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

[sylvantechie.livejournal.com]

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.

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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.

[stealthmuffin.livejournal.com]

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.