Deconstruction
Deconstruction
is unthinkable without poststructuralism. Many of the writers associated with
poststructuralism are considered to have practised deconstruction. The same presuppositions
are shared by both approaches. The purpose of the present section is to outline
the specific characteristics of a deconstructive approach to literary analysis.
The notion of deconstruction is indissolubly linked to the name of Jacques
Derrida.
Jacques Derrida
(1930–2005)
Like him or
loathe him, Jacques Derrida is a force with which to be reckoned. One cannot
take lightly a man who called into
question the basic metaphysical assumptions of all western philosophy since
Plato. The first signs of the revolution came in a paper given at the Johns Hopkins
University, America, in 1966: Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of
the Human Sciences. To express what was revolutionary about it in a
nutshell: he argued that even structuralism assumes a centre of meaning of some
kind, as individuals assume the central ‘I’ in their own consciousness. This
centre guarantees a sense of unity of being. But, for Derrida, recent
developments in western thought have led inevitably to a decentring process. Traditionally
there have always been ‘centring’ processes: being, self, essence, God etc.
This human need Derrida called ‘logocentrism’ (in his work Of Grammatology,
1976). This derives from the New Testament use of the term ‘logos’ (the
Greek for ‘word’) to express the Christian belief that the primary cause of all
things was the spoken word of God: ‘In the beginning was the Word.’ In
‘logocentrism’, the spoken word is thus closer to thought than the written
word. This Derrida refers to as ‘phonocentrism’, which always presupposes the
presence of self. When we hear speech, we assume a speaking presence.A writing
presence is not assumed in the same way when we read writing. In this way
writing lends itself more readily to reinterpretation, because we can reread
and analyse it more easily.
These views have
been accepted and unquestioned hitherto in western thought, but what Derrida
then proceeds to do is to upset the ranking order of speech and writing and
‘deconstruct’ this whole way of thinking: both speech and writing share
‘writerly’ features, and both are signifying processes which lack a real sense
of presence (of the speaker or writer). He makes the remarkable assertion that
all speech is always already written. Essentially, nothing new is ever
possible. He also develops the notion of a ‘violent hierarchy’. By creating a
hierarchy of speech over writing we do violence to the truth: when we say that
‘a’ is prior to ‘b’, in fact ‘b’ is already implied in ‘a’. Thus the word
‘good’ implies the word ‘evil’, ‘law’ implies ‘lawlessness’ etc. A
deconstructive reading of a text identifies the existence of such hierarchies,
reverses them and ultimately demonstrates that neither of the pair of opposites
in each case is superior to the other: they are interdependent.
In Derrida’s
approach to literary analysis there is the assumption that all texts, whether
literary or not, can be deconstructed. This involves, in effect, dismantling
texts, or parts of them, to reveal inner inconsistencies: where a text might
appear to imply one thing, it can, in fact, be shown to imply its opposite.
Texts create only a semblance of stable meaning. Where a text may appear to
offer the reader options (either/or), in fact, it offers no such choice (both/and),
and remains ultimately uncommitted, leaving the reader with no sense of
closure. The kinds of options which a text offers will often be in the form of
apparent binary oppositions which the text seems to distinguish. These include
distinctions such as self and non-self, conscious and unconscious, truth and
falsity, reason and madness etc. Derrida’s actual technique is to focus on points
in a text where contradictions are evident (symptomatic points) and pursue the
implications of these points, eventually undermining (deconstructing) the whole
edifice.
It is not
surprising that Derrida chose to apply his approach to a short story, Franz
Kafka’s Before the Law, which most critics have always agreed offers no
closure (it did not need deconstruction to reveal this to us!). In the story a
man arrives at a door that gives him access to the Law. He is not allowed to
enter but is told by the doorman that he may perhaps enter later. He waits all
his life and finally, just before he dies, he asks the doorman why he has been
the only one to have sought admittance. The doorman tells him that that
particular door was meant only for him and he shuts the door as the man dies.
For Derrida the story contains an endless deferment of meaning (‘différance’):
‘Deferment till death, and for death, without end because ended, finite. As the
doorkeeper represents it, the discourse of the law does not say “no” but “not
yet”, indefinitely.’ For Derrida, any given text involves such endless
deferment of meaning, although it may not be so clearly evident as in the Kafka
story.
As indicated
already, Derrida made his first public declaration of his deconstructive credo
at an American university, and it was American literary critics who first applied
deconstruction more extensively to literary texts. Significant among them were
Paul de Man and J Hillis Miller. Harold Bloom can also be described as
deconstructive, but his ideas have implications also for psychoanalytic literary
criticism and he has been discussed in that context. It should also be remembered
that Barthes’analysis of the Balzac story in S/Z (see the section on poststructuralism)
is essentially deconstructive in its revelation of contradictions in the text.
Paul de Man
(1919–1983)
The American
critic Paul de Man has applied deconstruction to Romantic poets and he argues,
in fact, that the Romantics actually deconstructed their own writing by
revealing that the desired presence (what is yearned for) in their poetry is
always absent or deferred, always in the past or the future. Fulfilment is
eternally deferred (as exemplified most vividly in Keats’ Ode To A Grecian
Urn: ‘She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,/ For ever wilt thou
love, and she be fair!’). De Man explained his methodology in two works in
particular: Blindness and Sight (1971) and Allegories of Reading (1979).
He also employs his own terminology which is different to that of Derrida. The
first book proposes the notion that critics only achieve insight through a
certain blindness to aspects of what they are doing. For example New Criticism
based its approach on a concept of organic form, but in fact demonstrated how
ambiguous meanings are. They created a ‘hermeneutic circle’ of interpretation
which they mistook for unity within the work itself. In Allegories of Reading
de Man analyses the use of figures of speech (tropes) by means of which
writers say one thing but mean another (as in metaphor and metonymy). He argues
that figures of speech destabilise the conventional logic of thought and he
believes that language is basically figurative and cannot ultimately refer to
or express nonlinguistic realities. All language is therefore essentially rhetorical.
De Man is in
danger of succumbing to the infinite regress
of Barthes’ metalinguistic account of a metalanguage. This is because, for him,
critical writing itself is essentially comparable to a figure of speech:
allegory. It is a sign sequence which is itself removed from another sign sequence
(the text) and attempts to replace it in the reader’s perception. Reading a text
is therefore only a ‘misreading’. But de Man believes that some ‘misreadings’ are
correct and others incorrect. A correct misreading does not repress the
unavoidable ‘misreadings’ of the text: it recognises them. For him in fact
every literary text is self-deconstructing. It ‘asserts and denies the
authority of its own rhetorical mode’. This approach to criticism seems to set
up as an ideal model a kind of infinite quibbling: a never-ending series of
qualifications of meaning which results in a useless nihilism. Terry Eagleton
has argued that this ‘bottomless linguistic abyss’ is brought about by suspending
the reader between literal and figurative meanings of a text, in a way which
makes commitment to one interpretation impossible. Literature for de Man is less
deluded than other forms of writing, because it is essentially ironic, and
being conscious of the fact constantly deconstructs itself.
J Hillis Miller
J Hillis Miller,
also an American, was greatly influenced by phenomenological criticism (as in Fiction
and Repetition: Seven English Novels 1982). He was also greatly indebted to
Jakobson’s theory of metaphor and metonymy, although, in effect, he
deconstructs Jakobson’s original opposition of metaphor (which is essentially
poetic) and metonymy (which is essentially realistic). Miller argues that
poetry is often read as though it were realistic and would-be realistic writing
can be shown to be a fiction. But many have criticised Miller for his
implication that language can never refer to the actual world.
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