Next is the reader-centric approach. Rolland Barthes, one of the proponents of this approach, writes: “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.”13 He rules out the author’s role in the interpretation of the text completely. However, the negation is of all the biographical details or the attempt at studying the motive or the psychology of the author. According to him, the author ceases to be once the text is on the paper. He says, it remains only with the reader to relate and draw meaning from the text. This brings us to think about the role of reader in interpreting the text. We have already discussed how the author and text are connected through consciousness. Similarly, the reader can also connect to the text through his or her consciousness. Despite the fact that the text has its own consciousness, the reader’s interaction with the text might produce something which might be an amalgam of both. The reader also in a way becomes the recipient. While the author receives inspiration from above, the reader receives it from the text. Thus, he or she also becomes a channel of the word. Sri Aurobindo clarifies the nature of the recipient of inspiration thus:
… neither the intelligence, the imagination nor the ear are the true or at least the deepest or highest recipients of the poetic delight, even as they are not its true or highest creators; they are only its channels and instruments; the true creator, the true hearer is the soul.14
So whether the poet/author or the reader it is their soul which receives, their consciousness which translates, and the ears, intellect and imaginations are mere outer tools of reception. Sri Aurobindo stresses the point that a certain kind of preparation is always required if one has to read scriptures or texts embodying the higher consciousness. In relation to Vedas, he makes it clear that:
One of the leading principles of the mystics was the sacredness and secrecy of self-knowledge and the true knowledge of the Gods. This wisdom was, they thought, unfit, perhaps even dangerous to the ordinary human mind or in any case liable to perversion and misuse and loss of virtue if revealed to vulgar and unpurified spirits. Hence they favoured the existence of an outer worship, effective but imperfect, for the profane, an inner discipline for the initiate, and clothed their language in words and images which had, equally, a spiritual sense for the elect, a concrete sense for the mass of ordinary worshippers. The Vedic hymns were conceived and constructed on this principle.15
A certain amount of competence is certainly required to read a text. This competence might not necessarily be ‘literary competence’ as Culler puts it, but a preparation of consciousness; the competence to receive the consciousness of the text. This is certainly more so for reading the scriptures.
Thus we see how consciousness plays an important role in creation and reception of a text. The words, as they have power, create the corresponding vibrations and can deliver this vibration into the creation and subsequently into the recipient if she or he is prepared to receive it. We see how beautifully consciousness binds the author, the text and the reader. All the disputes and differences of opinions end when we find these three (the author, the text and the reader) as parts of a continuum and not as distinct entities.
