Sunday, February 02, 2014

Complexity, Simplicity and Criticism

As a poet; as a writer - even as a blogger I don't seem to have the same frustrations that I keep reading on Facebook and elsewhere about complexity/simplicity. I started thinking about this before Christmas, but was reminded on reading this intelligent piece by Booker winner Eleanor Catton on "literature and elitism."  I will come back to her piece later.

Perhaps because I write and I also critique I know that there's not an obvious binary between the complex and the simple. In poetry, some of this is about language - what I'd probably call the Geoffrey Hill argument when he took issue with the text speak of youngsters that Carol Ann Duffy was praising for its vibrancy.

I notice that writers who are generally - and successfully - accessible in their own work seem to have a particular problem with erudition. Yet, often these same people are well-educated, may even be in Universities (though that doesn't always mean the same thing!) but have a bit of a cultural cringe about criticism that takes literature too seriously. It may well be that there's not much sense writing an academically complex essay on, say, Wendy Cope, but I'd argue that if the poet's any good, and writing simply about complex things, then it requires just as much thought and attention as someone writing less accessible writing. Bad academic writing, bad criticism are surely where complexity is used as a smokescreen. I can perhaps understand why an academic-critic might find more to go on, in a Geoffrey Hill poem, but if the job is to write about the art, rather than the learning, then finding a critical language that is as at home with simplicity as complexity is surely vital. (And to give an example;. Emily Dickinson, a writer both infinitely complex, and equally accessible,  has hardly wanted for a complex critical apparatus around her work.)

In other walks of life we know that there are clever people who are, in some ways, cleverer than us. Whether its their knowledge of languages or science or theory. It doesn't mean they are better, or even more intelligent (or even right!) but its not something that we are uncomfortable with. Get arrested for something you didn't do and you'll want a lawyer, get fired or ATOS assessed and you'll want an expert at your tribunal or appeal. I want other people to know more about things that I don't. Yet in literature we seem to have a problem with this. Or at least, a problem in our reading of criticism. Yet a good critic (Clive James, Adam Hirsch for instance) or a close reader gives us something of themselves when they talk about literature. It is not the complexity of the source text, nor the complexity of the argument that we should be taking issue with, but the complexity of the idea; and sometimes ideas, whether in an accessible but complex poem like "An Arundel Tomb" or "Not Waving, but Drowning", or in a complex, but still accessible poem like "Soonest Mended" or "The Emperor of Ice Cream", require a more complex language to describe in prose, what the artist has already successfully rendered in poetry.

This is not a call for obfuscation, but a wish that we can find more time for complex readings of literature. I don't think my knowledge of the Beatles or the Band or the Sex Pistols or Joy Division has been reduced by my reading of Greil Marcus or Jon Savage or Paul Morley; the tertiary texts illuminate with a different light; and yes, growing up with the NME in the early eighties there were times when you felt Morley should "get over himself." But seeing more is valuable - as books like "Lipstick Traces" and "England is Mine" prove. As a reader/listener I need to meet them half way, not wish they don't exist. If we can have such an apparatus around something as visceral as the Sex Pistols, then surely we can't be frightened of it in relation to the written word?

As a writer, I know instinctively that writing simple is easier than writing complex; but that if you start from a position that is in itself simplistic, then you may well find it much harder to write complex ideas in any meaningful way. A poem that makes you laugh can be very profound, but it doesn't require you to analyse how-humour-works, or why you found it funny; yet there's a different between a poem that tells a joke, and one that is written with humour, just as there's a different between a sentiment on a greeting card, and a poem that really moves us. Criticism is an essential mechanism for negotiating these differences, and I don't really have a problem with a critic that makes me look at a poem in a different way, or helps me unpick a writer that I'd found difficult to warm to. Where the critic complicates something that is already difficult, then I'd probably rather go back to the source material, to be honest, and figure it out myself.

Back to Catton, and she mentions using a word - crepuscular - that a reader objected to. There can reasons to object to a word, of course. It might be out of context, or an archaism, or simply too hefty a word for what its trying to describe; but more often than not, in prose at least, the reason a writer will use that word rather than another is because it fits. The English language's great joy is its range, and a native speaker might well feel they want to use the whole range rather than that of a tabloid newspaper or the much reduced wordset of "Global English". There have been times, whilst writing an essay or a story where I have used a word that I'm almost certain I've never used in my life before - but that I used it at all is because it was the right one. I didn't go to the dictionary to look it up, but somewhere in my internal lexicon, I'd picked it up from other readings. Some other writer had passed it on. Of course, there are times - certainly when I was younger, but not unknown now - where I reach for a word and have the wrong one. This is not be being over-clever, more that the toolkit that I have beside me needs occasionally refreshing.

I tend not to write a poetry of found words, yet many poets do go out and look for words that they might not use otherwise; but then poetry is made out of language; if the idea is good enough it can stand the weight of a few extra nouns thrown at it - particularly when poems are specialised. Write about the natural world for instance and there's a whole new lexicon for each genus.

When the inevitable debates come up around accessible vs. complex writing, I must admit to bridling a little; for I can't, in all honesty, outside of certain areas of the poetic avant garde, remember when I was last recommended a too complex book or story.  Yet I'm frequently being recommended detective stories or young adult novels; not that they can't have their own complexities in them. In visual art and music it can take a long time to move from a love of representative art or melodic tunes to sterner stuff, yet I don't think an understanding of conceptual art or minimalist composition necessarily precludes you from liking their opposite; but as Catton points out, not everything is handed to you on a plate. We might laugh at our historical forbears who couldn't abide Stravinsky's "The Rites of Spring" or Whistler's paintings; yet we are listening and looking not just with the value of hindsight (we know they have lasted) but with a visual and musical literacy that wasn't there to the first audiences. Our multimedia age means that we accept the avant garde quite quickly in certain ways: lapping up complex or overlapping narratives in film or TV mini series - yet if we've never read more than children's books its going to be quite a leap to literary fiction or contemporary poetry.

Criticism often fails for me where it simply asserts a point that is a "given." I'd value someone explaining their passion for a poet or musician that I don't particularly take to; and though it might not change my opinion it might help me explain better why I don't like this or that particular artist. Given the amount of cultural history that the twentieth century heaps on us, I can understand why we sometimes like the certainties of the canonical - like my book collection, if I lived to be a hundred I doubt I'd have time to read all I've now got, and each year its not just that there's more, but so much more. Finding time to understand writers we might have an interest in or come across is not about us being forced to accept a critical viewpoint, but there needs to be the space for that viewpoint to be expressed, even if we are not currently interested - like experts in other fields, its good to know they are there for when we need them.

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