Openness and Limit in Umberto Eco's The Island of the Day before

Abstract

In his theoretical corpus, Umberto Eco designs the fictional text as “a set of instructions” — a formulation that stresses both its immanent incompleteness, generative of plural meanings, and its limited and limitative scope. The text becomes the locus of communication, but also of struggle, among intentio auctoris, intentio operis, and intentio lectoris. In order to attenuate their mutual tensions, Eco proposes a pragmatic solution: a model of text production and interpretation that, while allowing semantic plurality, limits it through the socially and historically conditioned principle of contextuality. This article focuses on the modalities in which, in accord with the praxis of educare e dilettare, this theoretical argument is dramatized in Eco's postmodern metafiction, The Island of the Day Before. It investigates how the narrative substance becomes the theatre of a dialectical interplay of openness and limit, portraying en abyme the quality of fiction-as- pharmakon (mode of knowing, mode of escape, and in extreme, mode of interpretive paranoia), and suggesting the remedy for “hermetic drift” in the negative form of its transgression. Moreover, it shows how the story of a 17th-century castaway in the South Pacific can be a polemical text, incisive vis-à-vis radical theories of deconstruction.