Literary theory has not yet found its place in literary history. Many Anglo-Americans are skeptical about its place in literary transactions because literary theory sometimes places actual readers and spectators of literary events in the background. The solution may not lie in integrating literary theory into literary history…. [The] writings of Roland Barthes encourage the beginnings of … a case for theory which encompasses both literary and historical texts. Barthes especially encourages exploration into a theory of reading with its own historicity with his writings on history and within the historical moment of reading. His kind of theory is one which engages readers and spectators of the reading transactions by identifying theory as a reflective and reflexive activity which generates self-awareness in those participating in the reading activity in order to know more about the nature of readers and reading and to change these into more creative persons and endeavors. Barthes had proposed that Orpheus become "the eponymous hero" for such a literary theory of reading because it was Orpheus who looked back upon Eurydice and destroyed his beloved in much the same manner that theoreticians of reading look back upon their reading to destroy the mechanical gaze.

Re-reading can learn much by imitating the Orphic look which destroys the object of its love. By examining the effects of such visions, we can begin to understand how and what kind of transformations occur in this activity we call reading. The obvious creativity of the readings by Roland Barthes reminds us that our own daily readings are likewise creative transformations which must be further understood. A theory of reading may give us the opportunity to explore that understanding. Some feel that they are merely mesmerized by the haunting beauty of those readings signed by "RB" so that: "The RB precludes your idea from being developed." However, the myth of Orpheus returns as a model to dare us to re-examine the object of love and to destroy that mesmerizing presence in favor of developing and transforming the ideas inspired by reading RB. (pp. 229-30)

Barthes' differentiation between "simple readability" and "complex readability" marks the distinction between "classical texts" and "modern texts." On the one hand, "simple readability" characterizes "classical texts" because their meaning is bound up in an ideology that allows the reader to follow their meanderings in "a stringent irreversibility" from text to reader. On the other hand, "complex readability" is entailed by a "modern text" because the passage from text to reader is complicated by many types of reflexive and reflective activities. The reader of a "modern text" is distracted from the text by inspirations, reflections, and other digressions of one part of the text. Returning to the text, the reader is struck by the fragmented interruptions necessitated by such a text. And perhaps the "modern text" is becoming more and more prevalent as various types of distractions often interrupt readings of even the simplest, apparently "classical" texts. A reading, such as Barthes' own S/Z with its fragments describing the significance of the parts of the story Sarrasine, becomes a model for the modern reader who is becoming more and more displaced from developed dissertations that point to the unity and cohesion of certain texts. Barthes himself believes that the very distractions that take the reader away from the attention to a text become salient features of a "theory of reading" which is to be descriptive and reflexive of the activity of reading.

Reading then does not simply follow a text. The text becomes the point of departure for digressions elsewhere. If a reading attempts to describe a given text, something different than the text is produced…. Hence, reading operates somewhere between the reader and the text as an activity and creativity whose historicity cannot be understood on the same planes as those of reader and text. (p. 231)

Barthes would have literary history understand the reader in proportion to the text. Establishing the literary history of reading thus becomes a study of proportions between the text and its readers. Such proportions must be established to determine the perspectives and stances of readers prior to their reading certain texts. The purpose of such proportions is to enter the reading activity into the literary transaction…. Barthes has been insisting on his own physical presence before a text in order to understand more about his role in the activity of reading. The reader can thus begin to appreciate the proportional importance of the written words to the historical moment of the reading…. Reading and creating history are … intertwined in the same physical impulses because reading is going to a text created at a different historical moment and resurrected by the reader's activity. This initial act of resurrecting and encountering bodies is then followed by the impulsive act of physical judgment by which the reader draws a proportion between the text as a living body of words and the reader as a living body. That proportion is what Barthes has called "structure."

Literary "structure" exists as a bond between text and reader. It is more than the formalist operations happening within the boundaries of the written words. It enables the reader to participate in the act of reading and to destroy, as Orpheus did destroy Eurydice, that entity called a text. In its place, the reader projects the structure of the reading as a viable entity accounting for his or her own input into literary transactions. Such a projection according to Barthes, entails two operations: (1) to find mobile fragments which interest the reader's "physical judgment" by virtue of that "vegetative or existential impulse" previously isolated and (2) to organize these fragments into paradigms by laws of association. Barthes would call these paradigms "codes" because he understands the paradigms to operate as self-sustaining systems of communication identified by the reader. They are impulsively identified because the pursuit of pleasure is the goal of reading. Whether one reads for information, truth, relaxation, or enjoyment, Barthes tells us that pleasure is produced when one of those designs is realized. For him, there appears to be two distinct types of reading-pleasure. On the one hand, a classical text—such as those of Balzac, Chateaubriand, or La Bruyère—produces a mild form of exhilaration which he calls plaisir or joy. Such a classical text can be simply read. Its structure can be projected according to the parameters of certain ideologies. For example, Balzac's Sarrasine can be structured according to the codes of realism and romanticism. On the other hand, there are modern texts which produce an ecstatic form of pleasure which is called jouissance or a possessive enjoyment. These modern texts are usually avant-garde writings which for Barthes are steeped in the past of a given culture and thereby give a sense of historical continuity and prolonged enjoyment to the reader. Robbe-Grillet and Philippe Sollers have provided such texts for Barthes who has given extended structures to their texts as testimonies to his "possessive enjoyment" (jouissance). Such "modern texts" may not inspire "possessive enjoyment" in all readers. However, because of the formal experiments in "modern texts," an extended period of reading pleasure is required in order to appreciate the "structures" of those texts.

The notion of a "reading structure" also leads us to an awareness of reading as a type of creativity. Literary history has previously favored the reading experience as an investigative tool for seeking truth and establishing the origins of the text in the messages of the writer and in the conventions of the writer's historical moment. Gustave Lanson perpetuated such a view of reading with a claim for literary history as a science of the literary fact. In contradistinction, Barthes has made a claim for the "science of literature" whereby "… the rules of reading are not rules of the literal text, but those of the allusive text." As a result, reading utilizes the faculty of the imagination to explore the plural possibilities of such an "allusive text." Readings by RB often represent exceptional resourcefulness in discovering codes to which a text alludes and which his readings develop. The Barthes reading of Sade (Sade Fourier Loyola) refers to the place of the reader's imagination and interruptions within the text itself…. Despite the interruptions of forgetting or "jumping over" the developments of a text, the reader can still remain consistent with the text by developing structures to which the text alludes.

Such a task reveals the creativity of reading as translation. By correlating the text to the reader's sense of meaning, reading projects the text into another dimension of time—that of the future. Literary history can be augmented to account for the future moment of the reader's creativity as part of the literary transaction … Barthes himself admitted that the ties of all … temporal moments must be explored because "everything is related: the least of literary problems, even if it is anecdotal, can be resolved in the mental context of an epoch which is not our own. History is also necessary for Barthes and for the types of reading he has fostered. But his expanded view of a three-dimensional history will allow us to explore the creativity of reading and perhaps even to establish a science of that creativity. The recent developments of semiology, structural linguistics, and Lacanian psychoanalysis are bringing us to the brink of such a science. (pp. 232-35)