Difficulty as a fine art


The other day my friend Joe mentioned to me a curious experience with his academic peers. Having recently submitted an MPhil thesis on cricket at the English and Foreign Languages [EFL] University, Hyderabad, he showed a paper to his friends hoping for critical comments. The most outstandingly critical comment he got was this – ‘your writing is too simple. It requires no effort to understand’. This was followed by according to Joe, the disgustingly sage advice – ‘if you continue to write this way, you may damage your academic career. If people can understand you without any strain, they will not value your work.’
These comments reflect on the quality of the mind of the critic in more than one sense. I felt moved by a sense of utter innocence reflected in the plain admission here that abstruseness may be the most distinguishing trait of good academic [or theoretical] writing. I remembered my own graduation days when we struggled to inject as much academic argot as possible into our writings in order to be able to look down at the laity. This was done with unseemly hurry and exuberance and often made us sound like the new rich kid on the block. The problem was partly that of language – we were mastering high order concepts from a foreign language. English was not exactly our language of intimacy and yet we hoped to be on first name terms with its most refined words and concepts – a bit like paradropping over the Everest summit by way of preparing for a trek in the Himalayan foothills. But matters seemed to go deeper – there was a sense of lack of continuity between our inherited concepts and what was taught in the class. Of course, such intellectual breaches proved to be more of a challenge than a handicap over the years for the more fortunate students like me. Others continued to run franchises of foreign families of concepts.
In our promiscuous post-modernist times, a difficult writing often carries a heavy load of playfulness along with awe. It is no longer the unmixed awe associated with a stern Hegelian or a spare Wittgensteinian text with all the untranslated or untranslatable Germanisms etc. There is, these days, more commonly a sense of play to be seen in the author’s slippery text. ‘You can try but you cannot catch me in the midst of all the gelatinously mazy mass’ – it seems to say. The reader on her part continues the chase to get some feel of the shapes around her. In this the reader is often guided by the dim submarine glow of the author’s intent, enjoying and cherishing brief flashes of comprehension and mastery. And thus the hermeneutic game of reading and re-reading goes on in the absence of an arbitrator [except for the little matter of the grades]. But there is an anomaly here – even if a text is rarely allowed to take a permanent or stable position at the Olympian heights, an individual reader has full rights to place it on his own personal pedestal. It is a bit like having several gods to choose from but with an option to decide how devout you wish to be towards your particular god. And indeed, a devotee may choose to exhibit heights of monotheistic passion rare even in days of high monotheism.
In brief, even though we rarely unite in our reverence for the master-text, many of us continue to worship our chosen fragments with great fervour. Along with this fervour goes a sense of ‘sacral’ awe, and along with the sense of sacral awe goes a sense of difficulty and opaqueness. I remember how devoutly some of my friends uttered names like Foucault or Derrida while elucidating their quoted passages. Of course, it was very frustrating when the listener refused to be swayed, exposing his banality without shame! But at the same time, the aura associated with textual ‘difficulty’ seemed heavily endangered too.
This is no place for me to attempt a typology of either difficulties or ambiguities. But what the campus critics may have failed to include in their advice is the very practical matter of the rewards that come with the mastering of difficulty. I will never forget how angry and clueless I felt after my first viewing of Tarkovesky’s ‘Solaris’ – equally angry with myself and the filmmaker, not to mention Lem. When I saw the film a second time however, things fell into place through a split second revelation within ten minutes of the opening, and the rest was sheer pleasure.
The point then may be – did one get rewarded for all the wrestling with an author’s textual difficulties, or one has had to come back empty-handed? May be the campus critics forgot that there is nothing like ‘pure’ difficulty and that it means different things at different times to different people. It is indeed possible to lend a certain conceptual density or thickness to one’s writing – probably the closest thing to pure difficulty. But is that a mostly stylistic or a substantive issue? In my experience, despite a Sokal, it’s quite rare to make a living out of difficulty alone. You need to garnish it with substance. And yet the Sokal scandal continues to haunt us!
These days I find myself brooding on the many contexts and kinds of difficulties without getting anywhere. But every time I get angry with an author for being opaque and walk away, I wonder if I am a bit like the fox of the grapes story. While the fox stopped at the modest slander ‘the grapes are sour’, after several attempts I do begin to ask ‘do the grapes really exist’? And also the obvious question - am I a rare breed of foxes that has developed unnatural fondness for grapes of all things?
In sum, we as textual commentators of all hues seem to be in the business of creating difficulties as much as that of simplification. Like a see saw, when truths seem intolerably obvious we question them, and when mysteries seem unacceptably impenetrable, we try to simplify them.
Any opaqueness in this piece, incidentally, is unintended or let us say, I have not worked on it enough, according to Joe’s friends.