The Author: What is a reader? What is a text?

Barthes describes all texts as ‘performative’, as exclusively ‘given in the here and now’. I understand this in the sense of theatre and performance art. That a person speaking on a stage will only become ‘comedy act’ if the audience is laughing. In this way, a novel is a different text each time it is read. No text can exist independently of observation and interpretation. For a comedy act to exist, both speaker and audience must agree that the joke is funny, this funniness depends on the cultural context and its conventions.

If a text is a performance, ‘containing no other content than the act by which it is uttered’, then its content can only exist in its being read and interpreted by another. But who is this reader? Each time a text is read, the individual will approach it with a different set of experiences, moods, ideas. Just as Barthes claims the text is written by a disembodied hand, so the text may be read by disembodied eyes. While an individual reader may exist within the same body with each reading, it will be a somewhat different reader each time. Therefore, with each and every reading, the text is created anew.

If a text is created anew each time it is read, then what is a text?

It seems that if a text is recreated each time it is read, then two readers could not say that they have read the same book, and a person can never read the same book twice. A counter-argument would be that the words on the page were the same, or the story was the same, but words may carry a slightly different meaning for each interpretation, and stories can be repeated many times in what we would consider to be different texts.

A writer records thoughts using the conventions of a language to organise them. According to Saussure, these thoughts are already organised by and constructed through linguistic conventions, and cannot exist independently of it. The individual mind is structured through a collectively shared language. Both the process of text construction and text interpretation involve engagement within a public discourse. One cannot deny the generative meaning-making power of this discourse through attributing the text’s construction to the individuals with whom it engages. Perhaps it is not the individual that creates the text, it is the conventions of language. It is only in this way that the writing hand can be disembodied.

That clichéd saying ‘no man is an island’ comes to mind here. No individual exists without interaction with others. And nobody is able to read a text without prior engagements with other texts and with the linguistic conventions that enable one to understand the language in which the text is written. All readers participate in communities of other readers and writers. The human condition is one of engagement in continual dialogue, interpreting linguistic forms and configuring them to convey meaning. In this case, when one reads a text, one is really reading that which has been read before in a modified fashion. A reader cannot read a text without the existence of some other prior text. Therefore, it is this prior text which enables the existence of the reader.

I think that if the author is dead, this does not mean that the reader is born. In an abstract sense, the text has as much of an impact in creating the reader as the reader has in creating the text. Perhaps this is an equal triangular relationship between author-reader-text. Perhaps the author cannot be said to be the authority over the text, but neither can the reader. As both reader and writer engage in a mode of public discourse in encountering a text, these are all on equal grounds, each engaging in an ongoing refiguring of the other.



Barthes, R., 2002. "The Death of the Author" from David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery (eds) The Book History Reader. London and New York: Routledge. 221-224.