Press, 1986), 272.
i68
C O N C E P T S
as what he has written in his novels and his works o f semiotic theory,
convinces me that deep down, in his hermetical soul, which draws him
to those interpreters whom he calls the “followers o f the veil,” Adepti del
Velame (those who believe in a hidden, hermetic meaning), he too believes
that overinterpretation is more interesting and intellectually valuable than
“sound,” moderate interpretation. One who was not deeply attracted to
overinterpretation could not create the characters and the interpretive ob
sessions that animate his novels. Eco spends no time in his three lectures
telling us what a sound, proper, moderate interpretation o f Dante would
say but a good deal o f time reviving, breathing life into, an outrageous
nineteenth-century Rosicrucian interpretation o f Dante— an interpreta
tion that, as he says, had had no impact on literary criticism and had been
completely ignored until Eco uncovered it and set his students to work
on this interesting semiotic practice. “The bibliography o f the Followers
o f the Veil is incredibly rich,” he writes. “And it is incredible to what ex
tent the mainstream o f Dantesque criticism has ignored or disregarded it.
Recently I encouraged selected young researchers to read— maybe for the
first time— all those books” {
10
, 52). If sound interpretation were the goal
o f literary studies and overinterpretation an abuse to be shunned or stig
matized, then why send one’s students to read what is justly forgotten and
ignored? Apparently Eco recognizes that these texts might in various ways
be more interesting than conventional, sound Dante criticism.
But if we are to make any progress in thinking about interpreta
tion and overinterpretation, we must consider the opposition itself, which
is rather tendentious. The idea o f “overinterpretation” not only begs the
question o f which is to be preferred, but it also, I believe, fails to capture
the problems Eco himself wishes to address. One might imagine overinter
pretation to be like
overeating, there is proper eating or interpreting, but
some people don’t stop when they should. They go on eating or interpret
ing in excess, with bad results. Consider, though, the two principal cases
Eco gives us in the lecture entitled “ Overinterpreting Texts.” The writing
on Dante by Gabriele Rossetti (the father o f the better-known Victorian
poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti) did not produce a normal, proper interpre
tation and then go too far, interpret too much, or interpret excessively.
On the contrary, it started from a premise radically different from nor
mal, proper interpretation: that Dante was really a Freemason, Templar,
and Rosicrucian, even though there is no evidence that Freemasonry ex
isted in Dante’s day. Rossetti sets out to interpret the D ivina Commedia in
terms o f hidden references to Masonic-Rosicrucian motifs. According to
Eco he “assumes that a Masonic-Rosicrucian symbol would be as follows;
a rose with a cross inside o f it, under which appears a pelican” (
70
, 55). As
I understand Eco’s argument, what vitiates Rossetti’s attempt to interpret
Dante as a Freemason-Rosicrucian are two problems, the combination o f
which is lethal and ensured his neglect until Professor Eco revived him.
First, Rossetti attempted to draw a Rosicrucian thematics from elements o f
a motif that in fact never appear together in Dante and some of which ap
pear rarely anywhere in the poem (the pelican appears only once), so that
his argument is not persuasive. “Rossetti, in his desperate and rather pa
thetic fowling, could find in the divine poem seven fowls and eleven birds
and ascribe them all to the pelican family; but he would find them all far
from the rose” (/O, 55). Second, Rossetti sought to explain the importance
o f these motifs (which he had failed to demonstrate) as the influence of a
supposedly prior tradition, for which no independent evidence exists {10 ,
54—60). The problem here is scarcely overinterpretation. I f anything it is
underinterpretation: a failure to interpret enough elements of the poem
and a failure to look at actual prior texts to find in them concealed Rosi-
crucianism and determine possible relations o f influence.
The second example Eco offers in his second lecture is apiece o f bel-
letristic interpretation o f Wordsworth’s “A slumber did my spirit seal” by
Geoffrey Hartman, whom Eco calls “one o f the leaders o f the Yale decon
structionists” {10 , 61), but who is better seen as linked to deconstruction
by metonymy— by his contiguity at Yale to people such as Paul de Man,
Barbara Johnson, J. Hillis Miller, and Jacques Derrida, who were engaged
in deconstructive reading. Hartman is in this example displaying what has
been known as literary sensibility or sensitivity: hearing in a verse echoes
o f other words or images.
The poem runs as follows, with Eco’s italics:
A slumber did my spirit seal,
I had no Vxxmisi fears
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of saxÛAj years.
No motion has she now, no force,
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