A Literary Priesthood

In 1977 I decided to read Gertrude Stein’s immensely long and repetitious The Making of Americans (1925). I was young and impressionable and wanted to be old and wise, so I read the damned thing. It is, of course, unreadable. That was Stein’s intention and the intention of many subsequent avant-gardists. The whole point of such work is to be puritanically obscure and boring, so only the enlightened ones, a literary priesthood, can appreciate their rare beauties. 

Patrick Kurp