Deconstruction

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) is generally considered the man behind this theory. His essay
entitled Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences is the origin which
started the debate which formed itself into a theory later known widely as Deconstruction.
Deconstruction is an apparent revolution against all the literary theories before itself which
promise for a unity in the literary texts. It seeks to find the differences, contradictions,
paradoxes, ambiguity and disintegration in the text. Deconstruction basically aims at proving
that a literary text is not certainly unified and it has a multitude of meanings if we try to find the
same. Therefore, sometimes, it is also called textual harassment.
In general, we read literary texts in order to establish unity and bring out a meaning based on
our entire reading. The Deconstructionist, however, reads the text just to find the fault-lines
and for proving that the text does not have any singular meaning and it be read and understood
in various ways, finding out the disassociation of ideas and discontinuity of style to prove that
the text is not a single unit and is rather made of different units of different kinds and looking
for various kinds of breaks in text to find out the possible repressed interpretations which could
be brought out of the ‘textual silence’
Peter Barry has hinted at the three levels which might be highlighted to further simplify the
process of a Deconstructive reading. He identifies the three levels as:

 Verbal
 Textual
 Linguistic
The elementary level, Verbal, is purely elementary in nature. A reader with the Deconstructive
view looks at the text leisurely to find out the obvious contradictions or paradoxes or
confusions. A Deconstructive reader would take the poem’s basic idea and question it. For
example, if you suppose the poem Paradise Lost by John Milton to be suggesting that God does
everything right and that He is just and upholds truth and righteousness, why did he create
Satan anyway? And the idea of the whole poem falls flat when we think of the poem this way.
On the Textual level, a close reading of the text is carried with minute details to find the
instances of shifts or breaks in the narrative or the continuity of the text. These shifts are of
various kinds that is time, point of view, idea, word choices, or even the technical shift such as
grammatical choices an also change from the third person to first person (speaker) or the
change in tense.
For example, if you read the part-poem, Before the World Was Made (A Woman Young and
Old, published in The Winding Stair and Other Poems, 1933), you will find a clear break in the
poem. It begins with someone decorating herself and then, after a certain time, suddenly trying
to look the face that was even before the world was made,
“I’m looking for the face I had
Before the world was made.”
And then the speaker thinks of looking at some man in a cold manner which might make that
man feel like betrayed and then suddenly the speaker remembers to hunt for the face which
was there before the world was made. So, a break is found and there is no singular idea which
is being carried in the poem by Yeats.
And the third one that Peter suggests is the Linguistic level. It concerns with finding the
instances where the author or the poet is unsure about the powers of the medium, he or she is
using that is language. For example, the instances when a poet says that no words can describe
the beauty of his beloved but actually describes her beauty in the same poem. In a nutshell, the
unconscious meaning is interpreted.