Literary Modernism

I've been thinking about Modernism, having recently read a few short stories by Katherine Mansfield while also embarking on Beckett's Trilogy, which made me wonder about the style.

Modernist works can be quite challenging to read, which often leaves "lay" readers in a state of head-scratching confusion, frustration, or anger. There are two causes of these challenges posed: 1) atypical narrative style and structure, and 2) a necessary background knowledge/context.

Authors of the Modernist form created new narrative styles (such as stream-of-consciousness) and played around with rules of punctuation, grammar, and capitalization (like the first line of Joyce's Portrait of the Artist: "Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo...."). This can be off-putting. 

They also frequently made their works only available to the very well-educated. Often their works are nigh inscrutable without the aid of explanatory notes, or else a very broad/deep cultural knowledge or education. A favorite tactic is the use of multiple languages. For this, consider the famed ending of T.S. Eliot's poem 'The Waste Land':

London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam uti chelidon—O swallow swallow
Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
                  Shantih     shantih     shantih

Or think about the cultural background knowledge needed to understand the lyrics of "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream" which deals with the Mayflower, Moby Dick, Captain Kidd and Columbus, and the New Testament. As well as a bit of Dylanesque nonsense, when he says he's employed by the "Pope of Eruke" ('Eruke' is a seemingly meaningless designation, although some suggest it is Greek...)

Bearing all of this in mind I made the following, admittedly highly subjective, graph:

(The works, by quadrant: 

Easy and Enjoyable: Waiting for Godot by Beckett, Mrs. Dalloway by Woolf, Ossia Sepia by Montale, Poet in New York by Lorca, Heart of Darkness by Conrad, Journey to the End of the Night by Celine, and Six Characters in Search of an Author by Pirandello.

Easy and Dislike: To the Lighthouse by Woolf, Winesburg Ohio by Anderson, The Metamorphosis by Kafka, Ash Wednesday by Eliot, and The Confessions of Zeno by Svevo.

Difficult and Enjoyable: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by Joyce, Desolation Row by Dylan, the complete short stories of Borges, and Ulysses by Joyce.

Difficult and Dislike: The Wasteland by Eliot, Calligrammes by Apollinaire, The Sound and the Fury by Faulkner, The Georgics by Simon, and The Cantos by Pound.)

Note that my scale of 'Ease to Difficulty' considers both of the two reasons for Modernist works' challenging status: the onerous structures as well as the depth of needed background knowledge. In particular, works that require an understanding of multiple languages were ranked at the farthest end of the difficult spectrum (The Cantos of Ezra Pound getting the top prize, which includes Mandarin characters, etc.). But that is, of course, another reason this is subjective: If you have conversational German, French, Latin, or Mandarin, then those poems may not be as challenging.

It was a fun little exercise. I am predicting that The Trilogy I am currently reading by Beckett - 'Molloy', 'Malone Dies' and 'The Unnameable' - will fall in that upper right quadrant.