How do you read books that defy interpretation, logic, semantics or even language itself?
After loving Waiting for Godot in the theater years ago, I recently tried to read the novel Molloy, by Samuel Beckett, in the Portuguese translation. It was a humbling experience. Most of the time I did not know who was talking, where they were talking, to whom they were talking, or what they were trying to talk about. The words were definitely arranged in interesting ways that pleased me at times, but I can't really say if what I was doing could be qualified as reading.
Half the book doesn't even have paragraphs, it is just one continuous block.
Maybe that is the point? I don't know. Critics do seem to get a lot more from these than I do, to the point that I ask myself "are they just deluding themselves, creating meaning where there is none just to justify their very existence? Wouldn't a work with little to no meaning render critics useless anyway?".
I don't know, I'm rambling. I'm looking at Molloy defeated, like one day I looked at Joyce's Ulysses.
Maybe I should read these books without thinking, like listening to music with lyrics in a language I don't speak (I can kinda do that in a movie, but a movie is only 2 hours...).
Maybe I'm not worthy.
I've never read Molloy, but am a fan of Ulysses. Half the fun of that book is reading people's interpretations of chapters and seeing if you can see what they see. It's like a dynamic Magic Eye puzzle. Totally unexpected things in Ulysses invite you to over-analyze, and totally deliver when you try to find discrepancies.
I took a whole class dedicated to it in college and remember mapping out people's walking paths around Dublin to see if they would actually meet up when and where they did in the book assuming an average walking speed, and it totally delivers. I think my final paper was on how one of the chapters (I forget which one) demonstrated a character undergoing the psychological definition of a fugue state while also being structured comparably with a fugue (musical composition), but in writing. I mean who knows if that was what was intended, but it's free-for-all fan theory material due to how murky it can be.
Totally out of left field, here, but I always recommend the anime FLCL to anyone who enjoys Ulysses since it's also just such analysis bait.
Maybe a weird request, but...would you mind sending me that paper? I've never read Ulysses and probably never will but I'm a musician and I'd be pretty interested in seeing your interpretation of writing structured as a musical fugue.
I wish I still had it, but I'm afraid it may be lost for good. I don't see it on my NAS, and I wrote it over a decade ago so the details are totally forgotten. There's a slim chance it survived on some CDs I have in storage, but I don't have a CD drive anymore. If it shows up when I move those CDs onto network storage I'll remember to send it your way, but I'm pretty sure only my documents from my first two years of college are on those.
Damn, no worries though. Thanks anyway!
I don't know dude, these seem like things I'd never wanna do. Obsess on details, meaning, interpretation, etc. I am not erudite and duel on the surface. Maybe these writers are not for me.
Hey that's fine. Nothing at all wrong with that. I may love Ulysses, but weirdly my favorite books ever are just random "crappy" novels in the Warhammer 40K and Warcraft universes. Enjoyment doesn't need to be complicated to be real!
I do like things with more substance but I enjoy their mysterious quality...? For example I liked the movie The Lighthouse but I have zero interest in any interpretation of its symbolism.
of course you are worthy.
i would go about taking them in without trying to rationalize or making sense of the text.
yeah, like poetry. this is similar to the approach I have been recommended for reading Deluze (which I have temporarily given up on due to lack of comprehension, haha). just let it move you, see how you feel.
I could.
This is hard to do on longer works though. Because 1) the brain will naturally look for patterns, and 2) it is more likely that there actually are patterns that you're not noticing.
In other words, it is not easy to read 400 pages of prose like it's poetry... :/
Incidentally, what did you find hard about Deleuze? I mean, when you compare him with intelectuals of a similar persuasion Deleuze is actually quite readable. He is very much related to the western philosophical traditions that precede hum.
I found Deleuze specially digestible after some comments/introduction etc.