The Limits of Interpretation.

UMBERTO ECO has earned international recognition by erecting, upon the base of his academic career as a semiotician, a variety of journalistic achievements, as well as two popular novels, The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum. His ability to communicate with diverse audiences seems to set a seal upon his profession of semiotics, to validate somehow his abstruse researches; but I think, on the contrary, that the humor and humanity evident in Mr. Eco's fiction have done much to fortify his philosophical investigations.

The Limits of Interpretation, a collection of essays old and new, undertakes to correct abuses and to restrain excesses. Umberto Eco wants to stop "the cancer of uncontrolled interpretation," deny the nihilism of vulgarized deconstruction, to restore at least some of the meaning of "meaning." And he aims to do so in the language of Peirce and of Derrida, probing at the fundamentals of language and logic, exploring the gap between the signifier and the signified, and filling in the void with sense that is both common and communal. Mr. Eco's 1962 work Opera aperta (The Open Work, translated into English only in 1989) advocated freedom of interpretation, the rights of readers. But now in the face of theoretical confusion and manifest nonsense, Mr. Eco must defend the rights of texts, the intentio operis. In other words, he writes, "A text is a place where the irreducible polysemy of symbols is in fact reduced because in a text symbols are anchored in their context." Mr. Eco distinguishes Peirce's "unlimited semiosis" from Derrida's "essential drift" by turning the latter's own interpretation of the former against him: "If Derrida assumed that his interpretation is the good one, he should also assume that Peirce's text had a privileged meaning to be isolated, recognized as such, and spelled out unambiguously." Mr. Eco finds a knowledge" or "truth" in the long run of intersubjectivity, in the community of readers-that is to say, of interpreters.

Thus, more than a parameter to use in order to validate the interpretation, the text is an object that the interpretation builds up in the course of the circular effort of validating itself on the basis of what it makes up as a result. I am not ashamed to admit that I am so defining the old and still valid "hermeneutic circle."

Why is Mr. Eco not ashamed, when his denial implies its opposite? I suggest that any tinge of embarrassment may be due to the yawning gulf between his good sense and his strained expression of it; between his human wisdom and his insistence on linguistic obscurities, abstract jargon, and pettifogging pedantries. How we long for Dr. Johnson to kick the stone, refuting Bishop Berkeley! Then we remember that, logically speaking, his place-kick was no refutation. No, Eco does better to beat the nihilists at their own game and with their own weapons. Still, his denial of "shame" at affirming what had been assented to seems a shrug at the futility of enquiry itself.

Umberto Eco's use of literary theory and linguistic pseudo-science is grounded in an awareness that shines through its off putting expression. His citation of a letter from Derrida addressed to him personally is a deft apology of the literal sense" and establishes a "univocal discourse" emanating from the denier of any such thing. In such a stunt of mental judo we must be reminded that if The Name of the Rose ended in the sad reflection that we have only the name and not the rose, yet that labyrinthine novel was a vindication of humor.

In his analyses of fictional universes or small worlds, this professor doesn't neglect Who Framed Roger Rabbit? He is as at home with Woody Allen as he is with Laurence Sterne, and as familiar with Dallas and Columbo as he is with the hermeneutics of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. Although sometimes The Limits of Interpretation tests the limits of patience, this book discourses brilliantly on Pirandello, on Joyce, on Borges, and rewards the attention paid to it with a wealth of insight and instruction.