The Limits and Advantages of Deconstruction

Hugo Blumenthal © 2006

The Limits and Advantages of Deconstruction: Reading Pamela Reading Pamela,, Humphry Clinker , and Evelina and Evelina by Hugo Blumenthal

‘deconstruction n. not what you think: the experience of the impossible: wh what remains to be thought: a logic of destabilization always already on the move in ‘things themselves’: what makes every identity at once itself and different from itself: a logic of spectrality: a theoretical and practical parasitism or virology: what is happening today in what is called society, politics, diplomacy, economics, historical reality, reality, and so on: the opening of the future itself.’ Nicholas Royle, What is Deconstruction?

Introduction (to a paradoxical task) To pretend to write about the advantages and limitations of deconstruction for the study of literature or the practice of literary criticism is a paradoxical task. First of all, because deconstruction cannot but question our role as evaluators (that is, position, authority, criteria, etc.), as well as the institution (here university) under which such evaluation is not only made possible but necessary. Second, because deconstruction would necessarily question the assumption that it could offer a ‘method’ for the interpretation of literary texts; and if deconstruction cannot be said to be or to have a method or a theory that could be applied to literature, what then could we evaluate in terms of advantages and limitations? And third, but not last, because the homogeneous existence of something called ‘deconstruction’, for all we know, could be not more than an illusion that haunts most of its declared opponents. Trying to avoid static definitions of ‘deconstruction’ (singular), J. Hillis Miller has repeatedly ‘defined’ ‘deconstructions’ (plural) as mere practices of good reading. In fact, understanding for good readers ‘those readers who are, for whatever reason, sensitive to the kinds of rhetorical complexities that Derrida, for example, sees in works’, Miller has gone as far as to be ‘prepared to say that all good readers are deconstructionists.’ 1 Unfortunately, even if I would not go as far as to imply that there have not been some quite ‘good readers’ Pamela, Tobias Smollett’s Humphry Clinker of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, , and Frances Burney’s Evelina Burney’s Evelina,, there does not seem to be ‘criticism’ of any these three novels that could

1

‘The Authority of Reading: An Interview with J. Hillis Miller’, conducted conduc ted by Martin Heusser and Harold Schweizer, in J. Hillis Miller, Hawthorne Miller, Hawthorne & History: Defacing It (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1991), p. 158.

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be considered a deconstruction.2 A fourth paradox then arises, having to evaluate an ‘application’ that doesn’t seem to have happened yet. Because of that, we would have to concentrate on an evaluation of the possibilities of deconstruction, rather than in ‘deconstruction’ as something already given. given . Writing as a Deconstructive Topic To glance at some of the possibilities of reading that a deconstruction could make available, let’s take the topic of writing, one of Jacques Derrida’s main interests, clearly manifest through his first books and essays: writing, as it tend to be considered secondary, accessory, dangerous, misleading, etc., in relation to speech, thought, truth, etc.3 Writing Pamela, Humphry also could be a very interesting topic to start with, in relation to Pamela, Clinker , and Evelina, Evelina, as they are –to borrow Julian Wolfreys’s words to describe Charlotte Perkins Hilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper – ‘representations in writing of the act of writing,’ where ‘the subject is read as writing’ of herself (or himself) writing. 4 In other words, these novels appear not just written by an author (Richardson, Smollett, or Burney), but also, at the same time, appear as composed by letters and journals written by some of the characters (Pamela, Evelina, Matthew Bramble, etc), who in not few occasions appear as writing about their writing. A deconstruction in relation to the question of writing in these three novels could start by analyzing what all the writers (including the characters that write) state state as the reasons for their writing, or the function that writing seems to have for them. Among those Clinker mentions two for writing reasons, let’s remember, for example, that Humphry Clinker mentions ‘novels’ in England in the Eighteenth century: as a ‘branch of business’, apparently opposed to writing ‘merely for the propagation of virtue’ (HC160).5 From there, a 2

Joanne Cutting-Gray’s ‘Evelina: Writing Between Experience and Innocence’, Woman as ‘Nobody’ and the Novels of Fanny Burney (Gainesville: University University Press of Florida, 1992), pp. 9-31, seems to have some influences from deconstruction, but she prefers to define her critical position as ‘hermeneutic’; Julia Epstein’s ‘Evelina: Protecting the Heroine’, The Iron Pen: Frances Burney and the Politics of Women’s Writing (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1989), pp. 93-122, though a feminist reading with some resemblances resemblanc es of deconstruction, is rather dismissive of deconstructio n as a outdated fashi fashion (cf. p. 227-228). Richardson’s Clarissa has had better luck in relation with deconstruction, espec espe cially with William Beatty Warner’s Warner’s Reading Clarissa. Clarissa. For a defence of his deconstructive reading of Clarissa against the criticisms of o f Terry Terry Eagleton and an d Terry Terry Castle, see William Beatty Warner, Warner, ‘Reading Rape: Rap e: MarxistFeminist Figurations of the Literal’, Diacritics Literal’, Diacritics,, 13, 4 (1983), pp. 12-32.

3

Grammatology , trans. by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (London: Joh n Hopkins Cf. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, Dissemination, trans. by Barbara Johnson University Press, 1997); Jacques Derrida, ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, Dissemination, (London: Continuum, 2000), pp. 67-186; and Jacques Derrida, ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’, Writing’, Writing and Difference, Difference, trans. by Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 246-291.

4

Julian Wolfreys, Deconstruction Wolfreys, Deconstruction · Derrida (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), p. 76.

5

Unless otherwise stated, all quotations are from Samuel Richardson, Pamela; Richardson, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded , ed. by T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1971); Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker , ed. by Angus Ross (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985); Fanny Burney, Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World , ed. by Edward A. Bloom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). For economy, I would use the following abbreviations for the quotations: Pamela, HC for Humphry er , and E for Evelina, Evelina, followed by a page number. P for Pamela, H umphry Clink er number. Therefore, ‘P105’ is Pamela, p. 105. not a misprint of ‘P. 105’, but stands f or f or Pamela,

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deconstruction could start to explore and contrast the possible functions of writing for Richardson, Smollett, and Frances Burney (as they could have been ‘at the moment’ of these three novels), with those of their characters. After all, by writing no novels but letters and journals, the characters seem to have a completely different set of reasons: Lydia says to write because it ‘lightens the burthen of affliction’ affliction’ (HC348), (HC348), and Pamela says to write to ‘divert My Grief ’, and is encouraged by Mrs. Jewkes to keep her ‘out of worse Thoughts’ (P105). Apart from that, Pamela’s writing seems primarily used as an aid to memory (P94), to strength her resolutions and keep her virtue (P52); and the same could be said about Evelina. But the characters that write in Humphry in Humphry Clinker also Clinker also could use writing with similar functions (though apparently less as a guarantee for moral behaviour): Matt and Jery Bramble, for example, account for everything ‘worth’ seeing and mentioned through their journey or ‘expedition’, so their letters also promote a question of archive, of o f leaving register of experience.6 A deconstruction could then focus on how writing seems to be regarded as a tool, not only to ‘re-present’ a reality, thought or speech that would supposedly exist or would have been ‘present’ ‘before’ writing (as it could be the case with Richardson’s ‘writing to the moment’) but also for something else. A deconstruction then could follow all these reasons through, to see to what point the writers could be said to have achieved or not their purposes through their acts of writing. In the last term, a deconstruction could probably show how such ‘uses’ of writing are deconstructed by the same practice of writing that seems to contain or p or perform erform them: witting, for example, being not only a form to record experience, but of shaping or creating experience –as pointed out by Joanne Cutting-Gray in relation to Evelina to Evelina..7 Deconstructing Appearances Taking as a model Derrida’s now famous strategy used in Of Grammatology to deconstruct the binary opposition speech/writing, a critic could try to deconstruct the opposition between appearances and what is taken for real or truth –an opposition not only essential to Western metaphysics, but also particularly marked in our three novels, especially as a warning to young, ‘innocent’ women, against a deceptive world. One of the tasks for a Clink er, er, and Evelina deconstruction then could be to see to what degree Pamela degree Pamela,, Humphry Clink and Evelina deconstruct or subvert the binary opposition reality/appearances they seem to promote; to see if appearances are not, in the last instance, the condition of possibility of truth or what is considered real. That does not mean that the critic would end up merely acknowledging the importance of the existence of appearances (that must be mistrusted) as something necessary to oppose to something else that could then be called truth or real (and that could be taken for granted); to do so, would be to reinforce the same opposition that a deconstruction would pursue to deconstruct. On the contrary, a deconstruction would need to show how 6

7

For the question of archive, see Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Impression, trans. by Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Joanne Cutting-Gray, Cutting-Gray, ‘Evelina: Writing Between Experience and Innocence’, p. 24.

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appearances are important or fundamental (as much as truth or what is real) through the three novels, almost to the point that there could be said to exist ‘only’ appearances (from the form ‘to appear’, to become into existence), where truth or what is taken as real could be taken as ‘other forms’ of appearances. But it must be made clear that the goal of deconstruction is not to instaurate the inversion of a binary opposition (as J. M. Ellis and Peter Zima seem to think, taking for the whole of ‘deconstruction’ what constitutes only a part of one of its possible strategies), but to show how the ‘secondary’ term is fundamental, contained in the existence of the first.8 In order to do this, there are many possible ‘threads’ that a deconstruction could follow in each text. Let’s take, for example, the case of Evelina. Evelina. First, it could be possible to show how h ow Evelina is constantly reminded that she must not trust appearances, to the point p oint that after her disillusion with Orville she decides that ‘never, never again will I trust to appearances […]’ (E256). But later on she is encouraged to confront her father, based in her appearanc appearance, ‘without any other certificate of your birth, [but] that which you carry in your countenance, as it could not be effected by artifice […]’ (E337). And in the end, it is because of such appearance that she is recognized by her father (E374). Second, a deconstruction could show how Evelina deceives herself, trusting her inner self, without being able to recognize her love for Lord Orville, a love that she keeps assuming to be something else, until Mr. Villars (who can only judge from Evelina’s exterior appearances) reveals to her the truth of her condition. That would prove how the ‘inner’ self –which, by apparently not depending of exterior appearances, could be taken as a core of truth–, could be as deceptive as appearances. Third, to show that there is not such a thing as a clear difference between appearances and truth, a deconstruction could be focused in Evelina taking for granted the truth of Orville’s Orville’s signature, and what comes signed by it. A signature, signature, after all, is supposed to be a guarantee of truth, as a form for a subject to claim responsibility for what he/she signs. But a signature is also –as Derrida has shown– an appearance of signature: it depends on the possibility of its repetition –and because of that, it could be also ‘falsified’, repeated by someone to whom it does not ‘belong’.9 And in effect, what Evelina takes for the truth or reality of Orville’s signature would prove to be, later on, an ‘appearance’ created by Willoughby. But because of her belief in the truth of such signature, Evelina must also believe in the ‘content’ of the ‘false’ letter. And even though that Orville is in love with her (the meaning she gathers in her first reading) would prove to be truth, Evelina cannot but be shocked by the contrast between (what she takes to be the truly expression of) Orville’s socially improper intentions intentions towards her, and Orville’s behavior when they have met (what she then takes as mere appearances).

8

Cf. Peter V. Zima, Deconstruction Zima, Deconstruction and Critical Theory , trans. by Rainer Emig (London: Continuum, 2006), p. 173. See also H. M. Ellis, Against Ellis, Against Deconstruction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).

9

Philosophy , trans. by Alan Bass (Chicago: Cf. Jacques Derrida, ‘Signature Event Context’, Margins of Philosophy, University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 307-330.

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And taking further the subjects of letters, signatures, appearances and truth, a deconstruction could also raise questions about the epistolary novel as a genre, asking, for example, if Pamela, Pamela, Humphry Clinker , and Evelina and Evelina,, contain or are formed of real letters or appearance of letters. After all, Pamela all, Pamela also contains ‘falsified’ letters, as the one Mr. Clinker raises similar questions B sends to Pamela’s parents, ‘in her name’, and and Humphry Clinker raises with ‘Wilson’s’ ‘Wilson’s’ love letter to Lydia, Lydia, which could be said to be basically truth, even if who signs it signs with somebody else’s name. But in general, a deconstruction then could show how all the letters in the three novels are also confronted by similar questions of writing and auth authorship, orship, with a ‘real’ author (for example Frances Burney) ‘signing’ also with somebody else’s name (for example ‘Evelina’ in her letters, within the novel). A deconstruction deconstruction then could ask that, if at one level all three novels seem to warn against appearances, could that warning be also applicable against the appearance of reality of each novel? Or does each novel also criticize such warnings against trusting appearances? Correspondences and Names The epistolary genre and the question of the name contain also a whole series of other related issues, as pointed out by Derrida in some of his works.10 The materiality of the letter, the letter as an object, for example, is important in relation to its possible (or sometimes apparently necessary) concealment, the possibility that it could be read by others (and therefore fall in wrong hands) than the person it was intended to –as in Pamela and Evelina and Evelina,, but also as possibility possibility of the three novels, that ‘exist’ on condition of the possibility of making public (publishing) letters essentially regarded as private. There is also a question about the channels a letter follows (or posting and delivering), and how a letter could be deviated from them, by mistake (apparently delivered to the wrong person, as in Pamela in Pamela (P144)), be stolen (as in Evelina (E259) and Pamela and Pamela (P34)), or get lost. Such channels relate to questions of authority, gender, and patriarchal models, as in Humphry Clinker , where the male (Matthew and Jery), heads of t of the family, are the ones with the most mediums of getting their letters delivered –whereas women (manly Winifred Jenkins and Lydia) depend upon favorable circumstances to send their letters. That relates also to freedom, censure and clandestinity, clandestinity, as for Pamela, Evelina, and Lydia. A deconstruction could ask, in relation to Evelina to Evelina,, for example, what a ‘correspondence’ means, when does one could be said to start or exist, what it involves (as to be considered ‘improper’ –what a deconstruction, in a game of words, could relate to the question ‘property’– and immoral for a single woman, in the Eighteenth-century, Eighteenth-century, to correspond to/ 11 with a man), etc. All these relate to questions of signature, proper name, identity (as self-writing and self-definition), the body (especially the female body, with the letter as fetish, as in Pamela in Pamela (P203-04)), and the letter as a gift.

10

See, particularly, Derrida’s deconstruction of Jacques Lacan’s reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’ in Jacques Derrida, ‘Le facteur de la vérité’, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 411-496; an d Jacques Jacqu es Beyond , trans. by Alan Bass (Chicago: Derrida, On the Name, Name , ed. by Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995).

11

Cf. Nicholas Royle, After Royle, After Derrida (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), p. 118, n. 9.

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Focusing on the question of the name, then, a deconstruction could help to explore questions that relate to authority, inheritance and identity. It could ask for the ‘origin’ of certain names, and what implications does such an ‘origin’ carries with them. After all, if –as Julian Wolfreys has pointed out– ‘the name assumes, or is assumed to have, a framing function. Its use is economical, implying a closed system and intimating a unitary presence, origin or source,’ one of the functions of a deconstruction could be to deconstruct such ‘intimations.’ ‘intimations.’12 For example, Evelina, by bearing her grandfather’s and mother’s surname (Evelyn), carries with her some ‘absences’ and some ‘presences’: the absence and presence of her mother, as a memory of her mother’s death (a mother who she also resembles); an ‘absence’, the lack of the father’s recognition, legality (as a sort of bastard), social position (because the father possess not only the title, but also a ‘fortune’), and therefore, apparently, the cause of most of her difficulties. In a similar way, Humphry Clinker could be said to suffer in his name, or because of his name is not what it ‘should’ had been, because of an accident involving names, names, with his father having changed his name, etc. The question of the name is also important in Pamela in Pamela:: Pamela is certainly recognized by her parents, but ends up changing her humble condition as servant by marrying her master and changing her father’s name –becoming instead part of the name of her ‘master’, a form of erasure proper of ‘courtship novels’, as pointed out by Julia Epstein.13 For a deconstruction, however, such questioning of the name does not have to be circumscribed to within the novels, but could also raise questions on what is call called ed ‘literary influence’, with Evelina not only bearing clear influences from Richardson’s Pamela, but also (though apparently less obviously) from Smollett’s Humphry Smollett’s Humphry Clinker .14 Translations and Influences But the ‘deconstructive’ topics and reading strategies mentioned above are not only far from representing a complete list of all the ones that could be explored and performed by ‘a deconstruction’, but are also far from representing all the deconstructive readings that could be possible in relation to our three novels.15 A more complete list of the topics and readings strategies ‘of’ deconstruction must necessarily take into consideration not only the works of Jacques Derrida, but also those by Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman, Barbara Johnson, Tom Cohen, Colin McCabe, Julian Wolfreys, Geoffrey Bennington, Nicholas 12

Julian Wolfreys, Deconstruction Wolfreys, Deconstruction · Derrida , p. 86.

13

Julia Epstein, ‘Marginality in Frances Burney’s Burney’s Novels’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth Cambridge, 2002), p. 199. Century Novel , ed. by John Richetti (Cambridge: Cambridge,

14

For some of the similarities similariti es and differences between Evelina and and Humphry Clinker , see Ronald Paulson, ‘Evelina: Cinderella and Society’, in Modern Critical Interpretations: Fanny Burney’s Evelina , ed. by Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea, 1988), pp. 5-12; and John Skinner, ‘Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Burney’s Evelina’, Quixote and Frances Burney’s Evelina’, An An Introduction to Eighteenth-Century Fiction. Raising the Novel (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 196-211.

15

Just for more of Derrida’s ‘interests’, see Geoffrey Bennington, ‘Derridabase’, in Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 3-316; and Niall Lucy, A Derrida Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).

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Royle, Derek Attridge, Peggy Kamuf, and William Beatty Warner, to mention just some of the best-known in English. But even then, deconstruction cannot be limited to an already established body of concepts, topics, figures or reading strategies. And to use the same topics, concepts or figures, as in an inter-textual inter-textual reading (reading Pamela (reading Pamela ‘with’ Derrida, for example), does not necessarily constitute a deconstruction of anything –even if that could be as valid as reading Sterne’s Tristram Shandy with Locke.16 The topics, figures and reading strategies of every deconstructive attempt depend not only on what is intended to be deconstructed, but also of the particularities of the texts where such deconstruction is going to take its place. In other words, one cannot generalize, create a method to ‘deconstruct’.17 A method, after all, implies not only an erasure of differences, by generalization (since in order to apply, the method must reduce everything to the same), but also ‘totalization’ (the method, then, assumes to account for everything). That would amount to generate the kind of ‘constructions’ that deconstructions usually seek to deconstruct. And that is not because deconstruction could be said to reject the elaboration of theories. Derrida’s writing on logocentrism in Western metaphysics, as well as Paul de Man’s writing on the ‘blindness’ inherent to every act of criticism, are theories, after all, but theories raised by recurrent findings through a series of particular texts, not methods that could be applied to any text, indiscriminative of its differences. In that sense, ‘deconstruction’ could be said to exis existt only in its 18 19 ‘applications’. There is nothing as a pure theory of deconstruction. But that does not imply that each deconstruction has to be absolutely different. That is not to say that some deconstructive practices cannot be transposed or ‘trans-lated’ into a deconstruction deconst ruction operating op erating in a different text. te xt. After all –as Julian Wolfreys Wolfreys puts it, quoting quoting Derrida–, ‘the chance of ‘deconstruction’, of a ‘deconstructive mod mode’, e’, of that ‘kind of practice’ is is in transformation, translation from ‘the same thing each time.’20 That is, even if deconstruction also cannot but remind the critic that there is nothing as a perfect translation, that something cannot be transposed into another medium or context and keep the ‘same’ (invariable) meaning or function. Bearing that in mind, it is that deconstruction could be seen has always already in ‘translation’, through what could be called its

16

Stern e’ss Philosophical Rhetoric (Berkeley: University of Cf. John Traugott, Tristram Shandy’s World: Sterne’ California Press, 1954).

17

Cf. Jacques Derrida, ‘Deconstruction and the Other’, p. 124, quoted by Julian Wolfreys, Deconstruction · Derrida, Derrida, p. 50.

18

Cf. Geoffrey Bennington, ‘X’, in Applying: to Derrida, Brannig an,, Ruth Robbins and Julian Derrida, ed. by John Brannigan Wolfreys (London: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 1-21.

19

Cf. Jacques Derrida, ‘Letter to a Japanese Friend’, trans. by David Wood and Andrew Benjamin, in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds , ed. by Peggy Kamuf (London: Harvester, 1991), p. 273.

20

Jacques Derrida, ‘The Spatial Arts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’, p. 28-29, quoted by Julian Wolfreys, Deconstruction Wolfreys, Deconstruction · Derrida , p. 90.

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influence or legacy.21 Or to borrow the title of one of Nicholas Royle’s books ‘on’ Derrida, today critics seem obliged to deconstruct ‘after’ not only Derrida and Paul de Man (still the most influential names associated with deconstruction), but ‘after’ many of those others names mentioned above. In other words, today we are obliged to deconstruct after ‘deconstruction’, understanding by ‘after’ not as if deconstruction had been a thing from a past to which we could return to or leave behind, but as ‘something’ that somehow ‘has taken place’ in the field of literary criticism criticism (though deconstruction is far from being limited to literary criticism, this is what concerns us here), that has taken place and is something still ‘to come.’22 Further Advantages and Limits By not being limited to a series of topics or procedures, deconstruction works perfectly at ease with/within a wide range of critical theories, approaches or discourses, as philosophy, literature, history, linguistics, politics, psychoanalysis, feminism, Marxism… In fact, it could be argued that there does not exist anything that could be called a pure work of deconstruction. The works of Derrida, Paul de Man and J. Hillis Miller, for example, could be located, roughly, as ‘in between’ ‘philosophy’ and ‘literature’; the deconstructive work Dissemination) could be located between of Barbara Johnson (translator of Derrida’s Dissemination) psychoanalysis and feminism; and the deconstructive work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Grammatology) could be located between post(an earlier translator of Derrida’s Of Grammatology) colonialism and feminism. And in relation some of those ‘other’ critical theories, other advantages advantages of the ‘use’ of deconstruction –as pointed out by Spivak, explaining her interest in deconstruction– could also be […] the recognition, within deconstructive practice, of provisional and intractable starting points in any investigative effort; its disclosure of complicities where a will to knowledge would create oppositions; its insistence that in disclosing complicities the critic-as-subject is herself complicit with the object of her critique; its emphasis upon “history” and upon the ethico-political as the “trace” of that complicity –the proof that we do not inhabit a clearly defined critical space free of such traces; and, finally, the acknowledgment that its own discourse can never be adequate to its example.23 However, depending of the point of view, some of those same advantages could be perceived by some critics as limitations, disadvantages, or even dangers. That is, deconstruction is sometimes perceived as an a-historical, generalized scepticism, that over21

On the ‘translation’ ‘translation ’ of deconstruction, deconstruc tion, see Julian Wolfreys, Wolfreys, Deconstruction · Derrida, Derrida, p. 30. On the transference of a legacy, see Jacques Derrida, ‘To Speculate –On “Freud”’, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond , trans. by Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 25 7-409.

22

Nicholas Royle, After Royle, After Derrida, Derrida , p. 4.

23

Deconstruction, pp. Gayatri Chakravorty S pivak, pivak, ‘Draupadi’, pp. 382-383, quoted by Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction, 224-225.

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interprets the role of marginal elements, makes everything relative, undermines all foundations (including the idea of objectivity and truth), and leads therefore to anarchy. As for the political role of deconstruction, it is well known that for some critics it is practically non-existent.24 Marginal Elements Pamela, Certainly, a reading strategy that a deconstruction could pursue through Pamela, Humphry Clinker , and Evelina and Evelina,, is by focusing on those elements that could be said to be located ‘at the margins’ of the text: things as the titles, the dating of each letter or journal entry, the signatures, the comments of the ‘editors’, etc. (Not to be confounded with the marginal as a topic. After all, Pamela, Humphry Clinker and Evelina, though figures of the marginal or ‘outcast’ in relation to their societies, as ‘protagonists’ cannot be said to constitute a marginal topic).25 The titles of our three novels, for example, are especially telling in their abbreviations ( Pamela, Pamela, Humphry Clinker , Evelina): Evelina): located at the margins of the book, in the cover (next to the author’s name), those very names designate a ‘content’ (a novel called ‘Evelina’) and a subject (a girl called ‘Evelina’). In other words, because of the title, the writing that constitutes each novel seems to be made equivalent to a character. Through this marginal figure of the title, a deconstruction could then start to deconstruct some some binary oppositions, as inside/outside, private/public, or other forms of logocentrism in relation to writing and identity, authority and authorship, property and female virginity. After all, the title could be shown to work as a membrane or hymen, that keeps apart and connects the inside and the outside (what is in the novel, and it is outside); the private (letter and diaries, as the most ‘private’ forms of writing about what is regarded as ‘private life’) and the public (by been published as novels, everyone can read them); etc.26 A deconstruction, then, does not have to restrict itself to what is acknowledged as the main concerns or themes of a text, but neither it limits itself to work with the so-called marginal. If some of Derrida’s work, for example, manifest a preference for marginal elements, that is more due to a question of strategy, not an explicit limitation imposed by ‘deconstruction’. But still, a deconstruction would certainly encourage the thinking of the marginal, supplementary, excl excluded, uded, as it could prove to be vital to the same system that apparently tries to put it aside or conceal it. As a result, such strategy cannot be said to be restricted to the marginal elements it uses as a starting points –especially since by

24

Cf. Jacques Derrida comments on the criticisms of ‘deconstructionism’ by Marxism and New Historicism, in Jacques Derrida, ‘Some Statements and Truisms about Neologisms, Newisms, Post-isms, Parasitisms, and other Small Seismisms’, trans. by Anne Tomiche, in The States of ‘Theory’: History, Art and Critical Discourse, Discourse, ed. by David Carroll (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 90; quoted by Nicholas Royle, After Royle, After Derrida , p. 38, n35.

25

For a ‘non-dec ‘non-deconstruct onstructive’ ive’ reading of the topic of marginality, marginali ty, see Julia Epstein, ‘Marginality ‘Margin ality in Frances Burney’s Novels’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth Century Novel , Novel , ed. by John Richetti (Cambridge: Cambridge, 2002), pp. 198-211.

26

Cf. Julian Wolfreys, Deconstruction Wolfreys, Deconstruction · Derrida , pp. 92, 109.

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deconstructing the marginal the critic inevitably ends deconstructing what the text supposedly proposes in relation to its ‘central’ themes. Deconstructive Criticism A deconstruction, deconstruction, then, cannot be said to deconstruct novels but certain readings of those novels. In fact, a deconstruction does not claim to deconstruct anything by itself, but to show how a text contains the deconstructions of its own readings. That does not mean, however, that deconstruction negates the possibility of ‘standard readings’ –as M. H. Abrams seems to think–, but that questions that such ‘standard reading’ could be taken as the truth of the text. 27 What a deconstruction then usually does is to follow certain textual threads in order to deconstruct a reading that could be shown as a simplification or misreading.28 In that sense, it goes without saying that a critic could also deconstruct previous deconstructions –as Paul de Man has shown through a deconstruction of one of Derrida’s deconstructions in relation to Rousseau’s Confessions. Confessions. 29 Such apparent implication of the possibility of an endless process of criticism is one of the things that troubles most critics. Not that deconstruction promotes free play, textual indeterminacy or that every reading or interpretation of a text is equally valid.30 After After all, a ll, a deconstruction cannot but point out not only that plays, like games, include strict rules and laws, but that a text, as an inscribed form, is far from escape certain determinations. That is, the marks that conform a text cannot but promote certain readings, making others practically impossible. 31 On the other hand, if all the readings promoted by a text could be said to be equally ‘valid’, how could a deconstruction promote the deconstruction of anything? Another popular criticism of deconstruction relies heavily on the supposed danger of its alternative ‘readings’, as for example the possibility of reading Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf to show that the ‘author secretly implies the opposite of what he declares ‘openly’’, showing Hitler as ‘a friend of the Jews who represses his sympat symp athies.’ hies.’32 A deconstruction, however, could hardly feel authorized to assimilate a writer to its texts.

27

ruction: A Critique (1989), p. M. H. Abrams, ‘Constructing and Deconstructing’, in Rajnath (ed.), Decon (ed.), Decon st ruction: 44, quoted by Peter Zima, Deconstruction Zima, Deconstruction and Critical Theory , p. 175.

28

Jacques Derrida, ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, Pharmacy’, Dissemination Dissemination,, pp. 69-70.

29

Cf. Paul de Man, ‘Th ‘ Thee Rhetoric of Blindness: Jacques Derrida’s Reading of Rousseau’, Blindness & Insight, Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, Criticism, 2nd ed (Cornwall: Routledge, 1996), pp. 102-141.

30

For the possible influence influe nce of Geoffrey Hartman’s Saving the Text in the popular misinterpretation of deconstruction as ‘free play’, see Nicholas Royle, After Derrida, Derrida, p. 49. But Hartman was not the only one. See also M. H. Abrams, ‘The Deconstructive Angel’, Angel’, Critical Inquiry, Inquiry , 3, 3 (1977), pp. 431-432.

31

On the question of the inscription of literature, see ‘“This Strange Institution Called Literatur e”: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’, in Jacques Derrida, Derrida, Acts of Literature, Literature, ed. by Derek Attridge (Routledge: London, 1992), p. 44.

32

Theory, p. 175. Cf. also D. Lehman, Signs of the Times: Peter V. Zima, Deconstruction and Critical Theory, Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man (London: André Deutsch, 1991), p. 238.

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But, all the same, just imagine what could have been Hitler’s reaction, and the effect on his popularity, if instead of taking his words for their ‘face value’, a deconstructive critic could have shown that he ‘secretly implies the opposite of what he declares ‘openly.’’ Wouldn’t that have been the most radical criticism, textual as political, to Hitler? On the other hand, deconstruction cannot but question the apparently inherent desire in most criticism to stand for the last word, to put a stop to any other possible critical enterprise in relation to the text interpreted; or since the history of the criticism associated with any particular text seems to question that such a thing could happen, to constitutea constitute at least a milestone in the way of a future total interpretation. Of course, such desire is hard to distinguish from a wish for truth, inherent to an ethics of reading, and therefore necessary to all criticism. Such a wish for truth is certainly not stranger to any deconstructions, but by been aware of those things that cannot but escape its acts of translation (and therefore of t of the impossibility impossibility of any mastery), mastery), a deconstruction deconstruction would be necessarily suspicious about any pretension of standing in the place of truth.33 Unfortunately, that deconstructive critics could maintain such desire for truth despite the skepticism of its fulfillment is something that most analytic philosophers (like Donald Davidson) and pragmatic critics (as Peter Zima) could hardly understand.34 Historical Contexts The quest for ‘the historical context’, though in part an understandable reaction to the simplification of what was called ‘New Criticism’, is one of the best examples of such a desire for an end to all criticism: to achieve the full meaning or truth of a novel, after which no further readings or interpretations would be necessary, after which all the rest would be merely accessory. accessory. After all, such ‘historical context’ usually usually pretends to contain not only ‘the time’ when a novel was written and published, but implicitly also to account for what the author could have really ‘meant’, as well as for the meaning(s) that the novel had for its contemporary readers (the source of truth is then shared with with the ‘original’ reader, a popular shift after ‘Reader-Response’ theories). The ‘historical context’, always taken as one, and definable, is then the new form of logocentrism: the search for an ‘origin’, a source of truth, grounded on reality (as opposed to mere speculations), to find fin d what a text ‘really mean’.35 And as such, it constitutes one of the main criticisms to deconstruction. As Peter V. V. Zima puts it, When they claim that all texts are aporetic and ultimately deconstruct themselves, the Deconstructionists tend to neglect the historical and sociological dimension of their research. For the plurality of texts and their historical contexts makes such an hypothesis […] appear rather implausible.36

33

Julian Wolfreys, Deconstruction Wolfreys, Deconstruction · Derrida , pp. 17, 190.

34

Peter V. Zima, Deconstruction Zima, Deconstruction and Critical Theory , p. 177-178, 191.

35

Cf. M. H. Abrams, ‘The Deconstructive Angel’, Critical Inquiry, Inquiry , 3, 3 (1977), 425-438.

36

Peter V. Zima, Deconstruction Zima, Deconstruction and Critical Theory , pp. 168-169.

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Deconstruction is rather skeptical about the possibility of such knowledge of the historical context and its assumed warranty of the truth of the text. If for deconstruction there is supposedly to exist nothing outside the text, that means not that one has to limit oneself to the covers of a book, but that –as Nicholas Royle points out– ‘there is nothing outside context (even though, or rather precisely because, context is non-saturable). […] there is nothing exempt from effects of textuality.’ textuality.’37 That doesn’t mean that deconstructions have to be a-historical, or against history, as some critics have put it. Derrida’s work, for example –to borrow bo rrow Nicholas Royle’s words– insists on this specificity and singularity of the time and place of a production, of a text and a reading. This historical specificity of the texts he reads: thus in Of Grammatology, Grammatology, for example, considerable energy is devoted to the (in some respects highly ‘traditional’) question of assessing when Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages might have been written. At time, written. At the same time, however, Derrida’s work is concerned with a deconstruction of classical notions of history, extending indeed to the exorbitant thought of deconstruction of meaning as such (in so far, that is to say, say, as ‘history’ is construed as ‘the history of meaning’).38 What a deconstruction would not do is to rely on ready-made concepts of history as source of truth or political commitment. A deconstruction, then, does not have to ignore the ‘historical context’ of our three novels. On the contrary, it’s it’s practically obliged to take take them into consideration. But what it would not do is to rely on any of those ‘contexts’ as a proved Humphry Clinker that Clinker that tend to source of truth. In relation, for example, to those readings of Humphry reduce Smollett’s novel to a ‘mirror’ ‘mirror ’ of history, history, a deconstruction would necessarily have to question the assumptions involved in its supposed representation of history.39 That, obviously, obviously, would also have to take into consideration question relating to writing, memory, ‘formal realism’ and objectivity; confronting, for example, statements like Ian Watt’s on Richardson’s lack of objectivity towards Pamela towards Pamela,, as where ‘the most serious objections to his novel arise,’ and John Richetti’s on Evelina’s ‘revealing neutral and even objective perspective.’40 That is, despite critics like Terry Eagleton, who would prefer to wave such

37

Nicholas Royle, After Royle, After Derrida, Derrida , p. 21. See also Jacques Derrida, ‘Biodegradables: Seven Diary Fragments’, trans. by Peggy Kamuf, Critical Inquiry, Inquiry , 15, 4 (1989), p. 841.

38

Nicholas Royle, After Royle, After Derrida , p. 26. Unless otherwise stated, all italics are the author’s.

39

Smollet , ed. by Cf. Paul-Gabriel Boucé, ‘The Representation Representa tion of the Real’, in Modern Critical Views: Tobias Smollet , Harold Bloom (New York: York: Chelsea, 1987), pp. 95-117; Michael Rosenblum, ‘Smollet’s ‘Smollet’s Humphry Clinker ’, ’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth Century Novel , Novel , ed. by John Richetti (Cambridge: Cambridge, 2002), pp. 175-197; John J. Richetti, ‘Smollett: Resentment, Knowledge, and Action’, The English Novel in History 1700-1780 (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 162-195.

40

Cf. John J. Richetti, ‘Women Novelists and the Transformation of Fiction’, The English Novel in History 1700-1780, 1700-1780, p. 219; Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Harmondsworth Novel (Harmondsworth:: Penguin, 1985), p. 193.

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questions saying to be interested more in what the novels ‘do’ (politically) than in what they ‘mirror’ –especially since he also assumes a novel as ‘the true history’ of something.41 The Death and Future of Deconstruction That there could have been a fashion of deconstruction, between 1970s and early 1980s, does not make deconstruction just a death fashion today. Such too easily assumed death of deconstruction could be partially contested by an evident increase, since the 1990’s, in the publishing of books related to deconstruction and/or Derrida’s work. Some of them, however, by trying to dissect, expose, define and ossify ‘deconstruction’ into a practice that could be easily recognized, they also threat it with the possibility of its death. But, at the same time, those publications could also be said to be opening up the compass of ‘deconstruction’s ‘deconstruction’s influence.’ In that sense, then, the future of ‘deconstruction’ could be said it is still to come, and as we have seen, we still cannot claim to have started to experience its limits.

Hugo Blumenthal London, 2006

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41

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Filmography Dick, Kirby and Amy Ziering Kofman, Derrida Kofman, Derrida (London: ICA Projects, 2005)

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The Limits and Advantages of Deconstruction

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