The Appeal of Deconstruction
A paper presented at the Linguistic Society of Manitoba and North Dakota, 1980's

Some of the drums have it that the supernova of deconstruction has begun to wane. Sharon Crowley, in her little book on Deconstruction, cites a conversation in which one authority calls it "dead on both coasts." A second declares it is "still alive in Oklahoma," while a third swears he has seen it "stalled in Cincinnati."     
   
The rumors of its death may be greatly exaggerated, as sometime happens. Remember that only two weeks ago, all the the experts were picking Oakland in 4. Now, granted, baseball is far more complex an enterprise than literary criticism, but when people can be so wrong about something so complicated as baseball, it is at least possible they might be wrong about the relatively simple business of literary criticism.
  
 In any case, I do not propose here anything so weighty as prognostication. A couple of other things I won't do. I don't intend to defend deconstruction. I am as uneasy with its implications and its prose as anyone else. I believe as much as anyone can that literature is "privileged", or as the church lady would say, "special." I believe, as much as anyone can, that literature can "mirror" and "be" reality--though I am more drawn to "be" than to "mirror." I believe  literature can provide "vicarious experience that deepens judgment."

Vicarious experience that deepens judgment. That phrase has stuck in my mind for 25 years.   Nor do I propose to apply deconstruction to some classic text. I  will, I promise,   get around to discussing, in a sort of deconstructionist way, some literature by Dickinson, and Whitman. and Stevens. But one of my points will be that deconstruction does not apply very well, that its greatest strengths lie elsewhere. 

What I do propose to do say a little something about the appeal of deconstruction, and I propose to do that, not in a tightly reasoned way, but in an almost essayistic format as a way of explaining why some people might choose to spend some time with deconstruction when they could be doing something more sensible, like reading a novel by Margaret Atwood or finally getting around to Middlemarch. I simply want to state three reasons why I find deconstruction interesting and why I think someone might find, it worth looking into. In order to give that effort a little substance, I will I try to describe these appeal in such way as to state three criteria that I believe any critical system must have.
   
I will begin with two facets of deconstruction that I admit are a little more gee-whizy and which I must leave a little less developed, and end with one--its connection to philosophy--that I will try to develop in a little more depth.     
   
The first appeal of deconstruction then, for me--which is the first criteria I believe any critical system must meet, is that it is acknowledges the centrality of language. This is predictable. Metallurgists, for example, would be sure to embrace a vision of reality with metal at its center, and one could scarcely expect English teachers to buy into a critical system that would put us out of business. But I trust that our insistence on the centrality of language is more than simple self-interest. Even a metallurgist might be willing to admit that without language metallurgy would never come to be. And if there is anything deconstruction does, it is put language at the center of its concerns. Deconstruction, following Nietzsche and Sassure, offers us a world as art or as text. Mimesis is passe. Mimesis is impossible. Irrelevant. Auerbach is dead; long live Derrida.  Jane Austen's novels are about some people following, and playing with, the social codes of l8th century English society. That is, they are playing with  convention, which is to say, with language. Austen's  novels then, are language about language. But the same reasoning, all language is about language. To Derrida's delight, philosophy, which thought it was talking about truth, was all the time using metaphor and narrative, which means it was really doing poetry and story. Story and poetry are all there are.
   
Now this is a two-edged sword. It may work against us or for us. The negative view is set forth in a recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education which argues that radical literary criticism achieves a certain freedom and power, but only by "heavily discounting the texts that are the capital endowment of literature." Whatever Derrida may think, the taxpayer thinks that literature has meaning and great literature special meaning. Our jobs may depend on the taxpayers continuing to believe that. But there is another side to this, given us of Robert Scholes in this little book Textual Power. While Scholes does not accept the more radical premises of deconstruction, he does accept that the "content" (whatever that is) of the traditional canon is not what we are teaching. Instead, he says, we are teaching what E.D. Hirsch says has been the death of reading: skills. That is, if the world is text, the most important thing we can do is read.

Set aside, if you can, the observation that Derrida and I claim to be telling you a "truth" about language and therefore seem to be ourselves trapped in some kind of referential system, and just concentrate on this concept: if deconstruction is right, the world has become text, does it not follow that readers would be very much in demand? Instead of teaching students what is "in" the great books or what they are "about," we need to teach them how to read. What they read is, in theory, less important, though in fact, Scholes' best examples of his own method are drawn from the dense, lyrical interchapters of Hemingway' In Our Time. This may, or may not, be a fatal contradiction, but it, to say the least, exciting to contemplate the the fundamental insight--that life is text and that living is reading, especially when we push on through to the imminently logical implication that reading specialists are, therefore, indispensable and should be treated with the greatest respect and paid very high salaries.
  
 Deconstruction's second appeal is that it leaves alive the mystery of the reading process. And again, this may be phrased as a criterion: any critical system worth its salt must be faithful to the texture of the reading experience, which is that the experience always escapes our attempts to describe or analyze it. I am here treating Deconstruction as a species of romanticism, and I realize I may be committing heresy which will probably lead to my being burned at the stake, probably in a fire of books by Neitzsche,  while someone reads Of Grammatology in my ear.

The question is, is deconstruction fundamentally romantic?  De Man talks fondly of "demystifying" literature which does not sound like a very romantic thing to do. But deconstruction by one set of lights is just the ultimate extension of New Criticism, and Foster called the New Critics, the New Romantics because through their emphasis on paradox and tension and irony, they always suggested that the "final" meaning of the poem, though accessible only through our analysis, was ultimately just beyond our analysis. As someone said, there is a very short distance from the Intentional Fallacy to the absence of presence.

If so, we may be entitled to say that critical insights must not substitute meaning for beauty. Theologians have long recognized two approaches to God: apocathesis and catacathesis. Catacathesis is the attempt to describe God directly: omnipotent, omnipresent, etc. Apocathesis takes over where catacathesis ends. It approaches God negatively, by saying what he is not. Deconstruction is the apocathesis of critical theory.

 Deconstruction, as a set of assumptions, leaves alive the sense of mystery at the heart of the poem. Logo-centered theories always run the risk of substituting an interpretation of literature for the experience of it. When we work with logo-centered theories, we run the risk that, as we come to know more and more what the work means, we will care less and less about it. Cliff Notes are the logical consequence of long-centered aesthetic systems.  Deconstruction protects us from this danger. Denying any final meaning to the work of art keeps us alive to the experience of it and the experience of it will always transcend its meaning.        
   
But now let me come to my final point: Deconstruction appeals to some people because it Deconstruction deals with first principles. And critical systems must have some connection, however tenuous, with first principles. I know there are different schools of thought about this. I know that F.L. Leavis, in a famous statement, deliberately and systematically shunned them. I know that some of the most helpful, or at least the most influential critical statements, such as those by Eliot, succeeded by finessing first principles, by leaping back and forth from close reading to almost off-hand sweeping generalizations about "dissociations of sensibility"--terms which he never argued through but which nevertheless came to govern critical styles for several decades. And I know that this same Eliot is wonderful condescending to Coleridge (when he want to demean theoretical criticism, he talks of "the ghost of Coleridge, beckoning to us from the shade.")
   
But, having said all that, have we said everything?  At least occasionally, don't we have to ask, don't we naturally ask, shouldn't we ask, what the hell is going on. What is literature? How does it mean? What do we do when we teach it? Presumably an obligation to do this is embedded in our titles. The degree hanging on my wall, supplied me at considerable expense to the state, proclaims me, not a doctor of English, but doctor of Philosophy.  Part of our job, at least for some of us, is to examine, as best we can, the metaphysical or ontological or epistemological  roots of our enterprise.
   
I know we can do that without deconstruction. Sartre asked the question What is Literature in 1949, when Derrida was only 19. But deconstruction, because it was invented by a philosopher, and because it draws upon the traditions of modern philosophy from Kant through Hegel, Neitzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, gives us some tools to do this. Those tools, tainted as they seem to be with connections to Nazism, are problematic and flawed. But we must work with the tools we have or find better ones. New criticism, after all, though it tried to shun philosophy, did draw on the tradition of German Transcendentalism as understood, or perhaps misunderstood, by Coleridge. As I understand, or perhaps misunderstand the story, we derive from Kant, via Coleridge, via I.A. Richards, the notion at poetry is a separate kind of discourse, that gives us a separate kind of knowledge different from, but equally as valid as,  "scientific" knowledge. Richards calls it emotive language. Rosenblatt calls it aesthetic reading. Susanne Langer calls it the non-discursive mode.

This distinction lies at the heart of the New Criticism which still informs most of our work, even when we struggle to cast it out in favor of something more up to date. Kant gave us a way of reading appropriate for his time, which turned out to be a long time. Perhaps we can live off Kant and Coleridge forever, or perhaps we can't. Perhaps Marxist criticism is discredited by the events of Eastern Europe, or perhaps not.  But some people are going to have to think about these things and devise rationales of reading and ways of reading appropriate for our time.
   
And deconstruction, because its does draw on a kind of discourse accustomed to think about final things, seems to me to stand at the center of this and to provide a perspective from which to examine it. Now I know that, by one reading, deconstruction does not pretend to do any such positive work. Deconstruction, as its name implies, tears down. Both Derrida and de Man made their reputations by beating up on Rousseau who, poor misguided man, thought he was saying something about social contracts. And deconstruction, to give it its due, does play fair. Insofar as it can, it not only undermines the texts it reads; it undermines itself, a strategy which some people may admit is fair but still find very irritating. Deconstruction is careful not to privilege, or at least to try not to privilege any discourse, including its own. Deconstruction works hard to avoid even the appearance of offering logical, a priori, statements of "how things are," statements which claim to stand outside of time and rhetorical moments.
       
But it can't help itself. Because it draws on philosophers, from Kant, to Hegel, to Heidegger to Wittgenstein, who did try to say how things are, its own discourse, has the effect of accomplishing what it claims not to accomplish, to give us a glimpse into the ultimate reality--what used to be called the Mind of God-- a glimpse into what we know from the outset we cannot understand, but which at the same time we know will give us all the understanding we can ever have. In fact, deconstruction could be seen as a revival, a jubilant, exciting revival of the theological debate between nominalism and realism, which has been lying dormant since Abelard and St. Bonaventure duked it out in the l5th century.
    
I do not see how anyone could not enjoy, or fail to be moved by, a book like Christopher Norris's Contest of Faculties: Criticism and Theory after Deconstruction. First of all, Norris provides a handy classification scheme--the handiest I know--for organizing modern theory. He splits the world up into about as many broad categories as I can understand, namely two. One one hand are the idealists, represented most ably by Jurgen Habermas. These are the critics still true to the philosophical enterprise as it came down from the pre-Socratics to Kant. That is, they are still optimistic about the power of discourse to arrive at logical a priori truths, to say How Things Really Are.

Opposing them, we have the pragmatists represented, in Norris' scheme, by Gadamer and hermeneutics. The philosopher Richard Rorty (another marvelously clear and entertaining writer) is in this pragmatist camp, along with his  very strange collection of heroes: Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and believe it or not, John Dewey.  Foucault, because he believes all knowledge is political (and thus locally conditioned) knowledge could be put there too. These pragmatists do not want to be called relativists. They mean only to say that we must abandon the search for final truth (with a capital T) and content ourselves with local truth (with a small t), which can still be truth.
   
Between these two camps, deconstruction, in Norris's view mediates. He distinguishes however, as he did in his earlier book, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice, between "soft" and "hard" deconstruction. Soft deconstruction is that practiced by a critic like Geoffrey Hartman who has taken the message of deconstruction to be--Play. Putting undue emphasis on a Derrida essay,"Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,"--which Norris thinks is an uncharacteristic essay--these critics declare that, since we cannot have truth, let us have fun. Abandoning the search for the meaning of texts, a Hartman or a J. Hillis Miller, turns criticism into a display of stylistic virtuosity.

But, says Norris, a critic like Paul De Man is made of sterner stuff. A "hard" deconstructionist like De Man, and like most of Derrida himself while rejecting any easy logo-centrism, still takes texts with great seriousness. Discussing  Derrida essay called "Ousia and gramme," Norris says that "At no point in this powerful reading does Derrida abandon the protocols of reasoned argument. . . .Deconstruction is preoccupied with the central questions of meaning, reference and truth, as addressed by analytical philosophers from Frege to Putnam and Davidson. It is a flat misreading of deconstruction that sees it as merely suspending these issues in favor of an infinitized 'free play of language devoid of logical rigor or referential grasp" (227).
   
My point is that deconstruction, by challenging our commonplace commonplace assumptions, can drive us to new understandings and appreciation of those assumptions, appreciation we would never have unless we had struggled in a serious way, with a set of revolutionary  assumptions. Struggling hard with what he know are ultimately mistaken notions drives us down onto the bedrock of our own assumptions and makes them live again, in ways they never could if we looked at them only from our own point of view.
    
 Finally, let me come to a related point, and, finally, get around, as I promised,  to citing some "primary" texts. That is, I want to point out an area that deconstruction and literature share besides their overt rejection of claims to (Capital T) truth.  To to this I need to call your attention to the well-known fact that deconstruction grows out of Sassure's attention to non-being, to "gaps," to nothingness. Theories of nothingness, and related ideas of death, the absurd, sin, have concerned philosophers since Parmenides and poets since Sappho. Thinking about nothing, is, of course, usually a way to think about something.

But sometimes it is a powerful way, and perhaps even the only way, to think about something. For example, theologians since St. Paul has recognized that one of the ways we come to God  is through awareness of Sin. When we come this way, we approach God through non-God. We approach ultimate reality through ultimate non-reality. Sassure's insight that the phoneme cluster "t" "exists" because of the "space" that distinguishes it from "p" and "g" seems commonplace, but it is a akin with resonant insights, such as that by Emmanuel Levinas descriptions of "an unrecoverable past," an "absolute past," a "deep formerly." I call this the language of Eden, what Northrop Frye in The Great Code, calls the one true myth, the myth of a lost paradise which can be glimpsed but not recovered, which lies beyond our grasp yet remains in our consciousness as a guide, and hope, a living dream that pervades our wakefulness.   
   
Only lately have I come to see how much of literature, American literature at least, is pervaded by this same idea. Take away the idea of non-being and you take away most of Emily Dickinson, half of Whitman and a good deal of Stevens. How many of Dickinson's poems in fact, deal with Derrida's favorite term: difference. I think she would have loved his pun, spelling it with an a, to combine the idea of deferring and differing. Think about the Dickinson's "certain slant of light on winter afternoons." Remember how it goes? "Heavenly Hurt it gives us--/We can find so scar,/But internal difference,/Where the Meanings are." Think about the narrow fellow in the grass producing--what?  "Zero at the bone." Think about her riddling poems which arrive at something by describing what it is not. Think about "After great pain, a formal feeling comes." Remember how it ends: "First chill--then Stupor--then the letting go."

And Whitman. What an irony that our greatest poet of death and loss should become known as our great singer of American positivism. To take just one example, in "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," a bird sings to whom? To  his lost mate. Everything is in the past tense or the future: "Loved loved! loved! loved! loved!/ "But my mate no more, no more with me. We two together no more." And out of this sweet song of loss, the poet (Whitman) will be inspired to write great poetry about what? "The sweet hell within/The unknown want, the destiny of me" which he names, five times: "death! death! death! death! death! And all that friendship, all those comarados who are recalled, or anticipated, or shouted to across great distances, but somehow never actually there. Are they not akin to  Stevens Snow Man, the listener who, "nothing himself, beholds/Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is."

I know that I am not really using deconstruction here in its characteristic clever way, but rather using the same basic insight of deconstruction--which claims there is no meaning in a text--to find "meaning"(of a sort) in a text. But it still seems to me that these readings share the same spirit as deconstruction, the same central fascination with non-being.
   
So there you have it. Nothingness, which turns out, closely examined to be something. And something which turns out, closely examined, to be nothing. Meaning pursued relentlessly knowing it will escape us in the end.. Hard work pursued with certainty of failure, yet sustained by the joy of the work, a joy which suggests that, playing in among the gaps of the failure, is something more important than any success--It all sounds a lot like life to me. It feels  lot like what things that are really important feel like. Recently my son, a senior art major living in Maryland, wrote to me to complain, a good-natured way, about people who claimed to have "found God." Much better, he thinks, the search for God, which he calls "noble and fruitless."

Sounds pretty good to him. Sounds pretty good to me. Sounds like deconstruction.