Reading Deconstruction, Deconstructive Reading by G. Douglas Atkins (review)

BOOK REVIEWS G. DOUGLAS ATKINS. Reading Deconstruction, Deconstructive Reading. Lexington, Ky.: University of Kentucky Press, 1983. 168 p. For several years now the opponents ofdeconstruction have been hopefully claiming that deconstruction's day is over, that it has become passé, that it was a temporary trend involving a few professors at Yale and ofinterest primarily to impressionable graduate students. In their haste to close the book on deconstruction, these detractors have had to close their eyes to an everincreasing number of serious and scholarly books dealing with deconstruction . Far from diminishing, the pace at which scholarship on deconstruction is being produced has accelerated in the early 80s. G. Douglas Atkins' book, Reading Deconstruction, Deconstructive Reading, takes its place in a growing series of works which share all or some of the following aims: to introduce deconstruction, to employ its strategies for reading texts, to analyze the work of deconstruction's major practitioners, and to relate it to various aspects of philosophical, political, and religious thought. While Atkins' text may well be eclipsed by fuller accounts of deconstruction's major terms and texts — for example, recently published studies by Jonathan Culler, Vincent Leitch, and Gregory Ulmer — it is nonetheless a serious work which makes its own distinctive contributions to a growing field of inquiry. Atkins' stated purpose in this book is to provide an introduction to deconstruction which will both analyze and exemplify, thus reflecting what he sees as the both/and nature of deconstructive insight. Part one accordingly provides an exposition of certain — though not all — terms and concepts associated with deconstruction (the term dissemination is notably absent from this survey). At the same time, Atkins seeks in this section to respond to various charges made against deconstruction: those of obscurity, nihilism, and the destruction of humanistic values. Far from obstructing the quest for intelligibility and truth, Atkins claims, deconstruction, like the Bible, makes possible the "humbling recognition . . . that whatever truth is attained is not final or absolute" (x). It is in this emphasis on the connections between deconstruction and theology that Atkins' book makes perhaps its strongest contribution to current scholarship and debate on deconstruction. In addition to examining the parallels between the concerns of deconstruction and the Biblical or "Yahwist" visions, Atkins points to theological modes ofexegesis in the work of Derrida and Hartman. He analyzes J. Hillis Miller's "conversion" from Poulet's phenomenological approach to Derrida's deconstructive perspective in terms of Miller's persistent interest in the connection between 139 140Book Reviews religion and literature. Atkins' analysis ofthis "theology connection" brings to the attention of the literary scholar a growing body of work whose goal is to examine the importance of deconstruction for Biblical studies, and to develop a "deconstructive theology." Atkins' book thus brings to light an aspect of deconstruction that is not dealt with in the other general studies ofthe subject. The second part of Atkins' book is a one-chapter pivot whose intent is to move from reading deconstruction to deconstructive reading through the analysis of a deconstructive text by Vincent Leitch which, in essence, accuses J. Hillis Miller of not being fully deconstructive. Criticizing Leitch for remaining within hierarchical modes of thought by opposing theory to practice , Atkins sees Leitch's text as undoing its own declared choices and intentions . But, Atkins asserts, this situation is always present to some degree in any text, and can never be fully corrected, no matter how rigorous and careful one tries to be. Atkins' own kinds of critical lapsus — at one point he refers to Derrida as the "father of deconstruction" (65) — attest to the impossibility of complete vigilance in respect to language's capacity for betraying one's declared intentions, for perpetrating the kind of hierarchical, genealogical thinking one overtly seeks to dismantle. Indeed, Atkins speaks throughout his text of "undoing/preserving" as a gesture basic to deconstructive thought. The third and final section of Atkins' study proposes deconstructive readings of three Augustan texts: Dryden's Religio Laid, Swift's Tale ofa Tub, and Pope's Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot. Here, Atkins examines Augustan literature's little-studied interest in questions of reading, interpretation, and interpretive authority. Lucid and clearly argued, these essays...