The Hidden Meaning and the Inner Tale: Deconstruction and the Interpretation of Fairy Tales

According to many of the students I teach, the really important aspect of literary works is a mysterious entity called "the hidden meaning"—the central purpose of novels and poems, the ideas their writers were intending to communicate to us. Describing those ideas as "hidden" implies a bewildering paradox: that which writers want us to understand is the one thing they never actually say. If the meaning of a literary text is properly hidden, then the work might well mean almost anything—anything but what its words literally say. A poem which seems to be describing a bird in flight may be about God or death or love or war or the pain of adolescence, or it may be about some peculiar combination of all of them; the one certain fact is that it is not about a bird.

Many of my students think of meanings as being hidden simply because they haven't easily seen the ones that have been apparent to their teachers; what is actually hidden from them is not the meaning itself, but a clear explanation of how that meaning connects to and emerges from the words that signify it. The ability to provide such explanations is the essence of good communication; knowing they do in fact exist ought to persuade us of the fact that, given our knowledge of appropriate contexts for them, the meanings of literature are not hidden; texts do mean just what they say.

But then, of course, different contexts evoke different meanings from the same words. In different circumstances, the word "blue" can evoke the happiness of a cloudless day or the melancholy of a gloomy mood, and so the meanings that words are in fact able to convey in a surprisingly exact fashion may nevertheless seem different to some of us than they do to others. Because we have no choice but to understand language in terms of our own previous knowledge, meanings that may seem literal to some of us might well be hidden to others. And for that reason, there is a sense in which my students are not wrong to conceive of meanings as hidden.

Indeed, whether we are students or teachers or writers of criticism in academic journals like this one, we all tend to act as if meanings are, in an important sense, hidden. The mere fact of literary criticism, writing that purports to discuss the meaning and significance of other writing, presupposes that literature itself does not communicate clearly or successfully. That we need to provide our own words in order to tell other people what a poet's or novelist's words have communicated implies that the original words of the poem or novel have not clearly communicated what we understood them to say. Indeed, we tend to assume that our basic response to a work of literature should be an act of interpretation—that is, an attempt to see beyond the specific words we read to the meanings hidden within them. Like my students, even professional interpreters act as if the important meanings engendered by works of literature are the one thing that the words of texts themselves never say.

Detailed discussion of specific works of literature with the main purpose of describing their significant meanings has been a central aspect of literary study only in this century—it certainly wasn't a practice of critics like Dr. Johnson or Coleridge. But if Jacques Derrida is right, the idea that the significant meanings of written texts exist somewhere separate from the written words themselves is a basic concept of Western civilization.

In Of Grammatology, Derrida explores the ways in which our concepts of language depend on and imply the idea that writing itself is merely a poor container, a distorted representation both of reality and of thoughts about it. His basic purpose is to show that, if we logically explore what we know about the operations of language, we must reach the conclusion that all communication, indeed all thought, all consciousness, is a form of writing. We could not think or speak if we did...