Interpretation and Overinterpretation ed. by Stefan Collini (review)

Book Reviews 149 These abstractions are certainly true of "Song of Myself," but they give no hint of the music, emotional power, and life of the poem. And this is true of Knapp's critical interpretation as a whole. Gay Wilson Allen Raleigh, North Carolina Stefan Collini, ed. Interpretation and Overinterpretation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Stefan Collini's Interpretation and Overinterpretation collects some of the most significant voices on the contemporary critical scene in a debate on (as Umberto Eco would have it) the age-old problem of the boundaries of interpretation. The text consists of the revised versions of Eco's three 1990 Tanner Lectures given at Cambridge. Along with these are included three responses by Richard Rorty, Jonathan Culler, and Christine Brooke-Rose. The book concludes with Eco's response to his respondents. Sadly, for the reader, none of the ensuing seminar discussion is printed here. Collini's excellent introduction does, however, allude to some of the local context: but more importantly, Cellini's introductory essay situates Eco's lectures, and indirectly, his theoretical endeavour as a whole, within the larger concerns of this particular literary and historical moment. Collini also focuses on the critical/ethical situation which often lies just out of earshot, in the words of Eco and his interlocutors. Eco's views on interpretation and overinterpretation are not entirely new for him. Nevertheless, his remarks are both learned and witty and, leading as they do to his somewhat anecdotal reflections on his own position as a real author (a lesser being in Eco's semiotic explorations), the book manages remarkably well to approach subjects of particular interest to specialists, while remaining accessible to a more general audience. Eco's lectures detail his antipathy towards what he perceives as the overinterpretive bias in much contemporary theory. The strategy of the first lecture is to historicize, and presumably discredit, the avante garde credentials of postmodern theory. At the same time, Eco wishes to delineate a safe route between the perils of a "radical reader oriented theory of interpretation " and one which "aims at finding the original intention of the 150 Canadtan Review of American Studies author" (25). Eco encyclopedically links the postmodern to the ancient Hermetic and Gnostic traditions of irrationalism which maintain that "truth is secret and any questioning of ... symbols and enigmas will never reveal ultimate truth but simply displace the secret elsewhere" (35). The argument that the ostensibly new is really just the very old may itself be a bit of a tired old hand. For as dazzling as Eco makes it look here, he fails to elaborate precisely why such irrationalism should persist in the habit of making itself new. (Could it be because in his haste to re-establish appropriate relations between reader and text Eco may be overlooking an ongoing resistance to rationalism, or indeed perhaps a whole political or ethical strata which such a resistance is compelled to keep in play?) Eco claims that "somewhere [there are] criteria for limiting interpretation 1 ' (40), and these he seeks to establish more clearly in his second and third lectures. Lecture two takes up the notion of "Hermetic semiosis" (45), or the paranoid interpretive practise which is based on an overestimation of the possibilities of similarity and analogy. (Foucault, among others, is clearly in view.) Overinterpretive tendencies go too far, in Eco's view, "in the practises of suspicious interpretation 11 (50). Eco's examples of criticism which proceed in this manner include Gabriele Rossetti's reading of Dante, and Geoffery Hartman's reading of Wordsworth. Eco's antidote to this too liberal approach by the reader is to suggest a more conventional hermeneutic relationship between text and reader. He proposes what he calls an 11 'intention of the text'": A text is a device conceived in order to produce its model reader. I repeat that this reader is not the one who makes the 'only right' conjecture. A text can foresee a model reader entitled to try infinite conjectures. The empirical reader is only an actor who makes conjectures about the kind of model reader postulated by the text. (64) And if empirical readers are now only "actors,, (no more...