Construction of a Case for Literary Deconstruction

As expected, my spoof of the school of literary criticism known as deconstruction has brought deconstruction down upon me.

As I said, “I would not be surprised to be showered by abstruse protests that I ought not to be criticizing that which I don’t understand.”

Let me remind the reader that deconstruction is a vogue form of literary criticism in which classic texts (or any texts) are reduced to multiple meanings, ambiguity or meaninglessness.

In an otherwise amiable and even laudatory letter, John Rowe, a “deconstructive critic” at UC Irvine, explains that even before I can take an elementary course in deconstruction I must read Hegel, Marx, Engels, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger and others. Without that sort of grounding, he warns, I can no more expect to understand deconstruction than nuclear physics. Both, he implies, use a “technical language” that seems like “jargon” only to the ignorant.

Rowe compares deconstruction not only to physics, but also to laser surgery, both of which he suggests are beyond the understanding of a journalist.

“What journalist, businessman, insurance agent, or automobile dealer would insist that he/she must understand nuclear physics or biochemistry as proof of its validity?” (He has a point; on the other hand, I would hate for a child of mine to take English from a professor who uses “he/she” in his prose.)

“Just what is it about scholarly approaches to the humanities,” he goes on, “that cause non-academics to believe they should be able to understand their basic principles in the course of a cocktail party?”

Well, I had existentialism explained to me once at a cocktail party. (By the way, would it be deconstructive of me to point out that in Rowe’s last sentence cause should be causes ?)

Geoffery M. Johnson of San Diego was meaner: “Sadly, what I found was yet another vitriolic attack on deconstruction by a man who glories in his own purposeful ignorance. . . . Tragically, Smith’s misconception of deconstruction as exclusively the product of an elitist intelligentsia is not dissimilar to those assaults on the intelligentsia made by Stalin in the ‘20s, or Hitler in the ‘30s. As a journalist who must value or respect the right of intellectual freedom, you think he would know better. Clearly, he does not.”

(I was merely exercising intellectual freedom.)

Of course, some of my faithful irregulars came to my defense. Edward F. Little recalls the famous paradox of Epimenides, the Cretan, who said, “All Cretans are liars.” Little adds: “Like the assertions of the deconstructionists, this statement self-destructs.”

John Wilson of UC Santa Barbara writes: “Your article . . . hits the nail on the head. . . . I’d love to have the chance to expose the charlatans who control our English departments around the country. . . . Your article in itself is a blessing if it convinces one student who loves to read not to become a sucker. . . .”

Col. Joseph J. Kelly of Laguna Hills encloses a letter he received from the chancellor of UC Irvine in answer to his question about the hiring of a Yale deconstructionist at “a six-figure salary.”

The chancellor explained, in part, that “the appointment of a single great scholar . . . can have synergistic effects on many other people, and this has happened as a result of the appointment of Prof. (J. Hillis) Miller.”

Kelly wrote to the governor, complaining that Miller’s appointment seemed to be a waste of funds, and received an answer from a governor’s aide (a doctor of education), stating that “I am not certain what a deconstructionist is, but it is in the nature of our very specialized world that this should be the case. We must rely on specialists in English as well as specialists in particle physics, biochemistry, or medicine.”

“I suspect you’re not as daunted by the deconstructionists as you pretend,” writes Charlton Heston. “You know precisely where they are: in the same boat with (John) Cage’s non-music . . . and two generations of non-structured painting, poetry and prose. They’re all wearing the emperor’s new clothes. In the end, someone stands up and says, ‘Hey, look. He’s naked, right?’ ”

In the New York Review of Books (March 1), Robert M. Adams reviews five books on deconstruction. Of the godfather of deconstructionists, Paul de Man, he says, in a departure from his scholarly style: “I knew where he was at, but couldn’t always tell where he was coming from.”

I wonder what the deconstructionists would make of that.