That ominous phrase and concept, “the death of the author,” has long been attached to deconstruction, or deconstructive criticism. Deconstruction is a leading critical theory of a larger grouping of literary and critical theory that emerges in the 1960s and 1970s in Europe, and thrives in American academic institutions (mostly) in the 1980s and 90s. That larger grouping is known as “poststructuralism,” a phrase which in some ways overlaps with the term “postmodernism,” but not entirely.

“Poststructuralism” (as an umbrella term for theories like deconstruction) is useful for our purposes this week since the phrase reminds us that deconstructive criticism follows and replaces structuralism, but does so by way of relation. Both focus on an understanding of language and writing as the foundation of any text–not the author, not the reader, not the historical era in which that text was composed or published.

To some extent, we are still talking about “text without contexts,” as we encountered in our readings of the New Criticism. But structuralism and then deconstruction take things a step further. In New Criticism, we had an author’s work (Brooks consistently refers to Keats and Eliot to “the individual talent”), but we understood that what mattered was interpretation of the poem/poetry, not the poet. Now, with structuralism and deconstruction, that individual author and work disappear into the writing of the text. Now, the text is all context–or as Derrida, leading proponent of deconstruction famously  put it: “there is no outside the text.” We move, as Roland Barthes phrases it, “From Work to Text.”  We will read that essay for Thursday, from a collection (Image/Music/Text) that includes his essay “The Death of the Author.” Barthes is a useful guide for us this week since his earlier work such as “The World of Wrestling” (from Mythologies) is a good example of a structuralist interpretation.

As a way to distinguish structuralism from what comes after it, poststructuralism, I think it is particularly helpful to focus on the linguistic “structure” that both emphasize in understanding the birth of the text and the death of the literary work grounded in the authority of the author. Structuralism would have us think in metaphors and analogies of surface and depth, the structures we can see and the deep structure we can’t. Here are some relevant surface/deep structure relations:

structural linguistics:

parole (individual speech) / langue (the underlying language, grammar, syntactic structures

cultural (also called structural) anthropology: culture (individual practices or rituals) or myths (individual stories, mythemes) / underlying kinship rules or archetypal mythology across groups, cultures [Levi-Strauss: “incest is bad grammar”]

psychoanalytic theory: conscious/unconscious

Marxism: superstructure/substructure or base

New Criticism: Denotation/Connotation or Tension/Opposition/Paradox in the poem/organic wholeness underlying the poetry

 

Poststructuralist theory, most especially deconstruction, learns from the structuralist insights on language (Saussure is a key figure for both) and what is called semiotics (the science of signs, the understanding the a sign is comprised of something signified but also its signifier). But rather than believing, as strucutralism does, that the acts of signification are contained or closed off by the signified, deconstruction argues that one signifier suggests another signifier. The process of signification continues without end. Instead of a surface/depth metaphor where the signifier is grounded by the signified, deconstruction shifts attention to the metonymy of signifying: one sign leads to the next sign that is near it or in part related, which leads to the next sign, and so on. From the deconstructive perspective, there is no underlying deep structure in language that somehow stands apart from language. The very idea of a deep structure, and the very act of interpreting or perceiving a deep structure in anything, exists only in the thinking we do with language and signs.

deconstruction: sign–>sign–>sign / signification (but: signification is itself more signs)

mise en abyme: a phrase from French used by Derrida and others: “placed into the abyss.” Think of a mirror held up to a mirror–where does it stop? Or a play within a play (which also has a play within it, and so on). This is where “undecidability” comes into play.

In other words, from the perspective of deconstructive theory, there is no end to the signifying process, since there is no one or no thing outside the process of signification. (The sign tells us there is another sign ahead; but when we get up to that sign, we are still looking at a sign.) There is no “transcendental signified” that can stand apart from the language we use to think. According to deconstruction, traditional names for some transcendental signifieds used to (falsely) suggest a stable ground apart from the process of signification: Author, God, Nature, Being.

Last week we suggested that Brooks’ new critical perspective on Keats’s “Ode” is on to something valuable. The poem is contradictory, paradoxical, maybe even noisy–and close reading of the symbols and language help us to hear the noise more clearly. That makes it interesting to both the new critic and the deconstructionist. But Brooks in the end has to sweep the mess (all the stuff he can’t account for) under the rug, saying the paradox is resolved by Paradox (his transcendental signified). It’s circular (just as the statement made by the Urn: this poem is art because true art is poetic). Deconstruction calls out that circularity as a lie, but says it’s a lie that all texts, all poets and critics, can’t escape, due to the nature of language. Instead of sweeping the mess under the rug, deconstruction suggests that the rug is indistinguishable from the mess.

But does that mean we should stop caring about cleaning up the room, stop sweeping the floor since the rug in the end isn’t separate from the floor or the mess? And are we, in fact, separate from that mess? Doesn’t contemporary physics suggest that we–the stuff that really makes us–can’t be decidable or certain in the ways we used to think of nature (Descartes, Newton) before Einstein and Heisenberg? I fear that the metaphor of my analogy is slipping away from me into quantum physics, sliding into the abyme of my thinking of thinking, my language about the nature of language.

For some further reading and thinking about structuralist principles in the real world, for example the idea of “archetypes”:  The 7 Story Archetypes, suggesting that any story  or narrative (including film) can be read at a deep structural level.

And for more on Derrida and deconstruction, you can’t go wrong with YouTube.

To hear Robert Frost reading “Mending Wall” (the poem used as an example in the Deconstruction chapter). Consider what a structuralist reading of this poem would do compare to what a deconstructive reading would do.