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]

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.