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kind of fruit. No reader-oriented theory can avoid such a constraint. Any act of freedom on the part of the reader can come after, not before, the acceptance of that constraint.
I understand that there is a difference between discussing the letter mentioned by Wilkins and discussing Finnegans Wake. I understand that the reading of Finnegans Wake can help us to cast doubt on even the supposed commonsensicality of Wilkins's example. But we cannot disregard the point of view of the Slave who witnessed for the first time the miracle of Texts and of their interpretation.
The essays collected here, except for three (the analysis of Pliny's letter and the essays on drama and Pirandello, written at the end of the 1970s), were published during the last five years. All of them deal, from different points of view, with the problem of interpretation and its limits, or constraints. It is merely accidental, but by no means irrelevant, that they appear a little after the English translation of an old book of mine, Opera aperta, written between 1957 and 1962 (now The Open Work [Cambridge: Harvard U.P., 1989]). In that book I advocated the active role of the interpreter in the reading of texts endowed with aesthetic value. When those pages were written, my readers focused mainly on the "open" side of the whole business, underestimating the fact that the open-ended reading I supported was an activity elicited by (and aiming at interpreting) a work. In other words, I was studying the dialectics between the rights of texts and the rights of their interpreters. I have the impression that, in the course of the last few decades, the rights of the interpreters have been overstressed. In the present essays I stress the limits of the act of interpretation.
It is neither accidental nor irrelevant that these essays follow my previous writings (A Theory of Semiotics, The Role of the Reader, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, all published by Indiana U.P) in which I elaborated upon the Peircean idea of unlimited semiosis. I hope that the essays in this book (especially the one on Peirce) will make clear that the notion of unlimited semiosis does not lead to the conclusion that interpretation has no criteria. To say that interpretation (as the basic feature of semiosis) is potentially unlimited does not mean that interpretation has no object and that it "riverruns" for the mere sake of itself. To say that a text potentially has no end does not mean that every act of interpretation can have a happy ending.
Even the most radical deconstructionists accept the idea that there are interpretations which are blatantly unacceptable. This means that the interpreted text imposes some constraints upon its interpreters. The

 
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