From: Rich Puchalsky Subject: Re: The Bridge: spoil-o-thon Date: Saturday, May 05, 2001 3:44 PM Thirteenth post (Intermission) This part of the book is particularly densely grained. As is common in Banks' better works, there are sections where each sentence means something else in addition to its obvious meaning. At this point I really should step back and go over what I'm doing by writing this and why it's taking so long. What kinds of books does Banks write? One answer might be that he writes the kinds of books that it's possible to write lots of critical study about. Unless you want to descend into the uttermost depths of postmodernism, where anything can mean anything, and you can write at book length on, say, any issue of Spider-man, it's necessary that such a book have a lot of complexity in it. But what kind of complexity? They are not books like Joyce's _Ulysses_, which make manifold references to other literature. They aren't like Tolstoy's longer works, where a lot of the complexity has to do with length of plot and number of characters (at least, Banks' *good* books aren't like that; _Excession_ might qualify). They aren't brilliant philosophical pieces, and they certainly aren't books that capture every nuance and feeling of ordinary life. Their complexity consists of having a multitude of *internal* references. Banks creates a symbology, keeps coming back to various parts of it at different points in the book, and produces a complicated structure, where he can finally say a whole lot with a few words, because those words have already been given multiple symbolic meanings. If his books weren't grounded in concern with the human condition, they would merely be puzzles, though rather good ones. Sometimes he achieves a sort of triple layered cake effect; most readers appear to read them as simple adventure stories, many realize that there are puzzles going on underneath that aren't strictly required in order to grasp the high points of the adventure, and get interested in the puzzles, and a few try to interpret those puzzles as part of literature. For example, take the familiar's remark about the rocks looking metamorphic, not igneous. Is he just showing off his erudition and annoying the barbarian? That's the obvious meaning. Does it have something to do with the differences between metamorphic and igneous rocks -- in other words that metamorphic rocks are igneous rocks that have been melted and changed, and that this is really a joking description of Banks' reuse of Greek myth in the Underworld scene? That's the puzzle meaning. There would normally be no other particular symbolic meaning attached to these words. But Banks has already referred to geology twice; once when Brooke said that there was enough just in the Bridge to keep people interested without going outside it, and talked about the rock layers supporting it, and once when we hear that the narrator went to university and studied geology. Banks has already created a host of symbolic meanings for "geology", so that his later sentences can evoke them all in just a few words. These kind of often-used symbols range from simple images like "red on the bridge" to heavily overloaded words like "witch", which start to take on connotations of all of the narrator's various sexual fears. Plus there are entire sequences, like the chapter in Use of Weapons where Zakalwe tries to write poetry, or like many of the dream sequences in this book, where nearly every sentence has a coherent second meaning, producing both an obvious and a hidden narrative. Making some sense out of these things, in a way that says something important about the human condition, is what I take to be the goal of literary criticism of Banks. Now, are these meanings arbitrary? There is every indication that Banks is putting them in there on purpose, or at the very least, that his unconcious is putting them in there on purpose. If someone wants to argue that, we can discuss individual cases, but otherwise I'll just say that while most authors' works have multiple symbolic meanings that are more or less created by the reader's history, Banks' are to a great degree implicit in the writing. There is an esthetic theory that holds that an attempt to force a single emotion in the reader is kitsch. I don't think that this is true when a more-or-less single symbolic meaning is implied, which the reader can then associate with a range of emotions. But maybe this is one of the reasons, besides genre, why Banks doesn't seem to have a big critical following. Or it could be just that my own critical sense is impaired and that I should be spending my time with better authors. But Banks combines some literary quality with at least some "ideas", whether political or social, that make his works more attractive to me than yet another great American novel of street life. And he's simply a good writer of fantasy, of which there are few. So why is this taking so long? Well, to have any hope of pointing out some of the meanings of a work like The Bridge, I have to dig down to at least the puzzle level. That means that in certain parts of the work, each sentence can be described with another sentence. And when Banks starts really using internal references, each sentence might need a paragraph or two. You could easily end up with a critical study as long as the original book. Which is silly, of course; maybe I should have re-read _Pale Fire_ before this as a cautionary tale. But this isn't a critical study, because it isn't carefully summarized, with the important parts picked out. It's a set of notes, written as I read, from a personal perspective. And because of the low-culture Usenet convention that an explanation of what happens is a "spoiler", as well as because explanations of puzzles can be spoilers for those who want to find the solutions themselves, it's a marathon of spoilers, a spoil-o-thon. It could be turned into a critical study if I cared to re-read the whole thing afterwards and re-write it, which I am most likely never going to do -- but the next guy that posts here for the first time looking for someone to help him do his homework is going to get pointed to this thread. After which I will sit back and laugh. The next post will return to _The Bridge_.