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

[balsamicdragon.livejournal.com]

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 :)

[stealthmuffin.livejournal.com]

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.