SOURCE: A review of The Open Work, in Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 10, No. 1, 1990, pp. 320-21.

In the following review, Comnes analyzes the thesis of The Open Work.

Amidst the farrago of isms (under erasure, of course) used to discuss contemporary narrative, it is sometimes difficult to discern just how bleak the postmodern narrative condition appears to be. Rupture, breakdown and self-contradiction prevail, and critics tell us our task as readers is to remain incredulous toward metanarrative “solutions” while we soberly applaud those works which acknowledge and exploit their rhetorical status in an essentially rhetorical world. Absent, of course, is any possibility of using narrative as a means of recovering meaning. Read in this context, Eco's Opera aperta (The Open Work) is an important book, since it at once accepts the standard postmodern critique of language and offers a manifesto detailing how meaning can be recovered narratively.

The...