The model reader

the reader models is a semiotic theory established by Umberto Eco in its principal linguistic work Lector In Confabulated.

What is what the model reader?

Each recipient being confronted with a text, finds himself thus confronted initially with his surface, his external and linguistic demonstration, and must bring up to date a whole series of chains of artifices. Since it is to be brought up to date, a text is thus incomplete for two reasons:

the first obvious reason is that it refers to a code: a term is regarded as “flatus vocis” insofar as it is not put in relation to its contents in reference to a given code. The recipient must thus have a grammatical competence with an aim of bringing up to date the message.

Umberto Eco stipulates that the text represents a “fabric of unvoiced comment”: “unvoiced comment”, explains it, “means not expressed on the surface, on the level of the expression”. These is precisely the “unvoiced comment” which requires to be updated. To allow this actualization, the reader must produce a series of co-operative and conscious movements. Let us take as example a conversation between two people: the reader will have to then mobilize a series of co-operative movements to bring up to date of it the contents and it will have to thus admit that one is necessarily addressed to the other. One of the movements which will be incontestably mobilized is that of the encyclopedia of the reader: for example in the syntagm “you returned” the reader will understand by his encyclopedia that there will have been a former distance.

The text is thus filled with white spaces, and the transmitter which provided that these vacuums would be filled, left them for two reasons:

for a stylistic reason: by avoiding the repetitions, the redundancies, the specifications, the text avoids the complication and heaviness.
for its esthetic function, the text must leave an initiative of interpretations to the reader.

We thus understand that the presence of the recipient is an essential condition with the text to release its significance from it: “a text is emitted for somebody able to bring up to date it”.

How the text envisage does the reader?

Umberto Eco issues a strong reserve concerning the traditional diagram of the communication worked out by the first theorists of information: this diagram sets up a Émetteur which transmits a Message to a Destinataire , and this Message is transported via a code . But the codes of the recipient can differ from the codes of the transmitter, know we it: the linguistic code is not the single one to enter concerned. Let us take as example the syntagm “You smoke? ”. The answer “not” is not only one information concerning the transmitter, but it is connoted like “impolite”, not in connection with a linguistic rule but a rule “of courtesy”: indeed label would have wanted that one answers “not thank you” There is thus truly well a semiotic activity with whole share, which will be added to a linguistic communication, where several systems of signs are supplemented. Eco then will specify its basic definition on the conditions of actualization: “a text is a product whose interpretative fate must belong to its own generative mechanism”. Umberto Eco then will speak about strategy: as in any military strategy, the objective will be to envisage the movement of the other.

But with the difference in a military strategy which will be elaborate with an aim of destroying the adversary, in our situation it will be there on the contrary with an aim of helping the reader. The author thus will organize his text by saying “the reader will react of such or such way”, but by taking care to take into account the unforeseen ones and unforeseeable occurrences (with the manner this time of a true military strategy); i.e. it will pre-empt possible encyclopedic gaps of its reader. For example, on a place name which will be quoted and which the reader could not possibly know, the author will then regard this name as a “flatus vocis” and will give further information later on other information and to allow his reader a better visualization. Eco thus says to us “that to envisage its Model Reader is not solely enough “to hope for” that there exists, that also means to act on the text in order to build it. ”

Closed texts and open texts

“The closed text is designed for a very definite reader, in the intention to direct in a repressive way the co-operation. ” In this type of text, we thus understand that the author will encircle with precision his model reader, according to whether it is of a child, a sportsman, of a doctor, of a historian… He sets what Eco will call a “target”, and will make so that each term is included/understood of its reader. But Eco specifies us that it happens that the forecasts of the author concerning competences of his reader are insufficient or that the target is different. Any text thus remains for him an open text.

Umberto Eco speaks about the open text as “free interpretative adventure”. Among all possible interpretations, it will make so that each one of them are in relation to the others with an aim of reinforcing them mutually.

Eco insists on the fact that we must make the distinction between “the free use of a text” which calls upon our imagination, and the interpretation of an open text. Let us take again the example of the author: to see the Odyssey as if it were posterior in Enéide is a free example of use of a text. In the same way, to design the Foreigner of Camus like an autobiography, is a diversion of the text. Even if the chain of interpretations is infinite, the universe of the speech intervenes to limit the encyclopedia of the reader. To use a text freely thus amounts widening the universe of speech of them.

Author and reader like textual strategies

In a context of messages to referential function, we can easily locate the presence of the Transmitter and the Recipient thanks to grammatical traces. But in the case of texts reserved for a broad audience (novels, speech,…), the Transmitter and the Recipient will not be regarded any more as poles of the act of stating and Umberto Eco then will speak to us about actanciels roles of the statement. One will thus be able to locate the author like a recognizable style: maybe by the presence of “I + Verb”: one will then on a subject which achieves such or such act, that is to say by the intervention of a subject foreign to the statement but present since it will act on textual fabric. Eco speaks to us here about the “phantom of the Transmitter”. The intervention of the subject speaker, which will appear by these marks, then immediately will involve the activation of a Model Reader, who him will be defined according to the type of interpretative operations that he will be supposed to achieve: to give in parallel the screens, to recognize similarities…

Umberto Eco thus says to us that we are vis-a-vis a double situation. Here a table summarizing this duality:

Eco then warns to us with regard to the textual co-operation: this one will apply between these strategies and not between the subjects. For example, the author can involuntarily employ a term containing a connotation. At the time of publication of Lector in Confabulated , the Caucasus being not burst, while using term “Russian” with place of “Soviet” (in report/ratio in the USSR which still bore this name), there is an ideological connotation here: indeed, the “Russian” term referring to old Russia of the Tsars can be discriminatory in certain situations, and the reader can see a connotation ideology thus there, without for as much the author is anti-Soviet. He can thus allot this intention to his Model Author but in no case with the empirical author: “the textual co-operation is a phenomenon which is carried out, (…), between two discursive strategies and not between two individual subjects. ”.

Since we said that the codes of the Transmitter differed from those of the Recipient, the empirical reader, to become Model Lecteur, must adapt the codes of the transmitter. He could be able to recognize an encyclopedia and a more restricted culture on behalf of the author. The text, independently of the intentions of the author, will learn to us from the things on his social personality or its origins, which Eco calls the ideological structures.

The configuration of the Model Author will be done via textual traces, and she will thus emphasize the universe which hides behind the text. We must represent the Model Author as a textual strategy (in the direction where this one will raise the question: “that is what I want to make of this text? ”) and not like a subject wanting to say things to its reader.

Sources

Lector in Confabulated , Umberto Eco, Grasset editions and Fasquelle, 1979, page 62

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