6. In his third lecture Eco writes that “if a normal English-speaking hu
lowers of the Veil evoke someone who, upon being told, ‘Sir, you are a thief be
lieve me!’ replies with: ‘What do you mean by “believe me” ? Do you perhaps wish
pretation as deliberately missing the point, ignoring a serious accusation (thievery)
by detecting a potential minor charge (you think I am distrustful?). But the gen
eral phenomenon is certainly pertinent to overinterpretation.
1 72
C O N C E P T S
may be counterproductive, but with things the way they are, a httle para
noia may be essential to the just appreciation o f things. What here emerges
in paranoid overinterpretation is at least an engaged reflection on the pos
sible implications o f speech acts and structures o f social interaction.
I f our interest is not so much in the receiving o f intended messages
but in understanding, say, the mechanisms o f linguistic and social inter
action, then it is eminently useful from time to time to stand back and
ask why someone said some perfectly straightforward thing such as “Nice
day, isn’t it?” What does it mean that this should be a casual form o f greet
ing? What does that tell us about this subculture as opposed to others that
might have different phatic forms or habits? What Eco calls overinterpre
tation may in fact be a practice o f asking precisely those questions that are
not necessary for normal communication but that enable us to reflect on
its functioning.
Eco conceives o f the intention o f the text, intentio operis, as the in
terpretation produced by the model reader postulated by the text. Actual
readers make conjectures about the text’s intention, and since “a text is a
device conceived in order to produce its model reader,” these are conjec
tures about how the model reader implied by the text would read it {10 ,
64). We thus have a sophisticated version o f the hermeneutic circle. Some
times what Eco calls overinterpretation seems to be, as in the case o f Ros
setti, interpretation that posits an intentio operis and a model reader on
scant evidence. At other times, though, overinterpretation seems to be in
terpretation that breaks out o f that circle.
In fact, I think that both this problem in general and the specif
ic problems Eco wants to address are better captured by an opposition
Wayne Booth formulates in his Critical Understanding, instead o f interpre
tation and overinterpretation Booth contrasts understanding and overstand
ing. Understanding he conceives as Eco does, in terms o f something like
Eco’s model reader. Understanding is asking the questions and finding the
answers that the text insists on. “ Once upon a time there were three little
pigs” demands that we ask “So what happened?” and not “Why three?”
or “What is the concrete historical context?” for instance. Overstanding,
by contrast, consists o f pursuing questions that the text does not pose to
its model reader. One advantage o f Booth’s opposition over Eco’s is that it
makes it easier to see the role and importance o f overstanding than when
this sort o f practice is tendentiously called overinterpretation.
As Booth recognizes, it can be very important and productive to ask
questions the text does not encourage one to ask about it. To illustrate the
pursuit o f overstanding, he asks.
What do you have to say, you seemingly innocent child’s tale of three little pigs
and a wicked wolf, about the culture that preserves and responds to you? About
the unconscious dreams of the author or folk that created you? About the histo
ry of narrative suspense? About the relations of the lighter and the darker races?
About big people and little people, hairy and bald, lean and fat? About triadic pat
terns in human history? About the Trinity? About laziness and industry, family
structure, domestic architecture, dietary practice, standards of justice and revenge?
About the history of manipulations of narrative point of view for the creation of
sympathy? Is it good for a child to read you or hear you recited, night after night?
Will stories like you— should stories like you— be allowed when we have produced
our ideal socialist state? What are the sexual implications of that chimney— or of
this strictly male world in which sex is never mentioned? What about all that huff
ing and puffing?^
Much better questions than “what happens next?” All this overstanding
would doubtless count as overinterpretation. I f interpretation is recon
struction o f the intention o f the text, intentio operis, then these are ques
tions that do not lead that way; they are about what the text does and how:
how it relates to other texts and to other practices, what it conceals or re
presses, what it advances or is complicitous with. Many o f the most inter
esting forms o f modern criticism ask not what the work has in mind but
what it forgets; not what it says but what it takes for granted.
To take the elucidation o f the text’s intention as the goal o f literary
studies is what Northrop Frye in his Anatomy o f Criticism called the Little
Jack Horner view o f criticism: the idea that the literary work is like a pie
into which the author “has diligently stuffed a specific number of beauties
or effects,” which the critic, like Little Jack Horner, complacently pulls out
one by one, saying, “O what a good boy am I.” Frye, in a rare fit o f petu
lance, called this idea “ One o f the many slovenly illiteracies that the ab
sence o f systematic criticism has allowed to grow up.”®
8. Wayne Booth, Literary Understanding: The Power and Limits o f Pluralism
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 243.
9. Northrop Frye, Anatomy o f Criticism: Pour Essays (Princeton, NJ; Princ
eton University Press, 1957), 17.
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