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Page 40
On the contrary, those texts that according to Barthes (1973) are able to produce the 'jouissance' of the unexhausted virtuality of their expressive plane succeed in this effect just because they have been planned to invite their Model Readers to reproduce their own processes of deconstruction by a plurality of free interpretive choices.
Naturally, a text can also be read as an uncommitted stimulus for a personal hallucinatory experience, cutting out levels of meaning, placing upon the expression 'aberrant' codes. As Borges once suggested, why not read the Odyssey as written after the Aeneid or the Imitation of Christ as written by Céline?
A semiotic theory offers the proper categories to explain also this sort of experience (Theory, 3.7.8). Everything can become open as well as closed in the universe of unlimited semiosis. 21
I think, however, that it is possible to distinguish between the free interpretative choices elicited by a purposeful strategy of openness and the freedom taken by a reader with a text assumed as a mere stimulus. The essays collected in this book deal with a shaded gamut of different attitudes toward different types of text. Kristeva (1970:185ff) speaks of a traditional 'closed' text as of a cube, or an Italian stage where the author disguises his own productive activity and tries to convince the spectator that he and him are the same. It is not by chance that Allais' Un drame bien parisien concludes my analyses: not only does this text reestablish in the open air the gap between sender and addressee, but it also portrays its own productive process.
To conclude a book of textual explorations with a metanarrative text that speaks ambiguously and with tongue in cheek of its own ambiguity and of its own derisory nature seems to me an honest decision. After having let semiotics speak abundantly about texts, it is correct to let a text speak by itself about its semiotic strategy.
Notes
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1. This article was published later as the first chapter of Opera Aperta Forma e indeterminazione nelle poetiche contemporanee (Milan: Bompiani, 1962).
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2. I take the term 'pragmatics' in its current sense. Thus pragmatics concerns itself not only with the interpretation of indexical expressions but with the "essential dependence of communication in natural languages on speaker and hearer, on linguistic context and extralinguistic context . . . on the availability of background knowledge, on readiness to obtain this background knowledge and on the good will of the participants in a communication act" (Bar-Hillel, 1968:271; see also Montague, 1968, Petofi*, 1974).

 
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