To The Smallest Particle

We can’t dismantle or parse or interrogate the literary world any further—it is time to look up from the microscope and adjust our eyes to what’s left.

Rome 2016

Deconstructionism emerged from the academy, triggered a few decades worth of dissertations, and then crept into nearly every critique and review and offhand comment about literature, so that, at this point, there’s absolutely nothing left to deconstruct. We’re at the subatomic level. We’ve broken down every novel and examined the word-by-word essence of every essay. We can’t dismantle or parse or interrogate the literary world any further—it is time to look up from the microscope and adjust our eyes to what’s left.

For the contemporary critic, deconstructionism is an everlasting reflex for all situations—a bit like how children always grab a favorite blanket. And that’s true even though hardly any contemporary critics don a deconstructionist label, as the techniques and insights of deconstructionism have simply been inculcated into what’s considered standard. If there’s a novel or film or painting, the contemporary critic knows that the explicit message must be—surely!—concealing the implicit message. Although at least there’s one fitting irony to this mess: the deconstructionists have challenged the hierarchies in our culture with such success that few people have realized that deconstructionism is, for contemporary critics, atop the hierarchy.

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Now I’ll do my best to not discuss Jacques Derrida, nor will I discuss how language refers to itself with signifiers and the signified, nor will I discuss the endless and contradictory definitions of deconstructionism, as I do want readers to have fulfilling and enriched lives of purpose. My target is also a bit slippery, as I’ve bundled adjacent methods with this one label. What’s fundamental to all of these rather similar methods, however, is that they look for contradictions—which can be, I admit, pretty close to an activity that resembles fun. I am primarily concerned with novels, and deconstructionism makes every novel, regardless of how banal, a mystery novel, where what’s stated isn’t what’s meant, where what’s implied supersedes what’s intended. Deconstructionists style themselves as literary detectives who arrive at the scene of a novel and find the missing fingerprints.

Spotting the hidden binary oppositions in a text is another major tool for these detectives, though this method, once you begin, is a bit tricky to stop. Just like how the veteran cop sees everyone as a criminal, the veteran deconstructionist sees binaries in every aspect of life: speech opposes writing, life opposes death, the real opposes the imaginary, the sane opposes the insane, what’s clean opposes what’s dirty, with no end in sight. The key is that words don’t emerge into the world as discrete concepts. Instead, each word contains an endless web of relationships, with, for instance, up containing the concept of down.

Although this notion does benefit from sounding at least mildly profound for a few moments, there’s no resolution or second step, nor does it bring us closer to understanding any novels. What happens, instead, is that the critic takes a quick detour, and transforms a literary project into a political project. And this usually comes about when a critic starts to dismantle the binaries in a novel. They are explained as unspoken hierarchies—such as the binary of social class or economic status between characters—with one side almost certainly privileged, and with only the astute deconstructionist able to, thankfully, guide the reader past the binary. By this time you have to really concentrate to remember that you were, just a short while ago, analyzing a novel.

Unfortunately, with the this method of analyzing literature, nobody ever gets to go home. Once you start deconstructing, you are committed for life. It never ends. Novels are endlessly split to find hidden meanings, the pieces getting smaller and smaller and smaller; and in those smaller pieces there are new hierarchies, with each new hierarchy disguising even more hierarchies. You must deconstruct a novel far beyond the limits of exhaustion until every bit of soul and sensation and humanity is drained from the page and there’s nothing left but a rather frigid neutrality—stripping literature to the faceless, the abstract, and the impersonal.

Susan Sontag wrote Against Interpretation way back in 1964 and condemned generations of literature students to misunderstand her words. For all these decades much of literary criticism has been astray, derailed from any literary purpose, yet nothing has changed from what was true so long ago.

The modern style of interpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys; it digs “behind” the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one.

Sontag’s words from more than fifty years ago have no ability to shock and even less to reverberate toward any change in the critical eye. Because contemporary critics are so entrenched with the notion of excavation and the detective work of revealing hidden truths, there’s no hint of possible alternatives, of flaws in these methods, of the very failure of this theory to touch what makes a novel literary—and that’s true even though most people wouldn’t, it seems, label themselves as deconstructionists. The method isn’t declared or even overtly taught—it is simply the unquestioned assumption of how novels are assessed, almost like this method of thinking is a parasite that has taken most contemporary critics hostage.

But to use these techniques is to start reading with the assumption that a novel must be wrong—that there’s something missing in the text, that there’s an unexamined contradiction. This is a mistake for any critic. It is the wrong orientation to view a novel. It puts the critic in the simultaneous role of salivating prosecutor, bias judge, and sleepy defense attorney, with a guilty verdict all but guaranteed. Rather than scrutinizing a novel until fault is discovered, perhaps it just might be worth figuring out what the writer wanted, and then assessing the novel on those terms. Was the goal accomplished? Did the writer succeed? What’s the broader literary context of the novel? With this simple shift the obligation to readers is to provide a critical response based on the actual intentions of the author and the content of the novel.

Of course a good deconstructionist is already shouting that there’s nothing more meaningless than a writer’s intention—the writer, we’ve been told, died long ago. And perhaps part of me wishes that true, as it would have saved us from decades of tedious criticism. Whether the writer even gets another breath, however, isn’t that significant when a critic begins a novel with an agenda. Because to drone on about the hierarchies of power and to dissect every character into an identity and status position in society while reviewing the latest spy thriller is to state a lot about a critic and absolutely nothing about a novel. When a critic concentrates on what they wanted to read and how that differs from what they did read, they’re presenting you a political project that’s disguised as a literary project.

To disassemble every novel as a first principle also comes with dangers. It almost guarantees that the critic will miss the larger point and get lost in details, which is immediately obvious if you imagine disassembling, for instance, a house into a pile of materials. You can put all the wood planks and electrical wires and window frames in one neat spot, and you can talk about them, inspect what’s there, even come to some conclusions about those materials, but you can’t pretend that you’re looking at a house. A novel isn’t a mere collection of discrete aspects of language—it is the emergent property that comes together as a whole on the page.

And my sense is that most people still value literature and possess this intuition—just as most people don’t stare into a heap of rubble and describe buildings. The issue is that contemporary critics find purpose in dismantling. They want to interrogate, tear apart, and reframe, long before the writer has even finished the novel. These deconstructionists are typically intelligent—just ask, they’ll be sure to tell you—and they’ve added to the literary conversation, but they’ve been drunk with power and dominating the party for decades. After all this time and with so much rich literature available it seems rather juvenile to concentrate so much criticism on the work of dismantling.