SOURCE: Hill, Archibald A. “Deconstruction and Analysis of Meaning in Literature.” In Language and Cultures: Studies in Honor of Edgar C. Palomé, edited by Mohammad Ali Jazayery and Werner Winter, pp. 279-85. Berlin, Germany: Walter de Gruyter, 1988.

[In the following essay, Hill discusses Hartman's deconstructionist interpretation of selected poems and posits that deconstructionist critics confuse textual with contextual meaning.]

As an academic who has spent a good many years in teaching both literature and linguistics, and in watching and even participating in literary and linguistic analysis, I can not help being repelled by some of the recent developments in literary study. I refer to that school of litterateurs who call themselves deconstructionist, revisionist, or hermeneutical critics. The school certainly has attracted a great deal of attention, even notoriety.¹ I believe that any one who reads such manifestos of this school as Deconstruction and Criticism, or Criticism in the Wilderness, will be familiar with the two main tenets of this group. They are, first that there is no such thing as a text of a poem—only the separate, individual, and subjective texts set up in the minds of the hearers and readers. The second tenet is that all such individual textual interpretations are to be judged altogether as art forms, so that all are equally true or false, though not all are equally rich and learned.²

In what follows I shall largely confine myself to specific criticisms of lyric poetry by Gregory Hartman. This is not because I feel that Hartman is especially extreme, or indeed, wrong-headed, but because he offers detailed interpretation of the texts of a number of poems in such a fashion that they can be fully tested.

Thus in discussing Leda and the Swan, he gives an interpretation of the syntax of the lines

                                                  Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power …

What is at issue here is the identity of the word Being. It seems clear that it is a participle, referring to Leda. Yet Hartman asks the question “Who is (the) Being so caught up?” He is evidently interpreting Being as a noun, referring, not to Leda, but to an unknown.

Hartman also finds alliteration as an ornament and part of the design in the line

He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

I do not agree that there is meaningful alliteration here. The two pronouns are weakly stressed in normal pronunciation, and so would lose the initial consonant. Moreover, though helpless has a poetic strong on the first syllable, in pronunciation it has secondary stress. I thus think that the four occurrences of the letter h are not part of a design in sounds, but are simply the result of chance.

In the line

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?

he speaks of a caesural pause, before vague. Yet in my speech there is not merely one pause in the line, but three. By pause I mean the entity that by linguists of my generation was called a “single-bar juncture”. That is, terrified and vague belong to different order classes of modifiers, and thus require single bars before and after vague. The result is that both modifiers equally modify the head of the phrase, fingers. The verb which follows, push, begins a new phrase, and is thus also preceded by a single bar. It would seem that Hartman recognizes only single bars that fall near the middle of the line, like the classical caesura. One wonders how Hartman would handle the line from Shelley—An old, mad, blind, despised and dying king.

A final example of what seems to me mistaken interpretation of Leda and the Swan is in Hartman's comment on the name Agamemnon, of which he says

“Agamemnon”, similarly, is more and less than a name. It is a sound shape with a curious hum and a recursive inner structure. The m's and n's bunch together, so that “Agamemnon dead” is the climactic “And” writ large. The consequence leaves the cause behind, for who could bear that visionary knowledge, that AND? Only a nonperson, a god, or a woman metamorphosed into divine impassibility.³

The passage, as I have said, seems to me mistaken. I am, however, aware that there is some evidence that sound-symbolism exists. Experiments on vowel sounds like /iy/ and /ow/ have shown that if a random audience of speakers of English are told that one of these vowels indicates something little, they normally tend to pick /iy/ as the indication of littleness. But it is also true that this kind of symbolism does not lead very far. For instance, the meaning of the English words big and small is the exact reverse of the expected vowel qualities. Further, in the analysis of literature, sound symbolism is nearly always quite overlaid and obscured by the meanings and associations of the words. As for Agamemnon, the sounds are normal English and in normal English combinations, so that I fail to see how they can indicate a “climactic AND writ large”.

After leaving Leda and the Swan, Hartman ([Criticism in the Wilderness] 1980: 126) goes on to Emily Dickinson, and says of her all-purpose mark of punctuation, the dash—

Why does this formal mark, this hyphen with zero meaning, have intraverbal force? Perhaps because it is like the line between dates on tombstones. It may be an arbitrary sign or it may be nakedly mimetic. In any case, the decorous proposition that nature is style is radicalized: this elliptical, clipped mark evokes style as nature. That hyphen-hymen persephonates Emily. At every pause, which it institutes, it can remind us of her wish to be a bride of quietness.

It is true that here Hartman seems to realize that Emily's hyphens have the function of indicating pauses. But he is surely going to extremes when he finds in such pauses (pauses occur in all speaking and writing) an indication of a wish to be a “bride of quietness”. What they do certainly indicate is phrasal and sentence boundaries, something Hartman does not mention. That is a sentence like He spoke roughly, like a bully is different from He spoke, roughly like a bully.

I am quite aware that Hartman achieves a richness and impressiveness in his writing about literature, and that therefore his criticism has deep literary value. Thus no less a critic than Helen Vendler (1983: 163) has said of it that

If [Americans] possessed an ampler range of thought (and Hartman wants to import into our culture the Frankfurt school and the Hegelian philosophical tradition as well as a broad canon of European literature), our discourse would be deeper, fuller, and freer, too.

Yet as I have indicated, no matter that Hartman's discourse is deep, full, and free, it seems to me mistaken. I shall now try to state the source of the mistake, and trace something of its history. First of all, there are two kinds of meaning, the meaning of the sum total of the text of a discourse, poem, story, or everyday utterance, and the meaning of words considered in relation to other words like them in meaning or form, considered without relation to the contexts in which they occur.

In textual analysis, it is characteristic that words or constructions which might be ambiguous out of context, are disambiguated by the surrounding context, linguistic or extra-linguistic. Here is a typical isolated, and therefore ambiguous sentence. From where we stood, we could see a cow and her calf. One might not realize the ambiguity, but note how the meaning is changed if the total discourse runs something like this:

We climbed the cliff and looked out to sea. Two great shapes appeared in the open water. From where we stood we could see a cow and her calf.

That is cow and calf here do not refer to bovines, but to whales. If on the other hand, I consider the possible meanings of calf out of context, I would have to list at least the young of bovine species such as cows and buffaloes, the young of marine species such as whales and dolphins, and the fleshy part of the lower human leg.

In everyday discourse, the words normally occur in contexts fully known to hearer and speaker, so that the meaning is fully plain. In literary discourse, two things happen. First, the nonlinguistic context is seldom clear, and must be derived from the text itself, and second, the text is permanent, since it remains as written or printed words on the page. The normal way of interpreting, therefore, is to make a conscious study of all the possible meanings of the words in the text, and only then to decide on the total meaning. All too often, indeed, the reader of literature will lose his way in all kinds of subjective reverie. In the somewhat silly cow and calf utterance that I have used, the reader may think of all sorts of associations with cows—milk, horns, mooing, cud, barns, and hay—forgetting that these have nothing to do with whale cows and calves. In effect such a reader has indeed created a subjective text quite different from that actually given on the page.

The distinction between the two kinds of meaning, textual meaning, and noncontextual word-meaning, greatly interested the well-known linguistic scholar, Ferdinand de Saussure, who was the author of the dichotomy between langue and parole. Unfortunately de Saussure seems to have understood langue somewhat better than parole, since he outlines families of noncontextually defined words like education, training, etc., and by similarity in form, education and formation, etc. As to textual meaning, that which falls in parole, he says only that “the mind naturally discards associations that becloud the intelligibility of discourse” (Saussure [Course in General Linguistics] 1959: 126-127).

As might be expected, de Saussure has been seized on as furnishing valued confirmation of deconstructionist views of literary meaning, based altogether on the associations of individual words, not on interpretation of words as found in context. For a linguist of my particular variety, it is richly ironic that a linguistic work as well known as the Course should be interpreted as the foundation for a school of analysis that is fundamentally antilinguistic.

It should be remembered that de Saussure's work preceded the detailed work in sentence phonology of the second quarter of this century, and the rigidly nonintrospective analysis of scholars like Bloomfield. Only after it was made clear that matters such as pause, stress, and pitch in their totality, were a part of linguistic signalling, and thus part of the text, and after Bloomfieldians like the late Martin Joos put meaning onto the Bloomfieldian foundation, could linguistic interpreters make something like a coherent theory of contextual meaning. I refer here primarily to the Joosian statement that the meaning of any word in context is that possible meaning which adds least to, or changes least, the totality of the context. All other possible meanings are irrelevant to the text under examination (see Hill [Constituent and Pattern in Poetry] 1976: xi—xii et passim).

If the student relies solely on noncontextual meanings, he will be led away from any close study of the phonology, syntax, and structure of the text, to the belief stated by Bloom and Hartman that all interpretations are equally true or false. Thus Hartman has ample precedent for regarding Being in Leda not as a participle but as a noun. He also has precedent for deriving his idea of the meaning of a poem from visual rather than audible signals, as he does with Emily's use of hyphens. He, furthermore, has ample precedent for the reverie about a sound-symbolism occasioned by the name Agamemnon. He finally has precedent for something else which he does not do, though others of the deconstructionists regularly practice it. This is the use of etymology as part of the meaning of a word.⁴ Such uses of etymology are a part of what Hartman has called, in another connection, the “overloading of language”.

I believe, then, that the deconstructionists make a fundamental mistake in confusion of meaning as part of langue and as part of parole. The mistakes of specific interpretation which I have discussed seem to me to derive altogether from this basic confusion. Hartman has made an eloquent plea for uncertainty of interpretation as a valuable analogy for the uncertainty of ultimate truth. Surely there is room for this ultimate uncertainty, but it also surely should not be allowed to keep the student from making a reasonable hypothesis about the contextual meaning of poems.

Notes

1. In going through the program of a recent meeting of the MLA, I found no less than thirteen discussions, advertisements of books and the like, concerned with deconstructionist topics. No other kind of study of literature came anywhere near that number.

2. For the first of these beliefs, see this passage by Bloom (1979: 7):

   When I observe that there are no texts, but only interpretations, I am not yielding to extreme subjectivism, nor am I necessarily expounding any particular theory of textuality … Emerson made my observation before me, in many contexts, and many others had made it before him.

   For the second belief, see Hartman (1980: 282):

   On every side there is a self-incriminating lust for evidence. Hermeneutics is an art that grows out of perplexity, out of finding an enigma where we expected a kerygma. Evidence fails or is disabled, and unusual or ungovernable types of interpretation come into play … No wonder some are scared witless by a mode of thinking that seems to offer no decidability, no resolution. Yet the perplexity that art arouses in careful readers is scarcely licentious. It is the reality; it is only as strange as truth.

3. The discussion of “Leda and the Swan” is found in Hartman (1980: 21-36).

4. Miller (1979: 217-253) prefaces his essay with nearly three full pages devoted to the whole set of words related etymologically to “parasite”. The etymologies are right enough, but deconstructionists sometimes employ shaky etymologies. Thus Bloom (1979: 1) states that meaning is closely related to moan. “A poem's meaning is a poem's complaint, its version of a Keats' Belle Dame, who looked as if she loved and made sweet moan.” The etymology is rejected by the OED, and Webster III says merely that “perhaps” the two words are related. In any case, I find it surprising to say that a poem, no matter how happy its tone, is moaning.

References

Bloom, Harold

1979 “The breaking of form”, in: Bloom et al. (1979), 1-37.

Bloom, Harold—Paul de Man-Jacques Derrida—Geoffrey H. Hartman—J. Hillis Miller

1979 Deconstruction and criticism (A Continuum Book) (New York: Seabury Press).

Hartmann, Geoffrey

1980 Criticism in the wilderness. The study of literature (New Haven: Yale University Press).

Hill, Archibald Anderson

1976 Constituent and pattern in poetry (Austin: University of Texas Press).

Miller, J. Hillis

1979 “The critic as host”, in: Bloom et al. (1979), 217-253.

Saussure, Ferdinand de

1959 Course in General Linguistics, edited by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye in collaboration with Albert Heidlinger, translated by Wade Baskin (New York: Philosophical Library).