I was delighted to receive these comments from Johan L. Tønnesson, a scholar from Norway, who shares my love for Eco's work. What follows is not an official review of On Eco, but rather the result of some very interesting email correspondence which Johan has kindly agreed to let me post here. Johan also wants me to let you know that he would be very interested in getting in touch with any scholars working in the area of the "Model Reader." I have listed Johan's address and email below.

Dear Mr. Text, alias Model Author,

Although I have to admit that I did not follow your final advice - I did not read you twice (c. p. 81) - I am very happy to have become a part of your text, and I actually feel like being so. I agree completely in the distinction you make between me and the empirical reader Johan, who sat in his apartment all yesterday, reading and enjoying an artefact sent by air from overseas, an artefact made of chemical pulp transmitted into paper with some black signs on it mostly from the Latin alphabet, but also including some Arabic numbers and a single Eco Droodle. You draw the division line between me and Johan much sharper than [[Eco]] does, not to talk of Iser, whose Implied Reader as I read him, often is equipped with flesh and blood. And I think you are right in this, because [[semiotician Eco]] tries to respect this distinction, where [[famous author Eco]] or who this [Eco] is, finds it hard to speak consistently in this matter. In the first English introduction of the term (a term which I believe was already introduced in Italian, in Lector in fabula) he writes:

To make his text communicative, the author has to assume that the ensemble of codes he relies upon is the same as that shared by the possible reader (hereafter Model Reader) supposedly able to deal interpretatively with the expressions in the same way as the author deals generatively with them. (1979: 7)

Of course, this text does not postulate that the Model Reader is an advanced, empirical reader, but this is one of a few Eco statements that are more ambiguous in this question than I appreciate. A Model Reader is not "able" to anything, or, to put it the other way around: (s)he is able to do everything, that is anything required by the text. A model reader is a textual strategy we may use as empirical authors and empirical readers.

On the other hand, it is of no use to isolate the textual and the empirical reader totally from each other. If we do so, the Model Reader may be given quite another name. The textual strategy is indeed characterized by acting "the role of the reader."

However, you do balance this perfectly, e.g. in your introductory greeting:

what I want you, my Model Reader, to take away from this book is not an objective set of facts about . . (Preface, p. ii)

And here, dealing with the acceptance and non-acceptance of Possible Worlds:

As Model Readers, we must agree to abide by the rules of the fairy tale, where animals speak and grandmothers can be swallowed whole and alive by wolves. (p.6)

But is there really only one Model Reader in each text? I quite agree that Brother Francis is not the Model Reader of the Fallout text. But I think we can imagine more than one historically and culturally contextualized "ensembles of codes," and I am not sure if we have to establish a hierarchy between more or less correct Model Readers. I think both you and all [[Eco]] go a bit to far in restricting the number of Model Readers to one (also when distinguishing between Naïve and Advanced Reader, who together make the one and only Model Reader, see the Allais analysis in Eco 1979). But indeed I think you act as a Correct Model Reader of Eco here, and perhaps that’s the right thing to do in a text that promises to make the empirical reader able to "get inside the minds of great thinkers in history" (the back page). In my February paper, I will introduce three alternative Model Readers in the same text (the possible number is not infinite, I construe some "Brother Francises" for falsification, but there could be more than three in this text), and I do not think I betray Eco in any way by doing this.

What is especially impressive in On Eco is the way you actualise Eco so that we may experience old Eco texts as being living texts of today. But here is one exception: Why do I feel that the distinction between communication and signification is terribly old fashioned? I guess it is correct that Shannon and Weaver are heavily misunderstood in Western culture: their purpose was not to say anything about signification. But to name the exchange of sign vehicles /communication/ in 2003 seems very strange and rather destructive to me. But perhaps this is only - if anything is - a question of "words." It is, after all, important to make the principal distinction between the two activities of Searle’s Chinese room.

But again I think you are true to Eco, so this is strictly speaking no critique. So let me finally mention some marginal, critical points:

• To declare Eco as "probably the most well-known European cultural and literary theorist of the second half of the twentieth century" (preface p. ii) seems, at least to a North European, to be something of an exaggeration. Of course, more people in the streets of Oslo would know Eco’s name compared to Foucault’s, Derrida’s, Habermas’ and Barthes’. But that’s because of //Eco the novelist//, not because of //Eco the theorist//.
  
  
• Eco is big, indeed he is, but why make him even bigger by proclaim him to be the father of the term "unlimited semiosis" (p. 25). The father is Peirce, isn’t it? Be proud of North America!
  
  
• In contrast, I feel that you feed your students with a touch of anglo-american cultural imperialism by saying "try to read Wittgenstein’s Tractatus or Foucault’s Order of Things. . . Both follow the rules of the English language" (p.7).

However, these were just some "skjønnhetsfeil", a Norwegian word translated to /imperfection/ in my dictionary. It is not a good translation, because a "skjønnhetsfeil" (/skjønnhet/ means /beauty/, /feil/ means /error/) are those very small imperfections that let a woman’s beauty to come to its right.

Again: What a beautiful book!

Best regards from //Johan//

December 6, 2002

Johan L. Tønnesson
Institutt for nordistikk og litteratur
Henrik Wergelands hus, rom 428
Boks 1013 Blindern
0315 OSLO

Email: johan.tonnesson@inl.uio.no.