The New Nihilism in
Literary Studies
In recent years, at least
in the United States, a new movement in criticism that calls itself
“deconstructionism” and its method “deconstruction” has not only found
adherents but has spread like wildfire through many universities and colleges:
it dominates several periodicals, such as Glyph, Boundary 2, and Diacritics,
and has elicited some twenty book-length studies1, ranging from enthusiastic
endorsement to severe condemnation. The movement is not simply another fashion
with a new vocabulary and a shift of focus but a self-proclaimed revolution
that embraces nihilism as its basic philosophy. J. Hillis Miller, its most
articulate spokesman, proclaims proudly his allegiance to nihilism, “an
inalienable alien presence within occidental metaphysics, both in poems and the
criticism of poems.”2 Nihilism is not of course the creed of bomb-throwing
revolutionary groups in Tsarist Russia nor the positivism or the naive belief
in science professed by Turgenev’s nihilist, Bazarov, in Fathers and Sons
(1861), but is rather derived from Nietzsche’s concept, which in turn comes
from the anti-Kantian polemics of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, who used and
possibly coined the term in 1799 in an open letter to Fichte in which he calls
idealism “nihilism.”3 For Nietzsche nihilism is, of course, a deplorable
symptom of the decadence of modern civilization, of pessimism a Ia Schopenhauer
that he himself was proud to have overcome. Nihilism, with the
deconstructionists, sounds more like Camus’s “absurdity of existence,” like
Sartre’s sense of Le Néant. Jacques Derrida, the influential French mentor of
the group, and the late Paul de Man, a Belgian who lived in
But
nihilism in this sense is only the philosophical background and ultimate
consequence of their literary theory and criticism with which I am here
concerned. Pronouncements such as Hillis Miller’s on the “underlying
nothingness”4 of all existence or even Paul de Man’s deeply personal statement
that “the human self has experienced the void within itself as pure
nothingness, our nothingness stated and restated by a subject that is the agent
of its own instability,”5 express the basic mood. They are only the ultimate
justification of a radical theory of literature.
It
starts with the “death of the author,” long ago formulated by Roland Barthes.
“We know,” he tells us, “that the text is not a line of words releasing a
single ‘theological’ meaning (the message of an Author-God) but a
multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original,
blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable
centers of culture.” Barthes blithely draws the consequences: “once the Author
is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile.” He recognizes
that “to give a text an Author is to impose a limit on the Text. “Thus if there
is no author, no originality, no personality, then Derrida can say “there is
nothing outside the text,”7 a statement that denies the whole perceptual life
of humanity. It is explained and defended by the theory that there is nothing
but writing (écriture) and that writing precedes speaking. Any child before his
years at school and any of the hundreds of civilizations that have no written
literature refute this. The paradox can only be defended by a verbal trick.
“Ecriture” means, in Derrida, not just writing but any system of signs, any
institution, any sense of orientation (even the distinction between left and
right) that thus precedes speech and what all others call and recognize as
writing.
If
there is no reality except an assembly of signs, writing has nothing to do with
reality; it has no reference and there is no referent. The problem of realism
and representation of reality is thus easily disposed of. As Hillis Miller puts
it, “the representative aspect as in all great art tends to dissolve before the
spectator’s recognition of the primacy of the medium in its meaninglessness.”8
What the Russian formalists called the emphasis on the medium, the
self-reflexivity of much art when they exalted Tristram Shandy as the first
novel about novel-writing, is pushed to the extreme by the deconstructionists
who argue that every word refers to another word and so ad infinitum in an
endless regression. This denial of any reference to reality has excited the
most opposition. Robert Scholes has discovered amusing examples of naming such
as “kangaroo,” first seen and named by Captain Cook in 1770, or Aphra Behn’s
story of an electric eel she saw in 1688. A. D. Nuttall, in A New Mimesis
(1984), has elaborately shown how Shakespeare represents a definite, external
historical reality subject to change in spite of all literary sources, stage
conventions, and fantastic devices.’0 All this, however, seems to me
unnecessary: the doctrine of the “prison-house of language” is manifestly
absurd. It would reduce literature to a play of words with no meaning for
people and society: it would relegate it to a musty corner of the intellectual
universe.
If
there is no author and only one endless web of text, there can be no individual
works of art set off from other works. Coherence and unity, especially organic
unity, are explicitly denied. The American New Criticism is attacked for
believing in an artifact, and the whole tradition of aesthetics descended from
Plato and Aristotle is repudiated. The deconstructionists often misinterpret
“organic” to mean a biological organism, though most adherents of organistic
aesthetics well understood that organism means not a uniform entity but a union
of conflicts or opposites as Coleridge knew.
If
there is no clearly set-off work of verbal art, there can be no difference from
any other text, historiographical, philosophical, or simply expository. Derrida
has argued, quoting Nietzsche, that truth is only “a mobile army of metaphors,
metonymies, anthropomorphisms, in short, a sum of human relations and that
therefore all philosophy is metaphorical.’2 Hayden White, in his Metahistory
(1978), has shown that the great nineteenth-century historians are in their
writings dominated by metaphors he classifies in the terms of Northrop Frye’s
theory of genres: Michelet is Romance, Ranke Comedy, Tocqueville Tragedy,
Burckhardt Satire. But instead of drawing the conclusion that philosophy and
historiography are permeated by rhetorical devices that serve conceptual or
aesthetic purposes, the deconstructionists perversely deny anything like
aesthetic experience and generalize the metaphorical nature of writing in order
to abolish the distinction between fictional writings and writings with claims
to truth, thus crippling the realm of history as incapable of representing real
events and live people and likewise depriving philosophy of the possibility of
making valid propositions. Oddly enough, with some critics, this abolition of
the distinction between imaginative literature and expository writing leads to
the reverse claim: criticism is metaphorical and just as fictional as any play
or novel. Hillis Miller says expressly that “the critic’s interpretation is
fiction, too.”3 Critics can now claim to be on a par with creative writers.
Miller has ingeniously punned on the relationship between the critic, often
called a “parasite,” and the text, the “host,” and Derrida, in several writings
has played a game of equivocations. In his Glas we get the Phenomenology of
Hegel contaminated with the Thief’s Journal by Genet and are treated to a
series of puns: Hegel is aigle, which leads to seigle, the rye field through
which the thief escapes, and then to sigle, the sign. Exalting criticism as an
art, the deconstructionists proclaim complete freedom, deny any deference to
the authority of a text or to any ideal of correct interpretation. This extreme
liberty of interpretation, the defense of misreading—called “misprision” by
Harold Bloom—is apparently one of the main attractions of the movement. It
allows arbitrariness, caprice, the display of the ego of the critic, a
battering of the object, accompanied by the satisfaction that the interpreter
is the master of the text under examination and is thus superior to it and
potentially greater than the greatest writers.
I
am aware of the conflicts in theories of interpretation and of the whole
enormous debate, which ranges from P. D. JuhI’s Interpretation (1980), which
defends the correctness of a single interpretation, to E. D. Hirsch’s Validity
in Interpretation (1967), which tries to rescue authorial intention and the
prescription of genre, to the “fusion of horizons” propagated by Hans-Georg
Gadamer in Wahrheit und Metliode (1960) and his often unfaithful followers in
German Rezeptionsaesthetik, such as Hans-Robert Jauss. There is no time to
state here my own position, formulated long ago in Theory of Literature (1948),
except to say that if there is anything to remain of literary studies, some
kind of authority must reside in the text, something I call, with a term
derived from Husserl, a “structure of determination.” If there were none, there
would be no reason to engage any text, or even to read anything, including the
writings of the deconstructionists themselves. There are obviously wrong
interpretations, as the classroom experience of any teacher will testify, and
they can be easily exemplified by such theories that Hamlet is a woman in
disguise or a satire on King James 1.
If
there is no standard of interpretation there can be no standard of evaluation.
The ancient task of criticism, the judgment whether a piece of writing is good
or bad, is declared to be a mistaken enterprise. All texts are equal, from
pornography, detective fiction, Westerns, romances, up to the pinnacle of the
highest art, which is easily disparaged as upperclass and elitist. Leslie
Fiedler, no deconstructionist himself, in What Was Literature? (1978) has stood
the usual canon on its head and praised the lowest genres and such middling
fiction as Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind. There are good arguments for
the study of undervalued genres. Feminist criticism is engaged in a large-scale
enterprise of rehabilitation. But there is, inevitably, a gulf between great
art and real trash. Criticism, whether by silent neglect or by explicit
condemnation, has carried out the task of sifting the wheat from the chaff,
establishing a canon of works, defining the classic. This task cannot and will
not be. abandoned. Newspapers or simply conversations will do it even if
scholars and students may choose to reject it.
Up
till now I have expounded the creed of deconstructionism, which makes, I think,
preposterous claims or pushes some arguable doctrines to absurd extremes. No
self, no author, no coherent work, no relation to reality, no correct
interpretation, no distinction between art and nonart, fictional and expository
writing, no value judgment, and finally no truth, but only nothingness—these
are negations that destroy literary studies. It is a violent break with the
tradition of humanity. Fortunately, things are not that bad. The
deconstructionists constantly contradict their theories in practice. To prove this,
I shall quote examples from the two committed deconstructionists, J. Hillis
Miller and the late Paul de Man, men of wide culture and great acumen. Harold
Bloom, though he collaborated in the manifesto Deconstruction and Criticism
(1979), is no deconstructionist. He is rather a psycho-analytical critic who
could quote Stevens’s poem, “An Ordinary Evening in
The
deconstructionists, who deny the author in theory, cannot help speaking of
authors not only as necessary pointers to a body of texts, but as personalities
whose psychology, life-experience, and social situation become relevant to the
texts they analyze. The chapters on Rousseau and Proust in Paul de Man’s
Allegories of Reading (1979) are eloquent testimony to this concern. Nor is it
possible for them to avoid singling out specific works of art. Hillis Miller
discussed seven Victorian novels in Fiction and Repetition (1982) and Goethe’s
Elective Affinities (Die Wahlverwandtschaften) (though no other work of
Goethe’s).’6 Paul de Man focuses on specific poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, on
Nietzsche’s Geburt der Tragedie, and on Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloise. While they
over and over again assert the impossibility of a correct interpretation, they
actually lay claim to the correctness or at least validity of their own
readings. They get annoyed and upset when critics doubt their infallibility. In
a single essay, “Narrative and History,”7 Hillis Miller complains of critics
who have “misunderstood and misjudged” Middlemarch of George Eliot. A
commentator on Walter Benjamin is accused of “an error of interpretation,” and
a note to the English translation asserts, we are told, something
“incorrectly.” Paul de Man complained frequently of “many aberrations in the
interpretation of Rousseau.”8
Hulls
Miller is not adverse to make explicit value judgments: he calls Middlemarch a
“masterpiece,” and on the next page calls a passage “admirable” and another
“splendid.” He is “overwhelmed by the beauty” of Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften.
Miller even states, surprisingly: “I believe in the established canon of
English and American literature and the validity of the concept of privileged
texts,”2° a welcome acknowledgment that he and Paul de Man concentrate on a few
authors they recognize as great—Miller on the Victorian novelists and English
and American poets from Wordsworth to Wallace Stevens and de Man on Proust,
Nietzsche, Rousseau, and Rilke. They have a very definite, rather exclusive
taste, though they deny any aesthetic standard, just as they deny the
distinction between imaginative and expository literature. But de Man discusses
only philosophers, such as Rousseau and Nietzsche, on the borderline of
imaginative and expository literature and avoids philosophers such as Kant or
modern analytical philosophers. Actually they both try, in spite of their
theory, to set off the world of literature as imaginative fiction from
expository writing by going even beyond the claim of the self-reflexivity of
literature of the Russian formalists as formulated, for example, by Tzvetan
Todorov: “The meaning of the work lies in telling itself, its speaking of its
own existence.”2’ De Man makes this the distinguishing mark of literature: “The
criterion of literary specificity does not depend on the greater or lesser
discursiveness of the mode, but on the degree of consistent rhetoricity of
language.”22 “Rhetoricity” means here the web of tropes that is
“deconstructed”—that is, shown to contain a contradiction between the propositional
meaning or the performative language and the figural rhetoric. De Man always
concludes that there is an inescapable aporIa, the figure of speech translated
as “Doubt” in Puttenham’s Arte of English Poetry (1587) who drew on Plato’s and
Aristotle’s use of this term. Aporetikoi was a name given to the ancient
skeptics by Aulus Gellius and Diogenes Laertius.23
The
monotony and predictability of the method should work against its spread. But
the appeal is in the sense it gives of being “revolutionary,” dismantling,
destroying without any particular political commitment; their only target seems
traditional scholarship established in the literature departments of American
universities. Hillis Miller, however, insists that he is not deconstructing a text,
but that the text has deconstructed itself. “Deconstruction,” he says, “is not
a dismantling of the structure of the text, but a demonstration that it has
already dismantled itself.”24 Barbara Johnson, a younger adherent, describes
the method as a “careful teasing out of warring forces of signification within
the text.”25
I
must admire the acumen and sometimes the learning and rational rigor with which
this “teasing out” is done. However, it always comes to the same conclusion
that the text is contradictory, and even paradoxical, a result that has
persuaded a commentator, Michael Fischer, to conclude that deconstruction makes
no difference, is simply a revival of the New Criticism in its search for
paradox and irony. But the New Critics wanted to increase understanding while
deconstruct-ionists try to prove its impossibility. The New Critics could not
have arrived—to give an example from Hillis Miller’s reading of Goethe’s
Wahlvent’andtschaften—at the conclusion that “each great work of Western literature
demonstrates its self-subverting heterogeneity” and that the meaning of the
novel is “in the necessity of this contradiction.” In contrast to Walter
Benjamin’s mythic interpretation, Hillis Miller, boasting of his “literal”
(buchstäblich) reading, sees this story of marriage, passion, and adultery as
“in fact an allegory of the laws, powers, and limitations of language.”26
Similarly
Paul de Man in Allegories of Reading persecutes his writers by exposing their
contradictions, though oddly enough he preserves his admiration for them. It is
easy to refute Nietzsche’s Geburt der Tragodie and to demonstrate its
inconsistencies. I find it, however, hard to see the contradiction in Proust’s
account of the reading of the young Marcel in Combray. It can be done only by
pressing the contradiction between the coolness, tranquility, and darkness of
his room and “the shock and the animation of a torrent of activity” into which
de Man reads “heat,” as “torrent” suggests to him torride. He is more
convincing when he shows how the “messianic promise” that Rilke holds out in
Duineser Elegien is repudiated in later poems of despair and silence, though I
would shy away from his generalization that “poetry gains a maximum of
convincing power at the very moment that it abdicates any claim to truth.”27
Rousseau
is an easy game. De Man demonstrates the contradiction in the Second Discourse
between the “state of nature,” which Rousseau himself has to admit to be
fiction, and the concrete political society. He can show that in the Profession
de foi Rousseau keeps listening to the voice of conscience although he can no
longer believe it: “The text is and is not a theistic document.” But I am
puzzled when de Man completely allegorizes La Nouvelle Hélolse, though he
admits the “constraints of referential meaning.” I find the interpretation of
the well-known episode of the stolen ribbon in the Confessions forced and
far-fetched. Much is made of a single sentence: “I [Rousseau] excused myself
upon the first thing that offered itself,” an assertion that contradicts his
alleged desire for the girl Marion, whom he falsely accuses of the theft. De
Man, as always, concludes that “performative and cognitive rhetoric don’t
converge. Irony is the systematic undoing of understanding”. The systematic
undoing of understanding becomes the aim of literary studies, their destruction
not merely their deconstruction.
Admitting
the acumen of some of these readings, one cannot help reflect that a terrible
impoverishment of literary study is being propagated. It is limited to a
rhetorical analysis that does nothing else than to reveal over and over again
that there is an irreconcilable contradiction in every text that leaves one in
doubt, undecided, with the matter left for ever “undecidable”, their favorite
catchword. Literary studies would become a specialty, a new anti-aesthetic
ivory tower that would deprive literature of its human and social meaning as a
representation of reality, as stimulation, admonition and simply enjoyment. It
would scare off students who could not possibly see why they should devote
their lives to such a negative and finally futile pursuit of dismantling,
deconstructing. One can only hope that deconstruction is a passing fashion and
that literary studies will continue to explore the riches of literature in the
spirit of tolerance and positive appreciation. In recent decades the great
variety of new, and not so new, methodologies has contributed to a deeper
understanding of literature: psychoanalytical critics, students of sociology,
Marxists, structuralists, semioticians, reader-response critics, feminist
critics, comparatists, and others have in their different ways widened our
horizons. Only deconstructionism is entirely negative.
This
paper originally appeared in Aesthetics and the Literature of Ideas: Essays in
Honor of A Owen Aidridge, edited by Francois Jost, published by the
The New Nihilism in
Literary Studies
NOTES
1. Here is a chronological list of comments in book
form only. The periodical literature is even larger.
1979. Gerald Graf. Literature Against Itself: Literary
Ideas in Modern Society. 
1980.Geoffrey H. Hartman. Criticism in tile Wilderness: Tile Study of
Literature Today.
Frank Lentricchia. After the New Criticism.
1981.Jonathan Culler. The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature,
Deconstruction.
Denis Donoghue. Ferocious Alphabets.
Geoffrey H. Hartman. Saving the Text,
Literature/DerridaiPhilosophy.
Suresh Raval. Metacriticisin.
1982. Elizabeth W. Bruss. Beauti:ful Theories: Tile
Spectacle of Discourse in
Contemporary Criticism.
Jonathan Culler. On Deconstruction: Theory and
Criticism after Structuralism.
Christopher Norris. Deconstruction: They,- &
Practice.
Michael Ryan. Marxism (old Deconstruction: A Critical
Articulation.
1983. Jonathan Arac; WIad Godzich: and Wallace Martin,
eds. Tile Yale Critics:Deconstruction in
Ulrich
Horstmann. Parakritik und Dekonstruktion: Eine Einjühru,lg in den
amerikanischen Poststrukturalismus. WU rzburg:
Konigshausen & N eumann.
1984.Christopher Butler. Ill terpretation, Deconstruction, and Ideology: All
Introduction to Some Current Issues in Literary Theory.
William E. Cain. The Crisis ill Criticism: Theory,
Literature and Reform in English Studies.
Eugene Goodheart. The Skeptic Disposition in
Contemporary Criticism. Princeton:
William Ray. Literary Meaning: From Phenomenologv to
Deconstruction. Basil Blackwell.
1985.Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer, eds. Rhetoric and Form:
Dc-construction at Yale.
Michael Fischer. Does Deconstruction Make Any
Difference? Poststructuralism and the Defense of Poetry in Modern Criticism.
Floyd Merrell. Deconstruction Refrained.
Robert Scholes. Textual Power: Literary Theory and the
Teaching of English. New
Haven: Yale University Press.
2.
Critical Inquiry 3 (1977): 447.
3.
Werke, ed. E Roth and E Koppen (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft,
1980), 3 :44.
4. “Stevens’ Rock and Criticism as Cure,”
5.Blindness and Insight (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 19.
6.Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang,
1977), 146.
7.Dc Ia Grammatologie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1976), 227; (English
translation) Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).
8.Dickens Centennial Essays, ed. Nisbet Nevius and Blake Nevius (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), 150.
9.Robert Scholes, Textual Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985),
97— 101.
10.A. D. Nuttall, A New Mimesis: Shakespeare and the Representation of
Reality (London: Methuen, 1984).
II.Nietzsche,
“Uber Wahrheit und Luge im aussermoralischen Sinn,” in Werke, ed. Karl Schlechta (Munich: Hanser, 1965), 3: 314.
12.Derrida, Marges de Ia philosophic (1972), English translation in New
Literary History 6 (1974): 5—74.
13.Dickens Centennial Essays, 22.
14.Leslie Fiedler, What Was Literature? Class Culture and Mass Society (New
York:Simon and Schuster, 1982).
15.Harold Bloom, Wallace Stevens (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,
1977), 331.
16.In “A ‘Buchstabliches’ Reading of Tile Elective Affinities,” Glyph 6
(1979): 1—23.
17.In “Narrative and History,” ELH 41(1974): 455—73, quotes on 472, 462, H
463,470,471.
18.Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1979), 248.
19.In “A
‘Buchstabliches’ Reading,” 20.
20.Hillis Miller, “The Function of Rhetorical Study in the Present Time,”
ADE Bulletin, September 1979, 12.
21.Tzvetan Todorov, Littérature ci’ signification (Paris: Larousse, 1967), 49.
22.Blindness and Insight, 137.
23.See Aulus Gellius Noctes Atticae 11.5.6, and Diogenes Laertius Dc Vita
el Moribtis philosophorum 9.61ff.
24.Miller, “Stevens’ Rock and Criticism as Cure,” 34.
25.Barbara Johnson, The Critical Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1980), 5.
26.In “A ‘Buchstabliches’
27.Allegories of
28.ibid.,
147,275,245, 167,288,300,301.
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