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

[minyan.livejournal.com]

Maybe not, but I have a feeling some writers see a very specific reader. Stephen King says he writes to his wife. Russell Banks says he hears his main character talking, and when he knows who that character is talking to he also knows what that character would say and leave out. He said that about Hannah in The Darling — he saw her sitting on a porch, talking to a neighbor, saying things she hadn't said even to close friends. And he knew she was talking to a man.

the composition folks around here talk a lot about audience. Whether we intend it or not, we probably do tend to write for one. For someone like us, if we're not thinking about it. And I don't usually think about it, but it could be an interesting exercise to write the same scene several times, directed and different and specific people. Like describing your day to your mother, your closest friend, your boss, or a native of Tonga (and that sentence assumes that you are not, yourself a native of Tonga; if you are, you might write the scene to a native of Connecticut.)