TWO

Reception

2.0. The argument I’ve been developing in the preceding section on the alterity of both literary and non-literary messages now leads me to a series of observations with regard to the “addressee.”

We have seen that the Bühler triangle, applied to literature, would manifest characteristic “doublings” or “introjections” at its vertices. Now, symmetrical to the doubling of internal and external senders, there is the doubling of internal and external addressees.¹ The author not only elects his or her own delegate within the text but prefigures the reader who will necessarily receive its message. This phenomenon had already been observed by the sociologists of literature. Sartre, for example, had said that “all works of the spirit contain within themselves the image of the reader to whom they are addressed” (1948, 92).

But this is not to say—as Sartre knew—that only one reader is projected by the author in the act of formulating the discourse; rather, there are at least three types of prefigured reader, which we shall now examine.

2.1. In the first case, the author conceives the reader as prototype of a determined social class, possessed of a given culture, a particular sensibility, and a particular taste. Often, but not necessarily, such an individual is conceived to be in possession of the same perceptive sophistication and the same cultural systems as the author (those proper to literature as well as axiological and ideological systems). This is true whether the author is prepared to treat the reader sympathetically or whether s/he wishes to confute principles, modify thought, and, sometimes, even modes of behavior. We can define this fundamental type of internal addressee as the “ideal reader” (Eco’s “Model Reader,” 1978). The eighteenth-century novel offers a limited example: a bourgeois writer elects a public of bourgeois readers, those who have attended the same schools, read the same books, hold the same ideological convictions, and so on. With this type of reader in mind, s/he hypothesizes particular linguistic contacts, and then a particular type of diction, and establishes particular expressive materials. Sartre wrote that it is “the choice that an author makes of a certain aspect of the world that determines the reader and, reciprocally, the choice of the reader that determines the subject” (1948, 91–92). By presupposing in the addressee a determined type of cultural formation, the author is permitted particular allusions, particular ellipses. All cannot be stated in the discourse, and while the stated and the suppressed do respond to some choices of an aesthetic order, there is also a precise logic of statement and suppression in a given rapport that the text establishes with the idea of its addressee.

2.2. Next to this clearly delineated reader there is generally another, who, with Sartre, I shall call the “potential” reader. This is a different reader, of a different culture, belonging to a different social class. In general, this potentiality is cultivated, perhaps not at once, by those writers—especially novelists—who belong to a historical period in which a rising social class is clearly in evidence. It was thus that at the beginning of the eighteenth century, coinciding with the advent of the bourgeois class, polite literature did not treat exclusively of elite characters, but endeavoured to address itself as well to the bourgeoisie which was beginning to produce a conspicuous reading public. In the years that followed World War II, Sartre was remonstrating with European writers for not recognizing the new historical reality, constituted by the birth of a proletarian public. The situation, here, was different from that of the eighteenth-century authors, consisting as it did in the refusal to communicate with even the middle bourgeoisie; by now, further changes have occurred: the “mass” reader has appeared on history’s horizon,² and it was inevitable that writers should exist who not only presupposed this reader as virtuality, but who directly fixed upon the “mass” as the ideal reader.

2.3. Beyond the horizon of the “potential” reader we must recognize that there is a third reader—considered by Sartre, but overlooked, in general, by the sociologists of literature—that we could call “universal.” In brief, this reader, constituted abstractly by “humanity,” is tied to the ambition, always manifest in writers, to live beyond one’s own time, to gain, by virtue of the future readability of one’s own products, a kind of immortality. This type of reader, too, is based upon presuppositions. The idealist writer counts on what s/he calls “human universals,” and if s/he is materialist, on the longues durées of culture, among which, above all, are those relative universals constituted by anthropological traits. It is on the basis of fundamental human systems that the antique Greek theater continues to be an important communicative phenomenon, even though our comprehension is deficient—most of the necessary codes are lost to us.

2.4. We can, of course, subclassify this essential typology of literature’s addressees. In some cases the author’s image of the addressee can be typologically more selective. According to Sartre, the black American writer Richard Wright addressed his message primarily to the cultivated Northern negro and secondarily to liberal white Americans. There can be readers chosen from groups held together by diverse factors, not only race, for example, but also ideology—groups formed on the basis of religious, political, or even sexual identity. We know that a vast “women’s” literature exists, which has its roots in the Middle Ages, and which, as Levin L. Schücking (1961) observes, continues throughout the Baroque Age, the eighteenth century—witness Samuel Richardson—and also the Romantic period, not excluding sentimental narrative poems such as those of Lord Byron. Usually, “masculine” literature has an intellectual-philosophical bent. In addition, there is a “children’s” literature, an “adult” literature—in general conservative—and an “avant-garde” literature, which is generally intellectually adventurous, progressive, desecrator of consolidated ideals, inclined toward radical changes in taste. Then, a “middle-brow” literature, widespread in the nineteenth century when books were read aloud to the whole family, maintains an equilibrium among diverse kinds of readers. We are now producing a “feminist” literature. And so it goes.

2.5. The final distinction to be made is that between “ordinary” and “specialist” reading. An “ordinary” reading seeks event, experience, and identification with characters, sometimes to a high degree of empathy; it is not as a rule concerned with formal questions. In the best case, an “ordinary” reader may experience through literature some “coming to consciousness” of his/her own existential state. As a “type” this reader is intellectually lazy, one who refuses the effort of profound reading when the page demands a stronger commitment. S/he has acquired a “competence,” and expects literature always faithfully to actualize it. In sum, s/he is a conserver of tastes, of ideas, of customs. As we know, during the second half of the nineteenth century the most highly qualified literateurs reacted against this reader—bourgeois by definition—thus bringing about the rupture we’ve been discussing.

2.6. Opposed to the “ordinary” is the “specialist” reading, which I shall discuss extensively later on, to illustrate its multiple activities. It too forms categories on the basis of the reader’s theoretical and ideological convictions. (This reader could be an historicist, an idealist, a formalist, a structuralist, a Marxist, and so on.) In conformity with his or her own mental constructs, this reader expects from the message certain determined contents and certain determined forms. In general, a specialist reading is devoted to the text’s connotative levels, to the most astonishing hermeneutics. Most symptomatically, Greimas has said that aesthetic pleasure—he means for our elite reader—consists in the discovery of hidden isotopies.

Writers may also elect the specialist as the only implicit addressee, but generally they place him/her beside one or more less exigent readers and situate him/her within a perspective further from the virtual reading. The Symbolists, however, made an exclusive election; they addressed their literature to the most restricted and select circles of personal friends, or in any case to especially qualified readers. During the entire first half of the twentieth century, the lyric, and in some cases the narrative as well, continued to be jealous, cryptic expressions, addressed to the “happy few.”

2.7. Not all literary works have projected an adequate “specialist” reader as implicit addressee. While the formula that every work contains the image of its reader remains valid, this image may anticipate its own existence in real time. Truly original works, those which are most at odds with acquired and ruling systems, are not immediately understood. In our century, new work is always axiomatically conceived as violent rupture with preceding works. A Gertrude Stein statement is emblematic: “If it has a public, it isn’t art.” The work is partially, or even completely, incomprehensible at the first reading, even to the specialist reader. Step by step, however, the exegete unravels the textual tangle, isolates its technique, and puts its sense in evidence. Often years go by before this work is finished: Finnegans Wake has not yet been completely assimilated; we are very far from understanding—to mention other work—Thomas Pynchon’s novels (in particular Gravity’s Rainbow, 1973). The specialist reader acquires, through the work, an ad hoc specialization. In such cases it is not the addressee which determines a particular work, but the work which generates its own readers. Still emblematically—and to remain at Montparnasse in the years of the twentieth-century avant-garde—we quote Picasso. To someone who observed that his portrait of Stein did not look like her, the artist replied “It will!” In some cases, one generation does not suffice for a work to become fully understood and appreciated. Capillary exegetic work is required, and with it the slow formation of a particular taste.

2.8. Until now I have referred to addressees as “prefigurations.” They are, as we have seen, schematic entities, ideally conceived by the writer, and they become textual “functions.” The literary text, constructed on the ordinary communication model but differing from that model by reason of a series of its own characteristics, is inconceivable without the possibility of an ideal reception. But readers, in their reality as “empirical receivers,” are subjective, singularly unidentifiable individuals who may also belong to diverse epochs and therefore to cultures extremely distant from those that characterize the transmission.

Most recent linguistics—under the aegis of Textlinguistik—indicates that in ordinary communication the addressee is located in a series of “presuppositions,” listed below (Siegfried J. Schmidt, in Maria-Elisabeth Conte, 1977, 254):

a) socio-economic (that is, the addressee’s role (status) and economic position);

b) socio-cultural and cognitive-intellectual (degree of knowledge of linguistic textuality, level of education, experience, and social sophistication);

c) biographical-psychical (motivations, personal dispositions);

d) linguistic-communicative (degree of knowledge of the code, mastery of communicative rules; in a word, “competence” with regard to the practice of communication).

It is evident that the sender of the literary text cannot have in mind such a concrete, definite image of the empirical receiver. Indeed, it is rare to find a text directed to a single real person, though Shakespeare’s Sonnets were placed directly into the hands of their dedicatee, the Earl of Southampton, and many of Emily Dickinson’s poems were handwritten to her sister-in-law Susan Gilbert. Even these compositions, though, must have contained some implicit, ideally conceived addressees, and must have directly presupposed some universal readers. Keeping in mind the ideas that I was developing at the beginning of this discourse, we can say that the fundamental difference between ordinary and literary communication rests in the fact that the latter is not in situation. Therefore, the literary text carries, among its countersigns, a constitution which permits an ideal recontextualization due to the introjection of referential elements which in ordinary linguistic praxis are taken as understood or signified—insofar as they are materially present—by means of deictic processes. Literary language plays upon its characteristic decontextuality/recontextuability for effects that aim at a non-contingent comprehension, generator of an oracular and universal statute. The limited case is described by Jean Starobinski in his reflection on a passage from the Gospels (Mark, v, 1–20):

To which author (or speaker) does the text belong? It is not the first-person author. . . . The text is not then produced by the thought, the will, the memory, the uncertainties of an individual. The “narrator” is completely suppressed, as if to subtract from the work everything that would relate it to a single person, that would depend upon a particular point of view, not be cause of modesty, but to confer upon the story the authority of absolute knowledge. We find before us the type of pure narrative, which functions radically to exclude every significant reference to the author. There is space only for the designation of a “referent” (the life and Passion of Jesus) to which is tied the destiny of humanity. . . . The text does not explicitly mention any addressee. It is not made final in a determined way; only by recourse to scattered hints can we conjecture that the Gospel of Mark “originally” refers to a paleochristian community. But the absence of a determined addressee allows the addressee to be universal. The narrative devoid of shadows calls for a reading identification by everyone, in every age. Christ, addressing His listeners within the narrative’s definite circumstances, reaches the future reader either because His words are so general that they reach beyond the occasion that has provoked them, or because the episodes consist of acts which cover a symbolic function to which the readers of any age can respond (1974, 78–82).

In the literary communication model, then, “doubling” occurs also at the text’s destination, a doubling that contemplates on the one hand the “internal addressee” (who, as we have seen, can be composite and formed of different perspectives), on the other, the “empirical receiver.” While the first is a “constant”—as a textual “function”—the second is a “variable” to be placed beside the other.

In addition, the empirical receiver—just because s/he is found beside the internal addressee—is a subject who does not receive the message directly, but watches its unfolding as a “spectator.” S/he is present, at a communicative process that unrolls before one’s eyes as spectacle. Roland Barthes has spoken of “voyeurism” and Northrop Frye has justly written that the receiver of the literary work is an “eavesdropper,” a kind of surreptitious listener, who overhears, and makes his own, a word that is not immediately and nominally directed to him. The author, well aware of this state of affairs, institutes a particular message in conformity with his/her knowledge.

On the basis of these observations, it seems impossible to doubt the reliability of Eberle’s anthropological thesis, which states that theater demonstrates the schematic situation of one character who speaks to another in front of one or more persons who listen; the invariable consists in the characters who speak, the variable in the people who listen.

2.9. Before some recent sociological investigations took place, the role of the receiver of literary texts had been undeservedly excluded from theoretical reflections. Today we read in sociological studies of literature that “whoever wishes to know what a book is must know, first, how it has been read” (Escarpit, 1958, 113). A history of literature from the point of view of the reader has also been suggested (Jauss, 1967). Undoubtedly, the literary text does not exist outside its reception (including the first reading by the author): it exists only as the physical matrix of a series of variable moral experiences in which its reality is constituted. Therefore, it is not incorrect to say that a text is the sum of its readings, with the implicit ideal of a “history” of reading, which would consider successive periods, and therefore successive cultures and tastes.

2.10. To affirm that a text equals its reception is to refer to diverse interpretations, and also to intimate and very private responses. If someone were to write, as Jauss proposes, a history of literature from the user’s point of view, it would be necessary to establish a typology of empirical readers to compare their readings with those of prefigured readers in each cultural area. The latter readings result from the text’s internal orientations and from the philological and historical reconstructions that the text must confirm. Such an effort could employ traditional research techniques of the “history of criticism” or “fortune of an author” types. However, on the personal and subjective plane, it is only recently—and amidst the innumerable difficulties that face an undertaking of this kind—that the adventure has been undertaken (Groeben, 1972; Segers, 1978). It goes without saying that documentary material with regard to the past will always be insufficient. The few and sporadic items of interest that have come down to us do not constitute a sufficient corpus. In addition, also with regard to research in possible actual documents, a notable difficulty arises, namely that of establishing what type, or better, what types of readers are to be favored. Confronted with these problems, I shall indicate—on the theoretical, and schematically typological plane—only two kinds of reading which, in their very abstraction, are valid for all times: (a) ingenuous and consumistic reading, and (b) specialist reading.

2.11.0. Ingenuous or consumistic reading could also be defined as “first degree,” insofar as it regards not only a class of readers but constitutes the initial stage of any kind of reading, before any eventual deeper reading (which would be precisely of the “specialist” type).

The text appears, in any case, as a complex of elements, only some of which seem to be structured. As we shall see, the quantitative rapport between “structured” and “non-structured” parts is a variable. However, the interpretative structuration of the text is never total.

2.11.1. This is principally due to the fact that a “phatic” function of the literary text is possible only at the theoretical level, that is, as an ideal address, and has nothing to do with the amount of real interlocutory phaticity involved. An effective control of contact is never possible. Nevertheless, one can speak of a phaticity peculiar to literature, that constituted by the text’s “spell,” its “charm”—Boudoin would say its “hypnotism.”

In material terms, we speak of an involving plot, of emotional implications, of anxiety deriving from uncertainty and ambiguity, of tension surrounding the motivation both of characters and action, of associative fascination, of stylistic admiration, of hallucinatory power of the rhythm, etc. And, in psychoanalytic terms, we speak of the stimulation of daydreams, the release of personal, intimate associations; we speak, in Freudian terms, of the hallucinatory realization of unconscious desires, of unloading of affective potential. We speak also of the strange phenomenon, still in part unexplained, that Coleridge defined in that brilliant formula “suspension of disbelief,” that is, that singular, tacit pact stipulated between sender and receiver, by which the latter, knowing that the text is fiction, yet accepts it as truth. Octave Mannoni (1969) says that we are aware of the trick at the conscious level, but that there is something in us—perhaps our latent and never totally destructible infantile disposition—that leads us to identify trick with truth. Literature, we well know, can be profoundly moving, even to tears. In any case, then, the text “fascinates” and “involves” us; and herein lies its “phatic” function.

2.11.2. From the moment of fascination, when our attention is arrested, begins the textual adventure or the “textual voyage,” as Maria Corti would say. Jan Mukařovský (1966; 1973; 149–188) has propounded the question in these terms: There are two attitudes to take in confronting the work, and they are both present in every act of reception. One is turned toward the work’s “semiotic” values (strictly speaking, these compose an “intentional” communication); the other “lives” the work directly as reality (in which case, the work appears not as “sign” but as “thing”). To explore the text as “thing” or “object” is to bring out an intentionality which is a product of the rapport between reader and the text’s component parts, and which the reader structures as though they were intentional. Even Francesco De Sanctis, after having made the distinction between the “intentional world and the effective world, what the poet wanted, what the poet produced,” declared that in sum “the safest method is to look at the book in itself, and not in the author’s intention.” Obviously it is not always possible to establish, with certainty, what the author did or did not intend. In fact, all those parts that are opposed to the textual unity constructed by the reader seem to him/her to be unintentional because they disturb that unity as s/he sees it.

Recent semiotics has clarified the problem. We read, for example, in Eco’s Theory of Semiotics (1976a, 261–276) that the literary text comes together on three levels, one “codified”—corresponding to Mukařovský’s “intentionality”—one “over-coded,” and one “undercoded.” The second level is constituted by the zone, generally called “connotative,” in which a second signification is made possible by a prior signification; sense unfolds by means of a successive coordination of the text’s components, an “ulterior” sense contained neither “in one or in the sum of the component parts” (Mukařovský, 158). The third level constitutes the text’s simple “materiality” where there are no “signs,” but, if anything, “stimuli” (Eco, ibid., 19-20). Margins of these material residues, sometimes considerable, always remain in the work in sufficient quantity to exceed the interpretative model. These constitute what is normally called—adopting a scientific concept—“entropy,” but I have defined the process elsewhere as “waste” with regard to hermeneutic modelization (Pagnini, 1970).

2.11.3. The ingenuous or mass reader—or, if neither ingenuous nor mass, then the first-degree reader—comes to a halt fairly soon on the long, never-ending road of interpretation. With regard to works that contain a factual narration, such a reader finds a sufficiently structured story which is easily understandable, even if, as often happens, the “plot,” that is, the order in which the text effectively presents events along the thread of narrative time, differs from the logical and chronological (“fabula”) order, which results from mental recomposition. S/he also finds the structure evident, that is, the network of relationships among the various characters and, particularly in narrative (less so in the lyric), the relationship among surroundings, objects, and the characters’ interiority, or the relationship of the lyric voice to the real states that the work directly imitates or to which it metaphorically refers. If, then, the work does not imitate the real, and does not refer to the real, the reader finds a ready orientation in the world of possible fantasies, though these might deform the world and use its data arbitrarily. S/he succeeds fairly easily in making out blocks of sense (thus finding him/herself already in the sphere where undercodings can be recognized), by using the guidelines supplied by titles or by particular signals distributed throughout the text (Sartre spoke of “pickets” purposely distributed here and there by the author), when there is no question of open authorial intervention, thus hypothesizing what the Textlinguistik theoreticians, concerned as they are with transphrastic coherence, call “deep structures.” These are later integrated into a profound structure which contains the total sense (Van Dijk, 1972a; 1976, 230). The reader arrives, finally, at the more flexible levels of overcoding, applying to the text the spontaneous systems of his/her own culture which may be the same used by the author in the work of textual codification or other systems stemming from diverse cultures not present at the original codification. It has been said that in “mass” reception, a strong deformation of the message may occur because of arbitrary and aberrant applications.

Overall interpretation—either at this stage of the reading or at that of greater subtlety—produces the satisfaction of projecting a text within the text. One knows that words possess complex series of semic nuclei from among which the interpreter makes some selections on the basis of interpretative directives, and that the interpretation is constituted by a structure of “interpretants”—to use Charles Sanders Peirce’s very useful concept—be they of a purely mental order or elaborated in writing.

The reader at the most elementary level of enjoyment receives an undoubtedly intense aesthetic gratification upon the first impact with the work. Spontaneously acquired, this initial gratification is certainly the most painless. The final deliberations upon the text comprise analyses, controls, comparisons, judgments, and corrections of one’s own initial responses, all of which constitute a notable effort, although such work produces other aesthetic gratifications of greater intensity and refinement. We allow ourselves here to use the term “aesthetic” in its most generic and wide sense, to refer, that is, to a series of emotional and imaginative responses to textual stimulations. Obviously, it is not only the author who is capable of sensibility. S/he is distinguished simply by the fact that s/he knows how to express what is possible for everyone to feel. S/he knows how to create forms that “illuminate” what in fact already exists, in the latent or nebulous state, in ordinary feeling. Therefore—as Hugh D. Duncan has observed (1953, 5)—readers do not limit themselves simply to contemplating or to perceiving the author’s emotions, but they discover how to express their own emotions through the text’s words, as if those words were their own. In brief, literary texts allow their receivers to give form to their amorphous and latent feelings.

And the spontaneous kinesthetic reaction (empathetic) is also, obviously, an emotive activity. The reader is always brought to identify with the character; with the same lyric or narrative “I,” and to live in it, and with it, its states of mind and the events of its fictional life. The true protagonist of the literary work is the reader. Mukařovský writes:

In art the most fundamental subject is not the author but he to whom the work is addressed, the perceiver (enjoyer); the artist, too, inasmuch as he assumes before his own work the attitude of one who observes a work of art (and not that of one who produces it), sees and values it as enjoyer (1966; 1973, 154).

Everything happens within the sensitive and cognitive apparatus of a unique subject. The work is the field of a continuous process of “autoidentification.” The author is induced—through the bonds of alterity—to identify with his/her addressee. The reader is induced to identify with the sender. Identification even takes place during the most specifically aesthetic moment—that is, in the contemplation of “adequacy of form” in its significative process, contemplation that brings—as Ernst Kris has indicated (1952, 56–63)—the ideal reliving, or imitation, of the artist’s expressive process. Thus, one who receives the word “re-creates” and “creates” the work with its author.

Another kind of formal contemplation—it too a source of aesthetic pleasure—is the perception of the text’s “form” in the Gestaltian sense; and that is the contemplation of the satisfying arrangement of the component parts: the so-called “good form.” As the most recent reflections on textual entropy have specified (Arnheim, 1971), this satisfaction is not tied only to recurrent symmetry that, in the long run, may even lead to the immobility of sense, and so provoke boredom and indifference, but to the organic, that is, the structural dynamics of the text. In sum, I am speaking, in substance, of the aesthetic pleasure deriving from recognition of “functional coherence” which, as we shall see, is of fundamental importance with reference to the specialist level.

The receiver enjoys another kind of aesthetic response in the elementary activity of recognizing the objects therein contained; that is, in the mental process of putting the object presented in the text in relation with the “mnemistic traces” that identify it. With regard to the rapport between the world within and the world outside the work (which we discuss in depth below), this act of relating establishes the work’s rapport with the states of the world. Such an evocation of mnemistic traces can also be seen as a process of “materialization” of the word, which presents itself, in part, as an empty space to be filled. This is an aspect of the aesthetic experience underlined by Roman Ingarden (1960, 86, et seq.), who spoke of words as of “potential things” that the reader “realizes.” Naturally, we are talking about a phenomenon which is not only aesthetic, since it is also a characteristic of the ordinary word; however, in the reception of the literary text such activity has a particular function due to the extremely high degree of the work’s evocativeness beyond the natural and ordinary referential activity of common language. Recall our reference to Gottlob Frege’s Vorstellung; it is specifically the receiver’s memory which contributes to the schematic nature of the word. Ingarden offers the example of someone who by chance reads about an event that takes place in the streets of Paris. If s/he has never seen Paris, s/he will still experience the event by searching the memory for other plausible and adaptable urban scenes. If instead s/he has seen Paris, s/he will recur to other predeterminations, that will be, in that case, exactly respondent to reality. This phenomenon is responsible for at least a part of the variable response to the text.

There is no doubt that the artistic function of “mirroring” is important, even when the usual terms of the rapport between the work’s internal and extratextual structures have to be revised, let us say, in light of Lotman’s thought, according to whom the work does mirror the real, but also contributes a “model” of the real, precisely by reason of its structure.

Another integrative activity performed by the receiver is the work of filling in the spaces that the author has purposely left in the text, for which reason it is characteristically “intermittent” and “undetermined.” Wolfgang Iser (1970) has spoken of the “empty spaces” left in the narrative (Leerstellen) as opportunities for readers actively to intervene.

In addition, we must remember that suggestivity, either in the field of image or of sensation and feeling, is never univocal. The material which gathers about a verbal stimulus is, in reality, a concurrence of associative elements, a complex of images, sensations, feelings, and memories (see James Deese, 1965). Naturally, only some of these elements will come to be considered pertinent, but the refused elements, too, have their function insofar as they are effectively present as potential components of the evocative process; and even of themselves—in their function as simple mechanism—they constitute a substantial phenomenon of the aesthetic response. In a certain kind of literature and especially in that of the symbolist type, the elocution is conceived in such a way as to favor a plural response, thereby fixing, at least in good part, the limits of pertinence in the spontaneously recalled associative area and pushing the ever-present phenomenon of mnesic polarization and ambiguity to the maximum.

I want to speak, finally, of aesthetic gratification—still fundamentally tied to the processes of identification—that accompanies the ideal realization of unconscious desires. There is by now a copious literature on the subject, which can be substantially epitomized in the formula that the aesthetic covering—semiotically tied to the “doubling” or “introjections” which take place in both transmission and reception—allows identifications and thoughts normally forbidden by psychic and social censure. At the end of the text, an abyss opens into the unconscious.

2.11.4. On the basis of the argument we have pursued thus far, a fundamental axiom, now universally recognized, can be stated: the receiver of the aesthetic message is never passive. Understanding is not an exclusively “reproductive,” but also “productive” behavior, and thus does not consist only in the classic consequentiality of the direct rapport between stimulus and response. Jurij Lotman has clearly summarized the theme of message appropriation with these words (worth quoting extensively):

The act of communication (in every case communication of a certain complexity and thus exactly relevant from the cultural point of view) is considered not as a simple transfer of the message from the sender’s to the addressee’s awareness without consequences with regard to its self-sufficiency but as the translation of a certain text from the language of my “I” to the language of your “you.” The possibility of such translation depends upon the fact that the codes shared by the participants to the communication, although not identical, form a complex of reciprocally intersecting elements. But, since in the act of translation a particular part of the message is always lost, and the “I” is transformed in the “you” translation code, we lose exactly what characterizes the sender’s will in its specificity, which, on the unitary plane, constitutes the most important element of the message itself. A “conflictual game” is thus created, in the course of which each individual, in taking from the counterpart, tends to reconstruct the semiotic universe according to personal models while simultaneously maintaining an interest in conserving the speaker’s particularity (1977, 10).

If this “work” performed by the addressee takes place during the normal and quotidian reception of verbal communication, it is understandable that with respect to literature it assumes wide and variously articulated dimensions, for, as we have said, literary work is very complex, decontextualized, oblique: it takes place in absentia from the real sender, and thus cannot be verified by the receiver. In conclusion, we can repeat, with Paul Valéry, that “a creator is one who makes others create.”

The reader’s normal anticipation in and of itself constitutes an “active,” if indirect, fact. The author, in his/her behavior as other, keeps this in mind, as we have seen, with the aim of ratifying, opposing, or modifying it. S/he knows, for example, that the reader usually expects the work to produce a “truth,” a “value,” something that, directly or indirectly, expresses a teaching, provokes a “coming to consciousness.” S/he knows that the reader expects a logical procession of the causal chains (especially in the novel and in the theater), a conformity to “genres” (a lyric that begins as “sonnet” must end as such), a stylistic congruence (which, obviously, also includes the rules of polystylism), a tonal uniformity, and so on. Or, in periods of innovative ferment, such as ours, s/he knows that it has become normal to anticipate sudden subversion of normal expectation. In any case, the author plays upon the intentionality that the reader projects, actively, into the text; and from this dialectic between two intentionalities, sometimes opposed, the “sense” of the discourse ensues.

2.11.5. In conclusion, one who has “received” has also “collaborated” in the work. The work has “enriched” the receiver’s sensibility and knowledge, has provided an awareness of certain states of the world, and insight into interior states of being, but the receiver has also “enriched” the text by pouring into it his or her own feelings and insights. S/he has been “interpreted,” but has also “interpreted” and has interpreted him/herself. S/he has received a new vision of things (Corti says that “the poetic text emits a message that changes the grammar of vision of its readers in the face of reality” [1978c, 80], but has also made the text function in a way which the author might never have thought possible).

2.12.0. We turn next to “specialist” reading. As we have seen, reception of the literary message always consists in a kind of textual reelaboration. The text is an object of knowledge, and knowledge implies, in any case, a “transformation” (cf. Casetti, 1977, 151). In first-degree reading, such work is spontaneous enough, since the receiver, limiting him/herself to a superficial decodification, uses interpretative systems that constitute an immediate store of cultural knowledge. In general, the reader employs interpretive habits acquired during a normal education and consolidated through a practical application that does not involve profound and complex problematics. Usually the aesthetic pleasure that s/he derives from ordinary reading habits is satisfying. If it were not, it would be necessary to acquire non-immediate interpretative systems, an often tiring chore. The typical “bourgeois” refuses this effort, may even declare it maddening and useless, and tends to wrench free from the book by replacing it with an easy consolatory structure of interpretants. But if curiosity or dissatisfaction due to the text’s greater resistance to the application of immediately available codes pushes this reader to a more precise and articulated knowledge, s/he will turn to “criticism” for help, that is, to the activity of specialists who have explored the text in a more selective and comprehensive manner. Such additional information offers not only the findings of more adventurous exploration to determine greater perspectives on the ground of materiality, but corrects possible aberrant interpretations, and brings what may have been blurred impressions into focus.

The “specialist” reader is, in substance, one who has a greater knowledge of the work’s structural complexity, who is more conscious than the ordinary reader of the malaise that underlies the fundamental ambiguity of the aesthetic text, who is not happy with over-simplifications and reductive readings, who has at his/ her disposal greater complexity of cultural systems to be applied and recognized, not least, those offered by a rigorous philological reconstruction of the linguistic ambience and a precise re-evocation of the cultural space in which the work was conceived.

To this kind of observer the text appears as a large structured complexity, in which s/he recognizes multiple “levels” (and “isotopies”³) structured both on their own planes and in an inter-planary sense. It appears, that is, as a complex which is polistructured both horizontally and vertically (Pagnini, 1974).

2.12.1. In detail, the specialist reader follows the practices listed below:

a) Recognizes in the text the “system” or “systems” to which the text leads, and verifies if, and how, each such system has been respected or violated.

We have seen that innovative work violates one or more of its systems. In the violation of the code’s rules, Umberto Eco has directly recognized the literary text’s “ambiguity” and the foundation of its aestheticity. He says that ambiguity “functions as a sort of introduction to the aesthetic experience; when, instead of producing pure disorder,” it attracts the addressee’s attention, to urge him/her to an “interpretive effort” (1976a, 263). It is usually verifiable that a violation worked on a level of “expression” brings—as I have already indicated—a new expressivity on the plane of “content.”

It is not to be believed, however, that even the most innovative work contests all the systems which refer to its multilevelled complexity. In general, it respects some systems, and these function to insure contact with the addressee. (In such cases, the reading is grafted upon what the reader is able to recognize without too great an effort.) Even the most revolutionary text respects and violates at the same time.

I have said, however, and it is useful to repeat—that there is also a kind of literature that does not contest any system, but need not for this reason be classified among second-rate products. A preoccupation of our time is that of evaluating the literary product only on the basis of its violent “refusals,” a predilection consecrated in the formalist concept of “estrangement.” Literature that “repeats” can be a tired product, mass-produced, kitsch; it can, however, have a special value. In Neoclassical culture, for instance, in which the principle of “imitation” dominates, the major works are within, not against systems. Alexander Pope was to catch the literary ideal of his time in the formula “What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.” The history of literature demonstrates the existence of strong currents of thought given over to perfecting certain systems. A comprehensive study, let us say, of the English theater in the time of Elizabeth and James I would indicate the “maturation” (the term frequently used in literary history where the organic-biological metaphor prevails) of certain formal practices: blank verse moves from its initial rigidity to a perfect flexibility and expressivity; the mounting of double or multiple plots moves from purely practical and material combinations to a closed structuration complete with complex interactions and mirrorings. Or it would be enough to look at phenomena of collective style such as Petrarchism, to have a picture of fixed systems, even stereotypes, which, however, may be open to brilliant “variations” (along with possible deterioration and passive repetition).

b) Projects into the text a system of his/her own competence, and sees whether that system functions as a “model”

I said “projects,” not “recognizes.” We are talking about an operation that is usually, though not necessarily, carried out some time after a work appears. The receiver invests the text with his/her own culture and feelings. Umberto Eco has illustrated this process very well, and it is worthwhile citing his entire description:

The reading unfolds ... in continuous oscillation, in which one moves from the work to the discovery of original, and therefore suggestive, codes, then to an attempt to construct a reading faithful to the work; from this point, one returns again to today’s codes and lexicons to try them on the message; then one goes on to the continuous work of comparing and integrating the various reading keys, enjoying the work also for the ambiguity that does not arise only from the informative use of signifieds with respect to the original code, but from the informative use of signifiers as conductors to our arrival codes (1968, 98).⁴

One might observe, in addition, that not all the grids that we apply to literature are given systems, given, that is, by the culture which produced the work and/or the culture to which we belong. There is a procedure by which the interpreter

c) Constructs “models” by means of inferential processes.

S/he applies “internal” rules, taken from (a) the corpus of the entire production of the author under examination—the rules of the “macrotext,” and/or (b) the single work under examination—the rules of the “microtext.”

In the first case, the cognitive system—or systems, if the macrotext is not considered as an homogeneous whole, but is subdivided into “groups” of homogeneous components—is used like a code to be projected (and recognized) in the microtext, which turns out to be like the actualization of the said systems. In substance, the interpreter extrapolates a kind of “regular practice” from within a writer’s activity. In the second case, the single text offers to the observer the laws of its own idiolect, which, once revealed, are used as if they were a code upon which the text has founded its own actualization.

I’ve said, “as if they were a code.” In reality this state of affairs must be clarified. The idiolectic system of an author is not the same thing as cultural systems, which pre-exist the composition of the work. The internal system of which we are speaking is (a) autoproduced by the corpus of the author, and (b) does not always pre-exist in that corpus (considered diachronically) the composition of the single work under examination. It may be that preceding microtexts have been forming a system to which the author remains consciously or unconsciously faithful, but it may as well be the case that systematic clarity comes about by means of compositions to come which would then throw a retrospective light on the expressive venture that they were constructing, with greater or lesser clarity and deliberation, that venture which was to become the idiolect of the macrotext.

This distinction, as we know, may apply also to non-idiolectic, that is collective, cultural systems. We have already had occasion to observe that authors compose texts without always applying norms clearly acquired from tradition, but achieving a systematicity as they work, proceeding according to intuition and instinct. The distinction is useful because it allows us to get away from the presupposition that any artistic activity may be considered a “conditioned,” and in the final analysis, passive operation. We said in the preceding section that in the artist’s activity we can observe more than actualization processes (even though these may be highly creative) or the original mounting of heterogeneous systems, or—and this is obvious—the formation of idiolects. We may also see his/her participation, or collaboration, in the formation of systems that only later come to be recognized as such, and projected retrospectively. This activity takes place not only in the relationships that an author establishes with a culture, but also in those that s/he establishes with his or her own inner world, and thus with the arc of production itself.

As a final possibility, in our listing of the interpreter’s activity, let us now consider the case in which the reader

d) Identifies a materiality of the text that s/he cannot insert in any “given system” and cannot interpret by means of any “model.”

In such a case, the materiality remains inert, or the reader responds to “stimuli” freely and privately. In the second case, responses are too confused to be systematized and often too profound to be objectified. We know that there is a kind of literature that points programmatically to this effect. “Sugerer, voilà le rêve!” Mallarmé used to say.

Having said this, we come to the last operation performed by the specialist interpreter of the literary text. After the above-indicated activity s/he will be confronted with a multiplicity of levels constituted by physical-technical structuration, by historical reconstructions of cultural systems, and by a-historical projections of other systems that are nevertheless supported by the text. Such multiplicity will appear to evidence no, or only partial, relationships and will constitute in its complexity a kind of new entropy, arising also from the fact that at each semantic and formal level, final structurations can be recognized on the basis of the principle of “isotopies.”

Once the text has been perceived as a great complex of recognized but as yet unrelated structurizations, it is necessary to

e) Construct, in the multiplicity of levels of structuration, a “hermeneutic model” (through fundamentally “vertical” operations).

This “model” is actuated by means of a newly attributed pertinence in the data collected, this time all together, independently from their single coherences. A unitary vision will emerge that pacifies—in large part at least—the malaise that the text’s receiver feels before its entropy. The text becomes, in fact, a global cognitive possession.

But it is not a question—one must insist—of absolute possession, because the hermeneutic pertinence achieved carries some “refusals” itself: something that is not specified remains at the margins of the “model,” and therefore returns to “materiality.” This means that it may be reopened as an unexplored horizon, alluring, troubling. The “hermeneutic model” pacifies the interpreter only in part. S/he knows, however, that consolation is temporary. The text promises to say, and in fact always will say, more than the hermeneut from time to time allows.

What the “hermeneutic model” does not specify (or wastes) remains available, together with all the other formants returned to zero degree, for another “hermeneutic model” which, practicing a different kind of specification, claims certain materiality for sense (the “symbol” becomes “sign”) and leaves other elements in the material state.

The activity I am talking about—hermeneutic interpretation—unfolds in two directions: horizontal and vertical. That is, it not only uses different levels of structurations, but puts them into interdependent and interfunctional relationships. Thus the text will appear to have a compactness that did not result from the analysis of its levels. And the “motivation” of its constituents will also emerge. In such a way the literary text will be distinguished from the non-literary (the text of practical communication) because its signifiers tend to be the most highly motivated with regard to the signified, exactly contrary to Ferdinand de Saussure’s definition of the signifier/signified rapport in ordinary language, which he defined as “arbitrary.”

Some objections have been raised to the Saussurian thesis. Emile Benveniste, for one, affirms that the “bond between signifier and signified is not arbitrary; on the contrary, it is necessary. . . . The two are impressed together in my spirit; they reawaken together in every circumstance” (1939).⁵ But non-arbitrariness (or the strong tendency towards non-arbitrariness) of poetry is not a question of sense “accustomed” to its vehicle—that could never be, insofar as the word of poetry is fundamentally neologistic; rather, it regards associations that are “artistically” motivated, that is, not motivated because of metonymie sedimentation. Proof of the phenomenon of the literary text’s interlevel functionality lies, however, in the absolute untranslatability of the original text into other-language texts. This is precisely because its physical-technical elements are not mere vehicles of sense but unsubstitutable determinants.

The “hermeneutic model” always constitutes, then, a partial approach. And this is also due to the fact that it generally proceeds from one textual place, a level or an isotopy. Usually, one accedes to the complexity of a work, beginning with one of its planes. For example, the interpreter can begin with an analysis attentive either to the plane of expression or to that of its elements, and from that basis develop the inferences or hypotheses later to be controlled on the other planes. Or s/he can start by extrapolating a model of one of the structures forming the plane of content, and then find a convalidation from among the diverse elements on the plane of expression. At this point, a structural prospect opens upon the entire text in accordance with one of its “hermeneutic modelizations,” from a privileged point of view. At one time, one proceeded principally from the plane of content, not bothering too much about control of forms, almost as though forms were just simply passive and inert vehicles of sense, as they are in the practical communication of language (“practical” not “emotive,” since in the latter the signifier—as Charles Bally [1932] has already magisterially shown—has clear connotative functions). Today the conviction is sufficiently widespread—thanks first to stylistics and then to formalism and structuralism—that the nature of the signifier has its own decisive function in the determination of sense.

For this reason, as Gianfranco Contini suggested in one of his often cited metaphors, it is advisable, though starting from a partial point of view, to aim at the totality of the work: “However judicious and limited the procedure may be, the final aim of any discourse on any author is to lay bare the integrity of this author; lighted by a single reflector, flattened into a single point, with its emphatic dissymmetry of light and shadow, the complete author must nevertheless be caught” (1951; 1970, 169). I have already observed that this totality can never be completely encompassed, but even so the specialist interpreter must try to cover as much as possible. In fact, if the “hermeneutic model” leaves too much textual space unused, the excessive partiality of the approach will be revealed as a defect in the hermeneutic activity itself.

I am convinced that the critical method, issuing from formalism and structuralism, and now merged into a kind of practice that merits the adjective “semiotic” (“semiotic criticism”)—especially if this is applied, as I try to suggest here, with an exact knowledge of the literary text’s pragmatic reality—can be satisfactorily inclusive of the most important procedures until now separately followed.

It is perhaps useful to specify that “semiotic” and “criticism” (“criticism” as “hermeneutic modelization”) are not two identical activities (see Casetti, 1977, 146–155), the one being a theory that studies the systems of signifiers and the mechanisms of signification, the other being an interpretative practice. But the label “semiotic criticism,” however, is appropriate for an activity that founds its knowledge of how the aesthetic message functions upon the theoretical teachings of textual semiotics. However, the same distinction between theory and practice, with its specific finalities, was also found in the appellative “structural criticism,” and it will always be in every label that indicates the science, or, in any case the discipline, that critical activity takes as a basis. It is clear as well that “semiotic criticism,” simply by virtue of its particular teleology, is not a “surpassing” of structuralism, but rather an enlargement of its confines, initially limited to consideration of the text solely as “object.” In reality, the conspicuous organization of the parts making up the textual complexity and their final organization in the “hermeneutic model” does not surpass, but rather confirms the principle that the text is a “structured complexity”—or, to be more accurate, a “structured and indefinitely structurable complexity.”

2.12.2. Such “infinity” of the text has constituted—constitutes yet—one of the basic preoccupations of our time, and is at the center of attention in the thought of Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, and the Tel Quel group (in particular Philippe Sollers, Julia Kristeva, and Roland Barthes). According to the psychoanalytic linguistics of Lacan, the sense of language flees ad infinitum under the signifier, as perpetual manifestation of a subject conceived as an irresolvable metonymy of itself. One understands that in transferring such a conception of being—or “lack of being”—from the sphere of psychoanalysis to that of textual analysis, the literary text itself comes to consist in a perpetual generation of free signifieds, especially if not only lexemes, syntagms and phrases are made to contribute to the structuration of sense but also their fragmentation into minimal units, such as the syllable, or even the phoneme (as in the practice of “ana-grammatic” criticism⁶).

A similar linguistic conception reveals the ideology of “absence” (Barilli, 1974), to which we have already referred. The subject is annulled in the text, being only an effect of language, being thought by the “signifying chain” and thus constituted by the founding laws of language (metaphor, metonymy). But the text also constitutes itself as absence of the object. The signifier—true absolute despot, and only survivor in this spectral reign—has “assassinated” (says Lacan) the “thing” (absent) and assumes ghostly meanings, elusive and delusory, regressing perpetually toward unreachable desire.

One understands that a conception of this kind, applied to the reading of the literary text, cannot do otherwise than reveal in itself congeries of signifying chains, with continuous generation of signifieds—of metaphor upon metaphor, of metonymy upon metonymy, of paronomasia upon paronomasia. The last phase of Roland Barthes’ thought and practice reveals the influence of such doctrine. This scholar’s recent definition of “text” is worth rereading:

Text means tissue; but where until now one has always understood this tissue to be a product, an already made veil behind which, more or less hidden, is the sense (the truth), now we accentuate, in the tissue, the generative idea by which the text makes itself, works by means of a perpetual texturing; lost in this tissue—this texture—the subject unmakes itself there, like a spider that would dissolve itself by itself in the constitutive secretions of its web (1973, 100-101).⁷

Since things have gone so far, this seems an opportune moment to distinguish between “infinity” of the text as an interpretative variable (because of the application of diverse systems, and of the dialectic of two subjects, the one that sends the message, the other that receives it, which takes place over the whole range of introjective doublings of the sender and of the addressee, that constitutes the phenomenology of the text pragmalinguistically understood), and “infinity” as one reality void of sending subject and referential object, in which the receiving subject as well becomes annulled in the vortical laws of language. These two conceptions are not to be confounded, the second coming into being under the insignia of irrationality, while the first is pledged to a rational view of communicative facts in their historical reality, a reality that consists both in the effort of the philological recognition of the initial communicative process and in the mechanism of its irrefutable transformation in diverse historical spheres and in its impact upon diverse personalities.

2.12.3. Turning now to the initial presentation of our discourse, that is, to a theory of the application of systems to the literary text, it is the systematic procedures of “criticism” which remain to be considered.

To practice literary criticism means to reduplicate the text with another text by means of metalinguistic operations (constantly referential) according to “behavioral models” founded upon (a) ideology, (b) philosophy, (c) aesthetic conceptions, (d) critical “genres” (specific lexicons, dianoetic procedures, etc.), and (e) scientific knowledge. What we call “method” is no more than the constant and coherent application of systems that are in large part preconstituted.

2.12.4. We list, then, in condensed form, the “procedural systems” most frequently used in criticism, leaving aside the procedures of “textual criticism,” where it may be necessary to “fix” the text, and also of criticism as “integration” into or “comment” upon the text, meant to fill the spaces left in the writing (since, as we have seen, the text never says everything, and its underlying intentions always relate to the prefiguration of the implicit addressee, whose competence the real receiver may lack). The list will necessarily be typological; but we know that various reading procedures do not necessarily single out only one approach from among the variety of available types. It usually happens that, even in the reading methods most easily “labeled,” collateral methods are applied along with the privileged one. In fact, more and more frequently now, we are implementing the kind of approach that brings a conspicuous number of systems into effect in direct rapport with our knowledge that the artistic text is many-sided. Criticism is a multiple genre, availing itself of a variety of disciplines that our culture generously offers and that it is not possible to ignore. And semiotics, the total science of communication, appears to be the discipline most suited to become a doctrinal basis for multiple operations. Further, it also offers the advantage—not to be overlooked—of a reception of the literary fact with no, or with very few, prejudices of an ideological order.

a) Judge the work. This means to evaluate it on the basis of preestablished normative systems (abstracted or demonstrable in model works), exalting its conformity, and holding it therefore “correct,” “satisfactory,” “beautiful,” and so on, or indicating its “errors,” and in practice, proposing a “correct” text to replace the “incorrect” one (evaluative criticism).

The judgment of value is always a comparative assertion (comparison with other works, comparison with the idea of beautiful work), and therefore always deductive. A reading without presuppositions does not exist (even if the reading modifies the critic’s nomological assumptions, predisposing him/her, thus, to make new evaluations).

The evaluation does not take place, usually, with a simple axiological assertion, but with a series of examples and clarifications, which, however, do not have demonstrative value of the judgment’s “truth”—truth that, in principle, cannot be demonstrated; if anything, these examples function to support the procedure’s coherence or to attract the reader to the qualities and aspects of the work that the critic has appreciated (or not).

R. T. Segers (1978, 8–88) indicates some of the major literary norms:

i) Literature as “imitation” of the states of the world (the eighteenth-century poetics of Nature “description” for example, or the Marxist theory of “mirroring” the social situation).

ii) Literature as “fantasy.” Literary signs need not refer to states of the world but to fantasies.

iii) Literature as linguistic “écart” (the Russian formalist theory of “estrangement”).

iv) Literature as “contestation” of ruling socio-cultural systems (poetics of the avant-garde).

v) Literature as “complexity.” The work must be able to be variously interpreted.

vi) Literature as “structural unity.” The work must be compact, economically constructed with interrelated parts.

vii) Literature as “epochal survival.” The work’s greatness is measured by its ability always to respond to the demands made upon it by the various epochs in which it is received.

The list can go on (Segers himself declares that it is not exhaustive). Let us add

viii) Literature as “transparency of sense” (the poetics of Classicism).

ix) Literature as “imitation of the classics” (the poetics of the Renaissance and of Classicism).

x) Literature as “opacity” (the poetics of Symbolism).

xi) Literature as “sentiment” (the poetics of Romanticism).

xii) Literature as “political commitment,” etc.

b) Compare the text with other texts by the same author or by different authors in order to reveal its peculiarities. This process determines affinities and contrasts (comparative criticism). It can also establish “values” (evaluative criticism).

c) Relate textual elements to occurrences and motives in the author’s life (biographical criticism). If the author is understood as psychological individuality, Freudian criticism results, the type conducted by Freud himself and later by some of his students (biographical-psychoanalytic criticism).

d) Consider an author’s opera omnia, or suitable regroupments of works in the arc of an author’s production as “texts” (“macrotexts”) and analyze them as such. The “macrotext” will then serve to illuminate and enrich every single component (“micro-text”) (macrotextual criticism).

Because of its practicality, “macrotextual” criticism is the most widely adopted. But strictly speaking, the only mode to which one cannot take exception is the “micro-macrotextual” reading. This consists of the in-depth reading of a single work with the help and in the sense of the macrotext, or some macrotexts. In such a way the practice is not reductive but respectful of the single structure, and does not preclude—to follow the logic of the macrotext, which is, in practice, a statistical logic—evaluation of the hapax legomenon.⁸

e) Specify the language of the work by means of an attentive reconstruction of the linguistic sphere in which the work was written (philological criticism).⁹

f) Beginning with the concept that the literary work gives form to the author’s feelings in an autonomous and unrepeatable mode, investigate and characterize its lyrical-sentimental moment (idealistic criticism).¹⁰

g) Presupposing that the work reflects and is determined by a set of ideological convictions, of artistic conceptions, or feelings that the writer has drawn from the cultural humus of his time and has elaborated, reconstruct this set in order to explain the forms and contents of his/her product (historicistic criticism).¹¹

h) Presupposing that the mark of poetic language is constituted by the “emotive” use of language, study the linguistic “digressions” that emotivity has produced in comparison with the norm (stylistic criticism)¹²

i) Presupposing, on the basis of Marxist theories, that the economic-social situation produces a determined dominating class, an ideology and its intellectuals, and then too the writer and his/her ideas, taste, style, and even connivances and reactions, take the work back to his/her cultural milieu and reconstruct from it the learning process of the world as historically determined practice (Marxist criticism),¹³

j) Utilizing Marxist theories, reconstruct the dynamics of the work’s production and consumption in a socially determined ambience (sociological criticism).¹⁴

k) Liberate—almost confessionally—subjective and intimate reactions to the text. Make a total identification of the critical subject with textual reality (hermetic criticism).¹⁵

l) Reveal how a work is structured. The work appears as a complex of levels each structured in itself and all structured as a whole (formalistic-structuralist criticism).¹⁶

m) Reconstruct the sign systems that compose a work, either as physical sets regulated by laws or as semantic systems and compare them with the literary and non-literary systems with which the text places itself in rapport. The text will emerge as a bundle of actualizations/variations/substitutions (semiotic criticism)¹⁷

n) (Re)construct the “model” that unifies the various levels of a text or of a macrotext, and perhaps interpret such a “model” in the light of contemporary cultural systems, (structuralistic-hermeneutic and semiotic-hermeneutic criticism).

o) Availing oneself of the theory of “archetypes,” see the work as bearer of symbols, schemes, models, all understood as reincarnations of elementary ideals presupposed as intrinsic givens of the human soul (archetypal criticism).¹⁸

p) Extrapolate the metaphoric material to compose it into patterns (“imagery” criticism).¹⁹

q) Utilizing the doctrine of the early Freud, identify in the text, or in the macrotext, the expressions of the unconscious. Elements that belong to manifest structurations are motivated by latent contents. Explain further the way in which unconscious fantasy transforms itself into conscious theme. If the inquiry is conducted on the macrotext, (re)construct the “system” of the transformational variants of single unconscious fantasies (transformational Freudian criticism).²⁰

r) Utilizing Lacan’s doctrine, explain a determined linguistic behavior by means of the tensive relationships between the “self” and the “Other” (Lacanian criticism).

s) Utilizing the Freudian theory of Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious and the concept of culture as repression, interpret certain levels of the text as “return of the repressed” or, to include political repression, as “return of the suppressed” (Freudian repression-theory criticism).²¹

t) Study attentively the phonic-syntactic-rhythmic structure of the discourse, both on its own level and in the implicative functions of the semantic-connotative levels (phonic patterns, phonic and syntagmatic iterations, paranomasia, onomatopoeia, etc. (textural criticism).²²

u) Utilizing the principles of the linguistics of “absence” (Lacan)—according to which the discourse is not the place of the full presence of the signified and of the truth but of an original amnesis—and those of the “generative” theory of the text elaborated by the Tel Quel group—according to which the text does not “express,” does not “re-produce,” a preliminary sense, but “produces” it by means of infinite fragmentations, intertextual concurrences and reorganizations of the énoncé in the act of reading, itself infinite (“significance”), deconstruct the discourse down to its minimum components (phonemes) and perpetually reconstruct it, allowing all the significative possibilities to explode in every direction (“differance” criticism).²³

2.12.5. I add two final observations that, even if fairly obvious, are necessary to completeness.

a) When we speak not of the text’s first reception, of its first interpretation, but of reading after other readings handed down in writing or read aloud (conferences, lessons, etc.), we shall have finally to bear in mind that the single receiver of the work is now constituted by a “multiplicity,” usually not only numerical but dialectical. Or, to be more precise, s/he is of course always a person, but a person in contact—ideally or practically—with other receivers. In such case, a communications network comes into being that constitutes a collaboration in the work of textual interpretation. Its phases—with acceptances, variations, substitutions, etc., are recorded in the history of criticism (see Groeben, 1972). But it is also what takes place in cases of literary or dramatic communication to groups of persons (texts read or acted before a listening public, a sufficiently common practice today). In such cases, a completely intersubjective communication can take place—exchange of impressions, criticism, comments, etc. But even without such a complete exchange, group reception is in any case intersubjective, if only because of the reciprocal influence exercised by simple emotional manifestations or the minimum kinestheses.

b) Literary criticism, too, is obviously a communicative practice wherein, therefore, one recognizes a “sender,” a “text,” and a “receiver.” And then, since criticism is language, it is inscribed not only in theoretical and executory systems but also, contemporarily in “scriptural” systems, that is, in “lexicons,” “syntaxes,” etc. Finally, the presence of the “other”—and the choice of the “other”—orients the writing according to particular directives of rational communicativity in which subjective shadings which can neither be rationalized nor used in the coherent framework of the hermeneutic modelization are lost. The subjective response to the text is never absolutely identifiable with the criticism (not even in the partial recuperation attempted by the “hermetic” reading).

2.13. I conclude this discourse on reception with a reconsideration of “cultural systems.” If these allow the reconstruction of the fundamental structuration of the subject of transmission (either as subject of the énonciation or as subject of the énoncé) and also reconstruction of the implicit, ideal addressee—that, as we have said, comes from the structure of the message itself and also from the same cultural systems that s/he naturally shares with the author by reason of the principle of alterity of the message, then cultural systems allow as well the reconstruction of the fundamental structuration of the heteroeval receiver. Heteroeval reception can be studied by means of a comparison of the structuration of the transmission with the structuration of the receiving subject, which, together with bringing historical and philological contributions into harmony with the whole, will reveal the forces that determine their particular emphases and their a-historical projections, constituted by their own existential preoccupations. In such a way too can the “fortune” of an author be documented in the historical and sociological sense.