|
|
|
|
|
|
We can conceive of an aesthetics claiming that poetic texts can be infinitely interpreted because their author wanted them to be read this way; or an aesthetics which claims that texts must be read univocally despite the intentions of their authors, who were compelled by the laws of language, and, once they wrote something, were bound to read it in the only authorized and possible sense. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
One can read a text conceived as absolutely univocal as if it were infinitely interpretable: see, for instance, the reading performed by Derrida (1977) upon a text of Searle in "Limited Inc." One can perform psychedelic trips upon a text that cannot be but univocal according to the intentio operis (for instance, when one muses oneirically upon the railway timetable). Alternatively, one can read as univocal a text whose author wanted it to be infinitely interpretable (as would be the case of fundamentalists if by chance the Kabbalists were right) or read univocally a text that from the point of view of linguistic rules should be considered rather ambiguous (for instance, reading Oedipus Rex as a plain mystery story where what counts is only to find out the guilty one). |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
It is in light of this embarrassingly vast typology that we should reconsider many contemporary critical currents that can superficially be ranked, all together, under the headings of response-oriented theories. For instance, from the point of view of the classical sociology of literature, one is interested in recording what different readers do with a text, but one does not have to be worried by the problem of the intentio. The sociology of literature describes social usages, socialized interpretations, and the actual public effect of a text, not the formal devices or the hermeneutic mechanism that has produced those usages and those interpretations. In contrast, the aesthetics of reception maintains that a literary work is enriched by the various interpretations it underwent along the centuries and, while considering the dialectics between textual devices and the horizon of expectations of the readers, does not deny that every interpretation can and must be compared with the textual object and with the intentio operis. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Likewise, the semiotic theories of interpretive cooperation, such as my theory of the Model Reader (Eco 1979), look at the textual strategy as a system of instructions aiming at producing a possible reader whose profile is designed by and within the text, can be extrapolated from it and described independently of and even before any empirical reading. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
In a totally different way, the most radical practices of deconstruction privilege the initiative of the reader and reduce the text to an ambiguous bunch of still unshaped possibilities, thus transforming texts into mere stimuli for the interpretive drift. |
|
|
|
|
|