The Spectator in Drama! Drama in the Spectator

The theoretical maneuver by which the reader came to occupy the space vacated by the disappearing author did not remain unquestioned for long. The reader — whether it be the "mock—reader," the "model reader," the "implied reader," the "super reader," or even the "real reader (me )" — could hardly withstand the pressure exerted by contemporary literary theory upon any construct in which meaning can be grounded (or, as Barthes says, "collected, united"). The "multiple writings" which Barthes found playing through and pulverizing the once closed, organic, stable, objective, autonomous text would hardly remain absent from the reader. They soon appeared, in the forms either of the institutional codes and conventions of semiotic theory (see Culler's "literary competence") or of "interpretive strategies," shared, cultivated and enjoined by the fact of one's membership in "interpretive communities." Barely installed as a literary fact, the autonomous reader was revealed as a critical fiction, the latest in a series that has included the autonomous author and the objective text. If the reader remains at all, it is as a psychologically unique individual (the actual person reading) imprinting private fantasies, desires and neuroses, in a radically personal way, upon the text. This reader is a construct of little theoretical use to literary study, though not without attraction to literary theologians desirous of justifying the existence of literature.