DEBATING WITH DIFFICULTY

Some current critical debates are as relevant to students of literature as they are controversial with ‘theorists’ and scholars. Whether intellectual and/or poetic ‘difficulty’ is a necessary or sufficient condition of literary merit is one of these controversial issues.T.S. Eliot remarked that: ‘Poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult.’

In a book published by John Carey, Emeritus Merton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford, The Intellectuals and the Masses, he accuses modernist writers (T.S.Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce et al) of deliberately driving a wedge between ‘literature, its practitioners and consumers, and the relatively recent arrivals at the gates of literacy, the mass of the population. In particular, Carey admonishes modernist writers for aligning literature with a particularly narrow version of ‘high’ culture and for separating literature (and especially poetry) from the everyday life of the wider society and from the day to day concerns of the average Joe and Joanna. In other words, ‘modernist’ writers are accused of deliberately limiting the appeal of literature to a narrow group of priviliged and ‘highly educated’ readers. Certainly T.S.Eliot vigorously defended this ‘elitist’ position in his 1917 essay, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ and, in fact, modernist texts, such as The Waste Land, are characterised by obscure references and allusions to other works associated with ‘high’ culture: marking modernist texts as ‘insider texts’ to which readers gain access with…