Assess the significance of structuralist literary theory for an

understanding of the relation between text and reader.

If we are to evaluate the way in which structuralist thought has

helped us understand the text - reader relation, we ought to begin by

explaining how each of this entities acquire shape and form (more or

less) independently inside the structuralist mind. In doing so, we will

be implicitly threading the constructed relation between them only to

realize the extent to which they are inevitably and forever tied

together.

In Death of the Author, Barthes constructs a theory of the reader

in relation, first of all, to the figure of the author. With the capitalist

exaltation of the individual, the author’s person has become a central

figure in the field of literary studies and criticism in that it is “him” the

vehicle through which the work is explained and acquires meaning.

Barthes, in an attempt of demolishing this prevailing idea, adopts two

different perspectives in relation to the work/text. From an external

point of view, he says that the author’s person isn’t the object of

analysis in which we should focus, but most importantly, from an

internal perspective, we should suppress the author’s figure as he is

not who speaks in the text, but the language. Narration, exercised in

its symbolic function (this is, when it acts intransitively on reality),

produces an impersonal mode of writing that allows for the language

to speak, act and perform. As so, writing becomes “the destruction of

every voice”, it is the place “where all identity is lost, starting with the
very identity of the body writing”1; we will be able to identify the ways

the dissolution of this body writing is carried out by Barthes by

explaining it through three different elements: time/ temporality, text,

and reader.

By talking of the author’s disappearance in relation to the first of

these elements, time, we can distinguish two important aspects inside

the French theorist’s ideas. First of all, the successive linear logic

between author-text, by which author comes in first instance as

creator and then secondly his creation, the text, is broken down- also

the hierarchical vertical structure that it implies.2 This will be

substituted, in turn, by a horizontal structure whereby author and text

emerge at the same time; it is a somewhat synchronized process, and

this synchronicity works on the basis of something we have already

mentioned: that there exists “no other time than that of the

enunciation”. In this way, the text is that something “eternally written

in the here and now”. By taking a concept borrowed from the

linguistic field, writing thus becomes the put into practice of the

performative, “a verbal form in which the enunciation has no other

content than the act by which it is uttered”3.

Continuing with our argument, we must now explore the

suppression of the author figure in relation to text. In opposition to

the already mention standardized thought of text been that time-

1
Roland Barthes: “The Death of the Author” from Image, Music, Text, trans.
Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), p. 142
2
Barthes applies the metaphor of father-child so that father (author) not only comes
first but is the wise that nourishes his child (text), “The Death of the Author”, p. 145
3
“The Death of the Author”, p. 145
linear construction, text is better conceived in the structuralist mind

as space. This space, most importantly, works as a tissue or network

where multiple signs and writings both meld and collide in an infinite

movement. This tissue text becomes, has in its multidimensionality

innumerable centers of culture; it has no ultimate (or starting) center

or origin, “its words only explainable through other words, and so on

indefinitely”. 4
In this sense, the author figure has to be transformed

into an impersonalized instance, empty of all subjectivity, more

similar to that of a scriptor, as it is language which explains itself.

This removes forever the hidden meaning and teleological principle

that underlay every text- with a capital T, Text, in all its revolutionary

force, cannot be deciphered but only disentangled.

Furthermore, though in a radically different manner, this space

concept can help us better attain an understanding of the meaning

structuralists give to text. As opposed to work, the literary centre par

excellence (as the product of an author’s creation) which is part of

reality, it is a material entity which occupies a space and can be held

in the hand (in this sense, can be identified with the book), text

cannot be seen or held, but only proved; its place can only be found

in the methodological field, and as such, can only acquire a presence

4
“The Death of the Author”, p. 146. Umberto Eco, in his “Unlimited Semiosis and
Drift: Pragmaticism vs. “Pragmatism” text, explains this unlimited semiosis as a
metonymic process of association whereby meaning is ever-growing; in quoting
Peirce, “a sign is something by which we know something more”, as opposed to
hermetic semiosis in which “a sign is something by knowing which we know
something else”- this last approach, ultimately, only asserts the teleological
functioning of language and meaning, contrary to structuralist thought, or what Eco
names “the Fullness of Meaning”, where every text has a final secret/meaning to
reveal. Umberto Eco in The Limits of Interpretation, (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1994), pp. 27-30
through certain laws or rules. Sustained by language, this text comes

into being as part of a discourse and can only be experimented

through a dynamic process: that of production. But what is meant

exactly by “production” here? We should stop at this point and take a

closer look to what this concept implies, as it is here where the

structuralist thought better reflects the reader-text relation.

In saying that “the Text is experienced only in an activity of

production”5, Barthes is linking it, in a first moment, to sign. While

work is that general sign which has an ultimate unique meaning

waiting to be interpreted through a beginning to end reading, the

text’s meaning operates backwards. What this means, essentially, is

that the operation that the compositional elements of the linguistic

sign, is inverted. No longer is the signified the sustenance, or the

essence, of the signifier but the other way around- the signifier thus

becomes the crucial part of the sign, something which laid bare of its

fixative static nature6, becomes a dynamic infinite journey (the

signified, consequently, is forever delayed). This journey is thus

understood essentially as a metonymic process (as we have already

seen, it is the process by a word is explained through another word,

ad infinitum). But “the generation of the perpetual signifier (…) in the

field of the text (…) is realized not according to an organic progress of

5
Roland Barthes: “From Work to Text” from Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen
Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), p. 157
6
From its foundational moment, there has been a sort of implicit hierarchy between
the compositional elements of a sign, whereby signifier worked only as an
instrument to grasp the signified’s implied “Truth”: signifier has always been
thought to be that part of the sign which fixates the forever elusive signified; by
giving it shape, the signifier seized its infinitude. In inverting this structure,
Barthes’s theory becomes ever more revolutionary; the implication here is that
there is no Truth with capital “T”, and if there were, Truth is language.
maturation (…), but, rather, according to a serial movement of

disconnections, overlappings, variations”7; how are we able then to

make sense of this displaced process? This question can be answered

through the notion/ act of playing.

If work is that instance that is consumed on the basis of a

qualitative (good-bad) criteria, the playing element frees it from this

consumption burden and transforms this act into one of production;

this ultimately unifies the reading and writing activities into one sole

significant practice. Playing then should be understood as an

ambivalent exercise. Firstly, it is the process by which the reader

plays to be the text, he reflects it in a sort of mimetic practice but, as

Barthes points out, never in a passive manner- this leads on to the

second appreciation of the term. The text asks for the reader’s

collaboration, he has to play the text, just as a musician plays his

instrument; he has to execute its content whilst at the same time

creating it (and not just reproducing it); analogous to the figure of the

interpreter in (postserial) music, the reader ultimately becomes a kind

of co-author of the text. We should now explore in more depth the

way in which this occurs.

We have already explained the idea of journey, of crossing, in

that the text cannot be immobilized, “its constitutive movement is

that of cutting across”8; this image can be better understood through

Barthes notion of text “as difference”. Being text a kind of amalgam

7
“From Work to Text”, p. 158
8
“From Work to Text”, p. 157
of incidents which aren’t completely identifiable in their particularity,

the reader carries out the reading process walking through it and

experiencing its (infinite) meanings through a sort of undefined and

singular experience: these meanings (or incidents as Barthes likes to

call them), are combined each time in a unique way, text becoming

that stroll that founds itself “in a difference only repeatable as

difference”9. This amalgam of incidents is explained in turn by the

text’s intertextuality. Transforming itself into a woven space without a

precise origin, and thus invalidating any filiative reading of it10, text

becomes the off-centered place where a multiplicity of cultural

languages are anonymously quoted, referred to, echoed. Reader thus

becomes co-author in that he is the walker of the text, it is through

this strolling unique experience that is can create its meaning in that

vast stereophony11.

Once reached this point, we can clearly see how the

disappearance of the author is linked to the figure of the reader. In

the Text, as we said, language is to a certain extent self-explanatory,

but this process come into being through the act of reading. But this

reader who activates this linguistic structure is not to be understood

in a conventional way: it also has to be freed from all subjectivity,

from its personality- he is “without history, biography, psychology”,

an empty vessel who ultimately is filled up with the text’s underlying

9
“From Work to Text”, p. 159
10
“The work is caught up in a process of filiation. Are postulated: a determination of
the work by the world (…), a consecution of works amongst themselves, and a
conformity of the work to the author”- we are hereby referring mostly to this last
two understandings. Roland Barthes: “From Work to Text”, p-160
11
From Work to Text”, p. 160
multiple centers of knowledge and culture- he gives unity to all this

contents, becoming that “space on which all the quotations that make

up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost” 12. Writing’s

future thus sustains itself in the dissolution of the author figure only in

the interest of the emergence of the reader.

We shall now draw more precisely on how the structuralist

relation between reader and text reflects in a practical way, this is,

through the novel. Jonathan Culler speaks of the novel under the light

of a double understanding: on the one hand, it is a discourse by which

society articulates the world, but too, and most importantly for our

study, as a semiotic process whereby the world is filled with meaning

through the creation and combination of signs. Words, through the

activity of reading, provide models and permit for the creation and

relation of social and individual identities. If “the novel is the primary

semiotic agent of intelligibility”13, Barthes would add it is also the

place where challenge and change them.

In this sense, the text becomes a place where the reader seeks

to recognize a world. Following this idea, Barthes makes a distinction

between readable and unreadable texts. The readable text is

apprehensible in accordance to traditional models of intelligibility,

which in last instance leads to the complete fulfillment of the reader’s

12
“The Death of the Author”, p. 148
13
Jonathan Culler: Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of
Literature (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), p. 189
expectations (in being able to perceive the world through it); this is

what Barthes more precisely calls the Balzacian or traditional novel.

Opposed to this comes the radical novel, who asks more of the reader

in that it does not clearly expose a recognizable world to him, it is the

unreadable text which we know how to write but have not yet learnt

how to read14. This distinction evolves ultimately into one of the

essential contributions of the French theorist to the literary studies:

the antithetical texte de plaisir/ texte de jouissance terms. In a sort of

quantitative difference between them, the former invokes in the

reader a feeling of pleasure, whilst the latter one of rapture; the

jouissance element of the text thus calls out loud for the figure of the

reader. As we have already explained, his role is that of a voided

instance in which the text acquires its meaning, it is the place where

the infinite codes which arise from the multiple cultural languages

embedded in it, meld and collide to make meaning. Freed from its

subjectivity, the reader enjoys a text from his bodily aspect, this is, as

individual15. As so, the disconnections, collisions, disruptions of an

infinity of texts which conform the Text, similarly provoke in the

reader “shock, disruption, even loss, which are proper to ecstasy”16;

in other words, and more concretely, it is the rapture of dislocation

produced by ruptures of intelligibility inside the novel17 what we might

call the jouissance. To continue, we should point out the fact that

14
Roland Barthes in Jonathan Culler: Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics
and the Study of Literature, p.190
15
Roland Barthes in Jonathan Culler: Barthes, (Glasgow: Fontana Paperbacks, 1983),
p. 93
16
Roland Barthes in Jonathan Culler: Barthes, p. 98
17
Jonathan Culler: Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of
Literature, p.192
Barthes reminds us that these are functional categories rather than

classes of text: the text of jouissance is just “a later and freer stage”

of the text de plaisir18. As such, they become the expression of

parallel forces which don’t ever meet. The reader of the novel

experiences both, this contradiction stemming from the inherent

contradictory tension between the intelligible and “the problematic”

inside it. We shall now focus on the internal aspects and functioning

of this novel under the light of structuralist thought, for here again we

will be able to recognize the necessary relation of text and reader.

To begin with, we can understand the novel on a double axis:

one horizontal, by which the text comes into contact with us as an

unwinding, development of the narrative, and one vertical, by which

we seize and construct the text through the establishment of a

hierarchy inside the (sub) systems that conform it; these are plot,

theme and character. They are of particular importance as they

reflect more intensely cultural models; ultimately, the figure of the

reader emerges again in that “the process of reading is that of

implicitly recognizing (these) elements as of a particular level and

interpreting them accordingly”19. In reflecting Culler’s analysis, we will

now address two of these possible levels; in doing so, we will be able

to identify two writing practices which help construct that text of

illisibilité Barthes proposes.

18
Jonathan Culler: Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of
Literature, p.191
19
Jonathan Culler: Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of
Literature, p. 192
 The first level concerns that of trivial detail. In a first moment,

the purely descriptive and objective extracts of the text seem to only

feed the mimetic function and thus make it easy for the reader to

recognize a world and fulfill his expectations. But if we take a closer

look, this descriptive residue can become precisely the instrument by

which to invert this recognition. In this trivial detail, the meaning of

the sign is nothing other than its referent, their function only being

that of asserting, as Barthes says, ‘we are the real’; subsequently,

they are the exemplification of the resistance to meaning20. If the

narrative text is essentially constructed through this purely referential

descriptions, the reader is unable to close the process by which he

makes sense of the novel’s plot- he cannot construct the text’s world

in that although he can recognize a world outside, it is thematically

voided. As opposed to conceptual language, this objective language

makes it difficult for the reader to seize a meaning through it. Barthes

will ultimately defend this use of language for, in finding no direct

meaning, the reader will apply more effort and produce it himself; he

will become the producer of the text.

But the construction of the referential is not just carried out

through the descriptive mode of writing, and this leads us to the

second level mentioned, the narrator’s voice; it will serve Barthes

once again as a tool by which to develop the Text. Against that

omnipresent narrator, the French theorist defends the figure of an a-

personal narrator. But how can we empty the text from voice? One of
20
Roland Barthes in Jonathan Culler: Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics
and the Study of Literature, p.193
the methods to achieve this is precisely through the same referential

detail previously mentioned. In being pure signifier, the descriptive

language is empty of voice; moreover, in this narrator’s absence, the

reader and the text are brought closer together in that it positions the

reader sort of inside the text: they “assert (…) what the reader might

have observed had he been present”21. By contrast, the

demonstrative and relative clauses (as Culler exemplifies: she was

one of those woman who; one of those days when…) serve to bring

the reader closer to the narrator, in that the meaning which is derived

from a particular scene is identified by both entities; the narrator

voice is heard through this built up relation with the reader, or,

inversely, what Barthes denominates the voice of reading22. What

there is to do then is eliminate these constructions and by contrary

make unfamiliar the events or things to which the text is referring – in

doing so, the reader once again will find the text problematic and

have an urge to discover what it is that it is trying to tell him.

Having reached this point, we can say we have approached the

many ways by which the reader-text relation is constructed through

structuralist theory. We have started this investigation by attempting

to define what each of these elements meant in their isolation, but in

trying to do so, we always came across the other; this also happened

21
Jonathan Culler: Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of
Literature, p. 195
22
This is more precisely “the displaced voice the reader grants, by proxy, to the
narrative”, Barthes in Jonathan Culler: Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism,
Linguistics and the Study of Literature, p.196
in a second moment, when trying to define in its relation in a more

applied/ practical manner through the structuralist’s analysis of the

novel. To conclude, we will recall Barthes words in one of his many

definitions of Text for it sums up the essence of the structuralist

theory and the relationship we sought to analyze: it is that something

“eternally written in the here and now”. Summing up, it is that tissue/

network imbued of cross-references in an eternal movement which

only come into being through the performative use of language and

the reader who writes/produces it: reader and text are thus forever

linked together.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barthes, Roland: “From Work to Text” from Image, Music, Text, trans.

Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977)

Barthes, Roland: “The Death of the Author” from Image, Music, Text,

trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977)

Culler, Jonathan: Barthes, (Glasgow: Fontana Paperbacks, 1983)

Culler, Jonathan: Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and

the Study of Literature (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975)

Eco, Umberto: The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana

University Press, 1994)