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'codes' of the heavy industry of dreams in a capitalistic society. But why not read Superman stories only as a new form of romance that is free from any pedagogical intention? Doing so would not betray the nature of the saga. Superman comic strips are also this. And much more. They can be read in various ways, each way being independent from the others.
0.2.3. Model Readers for Open Texts
This cannot happen with those I call 'open' texts: they work at their peak revolutions per minute only when each interpretation is reechoed by the others, and vice versa.
Consider, in the essay on the semantics of metaphor (Chapter 2), the interplay of possible interpretations foreseen by Joyce apropos of the trial of Shaun. Consider, even at the reduced scale of a laboratory model of poetic language (in Chapter 3, on Edenic language) the way in which a productively ambiguous message leaves Adam and Eve free to reconsider the whole of their semantic universe, but, at the same time, makes them bound to the indecomposable unity of their alternative interpretations.
An author can foresee an 'ideal reader affected by an ideal insomnia' (as happens with Finnegans Wake), able to master different codes and eager to deal with the text as with a maze of many issues. But in the last analysis what matters is not the various issues in themselves but the maze-like structure of the text. You cannot use the text as you want, but only as the text wants you to use it. An open text, however 'open' it be, cannot afford whatever interpretation.
An open text outlines a 'closed' project of its Model Reader as a component of its structural strategy.
When reading a Fleming novel or a Superman comic strip, one can at most guess what kind of reader their authors had in mind, not which requirements a 'good' reader should meet. I was not the kind of reader foreseen by the authors of Superman, but I presume to have been a 'good' one (I would be more prudent apropos of the intentions of Fleming). On the contrary, when reading Ulysses one can extrapolate the profile of a 'good Ulysses reader' from the text itself, because the pragmatic process of interpretation is not an empirical accident independent of the text qua text, but is a structural element of its generative process. 6 As referred to an unsuitable reader (to a negative Model Reader unable to do the job he has just been postulated to do), Ulysses qua Ulysses could not stand up. At most it becomes another text.
It is possible to be smart enough to interpret the relationship between Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin as the umpteenth variation of the Oedipus myth without destroying Rex Stout's narrative universe. It is possible to be stupid enough to read Kafka's Trial as a trivial criminal

 
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