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

[outsidetheparty.livejournal.com]

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.

[stealthmuffin.livejournal.com]

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.

[squirrelhaven.livejournal.com]

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."

[stealthmuffin.livejournal.com]

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.

[outsidetheparty.livejournal.com]

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.

[stealthmuffin.livejournal.com]

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.

[outsidetheparty.livejournal.com]

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.