The Concentrated Semiotic System in Paul Éluard's Freedom

Riffaterre considers two different readings of poetry as possible; heuristic reading and retroactive reading. In heuristic reading, the primary meaning of the text is reveled trough the common significant implications of language. Retroactive reading, will allow the reader to organize the mental associations that engage a deeper sense. In fact, the heuristic reading leads to an initial meaning and the retroactive reading brings the discovery of latent implications of textual infrastructures. For the case study, this paper has selected one of the world's most famous poems "Freedom" written by French twentieth century poet Paul Éluard. Firstly, we aim to present a detailed explanation of what is called "retroactive reading" and secondly, we try to apply this special reading to the poem "Freedom" and according to the analytic conceptions like concentrated semiotic system, we will study the interpretative possibilities of this poem. In retroactive reading which is done by verifying of semantic accumulation and descriptive systems, the various symbolic and iconic aspects of the signs in the poem "Freedom" are feasible. The retroactive reading of "freedom" refers to the fact that the thematic of this poem like "common past", "common history" and "the familiar nature", like many other signs of this poetry, they gradually abandon their normal significations and become vast and strange symbols. It can be said that Paul Éluard has intelligently employed an organized system of signs for constructing and transmitting of the presupposed meaning. So the reader, who wants to gain a deeper understanding of this poem, has no other way but a process of decoding on accumulations and descriptive systems.