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

[squeequeg]

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?

Comments

[2h2o.livejournal.com]

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.

[stealthmuffin.livejournal.com]

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?

[2h2o.livejournal.com]

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.

[stealthmuffin.livejournal.com]

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.

[2h2o.livejournal.com]

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