Suffer a Sea Change
Into Something Rich and Strange

I am only hounding myself with these questions, trying to work myself up by the silence that is my only answer from all around. How long, I ask myself, will you endure the insight, which your investigations have made increasingly clear to you?

How my life has changed, and how, at heart, it has not!

                                                                                    —Franz Kafka, Investigations of a Dog 1

I. To see the world in a grain of sand

When Johanna Winant approached me about writing an essay for this cluster on interpretive difficulty, she knew she was making me an offer I couldn't easily refuse.2 Hadn't I, after all, just written a book on difficulty and the transformative pedagogy of modernist literature? I had. Like Kafka's dogged investigator in the two epigraphs from "Investigations of a Dog," in my book, I worried bones of contention and gnawed on a number of other interrelated difficulties: the textual and existential questions that hound us; the quests we undertake in search of satisfying answers so elusive, inconclusive, or tacit, that we either fail to find or need to invent them; the longing for a lasting change in perspective that would bring clarity and understanding to the strenuous work of striving for the insights we do manage to achieve, and must then endure.

In her enticing editorial prompt to contributors to this cluster, Johanna asked us to write about "a problem of interpretation's stalling out, spinning out, or getting stuck." She invited us to write about the experience of finding ourselves confronted with situations in which interpretation becomes tricky, and thereby also productive, "when there's a mismatch between lens and focus," as she put it. "Or even," she said, offering a different metaphor, "between the indigestible grain that may provoke the pearl's creation, and remains within the pearl but also isn't the pearl."

How could I say no to this? Does my book on differently baffling textual puzzles not take as a point of departure just the kind of mismatch between lens and focus that Johanna describes? Yes. Does it not also attend centrally to the question of how an author's provocative tactical move of setting up such a disjuncture between ways of seeing and understanding ultimately serves as a catalyst to the gritty work of effecting creative change on the part of the reader? Yes again. Am I not a sucker for an iridescent metaphor for value, rarity, and the generative potential of chafing irritation? I am. Is the philosophical text at the center of my own interpretive project conceived by its author to function as just the kind of irritant stimulus to transmogrification figured in Johanna's indigestible particle? Also yes. 

Talking to Johanna last winter, I found myself eager to start thinking about the nacreous new layers I might add to her already compelling allegory for the critic's struggle to come up with pearls of wisdom about difficult texts. The kind of difficult texts that interest me here are the ones that rouse us to work to make something lustrous grow around the granule they've implanted. The ones we respond to out of an inspired natural drive to coat the thorny, ticklish irritant-catalyst that makes a mollusk itch and scratch in the unfathomable fathoms. They are texts so challenging that they can — to switch back to a canine metaphor for a moment — sometimes make a person feel like a dog listening to humans chattering on around them.3 Works like these, because they hinge on the alienation and exclusivity their difficulty engenders, can seem like incomprehensible babble to outsiders — their authors' pedagogical optimism and aspirations to potentially universal accessibility to the common reader notwithstanding. Such texts can drive to distraction any reader casting about for some workable solution or other to the problems they pose — whether that reader is one of the ideal, expert, committed, ready, or just plain good-enough variety.

And yet, staring down Johanna's offer — the one I couldn't refuse — somehow, refuse I did. Not outright, not explicitly. I mean, I mulled it over for a bit, but there was never any doubt in my mind that I wanted to do it; I was thrilled to join a smart group of people writing on a topic so close to my heart. It's not that I told her "no" — this essay's appearance here alongside all the others is proof that I didn't. My refusal was more general than that, one that had more to do with disposition than with decision. The pervasive reluctance I felt was more like the refusal of a horse before a jump — an unaccountable sort of whole-being sense of "no" that left me flightless, mired in denial. I was stuck, idling.

My overall hesitancy was a feeling that first took hold of me at some point after my book was published.4 It came out in March 2020, just as our everyday reality began to constrict into the enclosed forms of COVID-era life, in which a heightened awareness of our own vulnerability first hardened into the routines of isolated tedium we now all know so well. The course of events that has shaped our collective predicament ever since doubtlessly hastened my exile to the doldrums. But it's also true that I was already bogged down by sadness and exhaustion of morale of a more modest personal scale. I suppose that what had hit me could be explained away as just a classic bout of so-called postpartum blues. After all, it can take years and years for a pearl to take shape under the oyster's mantle, and there's nothing particularly extraordinary about a person's being overtaken by a melancholy cast of thought in the wake of the completion of a project that had worked her mind and body so hard, for so long. I had done the job of dutifully conforming to the mechanical limits of clock-time and deadline, bringing to necessary conclusion a book that was now something we in the biz like to describe with proud public humility as an "object in the world." "I wrote a thing." I'd cultured my pearl. But then I found myself at rather loose ends, my calcareous shell pried open, feeling strangely forlorn. But, ok, so? It happens.

But that wasn't the real problem. The real problem stems from something I can only begin to describe with the unsatisfying tagline that the job is not the work. The real problem had more to do with the fact that my own dogged investigations of difficult texts, their pedagogies of transformative possibility, and the never-ending labor of seeking, becoming, and moving toward clarity by way of opacity, had given way to something, well, finished. Actual. Legible.

My everyday activities, the scholarly ones at least, had for a long time been organized around one primary, if complex, task: to work my way out of the obscurity and bewilderment brought about by the deliberately puzzling philosophical text that is my own book's central focus. In doing so, I had pursued the interpretive clarity toward which that same puzzling text aims ultimately to guide readers by urging us to take up the hard work of making a thoroughgoing change in the outlook we take toward ordinary language and life. But the sense of possibility and becoming that operates at the core of the texts that had inspired my critical and philosophical investigations, and the thinking about the transfigurative labor of existential and moral perfectionism so intricately involved in the objects of my research, was, I had to admit, suddenly unseated by a stunning new sense of foreclosure. It was as if my sense of the whole enterprise of thinking and looking and writing and doing had disappeared with the book — kerplunk — like a pebble in a well. Or, more aptly in the present context, like a pearl in an ocean.

Full fathom five.  

The modernist difficulty I'd been thinking about for years has a lot to do with longing — for answers, clarity, change, peace, authenticity, the right way of living, and so on. After my book on the subject was written, of its bones coral made, if you will, I found myself filled with what felt like nothing but longing. But for what? Some cloudy pearl? The glass-hard grain of sand that gave rise to it, but isn't it? The true grit that gets the job done? The promise of attenuated creative transformation into something rich and strange? 5 The "unattained but attainable self"?6 Certainly not a dukedom. All I know is that there I was with my sense of an ending, before all that doth fade, silence all around, enduring the "insight which my investigations had made increasingly clear to me," still (negatively, capably) contending with possibility, still struggling with my questions.

Deeper than did ever plummet sound I'd drowned my book.7

But where on earth was the sea-change? 

II. Multivalent difficulty

So there I was, adrift in slack water, waiting on a storm surge, or for the sun to conspire with a little moon to pull the tides into a hypothetical equilibrium. Still clinging to my questions. "Life presents question after question which must be left to sound on and on after the story is over," says Woolf of the enduring power of stories that leave us without definitive conclusions, and thus with a sense that there is no answer (save perhaps the silence that raises the hackles of Kafka's dog).8 My book focuses on that longing for answers, and the silence in which they so paradoxically sound on and on. This essay here is a kind of afterword to it. It tells its own inconclusive story, one about difficulty, pedagogy, change, and the philosophical labor of the critic. I'll start again, at the beginning.

Once upon a time, I sat down face-to-face with a very short, very difficult book. It was opaque to me, and I struggled to understand it. I speak of that now long ago "once" here with deliberate coyness — as if the deceptively simple past registered by that stock adverbial phrase of overture were indicative of some fairytale temporality in which all the main actions are already complete, the vexing problems already solved, the attendant moral lessons delivered forthwith. But my own experience of happy-ever-after following my first encounter with that compressed little volume has had little to do with reaching any such resolution.  

It goes without saying that arriving at a workable understanding of any difficult piece of writing always takes time and effort. But I don't think I'm exaggerating here when I say that the time I've spent trying to think through just what (and how) this particular text aims to teach me — or, more specifically, what (and how) it is trying to make me see, what it asks me to do (as critic, thinker, person) — has been a stint of interpretive labor of an ongoing, incomplete duration, the imperfective aspects of which continue to this day to inflect my relationship to that book, the layered challenges to self and mind it entails, and the work of grappling with interpretive difficulty more generally.

It's not that the difficult book in question, Ludwig Wittgenstein's 1921 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, isn't itself all but categorical in its assertion of its preordained achievement of completeness. It is, after all, a book that opens with its author's declaration that the truth of the thoughts communicated in it are "unassailable and definitive," and that the problems it deals with are "in essentials" finally solved. It's not that the book doesn't tantalize the reader with something akin to a fabulous moral, either. In his penultimate remark, Wittgenstein extends the promise that the reader who understands him, its author, will come to "see the world in the right way."9

But (more questions here) what's a person to make of a book that opens with such a decisive announcement of its definitive achievement? What is it to solve problems "in essentials"? And what kind of goal or "moral" is that? Not the immediately available, directly applicable takeaway readers might expect or crave, that's for sure. But (a path to some answers here, conclusive and inconclusive) the Tractatus, its author tells us, is not a textbook. Instead, it's a book whose instructive force lies in the formidable exegetical gauntlet it throws down for readers with the aim of engaging us in the therapeutic activity of clarification he saw as the true work of philosophy, and which is for me also the true work of criticism.

Wittgenstein was no fan of easy didacticism, or of instruction via content delivery. Nor was he a stranger to the peculiar, open-ended, quiescent kind of ethical teaching that fairy tales and thorny parables can offer. As he saw it, philosophical work has nothing to do with the construction, explication, and enforcement of doctrine. Philosophy isn't a field of study or an academic discipline with a dedicated subject matter. The clarificatory activity it entails isn't about telling, but about doing. It's not about adhering to orthodoxy, but about finding one's way through problems in order to overcome them (mind you, this is something that can sometimes take forever).

The clarifying activity of philosophy Wittgenstein is committed to (and in which he hopes to engage his readers) has to do with working one's way out of lostness and confusion by adopting an attitude of attention that will help one realize the inherent potential of the self through transformative work — work aimed not at reaching the perfected state of the self, but engaging in the process of becoming a more authentic self (and this too is something that can take forever).

The resolutely unorthodox method he uses in the Tractatus is dedicated to getting us fallible readers to do just that. The tough part, of course, is figuring out what such a deceptively simple, deceptively specific "just that" entails. That task of figuring-out demands its own kind of evolving imaginative work, a creative labor Wittgenstein leaves entirely up to us. One consequence of his abiding distrust of theory and explanation is that the Tractatus gives us neither ordered body of rules, nor template to which our work on the self must conform, nor set of directives we might follow to the letter. Nor does it give us a recipe for how to "see the world in the right way," nor any description of what such a vision would look like.

In the place of a culminating instructive precept, what Wittgenstein dangles before us at the end of his book is a quasi-scriptural ladder metaphor that remains as mysterious as it is revelatory; an oracular-sounding tautological aphorism — "what we cannot speak about we must be silent about"; and the looming possibility of reaching clarity about the world and our language and lives in it (if only we can bring ourselves make a radical shift in the way we see things).10 In short, what Wittgenstein leaves us with at the end of his book is the goad to the pearl. Which is also, in effect, a prod to a lifetime of toiling in obscurity — and hopefully, ideally, ultimately out of it (though as I said, doing so might take forever).

Wittgenstein's writing brings into relief the three interwoven commitments I see as central to many of the literary works of his time — difficulty, oblique instruction, and a yearning for transformation (for the last, think of Wittgenstein's right way of seeing the world alongside Rilke's "You must change your life," or Musil's "right way of living").11

As far as difficulty goes, we can distinguish between the largely resolvable, contingent problems of scientific fact that test our discernment at a cognitive or intellectual level from the big moral, spiritual, and existential preoccupations of the human condition: the meaning of life (and how best to live it); the problems of the self and other minds; the contrast between how things are in the world and their significance from the point of view of the "higher." The quality of difficulty of these "Big Questions" far exceeds intellect and erudition. Concerns of this second type of difficulty are linked to a contemplation of the possibilities of redemptive change, and to the perverse work of coping in its possibly infinite deferral. It is about learning to tolerate the perennially unanswerable questions of meaning and being, while continuing to quest for solutions to such riddles of life even in the recognition of their paradigmatic insolubility. The conundrums that arise in this stripe of difficulty, as Leopold Bloom says in Ulysses, pose problems of "a different order of difficulty." 12   

Wittgenstein's peculiar hermetic book, which he himself described as "strange," something "nobody would understand," even though he believed it was "clear as crystal," is structured by such contradictions and different orders of difficulty.13 Wittgenstein's puzzle-text is framed from the start by the very title of the book, which announces itself as a logical-philosophical treatise. In the second-to-last of its spartan numbered entries, however, Wittgenstein pulls the rug out from under us with the stunning news that the theoretical system we have taken at face value and worked so earnestly to keep up with actually doesn't make any sense. The logical propositions that make up the (apparently) linear argument of the (apparent) theory it appears to advance are, he tells us, "simply nonsense." If we are to read the book as attentively as he asks us to, we will recognize that it is him we're to try and understand, rather than his sentences. To take Wittgenstein at his word, then, is to see the Tractatus not as the theoretical tract we thought were getting, but a pseudo-doctrine he means us to throw away once it has served what he tells us is its clarificatory purpose: getting us to "see the world in the right way."

More puzzling still, Wittgenstein maintained that his supposed logical treatise was really a book about ethics. To complicate things further, he insisted that although the point of the Tractatus is an ethical one, the ethical "part" of the book — the only part he says really matters — is the part that we will find nowhere among its spare propositions, but the part he chose to remain silent about.14

Wittgenstein's book is thus one that effectively thrusts difficulty — indeed, multivalent difficulty — on us as a point of inquiry. The Tractatus is a difficult text. It looks difficult in the way a student of philosophy or literary criticism might imagine a book purporting to be a logical-philosophical treatise might look. But the trick is that the real challenge of the book lies in the personally transformative work it demands of readers, work that begins only after we have figured out, with the help of Wittgenstein's carefully orchestrated authorial tactics, that the logical theory we first thought made the book hard going was really not its true difficulty at all. The work of self-transformation that the Tractatus demands of its readers poses a deeper and more indefinite sort of difficulty, and with far higher ethical stakes, than the more (apparently) straightforward intellectual challenge posed by his (apparent) logico-philosophical treatise.

The mismatch between lens and focus that can give rise to interpretive difficulty, as Johanna construes it, is thus a principal tactical component of the instructive method Wittgenstein uses in his perplexing book. The discrepancy Johanna describes appears most vividly in the Tractatus in the disjuncture Wittgenstein sets up between the book's (nonsensical) logical-philosophical content, on the one hand, and its real point on the other; between the analytical project he seems to be engaged in — developing a metaphysical theory about how language and world hang together — and what he posits as the book's overall transformative ethical ambition: to lead readers toward an enlightened kind of self-understanding gained through an improved relationship to language and life. Part of Wittgenstein's tactic is to get readers to see that we've trained our focus on one kind of difficulty, but if we replace the lens through which we see things, a very different challenge comes into view.   

Wittgenstein works toward bringing the book's ethical aim to fruition first by challenging readers to recognize that the faux-argument he sets up in the text amounts to nothing more than the nonsense he says it is. Recognizing this, in turn, means coming to see that trying to make sense of the philosophical theory he has constructed (to seduce readers into a struggle with the cognitive and intellectual order of difficulty it poses on the surface) offers only the illusion of philosophical practice as he conceives it.

As readers, we're to learn to turn our attention away from trying to understand the book's nonsensical propositions (there is, ipso facto, no making sense of them), and concentrate instead on the question of how elaborating these propositions in the way he does serves the deeper and further-reaching aims of their wily author, utterer of nonsense and figurative language that he is. It's by responding to Wittgenstein's tacit call for readers to redirect our attention in this way that we can begin to discover on our own something he does not spell out for us straightforwardly in the body of the text: that his tactical move of setting up a mock doctrine with the nonsensical propositions of his "book of ethics" functions as a part of the dialectical instructive strategy he uses to prompt readers to shrug off an attachment to doctrine and the allure of metaphysics, and engage instead in an introspective quest for clarity.

III. Something rich and strange

One of the habits of thought I owe to Wittgenstein's weird philosophical method has to do with this: clarity (whether about text, self, or world) isn't, of course, something that comes to us completely, all at once, as in a moment of conversion, or a sea-change — whatever the hell we might imagine in advance that a sea-change will even amount to in this context. The kind of clarity at stake here is something we achieve instead through a continuous process of struggling with the confusions and difficulties that confront us. The improved modes of understanding we get from the experience of reading challenging texts, which can sometimes seem to us as opaque as life can sometimes be, might make us better, more attentive readers, thinkers, and teachers (and in this way better people). But it isn't a clarity that, once attained, will simply do away with all forms of obscurity. Instead, it's process of working through toward clarity that brings with it the recognition that some aspects of literature and philosophy, like some aspects of everyday life — the ones that give rise to our most persistent interpretive questions - will remain as perplexing and unresolved as the questions themselves.  

At the end of The Childhood of Jesus, Coetzee's restless, questioning and questing protagonist, Simón, laments that "something is missing." "I know it should not be so, but it is," he says. "The life I have is not enough for me. I wish someone, some savior, would descend from the skies and wave a magic wand and say, Behold, read this book and all your questions will be answered. Or, Behold, here is an entirely new life for you."15 Simón's longing for the answers to be found in a book (or to be gratefully relieved of his longing by getting answers from a book) is a longing left unsatisfied, incomplete, figuratively and literally to-be-continued (literally, that is, in the sequels to that novel, now become a trilogy).

In the preface to the Tractatus, Wittgenstein declares "the truth of the thoughts communicated in the book . . . unassailable and definitive."16 He believes he has found "in essentials" the solution of the problems he's dealing with. In other words, what he is saying to us, as if echoing Simón in answer to his wish, is: Behold, read this book and all your questions will be answered. But Wittgenstein tempers the boldness of his statement with what he says just after: "And if I am not mistaken in this belief, then the second thing in which the value of this work consists is it shows how little has been done when these problems are solved."   

The commitment to different modes of difficulty and indirect instruction in many of the works of literature and philosophy I think about turns on an absence — the absence, that is, of definitive answers to the problems they thematize internally and pose formally. With their portrayals of a yearning for improved clarity of vision, they also seek to perform the accompanying task of refining our interpretive capabilities to help us to become more attentive and perspicuous thinkers and readers. They are novels, and stories, and parables, and works of philosophy that respond to our yearning for answers to the questions of being and meaning that resound in them by teaching us how to respond to them, in turn, by willfully, creatively transforming our own desire for answers. One thing I have learned from reading and studying them, and which I try to pass on in my teaching, is that in the absence of anything explicitly ethical or philosophical in them, we have to make of them something from which critical thinking can be learned, something that gives us new ways of looking at philosophy, literature, the world, and our language and lives in it.17

Maybe the sea-change brought about by endless exegetical pursuit, whatever it ends up looking like, has something to do with going through stages of understanding, riding the ebbs and flows of its rectilinear and reversing currents, but finding oneself always a bit at sea. Sometimes stuckness isn't about being blocked. Sometimes stuckness comes from sitting with a text, an idea, a problem, and thinking it through, working it out, suffering it, for a very long time, as one must.

Pearls are the only gem formed within a living creature. They are pretty, moony orbs that make for compelling metaphors. But pearls are also, in fact, made primarily of calcium carbonate. So, even the finest natural pearl, if we are to believe Pliny's story of Cleopatra's wager and extravagant cocktail, can be dissolved in a cup of strong vinegar and knocked back with an olive.18

Things don't work quite the same way with the irksome, unassimilable mote that stimulates its production, which isn't the pearl, but which remains intact at its nucleus. That accelerant speck is a harder thing, recalcitrant. Though not impervious to chemical dissolution or sublimation, embedded in the darkest folds of the softest tissue, it remains an enduring spur to the creative labors of thought and art in and of the living world. I'll repeat: The (pearl-making and seachange-suffering) hard work of becoming rich and strange is something that can, and sometimes must, take forever.

IV. Coda

I don't mean that closing remark in the previous section to reduce what I've been building up to here to a pat culminating moral delivered as a yawpish call to the wonders and toils of the eternal journey of personal transformation. This is an essay about texts whose difficulty is bound up with their resistance to definitive moral solutions. And I'm committed to the idea that letting us all off the hook at the end of this essay with anything that might even remotely smack of a tidy, self-helpy pronouncement about the promise of quest and the potential of critical work (even an openly gesturing moral that warns of the inconclusiveness of that work) would be antithetical to the project at hand. It's not just that such a rhetorical move is irresponsible in its unresponsiveness to that project. It's unrealistic as well.  

First, narratives of self-help and self-actualization seek to tame or even neutralize difficulty by making obscurity into something transparent, something we can identify and overcome if we just try hard enough. The models or plans for self-improvement they supply are aimed at making hardship and difficulty more manageable, the work of tackling tough problems easier on us. This is not at all the approach to problems of a different (ontological, existential, ethical) order of difficulty I'm concerned with here, which don't conform to models or respond to doctrine or instrumentalization, but demand our engagement in an indefinite kind of praxis.

But once you've codified such a praxis, or once you've named and narrated the transformation that is its goal, you've sealed it off, made it fit some kind of preestablished model for change that then goes back and distorts the praxis. So it's easy to see just how easy it is to come out with tautologies, platitudes, or false confessions when we're trying to talk about possibilities for overcoming the kind of difficulty that sets us adrift when we try to muddle through it, and feel at sea trying to describe it. Difficulty like that doesn't give way to stories of total overcoming. Not even in challenging books crafted to work on us precisely through compelling stories about total overcoming. 

Second, to look at how final pronouncements about the endless toil of becoming rich and strange are unrealistic, as I said, I'll return briefly to Simón's longing for a book of answers. Obviously, No book can fully respond to all our significant questions, however we might wish it to do so. And no book, however transformative we find it, can pull off the feat of changing our lives completely however centrally and prophetically it aspires to nudge its readers toward the work of achieving that ultimate goal.

It's been put to me, regarding this point, that a great many people would say they have experienced such transformation through the inspiration of sacred texts. Sacred texts, like those Coetzee refers to obliquely in his novel, for example, do change lives. Or they may inspire us to change our own. But certainly not all at one go. That's just not how they work, even on those to whom they are addressed, or seek to convert. What they do is call upon us to commit ourselves to doing good works, respond actively to their teaching with morally imaginative exegesis, and further commentary on that exegesis, and so on.

Training in scriptural interpretation sharpened the first literary critics. And the interpretation of sacred texts remains a concern for some of the writers I think about most — Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Wittgenstein, Marilynne Robinson, just to name a few. These figures all write, to varying degrees, from what Wittgenstein calls "a religious point of view," whether or not they are actually religious themselves. Each of these people may well have felt personally transformed by the sacred texts that infuse their secular ones. But what matters to me here is not the spiritual biography of these individuals. What I'm interested in his how each of them, in their work as authors, is keen to tap into the transformative power and complex, sometimes inscrutable teaching that drew them to sacred texts in the first place, and which made them want to go on struggling to give those texts new life in complicated and challenging new literary and philosophical texts of their own creation. As readers of these new texts, we are asked to struggle with them in turn, in an ongoing work of interpretive clarification that neither author nor reader nor critic is done with, and which continues to shape and throw light on our ongoing process of wrangling with the riddles, and enigmas, and obscurities that are part and parcel of everyday life.

This is what I take Wittgenstein to be doing, and asking us to do, with his own secular book. But speaking of Wittgenstein, what are we to do with his odd bit above about the value of a difficult work lying in its ability to show us how little is done when problems are solved? Are we just chasing carrots, struggling with difficult texts only to get smacked with the stick of having to reckon with the realization that the answers we hope to get from them and the criticism we produce under their influence doesn't really amount to anything?

At the end of an essay that has a lot to do with inconclusiveness, I certainly don't want to draw the conclusion that resolution is never desirable. As scholars, readers, and people with lives, we do busily pursue, and on a daily basis, the holy grail of interpretive insight, archival discovery, original contribution, a convincing line of reading, increased expertise, a refereed article, a published book, a promotion. What we don't tend to do with our precious research time is spend it waiting around for a proverbial sea-change. I said above that the job isn't the work. I've said a few times since that the work is something we're never finished with. I hold to that idea. But I do want to add here that there is also a way of distinguishing what we can and can't successfully achieve at various stages of our textual investigations. It's hardly the case that the critical work we do leads us inexorably to a dead-end of disappointment and dissatisfaction. Accomplishments don't just leave us empty-handed. Mostly, the work of finding answers and reaching resolutions does pay off, and that's exactly what keeps us going on looking and grappling with the broader issue of difficulty per se.

In this essay, I've distinguished the different-order difficulty at issue in the texts I've been talking about from the more negotiable, resolvable tactical and contingent difficulties that these complex works also inevitably entail. But perhaps it's worth making it plain once again that what I'm most concerned with here is not difficulty in general. Nor am I not concerned with all modes of transformation, or with transformation in general, but with the specific process of transformation that the different-order difficulty that is my primary focus here seeks to produce. The word "transformation" itself might be somewhat misleading in this context. It suggests, perhaps, the nominal, substantive kind of settled change that we can (and regularly do) bring about in our lives in all sorts of different ways at different moments. Thinking of transformation in terms of its regularly attainable doneness makes it easy for us to call into question the point of any call for transformation that is in essentials a call to potentially limitless becoming.

I set up the first part of this essay with a story about the temporary feeling of stuckness that took hold of me at the prospect of writing an essay about interpretive difficulty. I spoke also at the beginning of a pervasive sense of longing in the wake of a book project about hard questions that sound on and on even after the story is over, as they did, and still do, for me. I tried to indicate there, under the banner of Kafka's dog's expression of gratification and lament — "how my life has changed, and how, at heart, it has not!" — that my sense of an ending was an unfinished one, since my struggles with difficulty in my thinking and teaching are still ongoing.

Some readers, having followed this essay from its initial set-up to its denouement, have asked me whether writing my academic monograph — a book about difficult books that issue a kind of transformative challenge to their readers — was transformative for me. I wrote a book to which I am now answerable, but this was a question I had not counted on being accountable for. It's a question that I suppose makes sense. Narrative sense, anyway. To be fair, it's a question I should probably have seen coming, and yet, I admit, it caught me completely by surprise. I've tried hard to ignore it, but since I can't seem to make it leave me alone, I've worked instead to come up with a solution to the problem: a response that would put it to rest once and for all, endowing my essay with a well-rounded narrative arc in the process.

My story started with a once-upon-a-time. I'm now tasked with delivering a satisfying finis. Perhaps I've painted myself into a corner with my narrative set-up, but as I see it, the request for an account of how my book transformed me leaves me with a few options for reaching an ending here, none of them terrific. Option number 1: "I've been changed! Let me tell you how" (facile, cutesy, false); 2. "I wasn't changed, and now I'm disappointed (sadsack, boring, false); 3. "I reject the premise" (smug, inside baseball, true).

Because the thing is, I do reject the premise. The reason I've been resisting composing an answer is that the question is the wrong one. It's a question that arises out of a mismatch between focus and lens.

Good essays need good narrative arcs. Academic monographs need good narrative arcs. Short stories, novels, ditto (even those whose narrative arcs defy standard modes of closure). Works of confession — works that are about striving for transformation and, mostly, seeing it through to an arrival at the desired goal — depend generically on good narrative arcs. But the change that comes from engagement in an activity of clarification of the kind I've been discussing here may not have an arc at all.  It will have twists and turns and stops and starts and ups and downs, but I'm no surer about the ultimate shape of its arc than I am about what sea changes do.

And I don't think I'm going out on a limb here by venturing that the experience of writing an academic book doesn't typically make for particularly good, particularly trans-formative, copy. Even when the academic book in question takes as a focal point of its discussion of challenging interpretive difficulty an attendant fascination with questions and quests for transformation. Such a book might seem particularly poised to lend itself to a clean parallel story of how the act of writing it set in motion its author's own metamorphosis. A story, that is, that would be particularly well-suited to providing the payoff for an essay in search of the good narrative arc.

I've been thinking lately about an essay of Zadie Smith's, on fiction and authenticity of the self. She writes that she can read the first sentence of a novel and find that her reaction is I don't believe you.19 So I have one last question to ask here: after all I've said in this essay about difficulty, resounding questions, and longing quests for clarity, if I gave you a short, conclusive report about how, through hard work, I'd managed to overcome my problems and had achieved transformation, would it seem authentic?

Would you believe me?

—

Warmest thanks to Sara Edelman, Gregory Grene, Louise Hornby, Joshua Landy, and Johanna Winant, who read drafts of this essay with wisdom and generosity, and who can always be counted upon to talk me through all kinds of difficulty with same.

---

Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé (@zumhagenyekple) is Associate Professor of English at Tulane University, where she is affiliated with the Stone Center for Latin-American Studies and the Program in Film Studies. She is the author of A Different Order of Difficulty: Literature after Wittgenstein (University of Chicago Press, 2020), and co-editor of Wittgenstein and Modernism (University of Chicago Press, 2017), and of The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Philosophy (expected 2022). She is currently completing a book, Grace and Disgrace.

---

References