DECONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM

The Attitude:

Remember, when the New Critics set out to do a literary-critical analysis of a poem, they knew what they were looking for in "literature"--complexity and unity--but underlying that task was an always unstated social and political outlook grounded in a faith in "culture" to preserve identify and preserve a sense of communal wholeness and harmony lost in modern society. Deconstruction also "knows" what it's looking for--binary oppositions and hierarchies to upset, overturn, or subvert--and thus generally, one might call deconstruction a criticism of "suspicion" or "demystification," but as we saw in the example of a deconstruction of the phrase "Question Authority," it is difficult to identify this critical method with any particular social or political outlook.

As we will see, deconstruction has come in handy as a tool for ideological critics of all kinds--among them the marxist and feminist critics we will turn to next (the first move in many a feminist critique, for example, may be a deconstruction of oppositions assumed under a patriarchal social order). But even if you have no a priori goals for your critical work, deconstruction may be useful to you when you're simply looking for something to say--a way of getting you off square one or of questioning what seems limiting or trivial in the literature before you.

Contrary to the New Criticism, a deconstruction sets out to identify not how the text "of" a tale or poem before us is all we have and "all we need to know" to understand that text, but how no text is ever "complete" in and of itself, that every text's "meaning" depends on many others texts before and beyond it in a limitless relationality (this is why I've put the "of" in quotation marks above: it implies the boundaries of ownership or possession no post-structuralist will allow). As a deconstructive critic, what you'll be doing is expanding the purview of the "text itself," showing MORE there than is immediately or traditionally apparent. You got that, you got the [deconstructive] attitude.

Strategies

I. Remember Your Target

Remember, deconstruction is not "destruction;" it is an operation of revealing contradictions and other surprising relations where none may at first (or to some points of view) seem apparent. Deconstruction's reputation for some relation to "destruction" comes from the mistaken assumption that WHAT one deconstructs is "the text itself," that sacred object isolated by the New Critics. Granted, the assumptions of post-structuralism--that "texts" as webs of meaning have no boundaries--makes the phrase "the text itself" a nonsensical phrase, but the process of deconstruction is one carried out on arguments, by making reference to connotations or relations suggested by the work at hand. You don't deconstruct "the text itself;" you deconstruct a particular reading of it.

That is, IF the object of deconstruction WERE the isolated text, the whole purpose of doing it would be (as many say) repetitive and useless: in every case, one would show how "meaning" of any word, phrase, line, in a poem, say--like any word in the dictionary--depends for "its" meaning on myriad (really infinite) other words phrases or lines apart from it. Of course, once one understands the concept of "wall-to-wall textuality," there's just no reason to do that anymore, unless you simply enjoy wasting your professor's time.

Yet when deconstruction's object is NOT any particular work but rather someone's reading or argument or vision of that work, things get more interesting. Here you're not interested in the "infinite regress" of meaning--you just want to unhinge your opponent's reading for as long as it takes to replace it with your own. Sure, to then "stand pat" on your own interpretation flies in the face of the prime post-structuralist premise, but that's mostly what you'll find being done where "deconstruction" is used today: one step to deny the stability or "obviousness" of the opponent, and another to slip your argument in the back door. Referring to the academic home for the earliest American practitioners of this European rhetorical tool, this is often called the "New Haven two-step," and it is really what we're after here in "practical" criticism.

II. Starting Out

1. Identify in your text (for our inital purposes, a poem) a binary opposition. This should not be anything specific, e.g. "the point of view of the town" vs. "the point of view of Cory" in E.A. Robinson's poem "Richard Cory," or "the bird" vs. "the beetle" in Emily Dickinson's "A Bird Came Down the Walk." Open the text to as many possibilities as you can by starting general (the commoner against the elite or powerful, seeing/not-seeing, etc.). The specifics you can argue later. And don't stop at ONE binary or hierarchical relation--pick up as many as you can. You may find patterns among them after you begin to overturn one or two.

2. Ask yourself WHY the terms of these binary oppositions seem "natural" to you--what else in the poem seems to support their opposition or "order?" Is there another way to read what's here that might make these relations different? Can you imagine other contexts (or other readers reading, other perspectives with roots IN the poem (this is to say everything that can be shown to contribute to our understanding of the words here is "in" the poem) which might change or even overturn the opposition or order you've identified? One way "classic" deconstruction has often located such other perspectives is to do a careful analysis of etymologies. Did all these words ALWAYS mean what they mean today? In the handout demonstrating a New Critical analsysis of Stevens's "Ancedote of a Jar," for example, the wilderness was shown to be "slovenly" or messy in opposition to the "round" and symmetrical jar "placed" there (not thrown). This "sloppy/neat" opposition refines the "high/low" opposition that begins the poem. Still, if we read IN THE HISTORY of the word "slovenly" its root in "sloven" or prostitute, which connotes sexuality and NOT reproduction, one might argue that the irony at the end of the poem, when the wilderness is proven superior to the jar (higher) because it supposedly "gives of bird or bush," is actually an attempt to hide the fact that Stevens's conceptual reading of nature is just as sterile as any other man-made product.

3. Once you do find ways of questioning any given figural or thematic opposition or hierarchy, plug it back into the poem and see how it affects the rest. As I suggested earlier, here you may find patterns develop among other oppositions that may suggest a new argument for you about "what the poem means," or rather what it does, or can do, beyond that which is understood as "natural" or "obvious."

III. Writing the Paper

The previous sections are not guides to writing the paper, or presenting your deconstruction. Having discovered in these early explorations both a reading resulting from certain seemingly stable binary oppositions and another reading which comes of the overturning or complicating of those binaries, you will not present them in a mode of "discovery." Rather,

1. Set out a poem and a plausible reading of it, the key to which is the binary you will deconstruct. Here is not the place to anticipate your move--keep a straight face, take the (say, New Critical) reading seriously, for its worth.

2. Question the stability of the "key" to that reading, again, through serious attention to the problems or insufficiencies you find in it. Here you do your etymological or formal "close reading." Ideally, identify a MEANING that a certain reading depends upon for its coherence and then show how the instability of that meaning makes that certain reading­or any certain reading­less plausible if not self-contradictory.

3. (Optional but advised) Present a NEW meaning for the poem resulting from your deconstructive move, and defend (without too much guilt) your need to treat it thus. NO NEED at this point to admit that this reading is every bit as unstable as the one you deconstructed: don't worry, someone will prove that for you someday....