WHEN answering the question, “What is the one book you started but could not finish”, in his Talkingbooks interview (Books&Authors, December 25, 2011), my good friend Dr Tariq Rahman stated: “James Joyce’s books fall in that category nor will I go back to them”, and went on to remark that “modernist literature will never be read nor will philosophers like [Ludwig] Wittgenstein.”

The defiant tone of Dr Rahman’s phrases, “nor will I go back and will never be read”, sounds like a rallying battle-cry to move the masses against an insufferable elite. No doubt there will be some readers who will be gratified that an eminent academic’s dismissive pronouncement of Joyce and Wittgenstein justifies their own neglect of some notable modernist texts and elevates their ignorance to a sort of noble sacrifice.

A person’s choice to remain ignorant is his business as long as it is a personal, private matter. However, its public proclamation cannot go unremarked. For a prominent literary critic and a university professor to dismiss Joyce and modernist literature, and in philosophy to marginalise Wittgenstein, is like a scientist dismissing Darwin, Einstein and Heisenberg: he might get a standing ovation from evangelical creationists but he could not expect to escape censure from his peers. Questions of taste and temperament aside, Dr Rahman’s statement calls for serious comment.

First, let me say that I have much respect and affection for Tariq, my friend of several decades. He was one of the first critics in Pakistan to appreciate my novels, and wrote about them with a keen perception, whether he wrote with enthusiastic admiration, as for my “traditional” The Murder of Aziz Khan, or sharply critically, as of the “modernist” The Triple Mirror of the Self. I am forever grateful to him and I am confident that he will not consider me ungracious in opposing his disapprobation of modernism because I know that, like me, he believes that to disagree is not the same as being disagreeable.

Tariq and I do not always agree, but ours is the healthy disagreement of academic colleagues whose arguments, which advance opposing ideas, make for a comprehensive resolution of the intellectual content of what is being debated. There is no intellectual growth without diversity of ideas and there can be no diversity without disagreement. It is in this spirit, which values the free expression of ideas as one of the highest virtues and embraces academic antagonism as a disciplined foundation for the advancement of ideas, that I offer these comments.

Modernist literature generally refers to the early 20th century break from established traditional modes. Actually, the forces that led to it are far more complex than the normal stylistic changes with which every new generation inaugurates its singular identity. To put it briefly and simplistically, the cultural tectonic plates shifted violently with the French Revolution and the after-shocks continued well into the 20th century; modern man, who had begun to be shaped by the Renaissance, became fully formed at the end of the First World War; from being at the centre of the universe he had become exiled to its outer edge, the permanent outsider; the very perspective of reality had shifted radically. And that violent shifting caused the eruption of modernism, the context in which Joyce wrote his early work.

Joyce’s short stories collected in Dubliners were written over a hundred years ago. He had learned from his European predecessors, especially Chekhov and Flaubert, that the story writer’s job was to present human experience objectively, to show reality as it appeared in that special perception which is comprised of the totality of a person’s senses.

Senses, not ideas. This is the crucial distinction, which few people seem to grasp. Ideas do not have a prior existence to the sensual perception that occasions them. This was the lesson learned from Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.

Apart from being a sheer delight in themselves, Joyce’s stories have been the template for the majority of the short stories written after Dubliners was published in 1914 (after eight years of rejection by publishers). Many of the major writers of short fiction — such as Flannery O’Connor and William Trevor — have learned from Joyce. In fact, every short story published today that has the appearance of a well-made traditional story that has a recognisable beginning, middle and end (as opposed to experimental stories like that by B. S. Johnson and Donald Barthelme) can be said to have used the Joyce template; even if the writer has not read Joyce, he has absorbed him through the proliferation of his method by other writers.

Joyce’s second book, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, has been equally influential in giving stylistic directions to the novelists who have followed. And then came Ulysses — the novel that heralds 20th century modernism in fiction as T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land does poetry, Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring music, and Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon painting. The world changed then. Five years after Ulysses and The Waste Land were published in 1922 came Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle which launched the quantum theory and brought about a radical re-visioning of reality.

Ulysses was new in Joyce’s choice of, and control over, the form of the novel. The style he fashioned and his use of the stream of consciousness technique have become commonplace since; because some aspects of his style were radical innovations at the time, some readers naturally expressed their resistance to change by accusing the work of obscurity, so that it acquired the reputation of being a difficult work. But 90 years later, many aspects of Joyce’s style have become so ingrained in fiction that there cannot be a novelist writing today, even one who has never read Joyce, who has not partially incorporated some of Joyce’s devices. In fact, Joyce has become easy to read.

Today, there is only one reason to read Ulysses and the two previous books: they are hugely entertaining, often hilariously funny, with a subtle current that transmits the sort of wisdom we derive from all great literature.

However, the same cannot be said of Joyce’s other work. The self-indulgent conceit of Finnegans Wake, not to mention such puerile puns as “the Jung and easily Freudened,” make it a great bore. A case can perhaps be made in defence of this experiment, but none for Joyce’s slim volume of poems, Pomes Penyeach, which for so avant-garde a writer of fiction, is compiled of old-fashioned verses. And not much can be said for his play, The Exiles which is clearly written under the overpowering influence of Henrik Ibsen — and Ibsen himself, though a major playwright, is no longer of much literary consequence, being a perfect example of how a writer’s status diminishes because, however great an impression he made during his time with his ideas, he did not make the form new. The test of a writer’s quality is whether or not the generations of writers who succeed him can produce their work without first having absorbed him. By this test, Joyce is certainly one of the very best of novelists, and to deny oneself the pleasure of reading Ulysses is like fasting when you could be enriching your soul.

It is not surprising, however, that there are still readers for whom modernist literature is an infection to be avoided by remaining quarantined within the walled-in compound of ignorance.

The first problem with literature is that it is composed of books that have to be read and it takes a good 20 hours to read a novel of average length — and when it comes to such supreme masterpieces as Dickens’s Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend and Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, one needs weeks for just a first quick read and then months of attentive rereading to begin to fathom their extraordinary depth. The second problem is that no book can be properly appreciated without knowing what preceded it; to be really prepared to appreciate fiction, a reader will need to go all the way back to Martorell’s Tirant lo Blanc. Of course, no one who reads for an hour or two for pleasure has the time to do that. With music, you can put on a disc, eat dinner or work on a crossword puzzle or lie back with your eyes closed, and at the end of the hour you can say you’ve heard Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony; with painting, you can go to a museum, walk through the galleries exhibiting, say, a retrospective of Matisse, and after a couple of hours you can walk out convinced you’ve become an expert on him.

The third problem with literature is that it is taught for its socio-political content or what connections can be made with it by theorists, that is, by professors eager to relate literature to some ideological principle with no regard to aesthetics. This has been especially true in the last three decades with the rise of popular culture, which set off a universal democratisation impulse with the result that what was then deemed to be “high culture” became stigmatised as elitist, a word that has acquired a pejorative connotation, and it became respectable for professors to launch populist attacks on the presumed aristocracy that produced modernist literature — and most amazing of all, attacking that which they had not read and had no intention of reading.

There was a famous instance of this some years ago when an eminent professor who was that year’s chairman of the Booker Prize judges stated during his announcement of the prize that the Booker was not an award given to writers like Proust and then remarked jokingly, as if it added distinction to his qualification to judge literature, that he had never read Proust. Imagine if the judge for the best cut of beef were to start by proudly declaring that he was a vegetarian. As with literature, so with philosophy: one cannot begin to judge Wittgenstein without being knowledgeable about what led to his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (first published in English translation the same year as Ulysses and The Waste Land, 1922). Furthermore, Wittgenstein does not write philosophy, like, say, Bertrand Russell, but states a series of propositions that build up the architecture of his thought.

With philosophers like John Locke and David Hume one can read their books and give an abstract summary of their content; with Wittgenstein one assimilates his ideas and comprehends his essential thought but often it is difficult to convey the idea of that thought in a succinct summary. It is like reading one of those memorable passages in Shakespeare’s sonnets that cannot be paraphrased but are experienced as an interior illumination. That’s a bit exaggerated perhaps, for Wittgenstein is no poet; but the fact is that any single proposition, for example in his book Philosophical Investigations (1953), when read by itself, will appear somewhat banal and convey no profound thought: “It is no more essential to the understanding of a proposition that one should imagine anything in connection with it, than that one should make a sketch of it.” But within the context of the 693 propositions that comprise Part I of Philosophical Investigations, it is one of the logical steps one has to take in order to reach the top of the pyramid from where one sees his entire thought.

No doubt some new philosopher will emerge one day to astonish us with a new vision of reality, but so far Wittgenstein strikes me as the last of the great philosophers in that his exhaustive analysis seems to have exhausted the subject. What we perceive of reality is very much influenced by the language with which we attempt to describe that reality. In the end, language liberates us and simultaneously locks us up within its cage. Aristotle begins his Metaphysics with the statement that all human beings have a desire to know (what reality is); with Wittgenstein we conclude that all we can know is how the language operates through which we aspire to access our knowledge of reality.

Now, reader, come to the supreme modernist writer, Samuel Beckett. He was Joyce’s friend, his amanuensis (when the nearly blind Joyce was writing Finnegans Wake), and his literary successor. Read Beckett’s work, especially his novels. If the odour of modernism is too strong for you, a casual first glance will probably make you want to close the book and take a walk; but a little perseverance and what you will inhale will be that heady perfume which fills the mind with delight when one’s senses are thrilled by an experience of immense beauty. For all their autobiographical content, Beckett’s novels are structures of language in which the characters rehearse their memories in permutations of words until their reality is to find themselves trapped within a sort of Plato’s cave — as in Company (1980) and “The Lost Ones” — where all they have is words. As such, Beckett is Wittgenstein illustrated.

Assembling his words to create his distinctive language, which in the beauty of its rhythm and the generation of ideas that follow from his carefully crafted style surpasses anything written by his contemporaries, Beckett’s is the triumph of modernism.

Zulfikar Ghose is a novelist, poet and essayist