Deconstructionist

Ignoring/Denying everything you know……………

But there are no wrong answers……….

So…interpret/guess awaaayyyy.

I did not find the criticisms of this chapter to be particularly appealing, partly because they fail to take into account that we, as are our authors, are only human, and partly because they are not lacking in mumbo jumbo. Deconstruction was curious though. Its entire system of analysis is centered around tossing aside any fixed assumptions or binary operations. Deconstructionists attempt to “override their own logocentric and inherited ways of viewing a text” (Bressler 116). The peculiarity of the matter is that they also search for misspeaks, or where “the author loses control of language and says what was supposedly not meant to be said” (Bressler 117). Despite believing that meaning is an ongoing process, and there are no ‘wrong’ interpretations, the text alone should be examined.

            I am impressed at how the ideological positions of power and authority that dominate literary criticisms are challenged, so far as to argue that the author him/herself does not control a text’s interpretation. Each time a text is read, a new interpretation is discovered. The irony is that while text alone cannot posses meaning, and everything is relative to something else, a search for meaning in differences, the very human consciousness that deconstructionist insist is necessary to meaning, must be reversed and ignored in giving a text meaning. “Language is reflective, not mimetic”, if so, I should question why it shouldn’t reflect the environment my mind has absorbed (Bressler 118).

            In line with the many ideas Derrida worked to reverse is phonocentrism, or privileging speech over writing, believing that writing is a mere copy of speech (Bressler 111). It is the argument of the chicken vs. egg all over again.  Speech/ writing is a binary opposition between presence/absence of the speaker, which must be reversed (Bressler 113). Beowulf, written or told orally takes different forms, but today, at the end of the day, the text takes precedence and retains its ability to allow different meanings. If told orally, people can impose their own ideas and perspectives on the text. Neither a narrator, nor the author has that authority. The reader creates meaning with the text. As Huxely warns, “omission and simplification help us to understand- but help us to understand the wrong things; for our comprehension may be only of the abbreviator’s neat formulated notions, not of the vast, ramifying reality from which these notions have been so arbitrarily abstracted”(Huxley 235).

            To examine Brave New World in such a manner, I would set aside current world conditions and politics, and view their society in the world of the book, filling in blanks and making judgments left and right, tweaking them as I went along. Lenina is a monogamistic polygamist, then later as polygamistic monogamous or vice versa. She could be perceived as happy and contented with her soma, or miserable in her lacking existence. Everything is relative to a difference, and words are arbitrary. The word or sound of cup has no correlation to the actual item, alone, the word or sound has no significance, but coupled with the object, it does. Similarly, it could be argued that Lady Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises does not exist on her own in the context of the book, outside of the context of her relation to men.

            Despite all this carefully crafted criticism and analysis, people cannot control their minds to prevent them from taking an idea and flying with it. Our persons and mind cannot be ignored in our own thoughts, no matter the effort. I have found throughout the book, that I think in not one school of criticism but many, that they all seem to blend together. The technicalities I didn’t go into, all lend themselves to a broad summary or idea, at the end of the day, you’re just reading, so enjoy, meaning will find itself.