Nick DeHoust: Where Does Mythopoeic Meaning Dwell?

This class has inspired me to consider an interesting question: where does mythopoeic meaning dwell? Does the author take an idea and translate it into words that mean the same thing as the original idea? Do the words succeed in rigidly confining meaning to themselves (after all, poetry is supposed to be able to rupture the tyranny of language in such a way that it is freed to potentially mean new things)? Does the reader decide for himself what the myth should mean? Does meaning hover over all three areas, just out of reach? Does meaning? Is it? In his famous essay “The Death of the Author,” Roland Barthes argues that 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” (523). Here, he is criticising the tendency of classic literary scholarship to privilege the author as the sole arbiter of meaning within a text. He goes on, “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author” (523). In my copy of the Continental Aesthetics Reader, editor Clive Cazeaux writes that “[o]n this understanding, writing ceases to be the ‘recording’ of an already-formed content, and becomes a performance, an enunciation, ‘a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash’. The ‘location’ of this space is the reader. With the death of the author as the origin of meaning, the reader emerges as the network of traces through which the written text is constituted” (519). In this sense, then, the text itself seams to contain the meaning. It is up to the reader to engage in careful excavation according to the life experience he or she had already gained. I personally cannot escape the feeling that the whole dynamic is at least threefold: the text, the author, and the reader, but Barthes has a clever argument and his piece is excellent.