It’s what you read into it

Appreciating the reader’s role in creating meaning in literary works

In Thomas Hardy’s poem, ‘We sat at the window’, the narrator describes how he and his partner watched the rain on St Swithin’s Day at Bournemouth in July, 1875. With ‘nothing to read, nothing to see …’ for the couple in their room that day, they are ‘irked by the scene’, and

I did not know, nor did she infer
How much there was to read and guess
By her in me, and to see and crown
By me in her.
Wasted were two souls in their prime …

The poem points to the importance of the reader in producing meaning, whether it be the reading of a literary text, or indeed a situation or a person.

In this poem, one can see an allegory of reading, not just a poem which can be read, but one which also gives a sub-textual account of reading — or specifically in this case, of the meaninglessness resulting from a failure or inability to read. The failure to infuse meaning leads simply to waste.

In the theory of structuralism, everything is the product of a system of signification or code, from a bus timetable to a human gesture, all being forms of signals and symbols — language in the most general sense which can be read accordingly: ‘how much…