Against itself

I don't have a dog in this fight. The whole subject, the field, the theory--whatever it was--was never something I warmed up to, but something we all acknowledged we really needed to include in our English major. We had no choice. As a department, we simply had to set aside time in the lives of our majors for at least some introduction to or beginning practice in what seemed almost the barnstorming literary science of "deconstruction."

Even today, I don't know how to define it. It was a hybrid theory of literary criticism that seemed to operate more by sleight of hand than anything ever clearly understood. Those who were good at it--and it was all the rage in graduate schools--eventually simply left the rest of us behind by adopting a language all its own and speaking--and arguing--only with each other.

What I seem to remember--and I may be wrong--is that deconstruction was nothing the reader does. Instead, it's what the literature does to itself. On the basis of the literature's own incongruities--which we discover and map out--we determine that the play or story or novel or essay really eats itself. It "deconstructs" itself.

It seemed to me that the end game of "deconstruction" was, in fact, destruction--you stand by and watch as the Scarlet Letter "deconstructs" itself, showing itself to be a victim of its chaos within, its own strangled logic or perspective.

I'm sorry. I'm not doing well in explanation, but if there's one thing about the teaching of literature that I've not kept up on since leaving the classroom, it's "deconstruction." I found it interesting because I was supposed to. I did it out of obligation--we heard, after all, that an undergraduate curriculum without deconstruction wasn't an education. So we acted. I acted. I tried. I may have even been somewhat successful, but I couldn't help thinking the whole chaotic mess was silly, even a little poisonous.

Deconstructionism was hot at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, where I took my Ph.D. degree. One of its shining stars was an Egyptian-born literary critic and writer named Ihab Hassan. The English department would send notes around announcing lectures in Hassan's world of lit crit, academics coming to campus from near and far to discuss ideas that would take 500-word paragraphs to describe, paragraphs that was obliged to use language familiar to those who'd already waded, heart-deep, into the steamy waters of "deconstruction." I went once, understood nothing, and never returned. I have no regrets.

And thus, I am encouraged by an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, which does not proclaim the death of deconstruction, but expresses astonishment that literary scholars went a-whoring after it. "To this day, deconstruction remains a style of thought more complained about than understood, less outrageous than deliberately elusive," says Timothy Brennan, who teaches at the University of Minnesota.

The end game, I couldn't help but think, was the actual deconstruction of literary studies. What its practitioners appeared to want to illustrate is that Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter contains enough internal conflicts to bring its own house down. When I look back on teaching English to undergraduates for forty years, I can't help but think I was always trying to do the opposite--not "deconstruct" Hamlet, but feature the very strengths that made "to be, but not to be" universally recognized, even by those who never came near the play or Shakespeare himself. Wasn't pushing students to observe the death of literature an assassination attempt all its own?

I've not been any part of that whole discussion for years now, and that's just fine, but I can't help but smile a bit at the title of Professor Brennan's review: "What Was Deconstruction?" and the death he implies therein.