"Life is hard / And so am I"

So, yeah. I'm done with Gravity's Rainbow. Well, not "done," as in, "done," but as in, "I've now read all the words in the book at least once in order." I don't know so much about being "done." Steak. Burgers. A nice chicken. These can be "done." Literature? Yeah, no.

It occurs to me now, as I writhe in the initial post-final-page aftershocks, that part of what makes hard literature difficult, in an extremely pleasing (if frustrating!) way, is not only that we have to figure out what's going on in the book on a page-by-page basis while reading it (though that is certainly an ever-present difficulty in a book like Gravity's Rainbow), but that when we finish the book, we need to suss out our own thoughts and reactions in order to attempt to translate the experience into some sort of communicable understanding--preferably one that doesn't feel cheap or thin, or cliché, or too bleeding-heart or too academic. (Don't let litblogger lambastings of mainstream media Sunday book review sections fool you. I personally assert that writing about literature in an engaging way is so way not easy. So it wouldn't surprise me if most book reviews or whatever sucked; but when literature offers us so much, how can we not feel like we're coming up short when we try to offer ourselves back to it?)

From this vantage, then, a book like Gravity's Rainbow is no different than any other book or profound artistic experience, "difficult" or not. And knowing it's a challenge that I feel I haven't yet learned how to meet in a satisfying way, in all my years of writing English papers and writing blog posts and talking to friends about books, I suppose there's some comfort in that. Some comfort in this teeth-gnashing hell of wishing I could just make you know what I know now.

But of course a book like Gravity's Rainbow, with its accompanying active critical history, throws plenty of additional tripping points onto the path toward experience-translating. Not the least of which is the question, "Where the hell do you start?" Which is the question I seem to be starting with. Which is a question I don't plan to answer tonight.

But so long as I've got you thinking about difficulty in literature again, go check out Out of the Woods Now, where Ana María Correa takes some previous thoughts of mine and spins them into a far more readably succinct form. (Couldn't have said it better myself? More like, didn't say it better myself.) The Flannery O'Connor quote is great, too. Yeah. Truth is awesome.