Joe
There are, as so often, too many questions raised by your questions, for
example:
1. Pray define an 'average reader'?
2. Like wise 'difficulty'?
But -
The poets of the past you mention are disparate. Dante certainly did not
write for a mass public while Donne had a marked disdain for the
hoi-polloi - 'ends love in this/that my man..' etc. Herbert wrote more
nearly to something like the parable telling tradition of the Gospels, while
Langland was quite likely addressing a 'beyond' the narrow few.
As far as I can understand, the supposed difficulty of some fugitive
contemporary poetry stems from needs precipitated by the linguistic
alienation created by hyper-capitalist societies. The poetry seeks to look
behind language, or to re-actualise it, to recover the intimacies of figure,
speech and rhythm, their nexus-connects, that has been estranged by the
privatizations and land-grab-you's of the common tongue's appropriators.
'Most people', whoever they are, live in a linguistic environment that is a
form of ritualised continual theft of that bread that the prayer would have
each day give us. Our common humanity. The 'bourgeoise' classes act upon
languages of denial, of obfuscation by cliche, of the refusal of
self-examination. From this they create their poetry, their 'mainstream',
their Phillip Larkins and company of dessicated interiors of disappointment
predicated upon a rhetoric of the descriptive real, importing the minutae of
the novelist's eye as a guarantee against nothingness.
The 'lower classes' largely reject literature, as it presents itself to
them as an extension of the language of authority, of 'them', and embrace a
culture that is largely visual and musically broadly heavily rhythmical. The
literature they reject is that supposedly appealing to the 'average'
reader - which usually means something like the average school-teacher.
Literature they accept is usually either coarse, brash or escapist. Or very
secretly subversive, like, Lord help us it's true, Tolkien. Or sci-fi.
I'm lower-class. I live in a tower block. Most of my friends are
non-literary. I wouldn't try to get most of them reading Prynne or Joyce or
Vallejo but I do continually point out to them how words are actually
operating in their lives and believe me they take an interest. And there are
those who start looking into 'difficult' poetry, hesitantly, a bit at a
time, because they're conditioned to think it 'not for them', but they start
to look at language critically. Which is what counts. Which is what it's
about.
'Difficult' literature's history is trackable to the development of
capitalist society - to the alienation of language engendered by it. Those
who seek to muffle or sideline 'difficult' work, whether self-appointed
populists or self-perpetuating Motion machinists, seek too to preserve the
existing concealed authoritarianism of our world.
That's broad, and a simplification, and leaves out other, non-social reasons
for difficulty, such as can be found at the top of Wittgenstein's Ladder,
but I think, or hope, it addresses the area of interrogation your mailing
awakes.
David Bircumshaw
----- Original Message -----
From: Rancho Loco Press
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Friday, September 29, 2000 1:11 PM
Subject: the idea of difficulty
Hi,
Steve Duffy recommended I pose the following questions to this list, after
seeing my original query to the excellent wryting list.
Is the idea of "difficulty" in literature a modern idea? When did
literature become "difficult." Did Dante's contemporaries find him to be a
difficult read? What about Langland? Did they prepare glosses of the
allegorical symbol set of Piers Plowman, or was the average man on the
street just naturally able to get it? What about Donne or Herbert--were they
considered "difficult"? Did the average reader need help reading them? I am
trying to understand at what point the idea of "difficult" literature
developed, and in response to what conditions. Any tips or pointers
appreciated. I hardly know where to start researching such a topic.
Best,
Joe Ahearn
Joe Ahearn
Dallas
Rancho Loco Press / VEER magazine
Think global, act loco.
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