Reader Response Theory: Unpacking Roland Barthes' Insights

Theory has emerged in the 1970s as an influential critical theory of the Post-Structuralist tradition. It is a black lash against the proponent of New Criticism who has assumed that meaning existed solely in the text and can only be deciphered be competent literary critic who possesses concise analytic skills. Rosenblatt (1979) views the text as ‘an object of paper and ink until some reader responds to marks on the page as verbal symbol’.

Iser (1978) pointed out that this convergence will ‘always remain virtual, as it is not to be identified either with the reality the text or with the individual disposition of the reader’.

Jauss (1982) uses the term ‘horizons of expectations to describe the socio-cultural norms and assumption that mould a reader’s interpretation of any literary work in a given historical moments.

Rosenblatt (1978) echos this by pointing out that a written work does not have same meaning for all readers and that each individual brings background knowledge, belief, values, cultural expectation and reading context of the act of reading.

According to Norman Holland (1980), a readers engagement with the text is a platform for him to bring his unique expectations, fears and wishes to the text through DEFT (Defence-Expectations-Fantasy-Transformation) to create his identity. To this, Bleich (1979) also posits a psychological explaination of the reader’s interaction of the text just like Holland when he points out that meaning is located in the reader’s mind.

Despite the different perspectives on whether meaning is solely a creation of a reader or synergy between the reader and the text, the theorists have unanimously agreed that is not inherent to the text but the reader. They have provided a better understanding of how meaning is created by the reader through active engagement with the text.

In Rolland Barthes’s 'The Death of the Author', he argues against traditional literary criticism's practice of incorporating the intentions and biographical context of an author in an interpretation of a text and instead he argues that writing and creator are unrelated. In this particular essay, Barthes argues against the method of reading and criticism that relies on aspects of the author's identity. M.H. Abrams (2003), defines authors as 'authors are individuals who by their intellectual and imaginative powers, purposefully create from the materials of their experiences and reading, a literary work which is distinctively their own'. This definition describes implicitly that an author cannot produce anything unless he could find an opportunity as his experience and words as an expression of the experience. Barthes believes that writing is not subjective in nature rather it is objective and no other element can intervene in establishing its meaning. The Death of the Author is an essay where Barthes depicts a kind of post-structuralism or deconstructive view of the author. While announcing the metaphoric death of the author he mutates himself by taking different stands. It also specifies the death of structuralism. In this essay, Barthes pulls strings against the pattern of reading and criticism that relies on aspects of the author's identity — their social views, historical context, creed, ethnicity, psychology, or other aspects such as biographical or on their ascribe — to distil meaning from the author's original work. This type of criticism involves the experiences and biases of the author describe as a definitive 'explanation' of the text. Barthes considers this methodology of reading may be evidently tidy and convenient but in general hasty and flawed: 'To give a text an author' and assign a single, correlating interpretation to it 'is to impose a limit on that text'. Here, the ancient issue regarding the place of the author in the text is being questioned by Barthes. He squabbles that the author loses his voice as the moment he writes the text. How text is being correlated by the reader is more important. The author is nothing more than a dragoman and imitator and everything is not original for him. He simply recreates the materials that were already used.

In Roland Barthes’ essay “The Death of the Author,” Barthes asserts that the Author is dead because the latter is no longer a part of the deep structure in a particular text. To him, the Author does not create meaning in the text: one cannot explain a text by knowing about the person who wrote it. A text, however, cannot physically exist disconnected from the Author who writes it. Even if the role of the Author is to mix pre-existing signs, it does not follow that the Author-function is dead. Moreover, Barthes attributes “authorship” to the reader who forms meaning and understanding. The reader is, however, an abstraction “without history, biography, psychology”. These contexts – history, biography, and psychology – can only be set by the Author. Thus, the Author is alive and well because the text cannot exist without the Author, the mixing of signs is the Author’s art, and the reader’s meanings forming abilities are nourished by the Author.

The poem “Death you cruel” is written by one of the budding poets of Bhutan called Dorji Penjor. He is a lecturer of Royal Thimphu College and has some more poems in his credit. “Death you cruel” is an elegy written on the death of a father in one of the families that the author knew. According to Baldick, (2015), he defined an elegy as a sad and thoughtful poem lamenting the death of a person. It has a theme reflecting on the morality & immortality of human existence. Elegy is derived from the Greek term elegeia which means 'lament'. In the traditional meaning, the elegy refers to an elaborately formal lyrical poem lamenting the death of a friend or public figure. It is characterized by a powerful intertwining of emotion and rhetoric, of loss and figuration and above all by the movement from mourning to consolation. Dorji Penjor’s elegy is written without elegiac couplet. It is set in a dying bed of the father expressing mourns. Therefore, this paper will present the in-depth study of Dorji Penjors poem, “Death you cruel” by analyzing the textual meaning and structures incorporated in the poem through the lens of Roland Barthes, “Readers Response Theory” based on his essay, ‘Death of the Author’. Furthermore, this paper has contained John Donne’s Canonization explained from the lenses of Barthes Reader Response Theory.

In the essay, ‘The Death of the Author’, Barthes proposed a sort of post structuralist or deconstructive view of the author. He takes different stand through which he announces the metaphoric death of the author. It also declares the death of structuralism. Here, Barthes questions the historical issue regarding the place of author in the text. He argues that when the author writes the text, his voice is no more dominant in it. How readers interpret the text is more important. Author is nothing other than translator and imitator and nothing for him. He simply imitates the materials that were already used. True writing, he argues, takes place when the author is able to loosen the grip between their own identity and their notions of how a piece of art should be, “the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body of writing”. A text cannot have single meaning, but rather, is composed of multiple systems through which it is constructed. Using Barthes idea of Death of the Author, this paper will bring a paragraph wise explanation of Dorji Penjor’s poem “Death you cruel” as underscored below.

My Dad! My Dad! Each from the side of his bed,

The drowning hearts are weeping out of grief.

He lied cold and close with blood on head,

Brown and dry as he is shaded leaf.

Elegy is written mostly into three parts. The first two stanzas of the poem depict the first part of elegy called ‘sorrow’. The poet expresses the painful and sorrowful experiences at the demise of someone closed to them. Therefore, the very first stanza of the poem starts with a mourning call of children for their lost soul. Children from each side of the bed, called the name of their dead father with their hearts heavily filled with grief and eyes with tears, they yearn for the sudden awake of father but their father lied cold with stains of blood on his head like an autumn brown leaves shaded on the ground. The sorrowful moment of children is depicted and continued in second stanza.

Father! Wake up. Friends and neighbors all have come,

Dress up, wake fast to wander all we wish.

But, their father rested cold and dead so firm,

Only to find death is harsh.

The mourning call of children continued in this stanza believing that their father is still in deep sleep but not death. Children cried for father to wake up and get dressed up fast as the friends and neighbors have come to go for trips that they wished. But their calls were never responded by father because he stood cold and dead on the bed. This made children only to realize how cruel the death is?

Homely joys had sunken into withered doghouse of grief

For he cared and consoled one and all when in gloom,

His striking face and glistering smile were all one wished to thief.

Everything he did was all for them to bloom.

Children understood that their father will never return from the long permanent sleep. He has gone permanently out from the live of his family. His death has brought fountains of unbearable grief to the members of the family. All that happy and cheerful moments of past have withered into a doghouse of grief now. Children are recollecting the days spent with father when he made them smile at their gloomiest moment and how his glistering smiles lured all the children to forget their pains and lead happy life.

The pictures he drew, poems he wrote, dazzle all these times,

The canopy of shrubs, took his hands a month, stands alive,

Gathering souls of all age to sing the rhymes,

Nurturing hardships, enthusiastic and positive in life.

The stanza presents the continuation part of admiration of the children towards the departed soul. When the father was alive, how his talents in arts and literature have made them occupied and wonder still to these times. The canopy which took him a month to construct lies as beauty as it is even at the demise of the builder which long ago was used by people of any age to come there and listen a song sung by them. Children expresses their admiration to the father he was so positive and enthusiastic in nurturing anyone under him.

Life is but an easy prey to the mouth of cruel death.

We look before and after, yearning for more,

Only legacy remains but not a part of wealth

Life is absurd and vague that consumes like a running sore.

This stanza introduces the third part of an elegy called ‘solace’. Solace is comfort or consolation in a time of great distress or sadness (Oxford dictionary). This stanza tries to comfort the mourning souls who have lived in the ponds of sorrow due to the lost of their father. The poet tries to provide a word of solace making sure that the shattered ones are relieve from the pain. The poet tries to say, life for all of us is simple a journey between birth and death. We are born only to die one day or the other but before that cruel mouth of death swallows us, we should lead a life that can remain a legacy of how positive we are. No wealth or position can bar from death because life itself is absurd that we cannot predict when to die. Life goes on consuming itself until we know it is never to be rewinding anything back to normal.

They pray for his soul, rest in celestial abbot of tranquility,

Nursing the wisdoms of Buddha and bodhisattvas,

Accomplishing the merits of dharma, and lift the hell of their gloomy society

All is what they had prayed for hours and hours.

This stanza continues with the solace and prayers for the departed soul. Upon accepting that death will come for all, children are now comforting with the truth of life and expressing their prayers for their father to be reborn in the peaceful realm of paradise amongst the Buddha and bodhisattvas accomplishing the merits of religion and help to liberate all other earthly sentient beings from the realm of Samsara. The poem is written in definite structure of twenty eight lines divided into six equal quatrains. The poem has three main parts with two quatrains each. The first part of a poem talks about sorrow. The death of father is a sorrowful moment to the family. The poet expresses how the children are filled with grief and sadness at the death of their father. The second part of a poem presents the admiration of the demised soul. The poet presents how the demised father has done the arts that could be appreciated and cherished by the children. The last two stanzas of a poem is the third part that presents the solace and prayers towards the departed soul. Children in the poem pray for the swift rebirth of their father in the celestial abbot of paradise. The poem is written in irregular metrical tones but has regular rhyming schemes. Each quatrain has a rhyming pattern of ABAB.

The Second Poem presented in this paper is John Donne’s Canonization that is explained by incorporating Roland Barthes Reader Response Theory. 'The Canonization' is a poem by English metaphysical poet John Donne which was first published in 1633. The poem is viewed as exemplifying Donne's wit and irony which has an abrupt opening. The poet begins his poem with demonstrative lines to rejuvenate and invigorate the attention of the readers. ‘For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love’. Such an abrupt opening demonstrates his directness in luring the mindset of readers on to his poem. The speaker directly addresses to his lover to stop complaining about all his flaws for the sake of god and leave him in peace to love her which senses that the speaker lived until now in the pains of her complain. He has already accepted all his flaws within him such as his tremors, gray hair, thin wallet, or even his gout. Even against all these frailties, the speaker wanted to impart his lover to remain silence and understand just one thing how much he loves her. He requested to hold her tongue and let him love because love can happen between anyone. He said, he will accept and contemplate any sort of criticisms put forward to his body so that he can love her in peace.

For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love,

Or chide my palsy, or my gout,

My five gray hairs, or ruined fortune flout…

The speaker continued to justify that, his love for her will never bring injury to anyone nor it can drown the merchant’s ship. His love for her will not bring tears that can overflow into farmer's ground. Neither has the blissful love's coolness removed a spring time in the life of others. The heats or his hot passions have not added to the fever of the plague. He thus mocks at his lover wondering why he is not approved to love her because his love cannot be the source for all of the above calamities.

Alas, alas, who's injured by my love?

What merchant's ships have my sighs drowned?

Who says my tears have overflowed his ground?

… and I do love.

The final stanza is in the form of an invocation: 'You who did contract into yourselves the soul of the whole world and throw it on the mirror of your eyes, making them such mirrors, that they gave you everything in epitomy, countries, towns and courts, we your worshipers pray you to petition heaven for us to give us a pattern, that is, a copying of your love.' The poet asks to consider their love as an idealized pattern and implores with God to grant them something similar. Now they have been canonized to become them as saints.

And thus invoke us: 'You, whom reverend love

Made one another's hermitage;

You, to whom love was peace, that now is rage;

…A pattern of your love!'

Roland Barthes has vehemently opposed the view that authors have consciously created their master piece because he mentioned that authors often reproduce emotional patterns or they simply put together all the pre-existing texts in their writings. He also argued that the birth of the reader happens at the cost of the death of the author. For him, writers are not the psychologist but a linguist, not an author but a copier and not authoritarian but a scriptor. Therefore, this paper is produced purely from the concept of Barthes Reader Response Theory that emphasis on the impression of readers rather than the passion or taste that the writer has because a unity of a text does not lie in its origin but lies in its destination.