Pleasure or Bliss: Reader Reaction to Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
In The Pleasure of the Text printed in 1975, Roland Barthes defines two kinds of text. According to Barthes, the “text of pleasure” is “text that contents . . . that comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading” (14). The “text of bliss” is text “that discomforts . . . unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes . . . .” (14). These distinctions are useful in discussing Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, for at the time of its publication, many fans, who had settled into the “comfortable practice of reading” the sterile, formulaic detective stories popular up to 1926, found themselves “unsettled” by Christie’s latest work.
Considering common perceptions of bliss and the fact that, in 1926, Barthes had not yet presented his theories on these types of texts, the earliest readers of......
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