivering to his Harvard mentors a dissertation that excoriates the very practice of and rationale for analytic philosophy and which provides us with the philosophical foundation of the poetry he was already writing.

To squeeze the dissertation into a nutshell, Eliot dismantles the practice of philosophical explanation. Such explanations, he tells us, are not possible, because any explainer mistakenly believes his explanation will be true for all time—otherwise, why bother with the explanation in the first place—while in fact there is no stable, objective reality to explain. Rather, the world is in constant flux, being continually recreated by philosophers’ language. Each time a philosopher tries to explain a given object, he must step outside that object—an object that is naturally and properly whole (like the original one-ness of God) and therefore without need of explanation—and break that object down into analyzable parts, say, mind and body. Should the explainer succeed in convincing the world of his theory, a new reality is ushered into being, in this case, one in which mind and body are separate entities. That reality might hold for a time (“And what is actual is actual for only one time/and in only one place,” as Eliot would put it thirteen years later, in “Ash Wednesday”), but eventually a new theory—perhaps brought about by recent advances in neuroscience—will render the old reality obsolete and provide us with the next in the ever continuing sequence of truths. And so the dissertation climaxes with the audacious claim, “Reality is a convention,” meaning that whatever truth dominates at a particular historical juncture is, well, the truth until the culture in question adopts its eventual and inevitable replacement.

The point is that all explanations are false, while at exactly the same time, all explanations are necessarily, from some point of view, true. (Even schizophrenia, Eliot says, is not a pathology but a viable philosophical position.) The difference between truth and falsehood, then, is perspective; or to put it more simply, truth is a matter of faith. If one believes an explanation—as Christians believe in Christ or rationalists in the fundamental rationality of the university—the theory stands free of problems; it is simply true. But without that belief, the theory fails to stand at all. In a world in which all reality is neither stable nor objective, in which all theories are both true from some perspective and false from some other perspective, there is only (as F.H.Bradley, Eliot’s favorite philosopher and the subject of his dissertation, would say) “the total situation.”

In such a relative world—and this is essential to Eliot’s poetics—an object can only be known in relation to other objects, hence Eliot’s fondness for similes, metaphors, connotations, allusions, ramifications, etc.

Finally, as Eliot’s career in philosophy is concerned, if explanations promise to fail then a good philosophy strives not to explain but rather to describe, and the thicker and more comprehensive the description the better. Believing that philosophy had already and forever abandoned description, Eliot turned to the ultimate describer, poetry.

Put this all together, and you have a poetics that (a) requires mindful participation in 2,000-some years of European literary tradition, (b) demands abstention from explanations and declarations, and (c) strives for the thickest possible description of the total situation. The affect achieved by this poetics ought to be a productively cloudy head, or as Eliot put it, some ineffable feeling. According to Eliot expert Jeffery M. Perl, Eliot, in a paper he wrote for a Harvard seminar, argued that a philosophical paper should “reach no conclusions”; very much along the same lines, Eliot paid his highest compliment in honor of Henry James, who, he said, “had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it.”

What I hope to have introduced, if not proven, is that a writer’s poetics—however difficult or easy they may seem—is rooted in governing ideas about the nature and location of reality. One’s style, in the most comprehensive sense, is a direct consequence of ideology. Eliot’s methods, whatever the subject of a given poem, are necessary to a poet who finds the real to be nothing short of the sum of all perspectives and all history.

We have a chance in “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service”—or in “Gerontion” or “The Waste Land” and so on—to, among other things, put ourselves in something like Eliot’s shoes: if you start out believing what Eliot believes, what would be required to write a poem that satisfies you? And how could that poem not pose a world of difficulty for nearly anyone who encounters it?