Reaching the Destination

"The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted."
~Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author"

The Romantics valued the author: the poet was the representative of all humanity, embodying what every person was and is in part. And yet Emerson was suspicious of reading, for through doing this, someone else's imagination was in control of your own. Therefore, for Emerson and many of the other Romantics, books were good only if they inspired, but they were bad if you thought they were a record of pure truth. Usher in Formalism and T.S. Eliot, and you were instructed to look only at the poem, to read it for itself, without any view of the author's background or intent in mind. And then, the next player entered the stage, telling us the most radical story of all: that of the death of the author.

Roland Barthes does not say writers are unimportant... he instead gave birth to the reader. I would like to focus on the above quotation today, to see what it actually means for us as readers. Barthes is giving us a big responsibility here. He is actually allowing us to be writers ourselves, for through reading, we are really disentangling and rearranging the language in our minds to make sense of it. And we as readers are the words' destination. We are the final place it lands. We the readers - not the author - make the words come alive.

Ok, I can see that. I take my job as a reader very seriously, and I love the idea of disentangling and rearranging the words I read so that they make sense to me. I do this all the time, as I read something and write notes in the margins of what I like about the passage I just read, or what the words remind me of, or even what meaning I ascribe to the language the author uses. But doesn't that negate the second part of Barthes' quotation: "Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted"? I am very much so a person with a history, with a biography, and a psychology. I couldn't be reading if I wasn't me. I do not understand how we could in any way objectify reading to say that the reader is just as impersonal as the author (who for Barthes, really plays no role in this literary phenomenon). How can you extract yourself from reading? I can understand an attempt to read objectively, in an effort to look at all possible sides and reach an objective conclusion on the writing. This actually hearkens back to my last post and the question, "Do we have a responsibility to appreciate things we do not like?" And as readers, I think it is our responsibility. We can look at a piece of work and appreciate its craft (but then again, doesn't that point back to the author, who is the creator / location of the discourse you are reading? For it is the author himself who created, even though Barthes would say it is the language that speaks, not the author... more on that later...), even though we may not like the "message." But can we ever truly extract who we are from what we are reading? Can we ever truly take away all the history we have, all the events in our lives that would cause us to view a piece of literature through our own specific lens? I really don't think that's possible... I can't take any part of me away from myself. I can look as objectively as I can, but I cannot retract my history and my story. That would be going against the very essence of my humanity.

And the beauty of having a history, a biography, and a psychology is that you see something new every time you read something (be it a new piece of literature or one you've read over and over again). Take the Bible, for instance. Why is it timeless? Why can it speak to so many people in so many situations, millions of times over? Why can we read a passage and have it mean nothing, and then read it over five years later and have it transform our lives? It's because we have a story, and each time we read, we are bringing that history to the table.

Yes, perhaps that is making literature too personal. Perhaps I am giving the reader too much leeway. Perhaps I have taken Barthes' birth of the reader to a place he never meant it to be. And I will agree that part of the power of literature is in its destination, in what it means for the reader. But I will not allow reading to strip away the richness of my history... I will not allow my reading to always and only be an objective study of words on a page...