227 DAVID SKALICKÝ In Defence of Use: The Boundaries and Criteria of Interpretation of an Artistic Text DAVID SKALICKÝ A work has such a never-ending plurality of interpretations that its meaning cannot be an intrinsic property simply waiting to be uncovered. And yet two options still remain available to us here: to search for meaning in the work’s past (in the events surrounding its birth or in the semantics of contemporary speech), or to accept the meaning that is ascribed to the work in the future and is open to perpetual semantic recontextualisation. Roland Barthes makes his choice explicit in his famous essay “The Death of the Author” (1968): “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.” 359 The reader’s role is no longer to be a kind of archaeologist of meaning, but its creator. Interpretive theories of the last half-century subscribe to this agenda. Bar the odd exception‚ 360 these are theories on what constitutes such “meaning-making”. In the introduction to his The Limits of Interpretation, first published in 1990, Umberto Eco writes that in The Open Work (Opera Aperta), written in 1957–1962, “I advocated the active role of the interpreter in the reading of texts endowed with aesthetic value. When those pages were written, my readers focused mainly on the ‘open’ side of the whole business, underes- timating the fact that the open-ended reading I supported was an activity elicited by (and aiming at interpreting) a work. In other words, I was studying the dialectics between the rights of texts and the rights of their interpreters. 359 Barthes, “The Death of the Author”, p. 148. 360 In 20th-century literary studies, the most prominent “exception” is Eric Donald Hirsch, who argues that the subject of (objective) interpretation should not be the (elusive) significance of a work, but its (enduring) meaning, which Hirsch identifies with authorial meaning (see Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation, p. 216).