DECONSTRUCTION

            The theory of Deconstruction emerged by way of opposition to Structuralism mainly in France under the influence of Jacques Derrida, the renowned French philosopher.  Deconstruction also implies Post-structuralism. Besides Derrida, M.H.Abrams, J.Hillis Miller, Paul de Man and Gayatri Chakravorty Shivak also contributed to the theory of Deconstruction.  But all of them evince the influence of Derrida.

            The term deconstruction may be loosely applied to any rejection of the usual conventions of construction. The New Penguin Dictionary defines it as “ a critical technique which claims that there is no single correct interpretation of a text but that the task of a critic or reader is to dismantle the implied units of work of art to revel the variety of interpretations that are possible”.

            Derrida himself did not give a clear cut definition of deconstruction.  He simply said deconstruction had to be arrived at through a re-reading of texts. According to Derrida, the re-reading of a text shows the multiple meanings at work within language. It breaks the false assumptions that language is capable of expressing constant and unchanging ideas, that the author of the text is the only source of its meaning and that in the order of language writing is secondary to speech.

            Derrida did not define deconstruction as it has no set procedure and logical presentation of its main characteristics.  He only observed that deconstruction had to be arrived at through re-reading of texts.  The theory of deconstruction shows that language is constantly shifting and that a text may have multiple legitimate interpretations. Deconstruction is not dismantling of structure of a text but a demonstration that it has already dismantled itself. Literature is a verbal construction in which words have no fixed meaning. Language is not a stable object and therefore does not yield the same meaning in all conditions and circumstances.

            Derrida’s theory of deconstruction found wide acceptance particularly in USA. It was applied to a broad range of subjects including literary theory, linguistics, art, music, architecture, political science etc.  This led to the re-reading of the texts by Shakespeare and the Greek philosophers.

POST-STRUCTURALISM

            Post-strucuralism emerged in France in the late 1960s.  The two figures who are  associated with this emergence are Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida.  Roland Barthes was earlier recognised as structuralist critic but in the late 1960s his work began to shift from a structuralist phase to a post-structuralist phase both in character and move. This difference can be clearly seen by comparing the two different works of Barthes – The Structural Analysis of Narrative and The Pleasures of the Text. The Structural Analysis of narrative is detailed, methodological and technical whereas The Pleasures of the Text is mere a series of random comments of Barthes on narrative which are arranged alphabetically.

            During this time Barthes published another essay The Death of the Author (1968).This essay marked Barthes’ deviation from structuralism to post-structuralism.  In that essay, Barthes argues that there is a total independence for the text and the text is not concerned with any external notion like what the author might have intended or crafted into the work. This essay asserts textual independence.  Thus, the ‘death of the author’ gave rise to the birth of the reader. As a result, the text which was seen as something produced by the author is viewed as something produced by the reader. The early phase of post-structuralism enjoyed a free play of meanings and the escape from all forms of textual authority. But later, as Barbara Johnson pointed out, post-structuralism became ‘a disciplined identification’.

            The second key figure in the development of post-structuralism is Jacques Derrida. His lecture Structure, Sign and Play is the starting point of post-structuralism. In this lecture, Derrida talks about the ‘decentring’ of our intellectual universe. Earlier man was the measure of all other things in the universe. His norms of dress, behaviour, architecture and intellectual outlook provided firm centre against which deviations and variations could be detected and identified as ‘other’. However, in the twentieth century, these centres were destroyed and eroded. This was caused by the First World War and scientific discoveries. It resulted in the disappearance of absolutes or fixed points. Instead of movement or deviation from a known centre there was a free play. Since there was no authoritative centre to appeal for validation of our interpretations, all interpretations were accepted.

            The post structuralists read the text against itself so as to expose what might be thought of as the textual subconscious where meanings are expressed which may be directly contrary to the surface meaning. They are concerned with the surface features of the words like the similarities in sound, the root meanings of words, metaphor and bring these to the foreground so that they become crucial to the overall meaning. They show that the text is characterised by disunity rather than unity. They concentrated on a single passage and analyse it so intensively that the language explodes into ‘multiplicities of meaning’. They also looked for shifts and breaks in the text and saw them as evidences of what were repressed and passed over in silence by the text.

            The difference between structuralism and post structuralism can be brought under the following four headings:

Origins : Structuralism derives from linguistics. It follows methods, system and reason. Post-structuralism derives from philosophy. It encourages no facts only interpretations.

Tone and Style: Structuralists writing tends towards abstraction and generalization It has a detached tone and coolness of a scientific writing.

Attitude to Language: Structuralists believe that the world is constructed through language and we can have access to reality only through language. The post-structuralists hold the view that reality itself is textual.

Project:  Structuralists induce us to break free of habitual modes of perception or categorisation and believe that thereby we can attain a more reliable view of things. Post-structuralists consider the human beings as the individual and a product of social and linguistic forces.

                           

STRUCTURALISM

            Structuralism is an intellectual movement which began in France in the 1950s.  It is first seen in the work of the anthropologist Claude Levi Straus and the literary critic Roland Barthes.  It is difficult to define structuralism in a single line.  However, it can be defined that a work of art cannot be understood in isolation.  They have to be seen in the context of the larger structures they are part of.

            Peter Barry explains structuralism by taking Good Morrow, a poem by John Donne as an example.  According to him, a structuralist believes that a poem can be understood only if one has a clear notion of the genre which that poem belongs to.  Any single poem is an example of a particular genre and the genre and the example relate to each other.  In the case of Donne’s poem Good Morrow, the relevant genre is the ‘alba’ or ‘dawn song’. A dawn song is a poetic form in which lovers lament the approach of daybreak because it means that they must part.  But the ‘dawn song’ can be understood only by the concept of courtly love.  Further, the ‘dawn song’ being a poem presupposes a knowledge of poetry. Thus, the sturcuralist approach takes the reader further and further away from the text.  It takes him into larger and comparatively abstract questions of genre, history and philosophy rather than closer and closer to it. Peter Barry uses the analogy of chicken and eggs.  He considers the dawn song, courtly love, poetry as the chicken and Donne’s poem as the egg. For structuralists determining the nature of the chicken is the most important activity, whereas for the liberal humanists the close analysis of the egg is important.

            Thus in the structuralist approach to literature there is a constant movement away from the interpretation of the individual work and there is a drive towards understanding the larger abstract structures which contain them.  These structures are usually abstract such as the notion of the literary or the poetic or the nature of narrative.

            The arrival of structuralism in Britain and the USA in the 1970s caused a great deal of controversy because literary studies in these countries had very little interest in large abstract issues which the structuralists wanted to raise.  The Cambridge Revolution in English Studies in 1920s encouraged  close study of the text in isolation from all wider structures and contexts.  It was purely ‘text based’.  But structuralism brought a topsy turvy change in the principles of literary criticism by switching its attention from eggs to chicken.

            Though structuralism began in the 1950s and 1960s, its roots can be traced in the thinking of the Swiss linguist, Ferdinand Saussure.  Saussure concentrated on the functions of language.  He emphasised on how meanings are maintained and established in a language.  He said that the meanings we give to words are purely arbitrary and that these meanings are maintained by conventions only.  For instance, the word ‘book’ does not contain the meaning in itself but it is only we who have given the meaning to it. Secondly, he said that the meanings of words are relational and no word can be defined in isolation. For example the word ‘good’ will have the meaning only when the word ‘bad’ exists. Thirdly Saussure emphasised that language constitutes our world.  Meaning is always attributed to the object by the human mind and expressed through language.

            Then Peter Barry enumerates the functions of the structuralist critics. According to him, the structuralist critics relate the text to some larger structures such as literary genre, a network of intertextual connections or recurrent patterns or motifs. They interpret literature in terms of a range of underlying parallels with the structures of language. 

            Peter Barry cites Roland Barthes’ book S/Z as an example for structuralistic criticism. In S/Z,  Roland Barthes comments exhaustively on Balzac’s famous story Sarrasine. The five codes identified by Barthes in S/Z are:

a)      The proairetic code - This code provides indications of actions (eg. They began again)

b)      The hermeneutic code – This code poses puzzles which creates narrative suspense (eg. He moved stealthily and opened the door)

c)      The cultural code – This code contains references beyond the text ( eg. Baptism, a ceremony to cleanse a person of his sin)

d)      The semic code or connotative code – This code when organised around a particular proper name constitutes a ‘character’ ( eg. He is a good Samaritan)

e)      The symbolic code – This code consists of contrasts and pairings ( eg. Male and female)

After 1966, two new theories in context with structuralism emerged. They are Deconstruction and Post-structuralism.