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More disturbing than this wilful and self-indulgent use of language was the dismissal of the author as the creator of the work and the denial of objective status to the text. The author gave place to the reader, on the ground that the text has no existence as 'an object exterior to the psyche and history of the man who interprets it'. Since the reader may be any and every reader from now to the end of time, texts were to be regarded as susceptible of an infinite number of meanings, and, since no criteria were proposed by which any meaning could be rejected or accepted, were in fact meaningless. The critic, therefore, regarding it as impossible to fulfill what has always been regarded as his prime duty — to illuminate the author's meaning, now declared to be totally irrecoverable — created meanings within the void (le vide) of the text, or, to put it another way, imported meanings into a text that had no determinate meaning of its own.