You bring valid points (I started reading Mr. Difficult, will finish it tomorrow cuz too tired). What I meant was that most people usually don't dig this deep into the very strange and difficult books which you might had in mind, some might read 1 novel by Pynchon but they won't read Bolano's 2666, Gaddis' JR or Ulysses because they are fun(if they even know who these people are), but they will get the feeling from this 1 Pynchon novel or idk, Zaddie Smith, J.Franzen, P. Roth,S.Rushdie (great writers, nothing against them) that this is how the novel should be and that we should abandon classical ways of plot and writing, even though they aren't that difficult in comparison to Finnegan's Wake. What I wanted to say was that there is a kind of elitism (not in the sense that complexity=good) but just that there are so books which don't bring a lot of new because they fall into being clones of work from people like Marquez, Faulkner or Proust. It seems that for it to be really profound and have an impact on popular and a wider scale of the literary public it has to have some feature that makes the story more "complex" by involving magical realism, stream of consciousnes or unreliable narration(not generaly a bad thing, but the story and message of it should not depend only on it, I don't think Faulkner, Marquez or Proust did this with these intentions). Look for instance how magical realism got popular in literature, countless numbers of great current living writer writes in this style and it's even in pop culture.(Life of Pi as an example). So it's not that experimental even, it's a genre but oh.... "It's literature, it's complex". Fuck no.But looking in the Western Canon, you mention Joyce, Woolf and Beckett, but in terms being the only experimental writers, IMO many others from the Canon would join the list of experimental writers Kafka, Borges, Proust and Fernando Pessoa (especially Pessoa). Then again, if you look even at some of Goethe's work(Werther, Faust and his later books) and Cervantes' Don Quijote. For their time they were highly experimental and inovative. So that would be 9 writers(kind of many). But some other great classics not mentioned in the (f***ing) cannon would be Melville, Conrad, Nabokov, and Dostoevsky(the man invented existentialism for Christ's sake). All classics now and make the norm, but are they really that conservative? I don't know, I can't say what is and what is not popular but it doesn't seem that in popular high brow literature that people don't want the story to be understandable and just tell a good and profound story like with Hemingway or Vonnegut. Instead there are debates and discussions of how a novel should be, about the norm our understanding of the novel and stories and science,and I don't think that then they pay attention to the stories itself. Though, I love experimental books and from the popularity of some it shows that others love experimental books too. It's about the thing that Vonnegut said "Literature should not dissapear up in it's own asshole." This is it, the genre or how conservative or experimental the book might be is not important. However, when the book itself isn't about stories or the insight in the human soul, then we have a problem. It's elitist,says nothing and is art for the sake of art.