Eco's Poetics of “The Model Reader”

Abstract

In this essay the author argues that despite Eco's claims of ceding authority over his fictions to the reader, his poetics of the Model Reader serves to guide and condition reception. This is accomplished when the call for reader collaboration encourages the creation of a Model Author — a projection of reader desire for narrative closure and metaphysical certainty — who supplants the empirical writer as the ‘true’ author of the text. When the empirical author is granted this creative and ideological invisibility, Model Readers find reassurance in novels in which the writer re-creates and re-orders the past according to both conscious and unconscious desires. His kindred spirits, or Model Readers, endorse his condensing of the past into the here-and-now of the writing subject. This effacement time creates a semblance of realism that is re-enforced by the empirical author's use of pastiche, the incorporation into the literary text of what is already known, that is to say what has already been read. Such tautological ‘hyper-realism’ provides the basis for agreement on ‘common sense’ interpretations of the text, giving ‘normal’ readings normative status, thus de-legitimating readings that vary from Eco's ‘strong’ authorial intentions.