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In Barthes’ argument in excerpt 2, which examines the nature of Greek tragedies and how they relate to his theory of the reader, he observes the decidedly ambiguous nature of the texts, in which words and phrases have double meanings, only one of which is heard by the characters in the play. Both meanings, though, are heard by their intended target, the audience. The reader, or listener, is taken into account in these writings—if that engagement with the audience were not undertaken, the plays would have long since lost their power. It is the reader/listener who engages with the work and allows its multiple levels of meaning to come forth, not the author. A text contains a multiplicity of meanings and dialogues, but only within the sphere of a reader are they realized.
Of course, Barthes intends not an individual reader, with unpredictable tastes, backgrounds, and habits. Rather, he insists that the “reader” is a role, an idea which we enact (or reenact) as we engage with a text. His reader is not a person but an idealized theory; much like the famed frictionless plane: it is excellent for conceptualizing, but no one will actually get there. To borrow from Plato, we are but flawed copies of that perfect reader that exists somewhere else entirely, on another planet of existence. This was, and still is, a pretty radical concept. The idea that neither the author nor the text are of great importance, that the reader’s experience with the text and whichever of its meanings appeared in that examination is the whole of the work—these fly in the face of continental literary thought, especially at the time this was written. It is anti-authoritarian at its heart, on multiple levels, encouraging revolution and the overthrow of old ways of thinking about literature ….
