Welcome to the topic Deconstructionist criticism! Deconstructionist criticism sends many readers and writers running for cover; partly because it is one of the most critical approaches to reading that has appeared on the scene, but also because the terminology itself presents difficulty of its own. The term “deconstruction” itself is a very complicated term which may baffle some. You are not to be blamed. Its founder, Jacques Derrida, admits that it is not yet a fully developed critical method or school or even a philosophy. Instead, “it is a strategy, some rules for reading, interpretation, and writing.” To give you a better lead on, you need to read William Blake’s poem, “The Little Black Boy.” This poem is very much appropriate for us to deconstruct due to its very mind boggling and hair splitting possibilities of its meanings. You may click here to download and read. So, what are you waiting for? Join me as we embark on this journey of Deconstructionist criticism.
Intended learning outcomes
At the completion of this topic, you should be able to:
- Explain Deconstructionist criticism;
- Deconstruct the poem, “The Little Black Boy;”
- Write a Deconstructionist criticism of your chosen literary piece.
Historical background
Deconstructionism is also known as post-structuralism, that is to say, the moments way beyond the period of structuralism. To understand what deconstruction is, let us trace its origin.
- Deconstruction aims to challenge the way Western civilization has conceived the world since Plato.
- Rene Descartes, a 17th century French philosopher, scientist and mathematician, who applied the rational, inductive methods of science to philosophy by refusing to accept the truth of anything without grounds. He began by saying, “Cogito, ergo sum.” (I think, therefore I am).
- The Cartesian approach, which elevated the importance of reason over passion, superstition, and imagination as a means of finding truth in the natural world.
- It has helped shape the thinking of the humanists, artists, and philosophers into the 21st century, providing them with conviction that they can make a better world
- Friedrich Nietzche, a German philosopher began to question the existence of “objective truth,” even declaring that “God is dead,” meaning, we can’t sustain our belief to such anymore.
Rules of Language and Deconstructionist criticism
The rules of language were developed by Ferdinand de Saussure.
- Langue – Language is made of a set of rules, known as this.
- Parole – General rules of language applied by members of a specific community.
- Signs – He depicted language as a set of signs, that came in two parts the Signifier and the Signified
- Signifier – The written and sound construction that makes up a word
- Signified – The meaning of the word.
Deconstruction looks at the ambiguities in signifiers, and states that there can be many different signified meanings for a single signifier.
Binary oppositions
- The most important part of Deconstruction.
- This literary criticism uses Binary Oppositions to look at what is not in a story.
- Of the two parts of binary oppositions, there is a dominant and the oppressed or non-dominant.
- Roland Barthes (1915-1980) – French Theorist who worked on the development of structuralism and Deconstruction.
- Vladamir Propp (1895-1970) – Russian scholar who worked on folk tales.
- Jonathan Culler (1944-Today) – Worked at Cornell University; Worked on Structuralism.
Impact on Deconstructionist criticism
- Takes away from the text because you are looking for what’s not there.
- Makes literature seem like “Word Play” (Dobie, 154)
- Humanists view it as a “wedge between life and literature” (Dobie, 155)
- Looks for the Ideologies that are in our language.
- In deconstruction the signified and the signifier are unstable, and can take on multiple meanings.
- We live in a logo centric world – We want to believe that everything is grounded.
- In Deconstruction, this is the opposite of the logo centric view.
How to do Deconstructionist criticism
- In a Deconstructive analysis you are looking to reverse the dominant and non-dominant binary oppositions.
- Giving the privileged status to the oppressed of the two Binary opposites.
- Tries to find blind spots in the literature.
- Derrida derived this method because “By deconstructing constraints, he tried to open new ways of thinking and knowing” (Dobie, 157)
Writing as Deconstructionist critic
- Look for binary oppositions and hierarchies that inform a text.
- The deconstructive critic is looking for hierarchies in which one term is privileged at the expense of the other: such as speech/writing, nature/culture, art/popular culture, depth/surface, teacher/student, center/margin, etc.
- The subordinate term can usually be shown to define, constitute, or precede the first.
- This is not simply an injunction to reverse the current or present binary opposition, which would just create another hierarchy ready for dismantling.
- Texts, like identities, include what they try to exclude. Opposites are already united (that’s why they can be opposite).
- So, read to discover the correspondence between the opposites: what is the thing that unites these binary terms?
- Study the marginal: the discarded, the denigrated, the unessential, the fragment, the subordinate term, the mistake, the frame, the absence or omission, the footnote, the supplement.
- How does this marginalia enable or call into being what is supposed to be central?
- Examine a text for the ways it undoes or undermines itself. Deconstructive readers like to read against the grain, to read a text against itself.
- Deconstructive readers are interested in errors, gaps, ironies, aporias, silences, paradoxes, shifts or breaks, contradictions, conflicts, fissures, digressions, ambiguities, puns, multiple meanings, linguistic quirks, intertextuality, repetitions, corruptions.
- Look for texts or the moments in a text when the text refers to itself.
- Here is where you’ll see texts start to unravel, to deconstruct themselves.
Sample Poems for Deconstructionist criticism
The Little Black Boy
William Blake
My mother bore me in the southern wild,
And I am black, but O! my soul is white;
White as an angel is the English child:
But I am black as if bereav’d of light.
My mother taught me underneath a tree
And sitting down before the heat of day,
She took me on her lap and kissed me,
And pointing to the east began to say.
Look on the rising sun: there God does live
And gives his light, and gives his heat away.
And flowers and trees and beasts and men receive
Comfort in morning joy in the noonday.
And we are put on earth a little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love,
And these black bodies and this sun-burnt face
Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove.
For when our souls have learn’d the heat to bear
The cloud will vanish we shall hear his voice.
Saying: come out from the grove my love & care,
And round my golden tent like lambs rejoice.
Thus did my mother say and kissed me,
And thus I say to little English boy.
When I from black and he from white cloud free,
And round the tent of God like lambs we joy:
I’ll shade him from the heat till he can bear,
To lean in joy upon our fathers knee.
And then I’ll stand and stroke his silver hair,
And be like him and he will then love me.
Deconstructionist criticism of the poem
William Blake’s “The Little Black Boy” contains several clear binary oppositions – primarily: white/black, lighted/shaded and saved/unsaved. The speaker identifies the tension between all three of these issues in the opening quatrain:
“I am black, but O! my soul is white;
White as an angel is the English child,
But I am black, as if bereav’d of light.” (2-4)
Light is clearly a privileged term as it is tied to God.
“Look on the rising sun: there God does live
and gives his light”
while shade and black are clearly non-privileged;
“these black bodies and this sunburnt face
is but a cloud, and like a shady grove.
For when our souls have learn’d the heat to bear,
The cloud will vanish” (9-10, 15-18).
Only pure souls that have learned God’s love will be saved, since only after
“our souls have learn’d the heat to bear” will “the cloud . . . vanish” so that “we shall hear [God’s] voice” inviting us to “rejoice” (17, 18, 20).
The text seems to be promoting an ideology revolving around the concept that one must “learn to bear the beams of love” so that “our souls” can “come out from the grove” (which is shaded) and join God “round [His] golden tent like lambs rejoice” (14, 17, 19, 20); only white, lighted souls will be saved.
However, the text undermines itself in multiple ways. The speaker is taught the poem’s ideological concept by his presumably black “mother” “underneath” the implied shade of “a tree” (tree’s make up “shady grove[s]” – so the truth about the soul needing to be freed from shade is learned while under shade, and the issue of color is addressed by a speaker of color (5, 16).
Furthermore, shade as a non-privileged term is undermined by the fact it is needed to
“shade [the little English boy] from the heat, till he can bear
to lean in joy upon our father’s knee” (25-26)
so in essence, both blackness and shade are necessary to save anyone (25-26). The poem cannot seem to decide that white is superior to black, as at first only black is implicated as “bereav’d of light” but later on the “white as an angel” “ little English boy” is also trapped by a “white cloud” (clouds cast shade in the poem and being black “is but a cloud” in the mother’s words) from which he must become “free” (3, 4, 16, 22, 23).
The text/speaker also seems utterly ambivalent to being saved. The final lines state that after the eponymous little black boy saves the “little English boy” that he will “stand and stroke [the boy’s] hair, / and be like him, and he will then love me” – showing the “little black boy” really simply wishes to “be like” the “white as an angel . . . English child” rather than be saved (3, 22, 26, 27). The text’s own ambivalence and contradictions pull apart its proposed ideology.
The collapsed ideology creates new implications – black and white are equal, being saved is not the ultimate goal (in the speaker’s mind) and while light seems superior, shade is a required and necessary precursor to light. The text therefore forefronts issues such as race and whether or not white is superior to black in a time period where this was a major question (in 1789) – Parliament began holding meetings regarding slavery during this time.
“The Little Black Boy”’s initial overt ideological projection collapses in on itself and creates both ambivalence in the case of being saved or light and shade and support for equality (or even superiority) of black instead of white:
the black boy is needed to “shade [the white boy] from the heat, till he can bear / to lean in joy upon our father’s knee” (25-26)
implying the black boy is vital to saving the white boy rather than vice versa.
References
- Dobie, Ann B. Theory into Practice. Wadsworth, Cengage Learning, 2012. Paperback.
- Schmidt, A.B. An Exercise in Deconstruction – William Blake’s The Little Black Boy. Posted March 14, 2015. Accessed on October 2, 2017 at https://genius.com/A-b-schmidt-an-exercise-in-deconstruction-william-blakes-the-little-black-boy-annotated