Deconstructing The Canterbury Tales: Con

Deconstructing The Canterbury Tales: Con Traugott Lawler Yale University Let me stan by acknowledging that I am a beginner at undmtand­ ing deconstruction and that I have made this beginning as a kind of reparation for aggressive ignorance. Ever since I first heard the word and gained a vague notion of what it meant, I have been instinctively opposed to it. "Blessed be alwey a lewed man, / That noght but oonly his bileve kan," my motto was-and my "bileve" consisted in historical philology, close reading, and common sense. But I have come to feel that it is immoral to reject out ofhand a method and a set ofprinciples that not only are there and will not go away but are held and used by people I admire. I realized that one cannot claim to reject deconstruction on "humanist" grounds when a good number ofone's quite human colleagues and students take it seriously. I committed myself to writing this paper as a way of forcing myself to understand the method and experiment with it. My understanding is still far from complete. It depends chiefly on a thorough reading of Robert Scholes's Textual Power, supplemented by a partial reading of Vincent Leitch's Deconstructive Criticism and Jacques Derrida's OfGrammatology. 1 I have a long way to go to understand it fully. I have purposely avoidedreading arguments against deconstruction, since I wanted both to study it without prejudice and to make a personal, not a canned,response. In this essay I shall try to present a moderate or qualified argument against applying deconstructive methods wholesale to The Canterbury Tales. I want to grant a certain usefulness, and show that usefulness, but then to show what its limits are. I may have gotten a bit 1 Robert Scholes, TextualPower: Literary Theory andthe Teaching ofEnglish (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1985); Vincent Leitch, Deconstructive Criticism: An Advanced Introduction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore, Md., and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974). 83 FIFTH INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS more caught up in the usefulness than in the limits, maybe because of my desire to make amends, more likely simply because of the excitement of doingsomething different. Nevertheless,it is the insistence on limits that is my theme. Next let me try to put into words my understanding of deconstruction, especially as it applies to literary interpretation. This is not meant to instruct anybody, but simply to make my own understanding clear. I think of deconstruction as a way of analyzing any system or member of a system. As applied to a text or discourse, which is a system of words and ideas, it is the process of revealing how far it "constructs" its object, how it is not referential, not a mimetic representation of reality, but a "construct" made in part by the "subject" or author, in part by the language and cultural categories he inherits. Its major principle is that language is not referential, or at best is imperfectly so; a corollary of that principle is that "difference" or differentiation is a function of the mind, or of language, not of reality. Reality is seamless, or at least more seamless than our thoughts about it are, and therefore anydifferentiation is likely to be aviolence on, or "appropria­ tion of," reality. Binary oppositions, the most characteristic mode of West­ ern thought, are, in Scholes's words, "the most basic and most violent acts of differentiation."2 An obvious example is gender: though the difference between men and women is real enough, our language and our cultural habits require us to differentiate between them in thousands of situations where no real need to do so exists. Thus a major way to deconstruct a text is to reveal its constitutive polar oppositions, the fundamental dichotomies that it is constructed around and from which its apparent meanings flow. This is to lay bare the special violence it imposes on reality. It is important to note that the author does not intend such violence, indeed does not recognize the poles in his own thinking, or embedded in the language. One "deconstructs" these oppositions by showing how...