To whom it may concern:
In one of my early posts, I mentioned that my mentor in college routinely answered the question, "What do you do for a living?" with, "I teach people to read difficult books." Thank God I took him every chance I got, because he taught me well. Well, I'm not so sure how well I do, but he taught me how to persevere when the text gets rough, which it did this weekend.
I say all this because I'm currently on a short binge of reading Henry James. Nothing major, and maybe even this is a debatable point, just some of his novellas. The topic of difficult books must be raised in conjunction with James. He has a reputation for writing extremely dense prose. So much so that another of my professors, a brilliant man in multiple languages and great scholar, once told me that he didn't care too much for Horace because, like Henry James, he never felt rewarded by the text for the effort he had to invest in order to read it.
I'm here to relate that I cut my teeth on James's The Turn of the Screw this past weekend. From what I can determine, this story is hands down his most famous work. Wow! but talk about some convoluted prose. For a work in which the actual text covered only, and exactly, 100 pages, his sentences were long, complex, and the phraseology, most of the time was in the worst possible order conceivable. It reminded me of someone forcing a literal English translation out of formal Latin. One of my profs called this 'Yoda speak'.
In all fairness, given James's genius and renown, and given the text's abruptness, all I can conclude is that it was intentional on his part. No mere appeal to stylistic considerations could rationally account for it otherwise. He's far too revered a writer to write so badly. And I thought Cicero, Melville, and Heidegger were tough.
Things were so disjointed in places that I honestly got into the habit of reading every other phrase then adding back the deleted phrases where they best made sense - much like, as I alluded to earlier, reading the crazy word order of a typical Ciceronian Latin sentence and translating it into grammatically proper English word order. Strangely, this strategy worked pretty well and I recommend it to you. One could easily delete the apparently misplaced phrases altogether and render it well edited reading material for 8th graders.
Furthermore, if someone had mentioned to me that his typist was dyslexic I would not have questioned the veracity of the claim at all given the mind twisting arrangement of his prose. Again, to me, his style cannot be subconscious, but seemed deliberate for effect. I suppose it worked. By the time I finished The Turn of the Screw I sincerely hoped that his longer works weren't written this way. What would have taken me one long sitting to read, took three lengthy reading sessions spread over as many days.
Whether my effort was rewarded or not, I can't exactly say as the story's meaning hid in many ways. Fair warning, the commentators run everywhere with this one too. Briefly, it's a ghost story involving children: two to be exact, thus the 'turn of the screw' reference early in the story. But you'll have to read it yourself to further flesh it out. Interpretation runs the gamut too. Some question whether the children really see the ghosts, but are affected by them anyway. It seemed likely to me that children knew they were there, invisibly, and maybe even communicated with them. This is something the main character, their governess, never could do even though she encountered the apparitions on numerous occasions. Others claim the ghosts are only symbolic of something else, something more abstract. Take your pick.
Regardless of one's interpretation, with a little patience and creative reading, the story is comprehensible. It lured me in and held my attention in spite of the difficulties of mining meaning from his oft obscured text. In the vein of a ghost story by Dickens, this one would be great if read aloud by someone gifted for the task in a dimly lit room late one night. Strangely, it wasn't really scary. I'm not sure James meant it to be. However, like any good ghost story, it grips and holds the reader almost against his will - sort of like a real ghost . . . .
As a follow up, I'm well into Daisy Miller and have dipped into a couple of the other pieces in this volume just to see if they were all like the title cut (The Turn of the Screw and Other Short Fiction ISBN: 0553210599) and didn't find the same jarring, stirring of the verbal pot. I should probably reserve judgement then on Henry James until I gather a larger sampling of data and experience with him.
Until next time,
Contemplate the mysteries, and a good, stiff story, and remember to breathe.
