Deconstruction in a state of siege

Deconstruction ‘always in a certain way falls prey to its own work’, wrote Derrida.66

As he foresaw, his theoretical positions have attracted strong criticism, but have also stimulated further debate. Often these debates have been noted exclusively for their negative, disruptive elements, and therefore accused of destroying ideas without suggesting feasible alternatives. For example, Murray Krieger argued that deconstructionist methods were not so different from those of New Criticism.67 Yet Derrida’s work has hugely influenced thinkers of French poststructuralism, as well as scholars of the Anglo-American academies. Some have gone over to ‘the wild side’, as Norris puts it, proposing extreme positions (for instance Geoffrey Hartman and J. Hillis Miller); others have borrowed from deconstructionism to create conceptual rigour (Paul De Man). Linguists have used Derrida’s ideas about playfulness to create new theories on the performativity of language (Austin) and, finally, literary critics have engaged more and more in interpretation of poets and novelists who have overcome the limits of tradition and standard conventions (Bloom). However, there have been no serious attempts to approach deconstructionism on philosophical grounds that focus on what it has brought, rather than what it has not done or destroyed.68 As Norris states:

In the hands of less subtle and resourceful readers deconstruction can become – it is all too clear – a theoretical vogue as uniform and cramping as the worst New Critical dogma. At best it has provided the impetus for a total revaluation of interpretative theory and practice, the effects of which have yet to be fully absorbed.69

Derrida’s aim was not to annihilate communication; it was, rather, to suspend any preconceptions attached to Western traditional thought and see what happened if one freed language from conventions. As a matter of fact, ‘language continues to communicate, as life goes on, despite all the problems thrown up by sceptical thought’, and it would be naive to think that Derrida was not aware of this. He did not actually ignore language’s possibilities, he muted all pre-existing notions attached to it (and its uses or

65 _{The reference is to Frame’s novel A State of Siege (1966).} 66 Norris, Deconstruction, p. 91. 67 Ibid., p. 126. 68 Ibid. 69 Ibid., p. 17.

interpretations), and let them play. He let language move, allowed it to be trace, movement, activity.

In ‘Why deconstruction still matters’, Paul Sawyer interviews Jonathan Culler70

and states:

In the popular reception of deconstruction in the United States, theory is something scandalous and threatening, something you fall for or run from. I recall one magazine article that featured a photo of Derrida posed as a bandit, as if he were about to rob the palace of culture.71

Culler gives an interesting, ambivalent reply. On the one hand, he simplistically makes short work of deconstructionist ‘new questions as well as new readings, often difficult’, adding that he sympathises with those who used to hope this new theory would disappear (‘I'm not especially eager at my age to engage with complicated new discourses’).72

On the other hand, though, he praises Derrida’s effort in uncovering important meanings of Western thought, blaming the right-wing side of the debate that, still today, attempts to define deconstruction as destructive of Western culture civilisation:

[I]t's Derrida more than anyone else who got students and faculty in literature departments reading Plato or Kant. He brought them to explore classic philosophical texts whose meaning people previously assumed they knew. Derrida's rereading of major texts of Western culture has reinvigorated the humanities, and his engagement with literary works has never been a debunking of literature but always a celebration of the shrewdness and rhetorical and imaginative resourcefulness of literature. The right-wing claim that students would read Derrida and deconstruction and become turned off from literature proves false. On the contrary, students exposed to deconstruction have taken a heightened interest in literary and philosophical texts – with different questions, certainly.73

70

Both are professors in the English Department of Cornell University.

71 _{Paul Sawyer, ‘Why Deconstruction Still Matters: A Conversation with Jonathan Culler’, Cornell} Chronicle, 24 January 2008 <http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/2008/01/why-deconstruction-still-matters-

according-jonathan-culler> [accessed 4 June 2014] (para. 3 of 14).

72

Ibid. (para. 4 of 14).

73

Culler probably judges these ‘different questions’ very stimulating in their subversiveness, and therefore important for both students and theorists. Nevertheless, it is the attention to rhetoric and the literary values of traditional texts that he praises most. Even if concealed by the ambivalence of such an answer, his inclination to consider deconstruction nothing more than an intelligent provocation is discernible.

In truth, deconstruction could be accused of two main faults. It could be argued that language is never totally free from constrictions, for example those imposed by the economy of signs, or more simply by the necessity to be fully understood by as many readers as possible (perhaps in performative, or official uses of written language), and in any form of power discourse. Furthermore, it could be argued that, by configuring itself as a critique to Western thought, deconstructionism only works in Western contexts and could never be applied to languages that respond to hermeneutical conceptions that are radically different. Both points are sensible. The answer offered by this study is that when Derrida moved Western tradition towards deconstruction, he was well aware of the risks and critiques to which he was exposing his theories. However, he pursued his project anyway, probably because his ultimate aim was not to be right, but to question. The constant subversion of assumptions, the endless movement to which he opened language and the multiple, intricately interrelated doubts, reminders, and play – these were, in part, his goals. Such a position could be linked, paradoxically enough, to the Augustinian-Cartesian ‘dubito ergo sum’.74

A more contemporary explication of these positions is provided by the American philosopher Richard Rorty. He holds that there are two main philosophical traditions, which can never reach a common point, because their aims and approaches are too radically different.75 Therefore, they exist and work in perpetual rivalry, offering diverse, and at times complementary insights. On the one hand, there are thinkers who stick to the traditional view of philosophy as a dialogue of minds, pursued through rationality in the quest for truth. These thinkers accept scepticism, but only as a tool to avoid confusion and to ground their beliefs more solidly. On the other hand, there are thinkers who do not accept the impositions of rationality, who focus on subverting standardised paradigms, often through paradox and idiosyncratic style. Rorty calls their activity ‘philosophy as writing’, that is a kind of philosophy that does not employ language to structure reasoning

74

Augustine, De Civitate Dei, trans. by Patrick Gerard Walsh (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 2013), XI, 26.

75 _{Richard Rorty, ‘Philosophy as a Kind of Writing: An Essay on Derrida’, New Literary History, 10.1}

or reach truths. On the contrary, language is a tool with which to show alternative perspectives and fight against traditional assumptions. The ontological difference between them is expressed by Derrida in a letter to Searle:

I ask myself if we will ever be quits with this confrontation. Will it have taken place, this time?

Quite?76

Owing to her approach to language and written texts, Frame’s works could certainly be understood in the light of a ‘philosophy of writing’. As Chapters 4, 5, and 6 will illustrate, her stories defy rational, pre-constructed patterns and engage in a constant tension with traditional forms. Rather than looking for a specific point to convey, Frame employed language as a means to contradict and frustrate any quest for truth, for truth itself is unattainable. Her use of more conventional forms always hides a paradox or an implicit meaning. According to such a perspective, Frame’s texts deconstruct themselves.

Due to their very natures, translation and deconstruction are mutually implicated. As Kathleen Davis points out, both deal with language at its limits, and challenge standard ideas in order to do justice to another's words. Moreover, both delve into the permeable, muting margin between possibility and impossibility, meaning and paradox. The unresolvable (and unavoidable) double bind of translation lies in its being simultaneously possible and impossible. In a dimension of possibilities, texts collect stable sets of relations that make them intelligible; conversely, the impossibility of their essence lies in the fact that language has no pure origin, and meaning is constantly disseminated. One could ask: what is it that translations need to transfer if there are no stable, original meanings?77

Texts ‘mean’ because they are repeatable. Since the text is not the cause, but rather an effect of conventional systems that institute that boundary, it ‘overspills its borders: both STs and TTs are situated within an open weave of texts that stretches into the future, and which (fortunately) makes texts continue to mean’.78

Thus, translation is possible because neither the author nor the context can limit the possibility of a text to

76

Jacques Derrida, quoted in Norris, p. 129.

77

Kathleen Davis, Deconstruction and Translation (Manchester: St Jerome, 2001).

78

Ruth Evans, Review of Deconstruction and Translation by Kathleen Davis, Translation and Literature, 12.2 (2003), 312–16 (p. 313).

disseminate difference. In a non-prescribing approach, deconstruction elucidates how translators are always ‘working in the dark’. Davis' example of the 'micro-preemies' (extremely premature babies) well illustrates the struggle to make decisions when the outcome is unpredictable and there are no fixed protocols. In this sense, deconstruction clarifies why each translation is a unique event, thus contributing to a revision of normative, limiting visions.79

In this sense, a deconstructionist approach to Frame’s language would allow translators to continue her idiosyncratic approach to textuality. In the impossibility of recreating a context, a similar perspective on translation will not stop words ‘meaning’, so that new disruptive/creative languages can/will enter the target culture.