My favorite section of her list is the “Literally Unreadable (But People Pretend)” category, which includes Ulysses (Joyce), In Search of Lost Time (Proust), and Finnegans Wake (Joyce), which Karen describes as “unreadable even for Joyce scholars.”
So why the hell is everyone losing their mind over this? Like is Joyce your god? Why is criticizing these books, these authors, such a cardinal sin?
I think I finally figured out why. And it has to do what people value in their books. There’s actually a whole debate in literary criticism concerning what fiction is supposed to do for humanity and what makes a novel good.
I happen to fall in with the group that doesn’t particularly appreciate Joyce. But there’s camps out there that die for modernist novels (like Ulysses) and experimental post-modern writing (like Pynchon’s work). I don’t agree with them, but it was helpful to understand what those readers value in those works.
Here’s what I learned:
Realism vs. Everything Else
The big debate in literary fiction boils down to this: should novels try to represent life as it actually is, or should they do something else entirely?
Realism is what most of us think of as “normal” fiction. It’s Alice Munro, Marilynne Robinson, Jhumpa Lahiri. Characters feel like real people with believable psychology. The prose is clear and doesn’t call attention to itself. No one discovers they’re secretly royalty or gets abducted by aliens. It’s just life, rendered carefully on the page.
But here’s what makes realism click for me: it’s defined more by what it’s NOT than what it is.
Realism is not romance with impossible coincidences. It’s not allegory where characters represent abstract concepts. It’s not metafiction that constantly reminds you you’re reading a book. It’s not heavily plotted melodrama where orphans conveniently turn out to be related to their benefactors. And it’s not highly stylized or poetic prose where every sentence is gorgeously metaphorical. (...)
Before realism became dominant in the mid-1800s (think Flaubert, George Eliot, Tolstoy), novels were full of improbable adventures, clear moral lessons, and coincidence-heavy plots. Realism said: what if we just showed ordinary people dealing with ordinary disappointments? What if we went deep into their psychology instead of hitting them with dramatic plot twists?
Then Modernism Said “Not So Fast”
By the early 1900s, some writers thought realism was insufficient. Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, William Faulkner broke with realistic conventions, but not because they didn’t care about truth. They thought traditional realism couldn’t capture modern consciousness.
Modernism’s insight: Reality is fragmented and chaotic, especially after World War I shattered Victorian certainties. Modernist authors used stream of consciousness, fractured timelines, and difficult prose to represent how minds actually work and how reality actually feels...
The questions pile up without clear answers, thoughts interrupt themselves—this is trying to show consciousness as it actually moves, not tidied up for the reader.
The key difference from realism: Modernists believed meaning still existed, but you needed new forms to access it. Joyce’s Ulysses is notoriously difficult, but according to the internet (I don’t know, I haven’t read past page six), the novel is ultimately trying to demonstrate the truth of a day in Dublin in 1904. The experiments serve a purpose.
The problem, for me, is that the experiments can make the writing very un-fun to read.
Then Postmodernism Said “There Is No Truth”
Postmodernism (think Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Donald Barthelme) takes fragmentation and makes it playful. These writers are skeptical that fiction can reveal any stable truth at all. So they write metafiction that constantly breaks the fourth wall, mixes high and low culture, and treats meaning itself as a game.
Here’s an excerpt from Donald Barthelme’s “The School.”
One day, we had a discussion in class. They asked me, where did they go? The trees, the salamander, the tropical fish, Edgar, the poppas and mommas, Matthew and Tony, where did they go? And I said, I don’t know, I don’t know. And they said, who knows? and I said, nobody knows. And they said, is death that which gives meaning to life? and I said, no, life is that which gives meaning to life. Then they said, but isn’t death, considered as a fundamental datum, the means by which the taken-for-granted mundanity of the everyday may be transcended in the direction of—I said, yes, maybe.What’s interesting is that school kids wouldn’t, they couldn’t, be making the observation that death is “a fundamental datum, the means by which...everyday may be transcended in the direction...” because of their age and life experience. So if it’s not the children’s “voice” saying this in the story, it must be the narrator, or maybe even the writer. Barthelme is winking at us, breaking character (the fourth wall), reminding us that this story is all made up. It’s clever but keeps us at arm’s length emotionally.
When you read postmodern fiction, it often feels like writers writing for other writers—it’s inside jokes about literary conventions rather than stories that move you emotionally. That’s intentional. Postmodernists think the search for emotional truth through fiction is naive. Better to be playfully ironic about the whole enterprise.
This is why I sometimes find postmodernism so boring. (I actually like Barthelme’s short story “The Baby” which is harrowing.) But who reads Gravity’s Rainbow (Pynchon) for pleasure besides academics who need to write dissertations about it?
Why This Actually Matters For Writers (and Readers)
Understanding these camps helped me see what choices I’m making in writing my novel—and how certain readers or critics might respond to those choices.
If I write a straightforward story with believable characters and clear prose, I’m in the realist tradition. If I experiment with fragmented timelines or stream of consciousness, I’m borrowing modernist techniques. If I get cute and self-referential, I’m flirting with postmodernism.
None of these are “right” or “wrong,” but they come with trade-offs. Realism connects emotionally but can feel conventional. Modernist techniques can capture complex consciousness but risk alienating readers. Postmodern playfulness might be intellectually interesting but often sacrifices what fiction does best: making us care about people who don’t exist.
These days the fiction world is pretty eclectic. There’s typical realism (Alice Munro), realism with fantastical elements (Kelly Link), experimentalism with emotional sincerity (David Foster Wallace apparently tried to split this difference), and everything in between.
My take after this deep dive: Fiction’s unique power is making us feel what it’s like to be someone else. When technique serves that purpose—whether it’s Alice Munro’s precision or Faulkner’s stream of consciousness—great. When technique becomes the point itself, I lose interest.
This is why I sometimes find postmodernism so boring. (I actually like Barthelme’s short story “The Baby” which is harrowing.) But who reads Gravity’s Rainbow (Pynchon) for pleasure besides academics who need to write dissertations about it?
Why This Actually Matters For Writers (and Readers)
Understanding these camps helped me see what choices I’m making in writing my novel—and how certain readers or critics might respond to those choices.
If I write a straightforward story with believable characters and clear prose, I’m in the realist tradition. If I experiment with fragmented timelines or stream of consciousness, I’m borrowing modernist techniques. If I get cute and self-referential, I’m flirting with postmodernism.
None of these are “right” or “wrong,” but they come with trade-offs. Realism connects emotionally but can feel conventional. Modernist techniques can capture complex consciousness but risk alienating readers. Postmodern playfulness might be intellectually interesting but often sacrifices what fiction does best: making us care about people who don’t exist.
These days the fiction world is pretty eclectic. There’s typical realism (Alice Munro), realism with fantastical elements (Kelly Link), experimentalism with emotional sincerity (David Foster Wallace apparently tried to split this difference), and everything in between.
My take after this deep dive: Fiction’s unique power is making us feel what it’s like to be someone else. When technique serves that purpose—whether it’s Alice Munro’s precision or Faulkner’s stream of consciousness—great. When technique becomes the point itself, I lose interest.
by Noor Rahman, Write on Track | Read more:
Image: via
[ed. More examples in the full essay. I can't read Joyce. Even (and especially) because of his prose (except for Portrait of the Artist). Same with Proust, but for different reasons - his prose is beautiful but buried beneath the endless minutia of social manners and French society that eventually becomes unbearable (In Search of Lost Time).]
