another, some opinions are nevertheless preferable. Echoing Animal Farm
somewhat facetiously, Eco himself offers a more jaded summary: “OK, all
interpreters are equal, but some of them are more equal than others.” 28
One way an interpretation may be discredited is if it pays no mind to
the cultural and linguistic context in which the text appeared. Eco provides
the following illustration: In his book Criticism in the Wilderness , Geoffrey
Hartman analyzes Wordsworth’s poem “I wander lonely as a cloud.” When
he comes to the line “A poet could not but be gay,” he refuses to construe
it “as a contemporary reader would do if the line were found in Playboy.”
Eco is quite approving of this, noting that “a sensitive and responsible
reader ... has the duty to take into account the state of the lexical system
at the time of Wordsworth.” 29 Eco summarizes: “if I want to interpret
Wordsworth’s text [rather than use it] I must respect his cultural and lin-
guistic background.” 30 Hirsch would agree with these sentiments entirely.
E CO: THE AIM FOR CONGRUENCE
If a reader-response critic such as Eco insists that he “must respect” the
cultural and linguistic background of the author in order not to be charged
with bad interpretation, then perhaps the gulf between the “conserva-
tive” criticism of Hirsch and reader-response criticism is not so vast as one
might imagine. In fact, Eco maintains that achieving congruence between
an author’s intended meaning and the reader’s meaning is a laudable goal,
even if it is not always achievable. Expanding upon this idea, he states:
Meanings that are actualized by a reader are of course the reader’s mean-
ings—generated by him. Whether they are also meanings intended by an
author cannot be determined with absolute certainty, and the reader is in
fact free to choose whether or not he will try to make his actualized mean-
ings congruent with the author’s intended ones. No one disputes that a
reader can try to realize the author’s intended meaning. The two important
questions are: (1) whether he should try, and (2) whether he could succeed
if he did try. In this book, as in the previous one, my emphatic answer to
both questions is yes. The reader should try to reconstruct authorial mean-
ing, and he can in principle succeed in his attempt. 31While Hirsch would not speak of “the reader’s meanings” as Eco does
here, the thrust of this statement runs parallel to Hirsch’s hermeneuti-
cal theory and complements it. In fact, I think Eco’s distinction between
using a text and interpreting a text is quite helpful and would have enriched
Hirsch’s basic theory.
92 G.W. MENZIES