When reading a text, readers should base their interpretations on the reality created by the text, not on the world as we know it or what to know it, said Umberto Eco, the renowned, prize-winning author and essayist.
He spoke Nov. 8 as part of a series of lectures on "The Italian Influence on American Life," sponsored by the Library's Rare Book and Special Collections Division, the Embassy of Italy, the Italian Cultural Institute and the National Italian American Foundation.
"I think that a narrator, as well as a poet, should never provide interpretations of his own work," Me. Eco said. It is irrelevant to ask the author because, after the auther is finished with a work, is should stand on its own. The author wrote the text knowing that it would be interpreted in different ways by different people.
Most readers are what Mr. Eco calls empirical readers. "The empirical reader is you, me, anyone, when we read a text."
Mr. Eco explained that empirical readers try to see how their lives fit into the story. He told the story of a friend who wrote him about some characters in one of his books that seemed to be his aunt and uncle. The manwrote, "Dear Umberto, I do not recall having told you the pathetic story of my uncle and aunt, but I think you were very indiscreet to use it for your novel."
"I wrote back to that friend of mine sayind that they were my relations.
"He had been so absorbed by the story that he thought he could recognize some incidents that had happened to his uncle and his aunt.
"What happened to my friend?" Mr. Eco continuted. "He had sought in my story something that was instead in his private memory. He was not interpreting the text, bu rather using it."
The model reader, according to Mr. Eco, tries to fit the text into real life, instead of expecting real life to fit the text, as empirical readers do.
Mr. Eco learned of two model readers of his novel Foucault'sPendulum and their efforts to nestle the novel's fictional world into reality.
"Two students...came to show me a photograph album in which they had reconstructed the entire route taken by my character [Casaubon], having gone and photographed the places I had mentioned, one by one, at the same time of night. Given that at the end of the chapter Casaubon comes up out of the city drains and enters, through the cellar, an oriental bar full of sweating customers, beer jugs and greasy pits, they succeeded in finding that bar and took a photo of it.
"It goes without saying that that bar was an invention of mine, even though I had designed it thinking og the many bars of that kind.... But those two boys had undoubtedly discovered the bar described in the book. They wanted to trasnform the 'real' Paris into a place in my book."
Mr. Eco believes readers must respect the text as an entity. What readers want from a text is irrelevant. Readers should only expect to get from a text what is explicitly delievered. After reading the text and accepting it as a whole, readers can then begin to interpret it and apply their reality to it.
Authors can be empirical as well, and like empirical readers, authors must not use their interpretations of the text to justify one interpretation or another, but only to show how there are as many interpretations as there are readers, Mr. Eco said.
Much of the creative process of writing is spontaneous or unconscious, Mr. Eco said. And no matter what goes into the text, it must stand alone.
He concluded that authors will make a text as real or as fictional as possible, but when it is finished, it is its own reality.
