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symploke 14.1/2 (2006) 319-323

Some Difficulties with Difficulty
Lance Olsen
FC2 Chair of the Board of Directors

Reading R. M. Berry reading Ben Marcus reading Jonathan Franzen, I am left, as I hope I shall always be when watching such vivid imaginations at work, with a sea of questions rather than kludge of counterclaims. And I am left wanting to bring a small handful of them to the surface of this response, which touches on one of the key subtextual preoccupations of that trio's pieces in particular and the on-going conversation about the innovative in general: the notion of difficulty, the association of it with avant-writing's language as object and obstruction and opening up, a crucible of disturbance, as Julia [End Page 319] Kristeva argued in 1974 with respect to the revolutionary modernist projects of Lautréamont, Mallarmé, Joyce, and Artaud, the experience of which "exposes the subject to impossible dangers relinquishing his identity in rhythm, dissolving the buffer of reality in a mobile discontinuity, leaving the shelter of the family, the state, or religion. The commotion the practice creates spares nothing: it destroys all constancy to produce another and then destroys that one as well" (459).5

Once upon a time, of course, we had heard all this before. That is no longer the case. The worst already happened in the world of books. By and large they have come to seem over the last forty years an increasingly conservative mode of communication. Even bestsellers exist in a secondary position in our culture to the spectacles of film, television, the Web, the Xbox, the iPod, the cell phone. Three behemoth media corporations dominate Manhattan publishing. These brodingnagians employ the print arms of their swollen conglomerates as tax write-offs, considering low sales figures and small audiences tantamount to failure. That is, they view their products exactly the same way executives at McDonald's view their alarming menu items. More disheartening still, many independent presses have decided to mimic in miniature this preposterous paradigm rather than trying to subvert, re-imagine, or otherwise stand in opposition to it. That's just the way it is, the people who run them repeat until it starts sounding like the truth. Is it? Really?

No wonder Marcus feels the need to remind us that even the less riotous version he describes of the writing about which Kristeva commented more than three decades ago—and that the modernists began investigating in diverse ways for diverse reasons more than a century before that—is capable of "set[ting] off a series of delicious mental explosions" (40) in readers, proving by its very presence that "the world and its doings have yet to be fully explored" (48), that "there is always more to think and feel," even if "the result may be strange, foreign, remote, complex, difficult" (51). And no wonder Berry feels the need to remind us that impediment and impossibility are categories, not of pince-nez snobbery, but of human freedom; that the difficulties edge-textuality privileges (as well as the political, existential, and epistemological urgencies that spawn it) will not go away merely because they are no longer regarded by a sizeable swath of our culture as fashionable.

At the same time I discover myself agreeing instinctively with such assertions, I also discover myself wondering: what do we innovationists mean when we say "difficulty"? Initially, the answer seems clear. It is anything but. Franzen means the use of polysyllabic words that send him to the dictionary or look odd floating like big bullies in a certain [End Page 320] kind of paragraph in a certain kind of prose. Marcus means writerly and readerly ambition (a recurrent litmus test for an artwork's "greatness," experimental or otherwise, is how much labor has gone into its making) and a language that "has pushed at its limits," "refuses the artistic assumptions of others" (51). Berry soon moves from his opening consideration of avant-garde language to the notion of textual "inscrutability" (26), the impression that derives from the use...

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