Difficult Writing

It struck me today that the writers I find particularly difficult tend to be a) Nineteenth Century American writers or b) Modernist women writers.

The second category is less of an issue for me, because I'm basing that opinion on a handful of texts--a Stein book here, an H.D. poem there, a Djuna Barnes book here. The most difficult poetry on my Field Exam was definitely the H.D. poems with the flower names--"Sea Poppies," "Sea Lillies," and "The Sheltered Garden." They are deceptively simple; when it came time to try to analyze those poems, or suggest something, anything about their meaning, my whole brain would freeze up. The novels by the female modernists strike me as much more aggressively experimental than many books by male novelists. There are a few exceptions to that rule--I would not try to argue that Joyce, for example, is not aggressively experimental--but I would argue that, as a group, the women modernists take more radical approaches to language and narrative in novels than your average male modernists. That does not mean I enjoy their work very much. I don't feel like Stein's novels reward the work I have to put into them. (Woolf's do; a stories, her books work better, for me.)

The other category is a much bigger pool, but it doesn't include every Nineteenth Century American author. I do struggle with most of the Big Name Authors--Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Henry James, the transcendentalists. When I look at that list, no particular shared characteristics of their writing leaps out at me. Something about the style Americans used to express themselves in literature in that century really, really does not entertain me, nonetheless.