Ron Burgundy. 9/6

This week’s class discussions revolved around several theorists and their discussions of meaning. We looked at Saussure and his concepts of the sign, signifier, and signified, Barthes and the intrigue of the “gap” that exists within texts, and Macherey and the significance of what is unsaid versus the said. Out of these three pieces, Macherey’s excerpt about the interplay of a text between what is said and what is not said was the most interesting. According to Macherey, neither the author nor the critic can fully appreciate or understand the meaning of a text. This is because the full meaning of a text is not found in what is explicitly written on the page but instead what may be absent from the page. The critic begins to understand the text as they ask questions about the text and use their own experiences to interpret the importance of what is not being said. The author is unable to recognize certain experiences that an individual may bring to the text and therefore how they would interpret the unsaid and so therefore cannot appreciate it as much as the critic. When I read this part in the article it reminded me of the idea of underlying themes that exist within a text. We are taught to find underlying themes within stories by taking a deeper look at what is not said in the text, because after all a good author wouldn’t simply state the moral of the story so it would be explicit for the reader. As I’ve mentioned before, in my high school program we looked at numerous different texts and were always asked to come up with certain themes and ideas that the author may try to be communicating in the unsaid of the text. When we would do these kinds of exercises, the class would always come up with a large number of themes that could be applied to the text. To me this was curious because I always went away from these types of discussions wondering if the authors themselves had realized the different themes that existed within their text or if they were just created by my classmates and assumed to be intentional by the author. Several scholars have done great works on the themes that exist within popular novels and it always makes me wonder all these themes we have applied to these texts were intentional or if we are perhaps looking too far into the text, coming up with things that work for our own experience with the text but not for others. As Macherey explains, every person that comes to a text leaves some parts out but never skips the same paragraph twice. This means that every time we engage in a text we see different things and experience it in a different way. This may also suggest that each time we read a text we may find different meaning in the unsaid, different themes. This idea is extremely interesting to me and brings up a lot of questions about the intentions of authors in their writing and the question of who understands the text the best; the author or the reader?