sign in sign up
<<
Home , Umberto Eco

CHAPTER TWO

THE MODEL READER, THE ENCYCLOPEDIA AND TEXTUAL INTENTION

The pleasure of the text is not necessarily of a triumphant, heroic, mus- cular type. No need to throw out one’s chest. My pleasure can very well take the form of a drift. Drifting occurs whenever I do not respect the whole, and whenever, by dint of seeming driven about by language’s illu- sions, seductions, and intimidations, like a cork on the waves, I remain motionless, pivoting on the intractable bliss that binds me to the text (to the world). Roland Barthes1

[T]he semiotic theories of interpretive cooperation, such as my theory of the Model Reader (Eco 1979), look at the textual strategy as a system of instructions aiming at producing a possible reader whose profile is designed by and within the text, can be extrapolated from it and described independently of and even before any empirical reading. [. . .] In a totally different way, the most radical practices of privilege the initiative of the reader and reduce the text to an ambiguous bunch of still unshaped possibilities, thus transforming texts into mere stimuli for the interpretive drift. Umberto Eco2

2.1 : Open Works and Model Readers

As put forth in the previous chapter, the redaction-critical approach to the Gospel of Matthew involves serious neglect of the cumulative force of the many significant allusions to Isaac therein. Further, it is not true that redaction criticism alone permits determinative interpretation by providing access to the intention of the empirical author. Nor is it true that literary methods are necessarily indeterminate, arbitrary and unhistorical. In this chapter, I will present Umberto Eco’s theory of the

1 , The Pleasure of the Text (trans. Richard Miller; New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), 18. Emphases original. 2 Eco, Limits, 52. 22 chapter two

Model Reader, a disciplined, determinative, historical reader-response approach that permits adequate consideration of Matthean narrative dynamics and thus the phenomenon of Matthean allusion. Most of the world knows Eco as the author of the wildly successful The Name of the Rose,3 but he was an accomplished semiotician and literary theorist well prior to his career as a novelist. His theoretical work is marked by concerns for interpretive objectivity and involves a realist view of language as a socio-cultural phenomenon.4 The work with which Eco made his academic mark was Opera aperta (The Open Work), published in 1962, in which Eco argued against the distinction between “high” and “low” in and in art and for the necessity of the cooperation of the recipient in the interpretation of artistic works; ’s modernist texts Finnegan’s Wake and served as paradigms of “open” literary works.5 One detects affinities with both structuralist and poststructuralist tendencies. Eco applies structuralist techniques to the analysis of objects of mass culture and displays a fascination with the literature of high . Eco did move past his early , but not in the direction of French poststruc- turalism and deconstruction as the concept of “openness” might sug- gest. Indeed, Eco believes that his ideas in The Open Work have been routinely misunderstood: [M]y 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 words, I was studying the dialectics between the rights of texts and the rights of

3 Eco, The Name of the Rose (trans. ; San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983). 4 Eco’s early work involved an explicit rejection of Crocean Idealism, in which art concerns the artist’s intuition, emotion and individual creativity; Eco thought that Croce’s aesthetics divorced works of art from historical realities. Eco wrote his doctoral thesis on the aesthetics of , and found that Aquinas’ system contained the same defect: the scholastic concern for essences did not square with cultural realities. Eco thus regarded Aquinas as the forerunner of structuralism. This concern for concrete cultural realities undergirds all his theoretical work, as we shall see. For a succinct and accessible introduction to Eco as both theorist and writer, see Peter E. Bondanella, Umberto Eco and the Open Text: , Fiction, Popular Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 5 Eco, Opera aperta: forma e indeterminazione nelle poetiche contemporanee (: Mondadori, 1962). The English version, which is slightly different in content and arrangement from the Italian, is The Open Work (trans. Anna Concogni; Cambridge: Press, 1989). On Joyce, see Eco, Open Work, 10–11.