English Studies Forum

The Forum Reviews

The Importance of Difficulties

Leonard Diepeveen. The Difficulties of Modernism. Routledge, 2003. 318 pp. $24.95.

By Paul Campbell

Leonard Diepeveen’s The Difficulties of Modernism provides a thorough examination of modern literature and literary criticism that asks old questions and answers them in revealing new ways. Literary modernism is difficult to discuss as a movement because it encompasses such a vast number of attitudes, techniques, and styles which work in contradictory ways, making it difficult to forge useful connections and determine chains of influence. In The Difficulties of Modernism, however, Diepeveen synthesizes many disparate characteristics of the movement under the term “Difficulty.” By condensing many apparently incommensurate literary techniques (like the thick obscurity of T.S. Eliot versus the skeletal directness of Wallace Stevens) into a single category, Diepeveen is able to create a coherent narrative of the period that is both convincing and concise. And while any such simplification will necessarily ignore many of the subtle differences contained within a given period, the limitations of the approach are outweighed by its remarkable explanatory power.

                Diepeveen begins by defining difficulty as “the experience of having one’s desires for comprehension blocked” (x), but he stresses that “to discuss difficulty solely as the property of texts is to impoverish it” (xi). “Difficulty,” he continues, “is that recurring relationship that came into being between modernist works and their audiences” (xi, his italics). The focus on difficulty as an experience, rather than an inherent textual property allows Diepeveen to make his case much more comprehensive. The perceived experience of difficulty, rather than the specific way the writer catalyses the experience, is the focus. This raises the discussion from a purely literary question of readers’ responses to stylistic techniques, to a broader social and cultural debate over the value of art and its function in society. Diepeveen claims that “knowing how to respond properly to difficult art became a way of indicating one’s membership in high culture” (xv), suggesting that difficulty’s consequences reach far beyond the page and into the lives and reputations of individuals both early in the twentieth century and into the present. Though Diepeveen focuses on the literary and intellectual community of Britain and America from approximately 1910-1950, the difficulty debates of this period have significant implications today. One need only look at contemporary reactions to postmodern literature and poststructuralist theory to see that we have inherited the aesthetic and critical criterion of difficulty with little modification.

                Chapter one defines the combatants of the war over difficulty, polarizing the “difficult modernists” and “traditionalists.” The sides can be succinctly defined using a binary from E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India: mystery vs. muddle. Very few disagreed that modernism was difficult (though Diepeveen illustrates this position briefly as well), but there was an impassioned debate over what this difficult writing really was. Many difficult modernists argued for difficulty as a sort of mystery. The surface was opaque, but if you had the skills, education, sensitivity, and patience to see through it, the real significance of the work, the meaning, would become apparent. New Criticism, Diepeveen argues, was a product of and contributor to this view, as it created ways of dealing with material that defied easy analysis. On the other hand, many traditionalists saw difficulty as a muddle, a random concatenation of nonsense that not only resisted interpretation, but at its base contained nothing upon which any sort of meaning could rest. Talented writers, the traditionalist position argued, worked hard so that their meaning would be clear to their readers. Difficult writers, however, were unwilling or unable to create clear texts, causing confusion and frustration in their readers, in an attempt to defraud everyone into believing that difficulty was a sign of erudition, rather than incompetence.

                The battlefront terminology I employed earlier becomes especially appropriate as Diepeveen turns to readers’ responses to difficulty not only intellectually and socially, but also physically. Diepeveen describes the classic experience with difficulty as “a visceral, anxiety-filled encounter that gave high modernism its energy, modality, and power” (45). Few would deny that literature is capable of eliciting a physical response, whether it be laughter or tears, but Dipeveen’s point here is more subtle, and far more interesting as a result. Laughter and anger (the title of a section in chapter two) can doubtless be evoked through empathy with characters, or the interplay between a poetic scene and a reader’s private experience; however, it can also be provoked by a literary encounter that defies engagement because it is utterly impenetrable. Every reader applies a set of (usually unconscious) assumptions about the nature of literary art to every reading experience. When the literature in question doesn’t fit the reader’s established framework, Diepeveen claims, the response is often extreme, resulting in the scoffing laugh of the sceptic (Please! That isn’t art! Ha!), or the indignant curse of the critic who thinks himself the object of an insult (Do they think I’m a fool? This is not art! Mmph!). One weakness here is Diepeveen’s failure to distinguish between reactions to art based on comprehension and empathy, versus what I would term “meta-reactions” based on the work’s status as art or non-art. Diepeveen does, however, argue his points about individual’s meta-reactions to art convincingly, and his inclusion of several anecdotes which illustrate memorable instances of society’s extreme reaction to difficult art are both insightful and entertaining. These engaging mini-narratives, though they are examined logically, strengthen Diepeveen’s claims most by presenting them as convincingly true-to-experience. Fittingly, Diepeveen uses narratives to make us feel the truth of his arguments about physical responses to literature.

                The Difficulties of Modernism is an excellent historical examination of one of the defining battles of literature in the first half of the 20^th century. It makes explicit the arguments that its participants – as Diepeveen states throughout the book – took largely for granted, as they relied less on reasoned arguments than emotional appeal. That said, Difficulties is not all it promises to be. I don’t think I’m ruining the ending by telling you that the difficult modernists won the debate and the right to rewrite literary history. Though Diepeveen acknowledges the winner of the battle, he refuses throughout to take sides. This allows for a balanced account of the events and arguments, but makes his final section on our modern inheritance of difficulty far less convincing. Though he claims in his preface that, unless we re-examine our connections to the victory of the difficult modernists “we are doomed to accept its benefits and costs” (xv), his negative language is not reflected in his conclusions. Diepeveen does illustrate some problems with the difficult modernists’ position, but stops short of suggesting what needs to be done to extricate ourselves from it, or even whether such an emancipation is desirable or even possible. These important questions are just outside the limits of this useful and persuasive text; I hope  Diepeveen applies the same efforts to answering them in a subsequent book as he did in defining them here.