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world. Then he tries to isolate a second, "symbolic" meaning that this text is conveying, probably beyond the intentions of the author. Right or wrong, Derrida supports his second-level semantic interpretation with textual evidences. In doing so he also performs a critical interpretation, because he shows how the text can produce that second-level meaning. |
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For contrast, let us consider the reading of Poe by Maria Bonaparte (1952). Part of her reading represents a good example of interpretation. For instance, she reads Morella, Ligeia, and Eleonora and shows that all three texts have the same underlying "fabula": a man in love with an exceptional woman who dies of consumption, so that the man swears eternal grief; but he does not keep his promise and loves another woman; finally, the dead one reappears and wraps the new one in the mantle of her funereal power. In a nontechnical way Bonaparte identifies in these three texts the same actantial structures, speaks of the structure of an obsession, but reads that obsession as a textual one, and in so doing reveals the intentio operis. |
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Unfortunately, such a beautiful textual analysis is interwoven with biographical remarks that connect textual evidences with aspects (known by extratextual sources) of Poe's private life. When Bonaparte says that Poe was dominated by the impression he felt as a child when he saw his mother, dead of consumption, lying on the catafalque, when she says that in his adult life and in his work he was so morbidly attracted by women with funereal features, when she reads his stories populated by living corpses in order to explain his personal necrophiliathen she is using, not interpreting, texts. |
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6. Interpretation and Conjecture |
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It is clear that I am trying to keep a dialectical link between intentio operis and intentio lectoris. The problem is that, if one perhaps knows what is meant by "intention of the reader," it seems more difficult to define abstractly what is meant by "intention of the text." |
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The text intention is not displayed by the Linear Text Manifestation. Or, if it is displayed, it is so in the sense of the purloined letter. One has to decide to "see" it. Thus it is possible to speak of text intention only as the result of a conjecture on the part of the reader. The initiative of the reader basically consists in making a conjecture about the text intention. |
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A text is a device conceived in order to produce its Model Reader. I repeat that this reader is not the one who makes the "only right" conjec- |
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