Deconstruction Site : It May Not Mean What It Was Meant to Mean, and It May Not Mean Anything at All

MY CALTECH FRIEND Herb Henrikson has sent me a copy of “ProfSpeak” (Regnery Gateway), by journalist Charles J. Sykes, calling my attention specifically to a chapter on “deconstruction.”

In general, Sykes indicts the American university “professoriat” as a bureaucracy of greedy, vain, selfish, pretentious, slothful mutants who speak only in jargon and despise their students.

Critics of education have rounded up the usual suspects, he says: “the students themselves, television, the federal government, capitalism, public grade schools, high schools, teen-age sex, German philosophers Nietzsche and Heidegger, and, for good measure, the Walkman radio.”

All fail to identify the real villain, he alleges: “Almost single-handedly, the professors--working steadily and systematically--have destroyed the university as a center of learning and have desolated higher education, which no longer is higher or much of an education.”

But I am most interested in that faction of the professoriat that preaches deconstruction, an esoteric critical methodology that seems to undermine my temple and my reason for being.

I have read about deconstruction, but I don’t understand it. As Henrikson says, “I have a book by the ‘Decons’ but it is absolutely unfathomable--obviously only the most enlightened can appreciate the intricacies of the emperor’s new clothes.”

Deconstruction has been called a highly abstract critical theory “in which words and phrases are methodically scrutinized for multiple meanings, most of them contradictory and unpredictable.”

Whatever it is, it frightens me. The ignorant are always frightened by what they do not understand. I believe the deconstructionists hold that, to put it very simply, in my own words, literature is meaningless or ambiguous, since words don’t mean what they appear to mean. Sykes says many of the hierarchy hold that words have no meaning at all. Thus, the written word is beyond the author’s control, and literature is invalid.

Deconstruction evidently means whatever its various proponents want it to mean. Consider this paragraph from a story by Lynn Smith in The Times: “A feminist deconstructionist . . . would find that a feminist argument containing the words, ‘Do you see my point?’ undermines the speaker’s purpose since the figure of speech has phallic symbolism.”

Imagine what a variety of meanings might be drawn by deconstructionists from the phrase “keep off the grass” or the title line from the Leo Robin-Julie Styne song, “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.”

Sykes notes the posthumous discovery that Paul de Man, the late Yale professor who was adulated as archdeacon of the movement in America, had written nearly 200 pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic articles for collaborationist Belgian newspapers during World War II.

Of course De Man’s colleagues could hardly hold him to answer for his wartime prose since it couldn’t have meant what he meant it to mean and, in fact, didn’t mean anything at all.

Sykes sees in deconstruction, a branch of “post-structuralism,” the death of reading. As one deconstructionist professor put it, reading is “distinct from hallucination insofar as it describes a sequential encounter with signifiers.” Jargon like that is the movement’s lifeblood.

“So what is to become of reading?” Sykes asks. “Of literature? Of the legacy of more than 20 centuries of Western civilization?” He asserts that Shakespeare couldn’t get a job teaching beginning drama in an American university because he wouldn’t know the jargon.

Deconstruction is hard to define, since one must try to define it in words that are intrinsically suspect. One might say that “deconstruction is the theory that literature is meaningless,” but of course that doesn’t mean what one means it to mean.

I wonder what the deconstructionists would make of John Donne’s passage that ends: “And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee” or, for that matter, of Ernest Hemingway’s book, “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” which seemed to me to be about courage, dedication and love in a sleeping bag.

I have no doubt that our Southern California institutions of higher learning have been heavily infiltrated by the high priests of this bizarre movement, and I would not be surprised to be showered by abstruse protests that I ought not to be criticizing that which I don’t understand.

I have no defense. I have knocked at the door of deconstruction and found no one there who speaks my language.

Maybe Gertrude Stein was on the right track when she wrote: “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.”