Everything resembles everything
The second lecture turns from history to method. Hermetic semiosis ran on similarity — and its real flaw, Eco argues, was not that it saw resemblances but that it accepted any resemblance as significant. He quotes a sixteenth-century art of memory whose list of legitimate associations (by similitude, by homonymy, by irony, by sign, “and finally, pure idiolectal association, any monster for anything to be remembered”) amounts to an admission: “As long as some kind of relationship can be established, the criterion does not matter.”
Against this he sets an everyday fact. We all know that, pushed far enough, everything is like everything else — Eco notes that while and crocodile are related, since both appear in the sentence he has just uttered. Sanity is knowing what to do with that fact:
“The difference between sane interpretation and paranoiac interpretation lies in recognizing that this relationship is minimal, and not, on the contrary, deducing from this minimal relationship the maximum possible.”
The paranoiac is not the reader who notices the coincidence; the paranoiac is the reader who wonders about the mysterious motives behind it.
The criterion of economy
Suspicion itself is respectable — detectives and scientists live by it. What disciplines suspicion is a set of conditions Eco states with unusual crispness. A clue may be read as a sign of something hidden only if:
- it cannot be explained more economically;
- it points to a single cause (or a limited class of possible causes), not to an indeterminate crowd of them;
- it fits in with the other evidence.
His examples are tutorial-grade. The doctor who concludes that soda causes cirrhosis (all his patients drank whiskey and soda, cognac and soda, gin and soda) fixes on the conspicuous common element instead of the explanatory one. Renaissance herbalists read the orchis’s twin bulbs as a signature of the testicles — morphological resemblance promoted to causal power by what Eco calls false transitivity. And the occult tradition dated the Corpus Hermeticum before Plato on the grounds that it contained Plato’s ideas: post hoc, ergo ante hoc, the consequence interpreted as the cause of its own cause.
Crucially, Eco refuses the demand that he first define good interpretation:
“If there are no rules that help to ascertain which interpretations are the ‘best’ ones, there is at least a rule for ascertaining which ones are ‘bad.’”
The Followers of the Veil
The criterion then gets a workout on the Adepti del Velame — the long line of readers, from Gabriele Rossetti onward, who found in Dante a coded Masonic-Rosicrucian counter-church. Eco’s dissection of Rossetti’s hunt for a rose-cross-pelican emblem in the Commedia is the comic high point of the lectures: rosa appears eleven times, croce seventeen, “but they never appear together”; the one pelican in the Paradiso sits far from any rose; and the graceful bird of canto 23 goes hunting for food precisely because it is not a pelican, which could have fed its young from its own breast. The deeper methodological point survives the comedy:
“If we find on page 1 the article the, on page 50 the sequence ros in the body of the lexeme rosary and so on, we have proved nothing — because it is obvious that, given the limited number of letters in the alphabet that a text combines, with such a method we could find any statement we wish in any text whatsoever.”
Eco adds a Kuhnian rider: a winning interpretation need not explain everything, but it must not explain less than its rivals. Dante’s three mirrors, read through medieval optics, illuminate the whole canto; read as Masonic lights, they leave the rest of it dark.
Generous but not absurd: the Hartman test
Then a harder case, chosen because it cannot be dismissed. Geoffrey Hartman hears, beneath Wordsworth’s “Lucy” lines, a sequence of funereal undertones — diurnal splitting into die and urn, course recalling corpse, the unwritten word tears rhyming behind trees. Eco files objections (gravitation is the reader’s paraphrase, not the text’s word; tears is not in fact an anagram of trees) — and then declines to convict:
“One may judge his interpretation too generous, but not economically absurd. The evidence may be weak, but it does fit in.”
What saves Hartman is isotopy — Greimas’s term for the constant semantic level that makes a uniform reading possible. The funereal reading bets on a single coherent topic that the poem, being about a death, undeniably has. Interpretation is always a bet about what a discourse is about, “but the contexts allow us to make this bet less uncertain than a bet on the red or the black of a roulette wheel.”
The text builds its own reader
The lecture’s constructive core is Eco’s best-known theoretical machine:
“A text is a device conceived in order to produce its model reader.”
Not the reader who makes the one right conjecture — a text can foresee a reader entitled to try infinite conjectures. The empirical reader’s task is to converge on the model reader the text postulates, by conjecturing a model author that finally coincides with the intention of the text. Eco cheerfully admits this is circular — “I am not ashamed to admit that I am so defining the old and still valid ‘hermeneutic circle’” — because the circle has a brake: the text as a coherent whole. The rule is as old as Augustine’s De doctrina christiana: an interpretation of one part of a text is accepted only if confirmed, and rejected if challenged, by another part of the same text.
His test case is Borges’s game of attributing the Imitation of Christ to Céline. Eco actually tried it. It works for a few sentences (“Grace loves low things and is not disgusted by thorny ones”) — and then “all the rest, most of the book, resists this reading.” The game is legitimate play; the resistance is the text’s intention showing itself.
The lecture closes on a cliffhanger: what happens when the empirical author is still alive — and says, “No, I did not mean that”?