Are certain kinds of modern art too complex for anybody to understand? Fred Lerdahl, who teaches musical composition at Columbia University, argued that the hypercomplex music of atonal composers contained too many "non-redundant events per unit [of] time" for the brain to process. "Much contemporary music," he says, "pursues complicatedness as compensation for a lack of complexity."
If he's right, then a fair amount of classical music written in the past century is too complicated for ordinary listeners to grasp—meaning it is never going to find an audience.
The word "time" is central to Mr. Lerdahl's argument. That is why hypercomplex modern visual art is accessible in a way that hypercomplex literature and music are not. You can't get through a complicated novel faster by turning the pages more quickly. Reading demands a greater investment of time than looking at a complicated painting, and the average reader is not prepared to invest that much time in a book, no matter what critics say about it. I feel the same way.
"You have turned your back on common men, on their elementary needs and their restricted time and intelligence," H.G. Wells complained to Joyce after reading "Finnegans Wake." That didn't faze him. "The demand that I make of my reader," Joyce said, "is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works." To which the obvious retort is: Life's too short.
Part of what I find so fascinating about this, is that this is a battle the previous three generations of artists have fought but nobody's fighting it now. Hypercomplexity? It's recherché now, a throwback to an earlier "simpler" time when art and artists could afford to be multilayered, densely allusive and place unreasonable expectations on the audience. When you're competing in the same marketplace with YouTube, reality TV and mash-ups (not to mention we're living in a new Golden Age of Television and video games aren't far behind), it's hard to justify spending two weeks on a 900-page novel you don't actually understand.
These days, it's all about the minimalism, the path of least resistance, finding a new angle that hasn't been done to death. Great 21st-century novelists might include your angsty Anglo alpha males like Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, David Eggers, Jonathan Safran Foer - remixers all, throwing in pop culture and personal references, high ambition and tongue-in-cheek renunciation of said ambition. It can be complicated, but I think you'd have a hard time arguing that it's complex.
For the postmodern so-called "Generation MFA" we don't so much allude as name-check. There's this general world-weariness that it's all been done, there's nothing new under the sun, including this observation. We may as well pick over the bones of the past and use those fossils to create some pretty fantastic skeletons that never did or could exist, because we've run out of animals to name and tame.
The struggle of contemporary art isn't going to be solved by looking backwards - it never is, not even the Augustan classicists who thought Terence and Ovid were the height of drollery or the Georgians who couldn't get over their desperate longing to have been Lake District Romantics. So determining whether "Finnegan's Wake" is or isn't too complex is completely immaterial. We've got bigger work ahead of us.
To wit, here's something by former US Poet Laureate Donald Hall, one of the most famous poems of the past decade or so. It's incredibly well-crafted, heartfelt, difficult, with a great twist at the end that both breaks with the message and is completely in keeping with it. But as amazing as the work is, it's hard not to shake the nagging feeling you've heard this all somewhere before, some echo of Ecclesiastes you half-remember, in some long hall you've been down before.
It seems like everything's been done, doesn't it? What do you give to the reader that has everything?
Affirmation
Donald Hall
To grow old is to lose everything.
Aging, everybody knows it.
Even when we are young,
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads
when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer
pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,
that began without harm, scatters
into debris on the shore,
and a friend from school drops
cold on a rocky strand.
If a new love carries us
past middle age, our wife will die
at her strongest and most beautiful.
New women come and go. All go.
The pretty lover who announces
that she is temporary
is temporary. The bold woman,
middle-aged against our old age,
sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand.
Another friend of decades estranges himself
in words that pollute thirty years.
Let us stifle under mud at the pond's edge
and affirm that it is fitting
and delicious to lose everything.
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