The text deconstructs itself but you can't

Derrida, deconstruction, and the responsibility of thought.

I have been reading Derrida. I just finished his Of Grammatology and Geschlecht III. I say this to say that the idea of deconstruction has been in mind.

Deconstruction is the deconstructing of the antagonisms within a text. In Of Grammatology, Derrida writes repeatedly that “the text deconstructs itself”. The text deconstructs its own antagonisms. Derrida refers to the antagoniser as the “inside” of a text; the antagonised as the “outside” of a text. For Derrida, the author will always declare this antagonism. Yet, they will always describe something else. The text itself will always describe the “eruption of the outside within the inside”, despite the declared intentions of the author. This “eruption” is “described, though not declared”. This eruption is the text deconstructing itself. Derrida is only there to “measure this gap between the description and the declaration”.

Deconstruction was in mind when writing my last piece. There, I declared a certain task as a port of entry into writing. In writing, once I felt my declared task straining, I let go, not wanting to hold back the eruption. But, I let go a bit too briskly. A bit too eagerly. And, that - that is everything.

Deconstruction:

I wanted to read a 21st century novel. I had never read one before. I had avoided them for reasons which led me to believe that a 21st century novel wouldn’t be any good. In my piece, I told of a suspicion which had steadily arisen: what if I was wrong?

In deciding to read a 21st century novel, I was interrogating the relationship between the world-as-I-understand-it and the world as it actually is. I promptly declared that, if I were to discover that these were two different worlds, I’d be happier for it.

“This suspicion is a build up, waiting for a release. A release, for the record, I’d be merry for. It would bring with it the magical realisation that the world is more complex than I had thought. I’d discover that something of the world had hid itself behind the curtains of my feeling (thought), and, in pulling them away, my world would be richer for it.”

This, was what I declared.

I began my engagement with Paula Hawkins’ the Girl on the Train (2015) by attempting to carry out the task as it had been set up. I approached the novel as a 21st century novel. I approached as a reader virgin to that which I approached. I approached from a distance, a critical distance, a distance so as to genuinely make an approach. I approached as someone coming from far, as a foreigner who “might notice things others are profoundly used to, and hence would no longer notice.”

And, my approach led to very little. Not nothing, indeed, distinctly something, but precisely no more than that. The sky did not part and the fate of 21st century literature was not decided. Instead, my approach led to a laboured point, exhausted, not (only) by way of a finicky presentation, but by the task it had been asked to fulfil. I experienced this exhaustion as an “eruption”. So, I let go pronto, as the text deconstructed itself.

My piece ended by indicating one eruption site. Twice I discussed the emotion of suspicion. First, it was my own suspicion as presented above. The suspicion that the world-as-I-understand-it could be different than how the world actually is. There, I said that if this suspicion were confirmed, I’d be happier for it.

Second, the suspicion of the impersonal reader who otherwise enjoyed the Girl on the Train. In reading a book that professed to expose the dark underbelly of contemporary society, that instead exposed nothing that the reader wasn’t already familiar with, I claimed that the reader’s enjoyment was really the reassurance that, after all, there were no unknown horrors. The suspicion of a genuine dark underbelly unbeknownst to the reader would be quieted. Here, the suspicion that the world-as-one-understands-it might be different than the actual world is a suspicion one doesn’t want confirmed.

In Geschlecht III Derrida wonders if the author must always, in some way, be speaking of themself. “This is not a criticism in my view. It is in no doubt the condition of every situation.” Every situation, mine too. I declared that I’d be happy to have my suspicion confirmed, but, in writing the other, I wrote of myself, and I described dread, horror.

The responsibility of thought:

Derrida said that his task was merely that of “[measuring] this gap between the description and the declaration”. The text, after all, deconstructs itself. My own actions, however, took a different shape, a more complicated one. I began as the author, the one whose descriptions fail to correspond to what had been declared. And then, suddenly, conscious of this, I jumped ship. I became the critic, and began measuring the gap. Why did I jump ship, and why then?

I ask this question to problematise the explanation implicit in my last piece. The implicit explanation would be of the form: I somehow, to borrow from Kant, awoke from my dogmatic slumber, and, to borrow from Nietzsche, followed my will to truth to the side of the deconstructing critic, away from authorship. One of the problems with this implicit explanation is that it cannot explain why I jumped ship when I did. Like the prisoner in Socrates’ cave analogy, I suddenly found myself freed from my chains, free to make the ascent towards truth. The implicit explanation cannot explain why I left the cave when I did because it cannot explain how my shackles came undone.

So, why did I jump ship when I did? I want to return to the idea of suspected horror. In my piece, this was only written through projection. It was the impersonal reader of the Girl on the Train who, deep down, suspected horror (and was hence reassured by the familiarity of the novel’s contents). In the last section, I mentioned Derrida’s discussion of authorial projection in Geschlecht III. There, Derrida claimed that one is, somehow, always writing of themself. This can explain the observed structural affinity between the reader’s suspicion and my own. More than that, it encourages us to think the reader’s suspected horror as my own. That, faced with the prospect of the world-as-I-understand-it differing from the world as it actually is, I suspected horror.

One way of colouring this in would be to call my bluff when I wrote that the possible difference between the two worlds would bring happiness to me. I won’t pursue this path, but it is open for you to pursue. I’m not pursuing it because I genuinely felt excitement at said prospect (I refer here to Derrida’s writing on the practice of erasure). The path I want to pursue in colouring in trusts my excitement.

The impersonal reader was said to take pleasure in reading the Girl on the Train. Previously, I suggested that this was the feeling of reassurance that the book didn’t contain the horror they suspected. So, on one side of the coin, the reader felt pleasure, and on the other, horror. I wrote this of the other, the other written as myself, written as a two sided coin. So, on one side I felt excitement at the promise of pleasure. On the other, I felt the fear that the horror I suspected would be confirmed. The horror? That the world actually was how I understood it to be.

This conclusion was sought after as an explanation for why I abandoned the role of the author and took up, enthusiastically, the role of the deconstructing critic. The conclusion: I did so to flee the prospect of confirming the suspicion of horror. By deconstructing, I sought to rid myself of my fear. But, in doing so, I forsake my thought. I did not live up to the responsibility of thought. It was precisely this responsibility which I sought refuge from. The responsibility of bearing the thought of horror. Bearing, or a carrying, a supporting, a birthing, a grounding. One bears a weight, one bears a burden, one bears a responsibility. One is the ground of the responsibility that is felt as a burden. In deconstructing I sought to show that the author was groundless, to deconstruct the ground of the responsibility of the author’s thought. To make the ground groundless. To make the ground not ground. The ground that one is. Or the ground that I am, my being (bearing) the ground of the responsibility of my thought. Maybe this is what Heidegger means when he says that we flee in the face of our dasein. But I was most definitely fleeing.

It was a friend that pointed this out to me. I never even gave a reason why the 21st century couldn’t write a good book.

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None of this is to say that I was indeed right but simply afraid of how right I was. Or, you decide? I, for one, wouldn’t like to think it that. Nor do I wish to slander the proud house of deconstruction. I just wanted to complicate the complication I ended my last piece on, for it was far too proud and simple.

Oh, and I read a second 21st century book, Olivier Bourdeaut’s Waiting for Bojangles (2016), and cried miserably-joyously on the train.

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