squeequeg | too much coffee+late-night port=textual analysis!

Entry tags:

too much coffee+late-night port=textual analysis!

sigerson recently loaned me Interpretation and Overinterpretation, a collection of lectures by Umberto Eco and other notable scholars. It's well worth a read; while I find myself agreeing with Eco overall, the other lectures all bring up very good arguments in defense of both overinterpretation and limited interpretation (even the one by Richard Rorty, who is a little full of himself in the same way that the ocean has some water in it).

One of Eco's points (

sigerson, I'm paraphrasing wildly here; please tell me if I'm wrong) has to do with the privileging of hidden knowledge. This stems in part from the Hermetic and Gnostic traditions, which considered the "secret meaning" of a text to be more powerful the more hidden it was. Unlocking one secret only revealed a dozen more, and anything that could be stated plainly -- anything that could be stated, even -- was suspect and obviously hiding some new meaning.

As a result of reading these lectures, I went back and reread Little, Big by John Crowley. This is a very dense book. It's beautiful, powerful, and something that I will undoubtedly come back to many more times -- but I get very lost when reading it. This is a book for which I feel I need Cliff's Notes or heavy annotations; I can catch some of the allusions in structure, language, characters, and so on, but I keep getting the sense that there's even more to it, that because of my own ignorance I have missed some major meaning in the text. Thus even after multiple readings, I understand part of the story -- but I'm not sure I understand all of it. Or even if I'm capable of doing so.

On the one hand, it seems I'm falling into the overinterpretation trap Eco describes; each discovery only leads to more questions. On the other hand, I think this may be an integral part of the novel; the allusions are not there by accident, nor am I just seeing what I want to see in them.

And aside from all that, should this affect how I read the novel? Would I be happier not knowing the allusions are there?

What other novels (or movies, or other works) strike you in this way -- full of not-always-understood meaning, rich in allusions, puzzles for the careful reader? Do you ever get frustrated by them?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I read this post, and I can't help feeling there's a double meaning buried somewhere.

Shh! Only the Elect can know these secrets!

I think one of the things Eco mentions, though, is the concept of the model reader. Some texts are directed at "bored guy reading cereal box at breakfast"; others are directed at "allusion-stuffed erudite discoverer." Sounds like Little, Big is intending for you to be overwhelmed with allusions and references, intending for you to go looking further. As opposed to, say, a Sweet Valley High book or an episode of M*A*S*H*. Crowley opens the gate to a bazillion interpretations, like Nabokov in Pale Fire or Joyce and Ulysses; maybe he's hoping that you'll reach a particular one, or just hoping that you'll be stuck in the woods forever.

Were you to apply the same heavy-reading to a George R.R. Martin novel, Eco would be right to say you overinterpret: the text does not intend its reader to be its decipherer.

I think. Im reedin ur-text.

Considering the story, "stuck in the woods forever" is not an implausible option. But yes, I'd forgotten the model reader. Is there a genre of fiction that's directed to such a reader? Or is scattered throughout genres? Or is there just a term for that mode of storytelling? I called it a Hermetic novel, but that almost seems too pejorative a term.

These words are too long for me to be using before coffee.

Nah, I think he means that *every* text implies one. The way that the side of a cereal box implies a reader who a) cares about nutrition, b) is bored and c) knows what an RDA is.

Ah, I see... But I wonder if everyone sees the same implied model reader in a text.

Great, more layers of interpretation. Just what I needed.

Maybe not, but I have a feeling some writers see a very specific reader. Stephen King says he writes to his wife. Russell Banks says he hears his main character talking, and when he knows who that character is talking to he also knows what that character would say and leave out. He said that about Hannah in The Darling — he saw her sitting on a porch, talking to a neighbor, saying things she hadn't said even to close friends. And he knew she was talking to a man.

the composition folks around here talk a lot about audience. Whether we intend it or not, we probably do tend to write for one. For someone like us, if we're not thinking about it. And I don't usually think about it, but it could be an interesting exercise to write the same scene several times, directed and different and specific people. Like describing your day to your mother, your closest friend, your boss, or a native of Tonga (and that sentence assumes that you are not, yourself a native of Tonga; if you are, you might write the scene to a native of Connecticut.)

I'd be curious what you'd make of Timebandits under that type of analysis. My sense has always been that the screenplay intended Big Things to be said, and Gilliam intentionally "ruined" it - but that they can still be seen in bits and pieces around the edges. Like Lego Proust, maybe.

I've only seen all the way through Timebandits once. I agree in that there's a mixture of Big Things and seeming irrelevancies all the way through (the devil carousel? wtf?).

Out of curiosity, what do you base your sense of Gilliam's "ruining" the text? I'm not saying you're wrong; I just don't know if there's some story about the movie's creation that I don't know.

The idea of a purposely distorted text like this -- like

sigerson's distressing of clothing in the costume shop -- is fascinating. Does it add to the mystery or obscure it?

Out of curiosity, what do you base your sense of Gilliam's "ruining" the text? I'm not saying you're wrong; I just don't know if there's some story about the movie's creation that I don't know.
I saw an interview with Gilliam where he claimed to "avoid good scripts like the plague." But now I've checked IMDB, and learned/been reminded that Palin and Gilliam wrote it together. Even so, it seems they intentionally messed with the Big by throwing in, let's say, Napoleon and midgets.

Does it add to the mystery or obscure it?
It forces you to look harder. Having to chew your text, rather than sucking down Pedialite, might be a good thing. Rather than having a straightforward lesson on good and evil, we have a complex God, a bewildering villain, and no clear resolution of the conflict - or even an unambiguous sense of what the conflict is. Note that while Evil is Evil, God is merely God - there's no "Good" here.

I don't mean just the complexity of characters and ambiguity of morals; I've read plenty of novels that had those without the opacity of the text itself. (And few of those could be reasonably compared to "sucking down Pedialite.") What I mean by a purposely distorted text is perhaps similar to archarology; a text that forces one to look at the pieces and assemble them into a coherent whole to see what it once was -- or, perhaps, to see how each piece now fits into its ruined or rebuilt self.

And as far as I'm concerned, adding Napoleon and midgets to a movie can only improve it. Especially if they're on a plane.

La grande armée sur un avion: "I've had it up to here with these cheese-eating surrender monkeys!"

I tend to prefer the Eastern version of this kind of book, rather than the Western version, and my favorite would have to be the Tao Te Ching. I like the idea of something you can read over and over again and each time elicit a new meaning from it, I just prefer that it also be poetic :)

Zen Buddhism, for example, also relies on secret knowledge as the gateway to enlightenment, but it has always come across as a bit more egalitarian than the gnostic traditions of the West.

I've never read the Tao Te Ching. Perhaps I should. Maybe it's because I'm trying to tease out a Western plot structure that I sometimes get frustrated with these kind of books.

I would highly recommend it! My translation doesn't appear to be online, but wikipedia lists several that are. You read it first as a book of poetry, not a novel, and then as philosophy. If you've read Plato and Aristotle, there are some astouding similarities/opposites, almost as though a conversation was taking place between the writers. Of course, this is brought out more by some Western translators than others.

A sample:

All in the world recognize the beautiful as beautiful.
Herein lies ugliness.

All recognize the good as good.
Herein lies evil.

Therefore
Being and non-being produce each other.
Difficulty and ease bring about each other.
Long and short delimit each other.
High and low rest on each other.
Sound and voice harmonize each other.
Front and back follow each other.

Therefore the sage abides in the condition of wu-wei (unattached action).
And carries out the wordless teaching.
Here, the myriad things are made, yet not separated.

Therefore the sage produces without possessing,
Acts without expectations
And accomplishes without abiding in her accomplishments.

It is precisely because she does not abide in them
That they never leave her.

Hmmm...I'll track down a copy.

I'm going to totally ignore the actual post and just say OMG ICON LOVE!

hee! thank you! I'm not so good with Photoshop, so it's a bit blurry. I'll try to clean it up later on.

It's the result of a email conversation with

sigerson the other day. Ziggurats were involved.

I *love* Little, Big; Emily's halfway through it even now, at least in part because I kept raving about it. You just know there's a full reality those characters live in, with its own rules and possibilities, but we only get a sideways view of how it all works... just beautiful. (I just read his most recent book, though - the Evening Land, and was pretty disappointed; you can see where he's going after about three chapters and sure enough that's where he goes.)

Illuminatus!, though honestly kind of sophomoric, has the kind of complexity you're talking about: the narration wanders back and forth in time, the identity of the narrator changes frequently and without warning, and the plot switches through an array of conspiracies and counterconspiracies and different realities depending on who's doing the narrating at the moment. You're left with the certainty that it does all actually make sense, if you could just fit it together properly.

Others I can think of at the moment are Foucault's Pendulum of course; and Tim Power's Last Call (kinda)... seems like they lean pretty heavily towards the magic and/or conspiracy theory end of the spectrum, which I guess makes sense: it's hard to have hidden knowledge about the mundane. I guess Finnegan's Wake counts, though that sorta feels like cheating.

Would you recommend any of his earlier books? Aegypt looks interesting, but I'm a little skittish. Haven't read Illuminatus!; it's been on my "Oh yeah, ought to get to that sometime" list for a few years now.

I think there's a very slight distinction between the magic/conspiracy theory end and this sort of reading: those posit a world that is Hermetic and mysterious, while in Little, Big I get the sense that the world itself is perfectly clear; it's the text that is opaque.

I'd highly recommend Crowley's The Translator, which I think is his second-most-recent book (the one D just read is actually called Lord Byron's Novel; I'm pretty sure "The Evening Land" is the name of a novel-within-the-novel, but couldn't say for certain because I haven't read it yet). It's extraordinarily different from Little, Big (which I am indeed about 2/3 through at the moment, and reading unusually slowly), more straight-up literary fiction. But gorgeously written, and really well done on the whole. I have high hopes of bringing Crowley out to the nonprofit sometime in the next year.

But anyway -- this whole post reminds me of something I read a couple years ago, which might in fact have been the editors' introduction to my Oxford World Classics edition of the King James Bible. It was talking about the composition of the bible -- not the writing of it, but the compiling of those writings into a single text, choosing what got included and what got left out, designating an order for those chosen texts. Pointing out that Jews read the books of the Tanakh in a different order than Christians, and the Christian ordering of the books is very deliberately designed to create a sense of prophetic narrative, everything leading inevitably to the Gospels. And it then theorized about the effect that this process of compilation has had on western thought. Because the entire basis of western culture is in effect this loose assemblage of separate stories and poems and history and laments, which we are trained to read as a single narrative from which we must tease out meanings because it's all terribly important. And this in turn has interesting effects on how we construe narrative, and how/where we find it, and what we do with it. (I should probably dig out this essay and reread it, because it really was fascinating and I have the feeling that I'm garbling it here.)

Like

sigerson, I'd put Joyce and Nabokov high on the list of novelists whose work is filled with nuances and allusions that I'm sure I'm not getting. I enjoy this sort of thing when I'm in the right mood; having to untangle intellectual games in order to get at a story can be a lot of fun or it can be too much work, depending on when I'm reading (or how well it's written). I'd add Borges to that list too, and Calvino. And to a lesser degree, pretty much any writer whose work gets described as "difficult." I recently reread John Ashbery's "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror," and that belongs in this category too. (As a tangent, are you familiar with Nabokov's short story "Signs and Symbols"? It makes a good corrolary to this whole conversation; the story involves a young man who so compulsively tries to read meaning into the world around him that he's mad. And the story is, of course, filled with tiny details that could signify something important or they could just be the random details of everyday life.)

As for your question -- "should this affect how I read the novel?" -- I'll quote a professor from my grad program, on the first day of a seminar on Virginia Woolf. "If we were scholars," he said, "we should be reading a text to find absolutely everything that's inside it. But we aren't scholars, we're writers, and as such we should be reading a text to find whatever's inside it that excites us."

Good point. What excites me sometimes with this text is the story; what excites me at other times are the allusions. I guess I shouldn't allow one to overshadow the other.

I haven't read the Nabokov story, but I think I might be able to mooch a copy off of someone (helloooo,

sigerson?). Maybe I'm just making too big a deal of this sort of "difficult" text. If you find that essay, by the way, can you tell me the title and author? I'd love to read it.

Earlier books: I've only read Engine Summer and Beasts (they were in a three-novels-in-one-book edition with Little, Big). Both good reads, but not nearly at the level of Little, Big.

the world itself is perfectly clear; it's the text that is opaque

I think the 'opaqueness' in Little, Big comes from the fact that we're viewing this magical world through a lens that isn't quite capable of seeing it clearly. It's perfectly clear to those who live inside it, but to the rest of us it really is mysterious and almost incomprehensible at first... Smoky gradually gets assimilated into that other world; then we go through it again with his friend whose name I forget, the guy who starts the city farm, even more slowly -- but ultimately we the readers get left outside, never get a clear picture of why that world works the way it does; just a very strong sense that it does work, which I'm having a hard time articulating why that is. Internal self-consistency is an important part of it. Referring to a rulebook that we only get to peek at, so it always feels like there's more to every event than we're being shown. The fact that it feels new, not another Tolkien-inspired retread, but somehow ancient and archetypal at the same time... I'm wandering from the point, i think.

Thought of some more that might fit: The Canopus In Argos: Archives books, really mostly Shikasta and The Sirian Experiments. Heavily tinged with politics, I'm afraid, but if you can get past that. And Dictionary of the Khazars, though I wouldn't necessarily call it a *good* book, certainly takes the dense cross-reference and hidden knowledge things to an extreme.

I'd recently come across Dictionary of the Khazars, but hadn't done more than consider it. I'll have to look it up.

but ultimately we the readers get left outside, never get a clear picture of why that world works the way it does; just a very strong sense that it does work

Yes. Yes, exactly -- and I think this is why the very end of the book, the last few paragraphs, affects me so much.

Oh god yes. "Once upon a time." Means a completely different thing when you put it at the end of the fairy tale, instead of the beginning.

Bank's non-SF novels. Two in particular that come to mind are Wasp Factory and The Bridge. I have both if you'd like to borrow them at some point. His SF novel Against A Dark Background also has some of that element, though to a lesser degree.

Cryptonomicon (Stephenson) feels almost that way to me. Hyperion (Simmons), a bit too.

Declare by Tim Powers is very good - some fantastic stuff, but enough grounding with real, historical things and strange-but-true things to make you wonder where exactly fact stops and fiction starts, and to think that maybe if you knew a few more secrets then more would turn out to be real that you might otherwise expect.

---

I tend to enjoy such novel that have an interesting story in addition to the complex text, but get bored and frustrated by them if the text gets in the way of the story.

I've read a few of Banks' SF novels -- Excession and Consider Phlebas -- but hadn't touched his non-genre work. I know they're at the BPL; I'll pick them up sometime. I preferred Declare to Cryptonomicon, but that's mostly because I tend to get irritated with Stephenson's protagonists.

And yes, the novels where this works best are the ones where the complexity of the text plays off the story, rather than becoming a stumbling block.

I thought of another recommendation that's Western modern lit:

Gene Wolfe's Shadow of the Torturer series. Very good read and _lots_ of subtext and mystery. High proportion of "WTF!!?! So this changes everything that I thought was going on?!" moments, sometimes only available on the third read or so :) Also cool stuff with language! If you are interested in reading it, let me know and I'll also lend you the Lexicon Urthus (written as a companion to the series, not by the author) which helps out considerably with the archiac language and the Book of Days (written by the author) which has a couple of articles about the books as well as the missing jokes :)

I've read the Shadow of the Torturer series, and can't believe I didn't think of it in this context before, because I've made the same exact comments to

thomascantor regarding the whole Book of the New Sun (i.e. "I need annotations, dammit!"). So yes, I'd love to borrow the Lexicon Urthus. After I return the other books I've borrowed from you.

(deleted comment)

I found that for me, Infinite Jest is on that border between where the complexity of the text illuminates a deeper aspect of the story and where it just gets frustrating. I'm not sure why I get more frustrated with it than with House of Leaves. I haven't read any Moorcock since I was fourteen and going through the library in search of books with dragons or swords on the cover. Not the best age for unraveling metaphor.

I don't know The Strange Case of Balthazar Hippolyte, though the name is familiar. Care to elaborate?

I think part of why I sometimes react negatively is personal. If I'm not understanding something, but I have the impression (warranted or not) that everyone else is seeing what I don't, then I tend to get resentful and more thickheaded. This lingers; I had to be coaxed out of my first read-through reaction to Infinite Jest.

Agreed wholeheartedly — allusions and beautiful sentences do not make up for a lack of story. In fact, they tend to highlight it. I'm particularly interested in this right now because it's one of my failings too — I'll never forget my college poetry prof (the first one) reading one of my poems and saying, "it's not that it isn't lovely" in a tone that implied it would make good kindling. She was absolutely right; that's why I remember.

A story that keeps saying "look how smart I am!" isn't likely to have the guts to say anything real. A story that kees you riveted and leaves you only at the end saing 'wait, what — oh' is a marvel. And word games can be a pure pleasure... that's another of the many reasons I like listening to Peter Wimsey... :o)

i don't have anything substantive to add, but: ICON LOVE! :)

(if you want heelp cleaning it up or prettifying it, let me know... i'm thinking it would be especially funny in an old-fashioned ornate font.)

I would love help cleaning it up, and an ornate font would probably work very well. How should I go about this?

send me the original image for the person reading, or a pointer to it, and i'll do the rest :)

Will do -- once I'm home, which might be late tonight. But I'll send it!

I'd add Name of the Rose. (though perhaps just because I'm me) And almost anything by Iris Murdoch.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

too much coffee+late-night port=textual analysis!

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject