Deconstruction and the Gnostics

MICHAEL H. KEEFER Deconstruction and the Gnostics I Whatever its title might lead a new reader to expect, T.S. Eliot's wellknown essay on 'Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca' is not an argument for influence, but a pre-emptive strike. Eliot wrote, in his own words, 'to disinfect the Senecan Shakespeare before he appears. My ambitions would be realized if I could prevent him, in so doing, from appearing at all.'1 It is now late in the day to entertain similar thoughts with regard to that leading trend in post-structuralist literary theory known as deconstruction. The most violently jealous of traditionalists could hardly hope to strangle in its cradle a theory and a literary practice that already stalks with Herculean strength through English departments and publishers' lists, flushing out the Augean stables of humanistic commentary, and banging on the head such primordial monsters as the belief that the knowledge of relationships does not preclude a knowledge of things, or that truth is founded upon material characteristics rather than being simply a human invention or fiction, or that there is a real world (without inverted commas) which is not simply a web of intertextuality but an objective universe to which texts can and do, indeed must, refer. It may not seem clever, in the struggle between competing literary theories which has developed over the past decade, to say that one is on the side of Antaeus, the opponent of Hercules who drew strength from his contact with the earth: one remembers how many lumps that obtuse giant took before at last being lifted up (shall we say into the thin air of formalism?) and crushed. Nor is it much comfort, amid the enthusiasm of younger critics for the new theory, to remind oneself of the radical contradictions, even incoherence, of the deconstructionist metaphysic: Antaeus was long gone by the time Hercules, in his frenzy, slaughtered all his own children. Sanguinary allegories notwithstanding, it is not the purpose of this essay to deny that deconstruction has helped to revitalize critical discourse . Deconstruction has stirred literary critics from their dogmatic slumbers - even if, all too often, into an equally dogmatic wakefulness. It has raised important and previously neglected questions about the activities of writing and textual appropriation, and, for this generation at least, UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 55, NUMBER 1, FALL 1985 DECONSTRUCTION 75 has redirected the practice of interpretation into modes that are more frequently exciting than obscurantist. To refuse the mixed pleasures and sometimes liberating insights which the writings of deconstructionist critics can bring would be both stupid and dishonest. But a supine acceptance of their more radical claims might be equally dishonest, and rather more foolish. As A.D. Nuttall writes inA New Mimesis, 'It is after all common sense to welcome a gift and to resent a theft.'2 The line of thought which I wish to develop here was set off by encounters with two texts: the book by A.D. Nuttall from which I have just quoted, and John R. Searle's hostile review ofJonathan Culler's book On Deconstruction.3 Searle is known for his work on Speech Acts and Intentionality, and Nuttall for his brilliant applications of philosophical argument to literary subjects in such books as Two Concepts ofAllegory and A Common Sky: Philosophy and the Literary Imagination. In Searle's review of Culler and in Nuttall's A New Mimesis, two powerful philosophical minds encounter the central metaphysic of deconstruction, and raise serious questions about the claims generated from it. The positions which they attack, and the arguments which they deploy against these positions, will be alluded to in this paper. But my primary concern here is with the probability, as I take it, that their refutations of the deconstructionist metaphysic will have only a marginal impact upon the continued advance of deconstruction as a literary methodology in North America. Although well aware that the cutting edge ofJacques Derrida's thought is considerably blunted in the works of his American disciples like Culler or Geoffrey Hartman, Nuttall and Searle both quite properly treat deconstruction as a philosophy of language, and engage it on that level as well as on...