Any text is susceptible of multiple interpretations. This, moreover, holds true for every understanding of ‘text’ which is not Humpty-Dumptyish. It does not require the stipulation that the word preserve its etymological investment from the Latin textus and with it, the Barthesian distinction between a work and a text. Nor, for that matter, does it depend on ‘the death of the author’ and the repudiation of every manner of intentionality which goes with it, including that whose locus of authority is the text itself (at least in the sense belonging to what once qualified as New Criticism). Irrespective of all such internecine critico-ideological considerations, texts are inherently polysemic, first of all because language is inherently ambiguous – even (rather than especially) if the possible referent of ‘language’ be confined to a strictly verbal medium so as to exclude any analogical extension into the realm, say, of painting or music (whose ‘languages’ in any event require verbal translation for those who are not themselves painters or composers), and even, too, if the language in question is one whose utterances would be governed by the appropriate version of the principle, ‘Si ce n'est pas clair, ce n'est pas français’ (‘If it's not clear, it's not French’).

The ambiguity accruing to any text by reason of the nature of language itself may, of course, pass unnoticed so long as that text be exempt from ‘literary’ scrutiny. But the moment it is treated as a literary text – i.e., read with anything like the kind of attention which New Criticism inculcated – its potential ambiguity almost inevitably becomes actualized. This also means that any printed (or printable) text is open to ‘literary’ examination regardless of whether its author had any such intention (or aspiration).

Implicit in that proposition is another source of ambiguity, distinguishable if not wholly separate from the seven (or seventy) ‘verbal’ types which New Criticism concerned itself with. That other source resides in the nature of reading as an act of generic construction.