Graduate school in the humanities, particularly a doctorate in literature, is not a life choice whose value and purpose are necessarily self-evident. Some people look confused when I tell them that I am getting a Ph.D. in eighteenth-century British literature. Most others respond with some version of, "What do you do with that?" What follows is a sustained answer to this question - the why and the 'to what end' of a life, or an interlude, in the groves of academe. If you're wondering what the grad life is like, or why anyone chooses such a life, read on.I went to graduate school, I'm now quite sure, because I enjoyed nothing more than reading novels, poetry, and plays, and because I didn't know what I wanted to do and because they'd pay me to read books and take classes. Not much, mind you (especially by the standard of the starting salaries my friends were being offered by investment banks) but when you're used to work-study wages and have a morbid fear of suits and cubicles, $20,000 a year (plus tuition, health insurance, free books and meals, a computer, language study, travel to archives abroad...) is a princely sum. Especially when it comes with access to one of the country's most beautiful campuses, an excellent library, and astonishingly bright faculty and fellow students from all over the country and the world. Genteel poverty seems a small price to pay - and sometimes itself a gift - to be a part of such a community.One of my pet theories is that the American top-tier university is as close as humanity will ever come to realizing a utopia, and Stanford, with its vast expanses of lawn, citrus, fig, and palm trees, flowering vines, and sun-tanned young people, even looks the Edenic, pre-lapsarian part. Certainly now, by and large, universities are in the business of giving students credentials and connections - that is to say, getting them good jobs in finance and business, getting them into the best schools of law and medicine. But if you forget the use-value of a BA from a top-tier university for a moment and consider the texture of college life, the utopian aspects appear.The physical surroundings are usually beautiful or inspiring; your professors are bright and interesting and challenging, very often the top of their fields (Guggenheim fellows, Nobel laureates, Genius grant winners) - people who are defining the disciplines they teach; all of your basic needs (food, shelter, health care) are met, and even if you've got a campus job and take your coursework as seriously as possible, there still seems to be plenty of time for conversation, parties, intellectual debates, experimentation with sex and drugs (for those so inclined), and other extracurriculars of all sorts. You are free of your parents and not yet burdened by a "real" job, or paying back your student loans, or any of the other weighty personal and financial responsibilities that descend in adulthood. Through your peers and professors you are exposed to myriad cultures, philosophies, theories, and causes, and are free (theoretically, at least) to devote your mind and your life to any one of them, or (less dramatically) simply to take solace or pleasure from Buddhism or
Plato or
Kant or
Shakespeare.In sum, you are largely free from oppressive responsibilities, in a beautiful place, with unlimited access to gifted people and inspiring ideas. What could be better? And why wouldn't you do it all over again a second time with the university itself footing the bill?That was my thinking about graduate school. At least, that's what I thought before I started and at the beginning of my time at Stanford. And I still hold my utopia thesis about undergrad. But it is not entirely true about graduate school.As a graduate student, you go behind the curtain a bit more, and particularly as this relates to professors, it can be rather harrowing. I was fascinated when one of my professors told us about creating a persona: We needed, self-consciously, to fashion ourselves (appearance, theoretical approaches, research interests, even behavior and speech styles) in order to be successful academics in literature. He was only half-serious, I think. But with the persona theory in mind, I started noticing and remembering things: A very beautiful, young female professor I'd had as an undergrad, fond of mini-skirts, high-heels, and low-cut blouses, teaching something called Modernism and the Body - An academic's
Elle McPherson, as it were. There was also a Romanticist whose pale complexion, wild hair, large, dark eyes and volatile temperament seemed a quintessence distilled from the
Brontes and
Shelleys; A scholar of postmodern literature and culture interested in cuteness who embodied her subject ably in a pair of pigtails. Among the dix-huitiemeists, there was a pronounced preference for a rather
Samuel Johnsonian turn. And I wish I meant only devastatingly clever quips and deeply humane acts of generosity (which I do), though I also refer to his apparent lack of interest in clean linen (in an era not particularly distinguished for such: see
Emily Cockayne's Hubbub: Filth, Noise, and Stench in England) and his possible Tourette syndrome.This is a minor detail and by no means universally true. It is usually amusing - like people who look like their dogs - and can be instructive in its way. But it is also part of a larger culture of self-importance, self-indulgence, and cultivated eccentricity that can get old: not showing up for office hours and exams, forgetting to send job letters, taking students failings personally and walking out of seminars after yelling something nasty at the class or an individual, attending to matters of personal hygiene in lectures, falling asleep in conference seminars, mystifying the requirements for a seminar paper or dissertation chapter and then becoming enraged when these mystified requirements are not met, asking for changes to a paper and then asking for just the opposite in the next version, using graduate students as pawns in professional rivalries - to name a few generalized examples of the unsavory side of professorial eccentricity.There are actually worse stories outside of the English department about professors who use graduate students as handmaidens and valets (to pack their bags, chauffeur, entertain guests, do laundry...) but I've never heard those tales first-hand. I also once heard (what I will call a legend) about a professor (English, I think) who, when asked about her sexual preference, replied simply: "graduate students."But these are not my tales to tell. And, as far as occupational hazards go, the dangers of being yelled at irrationally and occasionally forgotten are mild, I think. Especially when what you get as recompense is a great deal of time in the presence of intellectual brilliance. There is some saying about exceptional people and how one is willing to tolerate in them behavior that would not pass in individuals of lesser personal and intellectual magnetism. I forget the exact words, but the notion, however expressed, is unapologetically elitist and perhaps only evidence that I have been in the groves too long and have had my brains addled. I do not think so.Intellectual virtuosity can be breath-taking - as breath-taking as listening to
Beethoven's 5th or 9th or seeing a
Vermeer in person or Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon, or whatever it is, man-made or natural, that you might find completely arresting and captivating. The best professors have minds as agile and flexible - as wonderful to behold in motion - as the bodies of professional athletes. I am waxing, I know, but part of the attraction of graduate school is the faint hope that by proximity to and tutelage from such minds as the best professors have, that we too, we novitiates, will ourselves one day be virtuosos and priests of knowledge.This is not the case for most. There is a lot of attrition in graduate programs, and even if you do make it to the end and get the degree, many are rewarded for their pains with joblessness, or a "hardship post" (there are many mythical worst places to get a job, the one I know is Southwest Texas Christian Women's Technical Community College), or a string of adjunct positions that make for a gypsy-esque, migrant existence (a year here, a semester there - no job security and often no benefits). The English department at Stanford claims a 90% job-placement rate for its students - if they're willing to go on the market three years in a row. Stanford also has the advantage of being a very small graduate program and so it has fewer students to place.Getting a job is a yearlong process and extremely competitive and grueling. In the fall you consult the jobs list and see what's available in your field (Medieval, Renaissance, sometimes Seventeenth-Century, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century British, Early American, Romanticism, Nineteenth-Century British, Modern British, Anglophone, Contemporary American, Theory). All of the fields have further refinements (poetry, drama, novels, Victorian, Modernism, Asian American, African American) and subtleties of periodization (long 18th Century, versus 18th Century and Restoration, for example), and this means that the first year you go on the market there may not be any jobs in your particular area of expertise in the country. Of course you'll try to sell yourself for jobs that you're almost a fit for, but it's hard when there's another candidate (or a hundred) who do exactly what a given university is looking for.You submit recommendation letters from your dissertation committee, a job letter summarizing your dissertation, your research interests, and why you'd be a good fit for the school, your CV, and a writing sample (for some schools it is as much of your dissertation as is finished), and you wait. In November you hear if you've gotten any interviews at the MLA Conference in December (the Modern Language Association is the professional organization for professors of language and literature). The MLA takes place immediately after Christmas every year, and if you've gotten any interviews, these consist of your being examined on anything and everything by three or four faculty members from the school to which you've applied (usually your teaching interests, your dissertation, and some form of thinking-on-your-feet questions about your period).Of the ten or so applicants interviewed for a particular position at MLA, usually three are chosen for a campus fly-back. These three are flown to the campus sometime between February and March and give a lecture to the entire department faculty. After all of the candidates have completed their visits, the faculty vote and the candidate with the most votes is offered a job. This job offer comes sometime in the spring - or, it doesn't. And then you do it all over again the next fall, and perhaps the next after that too. And that's not even getting into fifth-year reviews and tenure proceedings once you've gotten a job. Alternatively, I am told, one can go into consulting, think-tank and non-profit research, marketing, high school teaching, and archival and curatorial work, but I don't know how often or easily these happen."Good work if you can get it," one of my undergraduate professors called university teaching - and that "if" clause is not to be underestimated.There are other dark aspects too, that come earlier. Studying for qualifying and university oral exams can be devastatingly isolating. I think it's a line in Shadowlands that says something to the effect of "We read to know that we are not alone," but I assure you, in month two - or four, or six - of being immersed in the Cavalier poets, Ranter prophets,
Milton,
Bunyan,
Behn,
Swift,
Fielding,
Smollett, et al, you come to know a loneliness of the most rare exquisiteness. You might also find yourself sobbing a lot about how stupid you are, living on a diet of coffee, red wine, cigarettes, and proprananol, not getting out of your pajamas or brushing your hair, and sleeping badly with dreams of your teeth rotting and falling out. I generalize, of course.And even when the exams are over, there's a lot of angst and self-hatred among Ph.D. candidates. This probably owes more to self-selection than the atmosphere of graduate school itself, but there's something to be said for nurture in this case too. Literary scholars are ultimately critics and an atmosphere of relentless criticism, can be, well, relentless, as well as somewhat absurd. One of the fall-back ways to generate your own original critical take on a literary work or concept is simply to take issue with someone else's reading: "Blahblahblah's account of Romantic sensibility fails to account for __________ and fatally neglects to consider_____________" or some such. And students and professors use this same technique on each other in seminars and lectures. In the style of negative campaigning, there is a tendency to attack or show-up others' readings of things and thereby to show oneself as supremely clever. There is a slightly disgusting general tendency to perform cleverness - when a speaker's point or question is not to get to the crux of a literary work but instead to announce to all in attendance his or her superior smartness. And then there's the famous jargon - acculturation, narrativity, aestheticize, dialogism... And the continued fondness in literature departments for theorists like
Freud and
Marx. It can feel petty, ridiculous, and vain - not about literature or history or culture at all, but about petty ego-driven bickering and self-aggrandizement by silly, small-minded people, of which you are one.I realize I have said very little about literature itself and it is worth mentioning how literature changes when it becomes the object of professional study. I think the ideal way to imagine becoming a professor is to think of yourself as a living counterpart to libraries and archives - a person who becomes a receptacle of knowledge about a particular historical period and its literature. It is your job to animate this knowledge, keep it alive, add to it if you can, share it with students, and impart it to the next generation of scholars (if you get that far). You have to have faith in the importance of the literature and history you choose and you have to be willing to spend a lot of time mentally there. It's odd and anachronistic and hard to explain to those who don't do it. Sometimes it's hard to remember yourself why you do it. You also have to keep caring because there's not much in the way of praise or material gain to keep you going if you lose faith.There are transcendent moments - when you feel you've gotten a novel or a poem - figured out something true that no one else has said; or an afternoon squirreled away in a rare books room looking at, say, an early nineteenth-century folio of etchings and biographical sketches of "remarkable person" (i.e. dwarves, giants, gypsy queens, cross-dressers, political and religious radicals, a "pretended rabbit breeder") and are utterly absorbed and content. But there are other days (more days, I find lately) when you are full of self-doubt about your intellectual and dispositional fitness for the scholarly life, and doubt about the worth of your research, and the worth of the profession altogether. Sometimes you feel tired of the pressure to have a clever and unique take on every novel and poem and play that you read (and also to remember other people's clever and unique takes on them), and books become sources of anxiety and potential humiliation rather than of pleasure, instruction, or escape.
Horace counsels to seek truth in the groves of academe - and there is certainly some to be had. I have encountered great and instructive minds and literary works in my time in the groves, and though it has brought me no wealth or glory, and may well not get me a job, it has been and is a luxury and privilege. For all of the folly and absurdity to be found in academe, there is something mystical and sanctified and rarefied as well - something I am glad to have known.
William Gass’s The Tunnel is just brutal, but the people I know who have finished it claim that it’s one of the best things they’ve ever read. Go figure.
I’m one of those people, Saul. I think that should be the front cover blurb: “Just brutal.”
most frustrating and difficult book for me was Women and Men by Mcelroy, i was never able to crack the code and enter the world. Most challenging books to me are like a maze or like learning a new language, with sustained effort i can usually sort of solve it or start to understand it’s rythms and then it flows pretty well, but Women and Men just completely eluded me. Only Revolutions was a little like that for me too but i didn’t try as hard, the whole structure thing i found annoying, i don’t really want to have to put in manual labor while reading.
I found My Name is Red, for all its richness, an incredibly difficult book. The most brutal book I’ve ever read, however, remains the slim Narrative of Sojourner Truth.
What about something by Heidegger? Being and Time? He really makes Kant and Hegel look easy.
After forcing myself to read Ulysses about a dozen years ago because of all the best-book-of-the-20th-century hype I decided slogging through a long book that you are not enjoying is stupid.
So, after about 50 pages of Infinite Jest I decided it was the new Ulysses and unceremoniously put it down.
The Death of Virgil by Hermann Broch. I have read the English translation, which “unfolds” the German into a confusing hypnotic and intoxicating reading. Very difficult and quite rewarding.
I found _Women and Men_ though it took a year to finish it, a novel that has grown on me over time, and it changed the way I looked at how sentences can be written. McElroy’s humanity and compassion, attributes not easily spotted amongst Usian or other post-modernists, are evident in this book as he tries to show his characters living on multiple levels, just like we do in our daily lives. Forster’s “only connect” came repeatedly to mind as I read this book, and his most recent, _Actress in the House_, which is similar but easier to understand.
Difficult? Yes. Readable and eventually comprehensible? Also yes. It requires patience and interest. McElroy’s not for everyone, perhaps, but few writers are.
Nice to see Gass mentioned, though if anyone ever wanted a reason to read Burton, Woolf, Gaddis, Musil, Kant, Joyce, (and authors not on the above list), Alfau, O’Brien, Elkin, Mann… ah, the list goes on, Gass’s books of loving criticism are a good place to start.
And the Tunnel is amazing. Wish there was someone of Gass’s abilities to speak for the Tunnel.
I think Michael Brodsky is probably the most demanding novelist I’ve read, followed closely by Robbe-Grillet, Gaddis, early Beckett and Malcolm Lowry. I recommend cleansing your palate in between difficult books with Richard Yates, whose style is so limpid that it almost feels like you’re not reading.
Tristram Shandy is laugh aloud funny. I picked it up a few years ago with no prior knowledge–just wanted a novel from the 18th C. It’s a real treat. At one point, Sterne gets 8 pp. out of a piping hot chestnut falling into a guy’s breeches. This is lofty stuff.
As for difficult, I nominate JR by Wm. Gaddis. Seven hundred pages, virtually all dialog with no attributions. You have to pretend you’re sitting in a dark room with headphones on, listening to unidentified voices–but soon you recognize who’s talking. There are also, on the Web, guides that will break it all down into scenes by page. This book is a hoot. You just have to let it have its way with you.
At Swim -Two -Birds was unscalable for me. I’ve climbed Ulysses, The Recognitions, Gravity’s Rainbow, Tristram Shandy and enjoyed them all, but O’Brien leaves me gasping.
For sheer length, Richardson’s Clarissa should be a contender here. It’s supposedly the longest book ever written in English.
And though it wasn’t difficult to read, the 12-volume Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell should also qualify. It took me from November 2007 until June 2009 to get through the whole thing, but I took some long breaks from it.
I must second the nomination for Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa. When I first started it, I thought I would never finish. It is now my favorite book and I have read it many times. For cunning, wit, pure wickedness, and above all, charm, few villains in English literature equal Robert Lovelace.
Add to your list (or reading list): Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus.Difficult, wonderfully bizarre.
Though I love all of his stuff, it will do many readers a service to take a look at The Master’s last three: The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove and especially, The Golden Bowl. Pages would go by and I would not have known what he was saying.
“Mulligan Stew” by Gilbert Sorrentino was just about worth the read with some wonderful jousts with language. The sum greater than the parts? Probably not.
Clarissa isn’t that challenging – it’s essentially a bodice ripper dressed up as moral improvement. But it is loooong. That’s the trouble, right there.
Hands down has to be The Waves by Virginia Woolf. Utterly, totally and completely batshit crazy and baffling from start to finish.
Don’t forget Patrick White. Murky, baroque, and baffling, with flashes of brilliance that keep you reading in the hope that all will eventually become clear…which it never does.
I found Fredric Jameson “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” to still be a little out of my reach a few years back. I am getting ready to try it out again… It should be a bit more accessible in light of the understanding I have gained since my last whack at it.
All books by Gerald Murnane, if you can find them, are fascinating. Obscure and fascinating. One feels as though the grit in one’s reading eye has been thoroughly cleaned out with…something. They are fictions, sometimes_about_ the act of writing, in many cases, though not always.
He has a newie, Barley Patch, available from Giramondo Press in Australia, that opens, “Must I write?” As my kids might say, intense.
Carlyle’s a good suggestion. And how about Samuel R. Delaney’s Dhalgren? Still working on that one…
If we’re chucking in works of philosophy (Kant, Hegel, et al.), surely Wittgenstein’s Tractatus goes flying in at the top? Head-in-the-microwave hard.
During my late teens I devoured ‘Wolf Solent’ by John Cowper Powys, identifying powerfully with the author’s depiction of the protagonist’s inner world. Subsequently I choked on Cowper Powys’ magnum opus, ‘A Glastonbury Romance’ and the various other Cowper Powys doorsteps over which I attempted to clamber with increasing dispmay. I now have a modest collection of John Cowper Powys first editions, none of which I have read beyond their indigestible first few pages.
For something modern I suggest Theroux’s Darconville’s Cat.
thank god someone else mentioned the difficulty of as i lay dying! i thought I was the only one. i’d also like to nominate the man without qualities, and for something more contemporary, 2666. I read the first four books and just couldnt bring myself to finish the fifth.
Kirk, please give Infinite Jest five or six weeks of your attention – it’s a rich, rewarding book. Just keep three bookmarks inside it (one to mark your place in the text, one for the endnotes and one for words to look up). I finished it last weekend and haven’t been able to pick up anything else since. Nothing I’ve read describes entertainment or addiction so clearly and thoroughly.
May I suggest “The Decline of the West” by Oswald Spengler?
Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! is one of the few books I’ve ever thrown across a room from frustration. I picked it up and continued, threw it across the room again, picked it up again … and now it’s my answer to anybody when they ask me my favorite American novel. As with so many “difficult” books, once you figure your way in, once you begin to get a foothold, then the magic starts.
William Gaddis’ “JR” is indeed difficult and wonderful but even more complex, and again all dialogue with no character identification was his next one, “A Frolic of His Own,” which takes on the American’s craze for suing one another to the nth degree.
But for sheer intensity of writing, I suggest “Miss MacIntosh, My Darling” by Marguerite Young, two volumes (Dalkey Archive Press), 1300 pages of paragraphless prose poetry and essentially plot-less. It’s that aspect that allows you decades to finish it (it took me four).
It also happens to be one of Anne Tyler’s favorite books, which she says she dips into during episodes of writer’s block. The book even had a few seconds of fame in the film version of her “The Accidental Tourist.”
Looking at the list of Difficult Books covered so far, it looks like they are going in chronological order. That means Ill have to wait for my favorites: Vollmann, Gass, and DFW.
@Otto At Swim-Two-Birds harder than Ulysses?!? You must be joking. Without the footnotes, I never would have stood a chance with Ulysses. I never even felt the need for footnotes with O’Brien (and At Swim-Two-Birds is far and away his toughest book).
‘apologies for getting all epistemological, but “hard” is really (really) subjective in this context…..
I read Ulysses at age 15, and I don’t regret it.
Now I’m 16, and on to Gravity’s Rainbow.
The Cat in the Hat really blew my preconceptions away.
What is it with that tall, anthropomorphic, mischievous cat, wearing a tall, red and white-striped hat and a red bow tie.
I have a few white whales that I will dominate. Did I miss it in the comments? Did no one mention Proust? I’ve read Swann’s Way, but I feel uncomfortable making that statement. I just don’t feel like I paid enough attention. Oh also, Auerbach’s Mimesis. Maybe one day, I’ll figure that one out.
Sorry I just realize my previous first sentence made no sense. (I call the books that truly challenge me white whales…usually in my best grizzly old sea captain voice.)
I’m 2/12 on that list. I’ve read both Paradise Lost & Ada. Tristram Shandy is next on that list, but not for some while. I just spent an entire summer blogging my way through Ada with a good friend: http://readingardor.tumblr.com
Have read 2/12: Moby-Dick and Paradise Lost. I have to say that, for me, both are superseded in difficulty by Bronte’s ‘Villette’. It’s long, jumps in and out of French during speeches, and has a very devious narrator — the reader has a task to work ahead of her.
If “House of Leaves” by Mark Z. Danielewski is not on this list when its done, it cant be taken seriously…
Ashamed to say I’ve read not a single one on that list…BUT (I saved a lot on my car insurance) I DID make it through The Royal Family by William Vollman. I’ll choose waterboarding next time.
Several books by the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. Or Kant.
i am surprise that the bible is not number one , very difficult to read and everybody have a different interpretation
it have all murder ,mystery, science fiction , mass murder ,jealousy ,erotic poems ,magic.
plus not many have read it covert to covert , one problem though no jokes !
I’ve read (and felt I understood) quite a few difficult philosophers like Derrida, Heidegger, Hegel, Adorno, Baudrillard and even Lacan, but nothing could get me through Being and Nothingness, by Sartre.
Great project, sweet feeling of investment paying off when you have suffered through some entry on the list.
If the flood gates are opened to french philosophy, well, there are many… but Lacan and his Écrits should definitly be considered. Derrida just need a friendly explanation, but Lacan never intended something as mundane as being understood. Even Zizek admits it: unreadable.
I second two books: Darconville’s Cat-moreover, you
reach the point of increasing returns.
And Oswald Spengler’s Decline-the 2 volume unabridged set with fold-out
charts will make for instant discombobulation.
Also Laura Warholic by Theroux.
I loved “Moby Dick” when I read it in the 1980s, but that was because I had the now out-of-print Harold Beaver edition from Penguin with its 300 pages of notes telling you what you need to know.
I have loved the first 3 pages of “Ulysses” each and every time I have read them.
Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus”, ugh.
Carlyle’s “Sartor Resartus” is actually supposed to be funny, rather than impenetrable. Melville was inspired by Carlyle but lightened up the prose.
Wright’s “Arabic Grammar” (Dover reprint) is easily the best Arabic grammar I know, but the author assumes the reader already reads Arabic, as well as German, French, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Coptic and Ethiopic, so people who had trouble with Spanish …
My nominee is Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. Clarissa is a walk in the park compared to this.
And of course the unpublished Chiliad by Simon Otius at unhappened [dot] com.
I’d nominate Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell, and The Illuminatus Trilogy, by Robert Anton Wilson and Shea. The former due to its postmodern and semi-experimental semiotics; the latter due to its length. The people I’ve met who have abandoned these works far outweigh those who have completed them.
Cloud Atlas, however, is a higher achievement. Amazing work.
i guess the books were too difficult to complete the list.