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

[stealthmuffin.livejournal.com]

I found that for me, Infinite Jest is on that border between where the complexity of the text illuminates a deeper aspect of the story and where it just gets frustrating. I'm not sure why I get more frustrated with it than with House of Leaves. I haven't read any Moorcock since I was fourteen and going through the library in search of books with dragons or swords on the cover. Not the best age for unraveling metaphor.

I don't know The Strange Case of Balthazar Hippolyte, though the name is familiar. Care to elaborate?

I think part of why I sometimes react negatively is personal. If I'm not understanding something, but I have the impression (warranted or not) that everyone else is seeing what I don't, then I tend to get resentful and more thickheaded. This lingers; I had to be coaxed out of my first read-through reaction to Infinite Jest.

[minyan.livejournal.com]

Agreed wholeheartedly — allusions and beautiful sentences do not make up for a lack of story. In fact, they tend to highlight it. I'm particularly interested in this right now because it's one of my failings too — I'll never forget my college poetry prof (the first one) reading one of my poems and saying, "it's not that it isn't lovely" in a tone that implied it would make good kindling. She was absolutely right; that's why I remember.

A story that keeps saying "look how smart I am!" isn't likely to have the guts to say anything real. A story that kees you riveted and leaves you only at the end saing 'wait, what — oh' is a marvel. And word games can be a pure pleasure... that's another of the many reasons I like listening to Peter Wimsey... :o)