closed text. Good contracts are written so they have little wiggle room to
be interpreted other than as intended.
Open works differ in that the author surrenders control to the reader’s
imagination, inviting the reader to add his stamp. There are degrees of
openness, and very few works are completely open. As far as I am aware,
the only example Eco gives of a completely open work is James Joyce’s
Finnegans Wake , which consists of one ambiguous wordplay after another.
The second insight Opera aperta presents is that every work with an
aesthetic or literary character must be at least partially open. Literature
uses gaps, symbols, allusions, wordplay, and other ambiguities that require
the reader’s active involvement in interpretation; without those devices,
it is not literature. By his or her choice of literary devices or particular
genres, the author cedes some control to the reader and requires the
reader to apply her imagination to the task of interpretation.
E CO: THE MODEL READER
Eco is often associated with “reader response” criticism because he envi-
sions a rather active role for the reader. But he is also prone to discuss the
intentio operis. Yet any discussion of a text’s “intention” invites Hirsch’s
question: How can a text, an entity without consciousness, have an inten-
tion? Eco’s answer seems to be: Readers ask questions of texts and get
answers back, so texts act as if they are conscious, even if we know they
are not.
Eco also insists that a key question the reader should ask is this: How was
this text “designed to be read”? 23 Of course, concealed in this question’s
passive voice is the author and the design he imposes on the text he creates.
In his book Interpretation and Overinterpretation , Eco provides a very
curious defi nition of a text. “A text,” he says, “is a device conceived in order
to produce its Model Reader.” 24 What he means by this is that the normal
strategy an empirical reader employs, whether consciously or not, is to make
conjectures about the reader for whom the text was written. If the text begins
“Once upon a time ...,” it is probably a fairy tale and the Model Reader is a
child. Now, it is possible that this stylized opening is intended ironically and
the text is intended for an adult, but in this case other clues will point out the
ironical character of the opening and the empirical reader’s original conjec-
ture that he or she is reading a fairy tale will be discarded. Even in this case,
however, the fairy tale opening remains an important clue to the nature of
the text and will guide further conjectures about the Model Reader. 25
90 G.W. MENZIES