Letter to the Editors: “A Century of Serious Difficulty”

On reading outside the university.

Marjorie Perloff

February 3, 2023

In reply to “A Century of Serious Difficulty,” December 7, 2022

To the Editors:

Johanna Winant’s very thoughtful and compelling essay on the difficulties a 2022 reader faces when confronted by the “classics” of 1922—specifically, Joyce’s Ulysses, Eliot’s The Waste Land, and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus—makes the assumption that these are books to be read and understood primarily in the classroom. Given this proviso, her conclusions make good sense: inevitably, as Winant notes, we read these books (if at all!) very differently today than did their contemporaries. The cultural matrix has so radically changed and the shrunken English department today may not make time for such distant and demanding reading.

A Century of Serious Difficulty

 

A Century of Serious Difficulty

Reflecting on three monumental works of modernism—James Joyce’s Ulysses, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus—a hundred years on.

Johanna December 7, 2022

This year marks the centenary of modernism’s annus mirabilis. For many, that means T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and James Joyce’s Ulysses—both first published in book form in 1922—perhaps along with the first English language translation of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. These books are in different genres and disciplines—poetry, fiction, philosophy—but all of them wed experimental literary aesthetics with highly abstract intellectual projects. All invoke myths to represent immense aesthetic and intellectual challenges: each tells of an arduous journey, that could, if successful, be redemptive, even transformative. Each text has its hero, but in each case the hero is also—or really—you. You, the reader, are challenged to find your way through these depths and heights and broad, rough seas. The journey is perilous, filled with traps as well as marvels. Should you succeed, your home may look different by the end; you will be changed too.