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the paramount instance of every possible text. A text is a place where the irreducible polysemy of symbols is in fact reduced because in a text symbols are anchored to their context. The medieval interpreters were right: one should look for the rules which allow a contextual disambiguation of the exaggerated fecundity of symbols. Modern sensitivity deals on the contrary with myths as if they were macro symbols andwhile acknowledging the infinite polysemy of symbolsno longer recognizes the discipline that myths impose on the symbols they involve. Thus many modern theories are unable to recognize that symbols are paradigmatically open to infinite meanings but syntagmatically, that is, textually, open only to the indefinite, but by no means infinite, interpretations allowed by the context.
To recognize this principle does not mean to support the "repressive" idea that a text has a unique meaning, guaranteed by some interpretive authority. It means, on the contrary, that any act of interpretation is a dialectic between openness and form, initiative on the part of the interpreter and contextual pressure.
Medieval interpreters were wrong in taking the world as a univocal text; modern interpreters are wrong in taking every text as an unshaped world. Texts are the human way to reduce the world to a manageable format, open to an intersubjective interpretive discourse. Which means that, when symbols are inserted into a text, there is, perhaps, no way to decide which interpretation is the "good" one, but it is still possible to decide, on the basis of the context, which one is due, not to an effort of understanding "that" text, but rather to a hallucinatory response on the part of the addressee.
Notes
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1. Auerbach suggests that sometimes Dante, instead of designing complex allegories, sets forth characters such as Beatrice and Saint Bernard, who stand at the same time as real persons and as "types" representing higher truths. But even in this case one witnesses the presence of a rhetorical device, halfway between metonymy and antonomasia. There is nothing there that may recall the idea typical of romantic symbolismof an obscure intuition that cannot be translated by a verbal paraphrase. Dantesque characters can be interpreted in the same way as those characters of the Old Testament who, as we shall see later, were intended as figures of the New. Since the times of Augustine this procedure was called allegoria in factis, as opposed to allegoria in verbis, and was later

 
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