The complaint of 1990
Eco opens with an author’s grievance. In 1962 his Opera aperta (The Open Work) had argued for the active role of the interpreter — and his readers, he says, heard only the word open, forgetting that the open-ended reading he supported was “an activity elicited by (and aiming at interpreting) a work.” His verdict on the decades since:
“I have the impression that, in the course of the last decades, the rights of the interpreters have been overstressed.”
The lecture’s whole program is in that sentence. Eco does not retreat to the author’s intention; he had helped demolish that position himself. He wants a third thing — a dialectic between “the rights of texts and the rights of their interpreters” — and he spends three lectures looking for where the limit comes from, if not from the author.
He stakes the claim early, against the strongest possible version of the opposing view. Yes, Peirce’s unlimited semiosis means interpretation is potentially endless; no, that does not mean it is criterionless:
“To say that a text has potentially no end does not mean that every act of interpretation can have a happy end.”
The picnic and the Ripper
Against the theory that a text is (in Todorov’s borrowed quip) “a picnic where the author brings the words and the reader brings the sense,” Eco produces a deliberately crude counterexample: Jack the Ripper claiming his murders were grounded in his interpretation of the Gospel according to Saint Luke. Even the most reader-oriented critic, Eco bets, would call that reading preposterous. And one preposterous reading is all he needs:
“It proves that there is at least one case in which it is possible to say that a given interpretation is a bad one.”
The move is Popperian and characteristically minimal. Eco does not need criteria for the best interpretation; a single agreed-upon bad one falsifies the hypothesis that interpretation has no public criteria at all. From here he can introduce his triad — intentio auctoris, intentio lectoris, and between them the intentio operis, the intention of the text — which the second lecture will develop.
The archaeology: modus against Hermes
The bulk of the lecture is a long historical detour with a sharp polemical point: “most so-called postmodern thought will look very pre-antique.”
On one side, Greek and Latin rationalism. Knowledge as causes; identity, noncontradiction, excluded middle; modus ponens. Eco dwells on the Latin word modus — measure, but also limit and boundary. Romulus kills his brother over a boundary line; Caesar crossing the Rubicon knows he can never turn back; even Aquinas’s God, who can restore a fallen woman to grace by miracle, “cannot cause what has been not to have been.” Limits in space, limits in time, limits on what a thing can mean.
On the other side, Hermes — “volatile and ambiguous … young and old at the same time,” the god in whom identity, noncontradiction, and the excluded middle all dissolve. Eco locates the flowering of this spirit in the syncretism of the second century: an empire where all gods are tolerated, where every book is presumed to hold a spark of one truth, and where, consequently, every word must be an allusion to something else. Truth becomes what lies beneath; whatever a text says, the real meaning is further down. The chain never terminates:
“Every time a secret has been discovered, it will refer to another secret in a progressive movement toward a final secret. Nevertheless, there can be no final secret.”
Add the Gnostic temperament — the world as a botched creation, the elect reader (pneumatikoi) redeeming the error of the author-Demiurge while the hylics who think texts mean something definite are left behind — and the portrait is complete. Eco then turns it, with visible enjoyment, into a mirror: a list of “disquietingly similar ideas” shared by ancient Hermetism and “many contemporary approaches” to texts. The first item is the most famous sentence of the lectures:
“A text is an open-ended universe where the interpreter can discover infinite interconnections.”
And the portrait’s punchline, aimed at the deconstructive reader as Gnostic Übermensch: “The Real Reader is the one who understands that the secret of a text is its emptyness.”
He concedes at once that this is caricature — “caricatures are frequently good portraits” — and then states the thesis of all three lectures in one plain sentence:
“What I want to say is that there are somewhere criteria for limiting interpretation.”
The slave and the figs
The lecture ends with its best thought experiment, borrowed from John Wilkins (1641). A slave carries a basket of figs and an accompanying letter; he eats some figs on the way and is betrayed by the letter, which states their number. Eco escalates: kill the messenger, replace the figs, misdeliver the basket; finally, put the letter in a bottle and let Robinson Crusoe find it seventy years later. No sender, no referent, no context. Has the text become free?
Not quite. The sophisticated finder may try rhetorical senses of fig, may suspect allegory, may reconstruct cultural frameworks — but, Eco insists, will rely on “economical” criteria throughout, and one constraint survives every loss of context:
“It can mean many things, but there are senses that it would be preposterous to suggest. Certainly it says that once upon a time there was a basket full of figs. No reader-oriented theory can avoid such a constraint.”
The closing line gives the site its working ethic. Faced with the choice between the masters of suspicion and the illiterate slave who witnessed “for the first time the miracle of texts,” Eco chooses the slave:
“Thus my proposal is: let us first rank with the slave. It is the only way to become, if not the masters, at least the respectful servants of semiosis.”