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in tr o d uct i o n : the re p ud iat i on of p le asure 21
offered cognitive tension, irony, and analytical rigor. Leonard Diepeveen has made a convincing case that when disparaged for “block[ing] reading pleasure, creating anxiety and irritation instead,” modernists claimed that the struggle with difficult texts had its own intrinsic rewards: the satisfaction of solving a puzzle or recognizing arcane references, sorting out the voices of The Waves, or decoding Pound’s Cantos.64 Those of us who have to coax recalcitrant undergraduates into reading Ulysses will recognize this argument: really, it’s FUN. An important motivation for modern art’s aesthetic difficulty was competition with the undeniable charms of vernacular culture. In Orwell’s 1936 novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying, which wittily stages the cultural battle of the brows in a bookshop scene, the self-defeating would-be poet Gordon Comstock is undone by his attempt to compose a massive work in rhyme royal, an Eliotic pastiche caustically called “London Pleasures.”65 Gordon sneers at the common urban pleasures around him even as he acknowledges their allure: The pubs were open, oozing sour whiffs of beer. People were trickling by ones and twos into the picture-houses. Gordon halted outside a great garish picture-house, under the weary eye of the commissionaire, to examine the photographs. Greta Garbo in The Painted Veil. He yearned to go inside, not for Greta’s sake, but just for the warmth and the softness of the velvet seat. He hated the pictures, of course, seldom went there even when he could afford it. Why encourage the art that is destined to replace literature? But still, there is a kind of soggy attraction about it. To sit on the padded seat in the warm smoke-scented darkness, letting the flickering drivel on the screen gradually overwhelm you—feeling the waves of its silliness lap you round till you seem to drown, intoxicated, in a viscous sea—after all, it’s the kind of drug we need. (71–72) Here we see, in characteristic Orwellian clarity, anxiety about cinema’s appeal (such bad food and such small portions!), felt all the more now that cinema was superseding or cannibalizing literature. Unlike Graham Greene’s sociopathic Pinkie in Brighton Rock, who has an extreme antipathy to somatic enjoyment—dancing, alcohol, and sex fill him with “the nausea of other people’s pleasures”66—Gordon senses but