When does the author matter?
The third lecture opens by narrowing the question. In conversation, in letters, intention-hunting is not optional: “When I speak with a friend I am interested in detecting the intention of the speaker.” But a text written for a community of readers is different in kind — put in the bottle, Eco says, and that “happens not only with poetry or narrative but also with the Critique of Pure Reason.” Such a text is interpreted against the social treasury: the language, the encyclopedia of cultural conventions, and “the very history of the previous interpretations of many texts, comprehending the text that the reader is in the course of reading.”
This yields the lecture’s first hard distinction, between interpreting and using a text. Reading Wordsworth’s “A poet could not but be gay” with today’s lexicon is a use; interpreting requires the lexical system of Wordsworth’s time. Uses can be brilliant — Eco has no objection to parody, free association, reading for inspiration — but they make no claim on the text. The exemplary interpreter here is Lorenzo Valla, who exposed the Donation of Constantine without speculating about anyone’s psychology: certain expressions were simply implausible for a fourth-century writer. “The model author of the donation could not have been a Roman writer of that period.”
The liminal author
Between the empirical person and the textual strategy, Eco (crediting his student Mauro Ferraresi) inserts a third, “rather ghostly figure”: the liminal author, caught on the threshold where a human being’s intentions become language’s. Did Wordsworth want Hartman’s tears behind his trees? Wrong question. On that threshold, “he obliged the words (or the words obliged him) to set up a possible series of associations.”
The Italian evidence is lovely: Leopardi’s “A Silvia” opens with Silvia and closes its first strophe on salivi — a perfect anagram, in a strophe critics have always heard as saturated with the vowel i. That attribution is economical. But Eco, “a very skeptical semiotician,” then went looking for Silvia in Petrarch and Laura in Leopardi and found pseudo-anagrams of both — the alphabet is small, and the criterion of economy “becomes rather weak” exactly here. His rule of thumb for when the hunt turns preposterous is one of the lectures’ finest passages: a student who scoured Leopardi for hidden acrostics of melancholy was wasting the poet’s time as well as his own, because Leopardi “was so poetically committed to making his mood poignantly clear by other linguistic means.” Secret-hunting is fruitful for Rabanus Maurus, who wrote secrets in; it is “grasshopper criticism” for Leopardi.
The author in the dock
What makes this lecture singular is the experiment Eco runs on himself. The author’s testimony, he proposes, is never a way to validate interpretations — it is theoretical evidence, useful precisely for “the discrepancies between the author’s intention and the intention of the text.” Then he opens his own case files, and the scoreboard is striking.
The text wins. A reader asks what connects William’s fear of haste in The Name of the Rose with Bernard Gui’s contempt for haste on the same page. Eco knows the banal truth — the William dialogue was added in galleys, the echo is an accident — and rules that it does not matter: “The text is there, and it produces its own effects… I myself feel embarrassment in interpreting this conflict, though I realize a meaning lurks there.”
The text wins again. David Robey points out that Eliot’s Casaubon in Middlemarch — a reference Eco had tried to write out of Foucault’s Pendulum — was composing a Key to All Mythologies. Eco surrenders: “Text plus encyclopedic knowledge entitle any cultivated reader to find that connection. It makes sense. Too bad for the empirical author who was not as smart as his readers.”
The reader loses. Helena Costiucovich derives The Name of the Rose from a 1946 Henriot novel via Casanova and a character named Hugh of Newcastle. Here Eco can fight — not by testifying (“my witnessing cannot be taken into account”) but as a reader of his own book: Newcastle does not translate Casanova; Hugh is marginal and far from the library; nothing in the novel values sexual incontinence. The hypothesis is not forbidden; it is unrewarding — it leads nowhere.
The reader loses absurdly. A reader quotes “the supreme happiness lies in having what you have” as Eco’s wisdom; the line, restored to its context (Adso’s ecstasy, collaged from the Song of Songs), says something else entirely. This produces the lecture’s central formula:
“Between the unattainable intention of the author and the arguable intention of the reader there is the transparent intention of the text, which disproves an untenable interpretation.”
And one verdict is pure Eco: the critic who quoted William admiring the frangula bush as an echo of Sherlock Holmes’s love of roses stopped his quotation one comma early. The sentence continues: “for hemorrhoids.”
The unfathomable author
The coda concedes the empirical author one dignity — not as an authority over meaning but as a witness to the creative process. Eco tells two stories against himself: the name Amparo, which migrated into Foucault’s Pendulum from a half-forgotten song sung by a girl he loved in the fifties; and the day he discovered, while cataloguing his own library, a 1587 Riccoboni edition of Aristotle’s Poetics — browned, stained, its final pages stuck together as if smeared with something fat. He had owned, for decades, the poisoned book he believed he had invented. “By a sort of internal camera I had photographed those pages… and I believed I had invented it.”
Neither story interprets anything. That is their point:
“The private life of the empirical authors is in a certain respect more unfathomable than their texts. Between the mysterious history of a textual production and the uncontrollable drift of its future readings, the text qua text still represents a comfortable presence, the point to which we can stick.”