Barthes argues that writing lies in between the historical and the personal. The text is thus the interplay between the writer's freedom and society. A language and a style are
data prior to all problematic of language; but the formal identity of the writer is truly established only outside of permanence of grammatical norms and stylistic constraints. It thus commits
the writer to manifest and communicate a state of happiness or malaise, and links the form of his utterance, which is at once normal and singular, to the vast History of the Others
(Barthes, 1968, p.14; Haney, W. 1989, p. 319)
His thought about reading further expands the potential of meaning. He separates reading into two categories, the writerly/scriptable
and the readerly/legible.
The writerly reading means that a reader participates actively in producing meanings as if he/she re-writes the text. The text which makes this activity possible resists being
appropriated by paraphrase or critical commentary because it escapes conventional categories of genre, and hence cannot be read as a representation, cannot even be reduced to a structure.
(Moriarty, 1991, p. 118) A reader finds pleasure from reading the writerly text. The readerly text is opposite to the writerly, which makes the reader passive in interpreting the text.
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