“Laura Frost’s The Problem With Pleasure: Modernism and Its Discontents of
“Laura Frost’s The Problem With Pleasure: Modernism and Its Discontents offers us an illuminating perspective on modernism during the interwar era, a period of literary history in which writers took on more audacious subjects and explored more challenging formal strategies. Frost focuses on the notorious “difficulty” of much modernist writing, difficulty that the writers themselves intended and that critics such as Lionel Trilling regarded as the distinctive, as well as most valuable, feature of modern literature. As she puts it: Modernist texts do not appear on summer reading lists: for all its attractions, modernism is no picnic. Its pathways to readerly bliss often require secondary sources and footnotes as dense as the original text. Yet the modernist doxa of difficulty gives rise to new kinds of pleasure. Along with offering thrilling and powerful innovation, modernist writers ask the readers not just to tolerate but also to embrace discomfort, confusion, and hard cognitive labor. Modernism, in short, instructs the reader in the art of unpleasure. Modernist fiction expects us to acknowledge its inherent difficulty, a difficulty that comes from its rejection of the usual kind of story and, more importantly, the usual kind of storytelling. But it also helps us discover “new kinds of pleasure” by successfully assimilating a particular work’s particular kind of “difficulty” through “hard cognitive labor” that converts initial discomfort into something closer to comfort, confusion to greater clarity. Thus the discontents of modernism are not the signs of its own problem with providing pleasure but the deliberate strategies that work to redefine pleasure and strengthen the reader’s resistance to insipid modes of mere “entertainment.” “Unpleasure” is therefore not the negation of pleasure but its transformation. This requires a deferral of gratification, a willingness to actually court confusion and endure a sort of pain that results from delaying immediate satisfaction. In return, “against the saccharine, predictable, easy amusement of popular novels, newspapers, and cinema, modern fiction offered cognitive tension, irony, and analytical rigor, which can and should be enjoyable in themselves.” Although she never quite suggests that reading modernist writing is a kind of literary masochism, Frost does invoke Freud to provide a contemporaneous analogy in psychoanalytic theory to what the modernists were illustrating in practice. “Far from a perverse experience,” Frost observes, “unpleasure can be part of commonplace experience, and not just in the sexual realm. The reality principle itself, Freud maintains, requires ‘the temporary toleration of unpleasure as a step on the long indirect road to pleasure’.” More here HOMO MAGAZINE -- source link