Derrida’s Two Kinds of Reading

Some Background

There are a great many confusions about Jacques Derrida, the famous (or infamous) French philosopher. To some extent — and maybe to a great extent — these confusions are justified. Derrida, as you may know, had a famously difficult writing style. One of my favorite stories about that was told by the American philosopher John Searle, in an essay he wrote for The New York Review of Books. In an essay titled “The World Turned Upside Down,” Searle wrote that,

Michel Foucault [another well-known French intellectual] once characterized Derrida’s prose style to me as “obscurantisme terroriste” [terrorist obscurantism]. The text is written so obscurely that you can’t figure out exactly what the thesis is (hence “obscurantisme”) and then when one criticizes it, the author says, “Vous m’avez mal compris; vous êtes idiot” [You misunderstood me; you are stupid] (hence “terroriste”).

This somehow reminds me of the saying that a bad workman blames his tools. Likewise, a bad writer blames his readers. Perhaps this is being a little unfair to Derrida but, well, he has caused me quite a bit of pain as a reader over the years.

Anyway, in principle, the theory of deconstruction is not so hard to understand as you might think. I want to try to briefly describe the theory and method of deconstruction and illustrate it with an example from the critic J. Hillis Miller. There are a number of criticisms of deconstruction that people have made over the years, and that I might want to make, but here I mostly just want to try to explain deconstruction in a way that I find useful.

To give some background first: The term deconstruction was first given the specific philosophical meaning it has today by Derrida in his publications of 1967. If you’re not too familiar with Derrida, 1967 was the year that really put him on the map in philosophy. In that year, at the age of only 36–37, he published Of Grammatology (still maybe his most famous book), Writing and Difference, and Voice and Phenomenon (aka Speech and Phenomena).

The idea of deconstruction started to trickle into the United States at just about that time (mid-1960s). Derrida participated in a colloquium at Johns Hopkins University in 1966, which was influential in introducing American academics to continental theory. One of the academics who met Derrida at this time was the literary critic J. Hillis Miller. Miller had already started reading Derrida before this, but over the next few years they would become friends and remained friends and colleagues for the rest of their lives (if you’re interested in this, see Miller’s essay “A Profession of Faith”).

Miller was one of the first American converts to Derridean deconstruction. As far as I can gather, Miller first started mentioning Derrida and deconstruction in his publications from 1970. We can take 1970 as roughly the start of deconstructive criticism in the United States.

Deconstruction was controversial, and Miller found himself involved in some debates over the new theory and the question of literary interpretation. Another participant in these debates was M. H. Abrams, another quite well-known literary critic. Abrams was probably one of the first “traditional” American critics to try to understand deconstruction sympathetically. Abrams always remained critical of deconstruction, but he also found some things to appreciate about it. I am going to heavily rely here on Abrams’ analysis of deconstruction; but I should acknowledge that not everyone will agree with it. I also rely on a book by the Greek Derrida scholar Gerasimos Kakoliris called Derrida’s Deconstructive Double Reading. Kakoliris follows Abrams’ analysis in important ways, although Kakoliris’s engagement with Derrida is broader than Abrams’ was.

Whether Abrams and Kakoliris are correct about Derrida is hard to say. There’s a lot of room for disagreement, and Abrams and Hillis Miller disagreed sharply about the nature of deconstruction. Nevertheless, I think the analysis given by Abrams and Kakoliris gives us an interesting and useful way to think about how texts are interpreted by deconstructionists — even if there will probably never be complete agreement about what Derrida was going on about.

With that caveat out of the way, let’s talk about Derrida’s/deconstruction’s two kinds of reading, or what Abrams called Derrida’s “double-dealing” with texts.

Deconstructive Double Reading

Deconstruction is actually a two-leveled procedure or what Derrida calls a “double gesture.” Now, traditional literary criticism is also two-leveled in a sense. M. H. Abrams called the two levels of traditional criticism construing and explicating. When you construe a text you try to “mak[e] out what the sentences of a text signify, in the order in which those sentences occur” (“Construing,” p. 349). What do these sentences mean when put in this particular sequence? The poem we’ll discuss later begins with the words “A slumber did my spirit seal.” When you construe this line you want to say what it means in the context of the rest of the poem, and you want to say this “in your own words” (as your teacher used to say). Saying what it means usually involves considering the author’s intention: What do we think the author was trying to accomplish by writing this poem? Derrida calls construal a “doubling commentary,” since we’re trying, in a sense, to repeat what the author has already said but in a perhaps more obvious or ordinary way. The meaning of the line “A slumber did my spirit seal” might be construed or doubled as something like “My spirit was closed off to the world as if I were asleep.”

The second step, explication, comes after or even alongside construal. When you explicate a text you ask about its genre, its structure, its main themes or ideas, the effects the author was trying to achieve, the rhetorical figures the author uses, and so on (“Construal,” p. 349). Construal “merges” into explication. There is no “sharp boundary” between construal and explication; critics generally dance back and forth between them. This is because you need some basic construal to explicate a text, but how you explicate a text (what you think its genre or main theme is) can also affect how you interpret the meanings of its words, that is, construe it (pp. 349, 353). Construal and explication interanimate each other (to use a word favored by yet another critic, Eliseo Vivas).

Explication involves a higher degree of inference than construal. It also involves the importation of personal or professional interests. A poem or novel typically doesn’t come right out and say, “This is my most important theme” or “Now I want you to feel this way, now I want you to feel that way” or “I have a cyclical organization” or “I am a Bildungsroman.” Usually we have to figure these things out based on the evidence in the text plus our knowledge of culture and literary history and biography and things like that. These explications are added into our interpretation of the poem. The poem that we’ll talk about presently is usually explicated as being about the death of “Lucy,” who may or may not have been a real person that the poet really knew. The poem does not mention the name “Lucy,” so we can’t necessarily construe it as saying anything about Lucy. But according to other evidence we can explicate it as being what is called a “Lucy poem.” And if we make this explication it changes how we construe the poem (i.e., what we take the basic meaning of the poem to be).

So construal is “doubling” the meaning of a poem in ordinary language (bearing in mind what is known of the author’s intentions), while explication is making inferences about it based on what you know of the broader context. Construal and explication are common to most traditional modes of criticism: rhetorical, historical, biographical, formal, close reading, and so on (though close reading in theory tries to avoid explication). But deconstruction goes beyond construal/explication to a stage that can be called dissemination. Depending on how you look at it, deconstruction either adds dissemination onto the levels of construal and explication (as a kind of third stage of criticism), or it replaces explication with dissemination, or perhaps it combines itself with explication to create something more “playful” than traditional explication. The example I’ll give from Miller strikes me as an especially wide-ranging version of explication.

What exactly is dissemination? Dissemination basically “undermines” the results of traditional construal and explication. It shows how the text also means something other than what the author wanted it to mean; it shows what the text means despite the author. The purpose of dissemination is to reveal to us the ultimate instability or “undecidability” of meaning. Meaning, for Derrida, must be guaranteed by some sort of ground or foundation. But deconstruction shows that there is no such ground or foundation. Traditionally, the ground of a text’s meaning is the author’s intention; this intention determines for us what the text can mean. However, deconstruction points out that, once the text is created and circulated, it breaks free of the author’s intentions. It escapes the control of the author — if it was ever really under the author’s control in the first place, and if we can even speak of a unitary author and unitary intention (deconstruction also challenges our basic concept of authorship).

This absence of a foundation for the meaning of the text is shown by the deconstructor’s ability to disseminate the construed meaning into a series of opposite or alternative meanings. The text dissolves from a sequence of determinate meanings into a loose network of “traces” of meanings. The construed meaning is shown to be, as Miller has put it, “one strand in a complex fabric” of meanings (Theory Now and Then, p. 190).

There are a couple of things I want to point out here. The first is that deconstructionists seem to be playing with the gap between author-meaning and reader-meaning (or speaker-meaning and listener-meaning). Author-meaning comes from the fact that an author creates a text in response to a particular situation and wants, in turn, a particular kind of response or range of responses from the reader. Traditional criticism tries to figure out what the author wanted from the reader and how the author went about trying to get this response. But, even if critics could agree on the author-meaning, this meaning may be different from what readers actually understand. This difference between author-meaning and reader-meaning arises because of the special nature of the situation in which literary text and reader encounter each other.

Now, in ordinary, non-literary life, there are practical limits on how we interpret texts or utterances. In other words, there are practical consequences for understanding or misunderstanding author-meaning or speaker-meaning. When you see a street sign that says “No Parking,” there are consequences for how you interpret it. If you interpret it in a way other than what the people who put up the sign intended, you risk getting fined or having your car towed. Of course, you are technically free to interpret the street sign as a metaphysical statement that parking does not exist, or whatever, but such interpretive freedom will probably not work out well for you in the long run.

On the other hand, with a literary text, or even a philosophical treatise, there are usually no great consequences for “misunderstanding.” No lives are at stake if we get, say, Wordsworth’s intentions wrong. The reader is free to make of the text whatever she wants; it’s not like her car will get towed or her cat euthanized if she’s wrong. Now, deconstructionists try to limit the free play of interpretation to some extent by focusing on certain key words and making connections and oppositions based on those words (see Miller’s analysis of the words “thing” and “Lucy” below). But in principle there is no limit to the ways a reader can play with the meaning of a text. A deconstructive analysis could, in principle, simply go on forever.

So deconstruction would seem to exploit a gap between author-meaning and reader-meaning that arises because of the special way in which readers encounter literary text. These encounters generally do not have immediate practical consequences that enforce a particular meaning.

Secondly, I want to point out that this is different from what you find in something like Freudian or Marxist or feminist or critical-race-theory-based criticism, even though deconstruction is sometimes grouped along with these. In Freudian criticism, for example, a poem might be shown to mean not what it would be traditionally construed to mean, but as an expression of, say, the Oedipus complex. The Oedipus complex then becomes the “deeper” or “real” meaning of the poem. Or, in other types of criticism, the poem might be explicated as an expression of class struggle, or patriarchy, or white supremacy. These explications are decisions about the real meaning of the poem. A Freudian or Marxist or feminist reading tries to tell us what the poem really means according to that theory.

Not so deconstruction. In deconstruction the meaning is supposed to be left as “undecidable” rather than “decidable.” Does the poem mean what it is traditionally construed to mean? Or does it mean one of the alternative, disseminative meanings? From a deconstructive perspective it means all of these things, and it is only by an act of will or bias that the reader makes it mean one or the other. So deconstruction is different in a certain way from all other types of criticism, even those types of criticism that might seem to be politically close to it. But it’s also similar in that the results tend to be repetitive: in deconstruction, meaning always turns out to be undecidable; in feminist criticism, the text always turns out to be about gender politics or patriarchy; in Marxist criticism, the text is always about class politics or false consciousness; in Freudian criticism, the text is always about sexuality.

In short, I would say that traditional or “humanist” forms of criticism try to find out what is special or unique about a literary text: What makes this text different from all other texts, and how does this difference come about? The newer forms of criticism (deconstruction, Freudianism, etc.) look for how “universal” features of culture or society are embedded in texts: How is linguistic indeterminacy, or class conflict, or gender bias, or sexual repression revealed by this text?

An Example

Possibly the most famous example of deconstructive double reading is found in Derrida’s Of Grammatology, which applies the procedure to Rousseau (for an analysis of this, see Kakoliris’s book). However, to keep things brief, I’m going to take a short example from J. Hillis Miller to use as an illustration. This is from an essay by Miller called “On Edge.” In this essay he illustrates deconstruction with an interpretation of Wordsworth’s poem “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal.” The poem is very short. It goes like this:

A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.

Miller begins by construing and explicating the poem. He points out who wrote the poem (Wordsworth) and the conditions under which it was written (p. 176). He points out the form of the poem with its two stanzas and a-b-a-b rhyming; he comments on the narrative of the poem with its shift from past to present as we move from stanza 1 to stanza 2, and notes that this suggests a transition from innocence to experience (“She seemed a thing … No motion has she now …”); and so on.

Regarding the main theme, Miller writes that the poem is about Wordsworth’s reaction to the death of a young woman. Miller assumes, in keeping with critical tradition, that this young woman is “Lucy” (whose identity remains unknown). He writes that

The poem expresses both eloquently restrained grief for that death and the calm of mature knowledge. Before, he was innocent. His spirit was sealed from knowledge as though he were asleep, closed in on himself. His innocence took the form of an ignorance of the fact of death. [see the lines “A slumber did my spirit seal; / I had no human fears:”] Lucy seemed so much alive, such an invulnerable vital young thing, that she could not possibly be touched by time, reach old age, and die. [see the lines “She seemed a thing that could not feel / The touch of earthly years.”] Her seeming immortality reassured the speaker of his own, and so he did not anticipate with fear his own death. He had no human fears. To be human is to be mortal, and the most specifically human fear, it may be, is the fear of death. (pp. 177–78)

Miller further explicates this by drawing on facts from Wordsworth’s biography (p. 178).

So far we are on the traditional levels of construal and explication. At about this point, however, Miller starts to disseminate the meaning of the poem; we enter the specifically deconstructive phase.

Miller begins his dissemination by focusing on the word “thing” in the first stanza: “She seemed a thing that could not feel.” A casual reader might not attach any special significance to this word. But Miller points out some different meanings of the word “thing.” A person who has died can be considered a “thing” in a sense, as opposed to a living creature. But we also use it in phrases like “pretty young thing” to describe a young woman. In the first stanza, while Lucy is apparently still alive and innocent, she is a “young thing”; in the second stanza, after she has died, she is a thing like an object and is compared (by Wordsworth) to rocks and stones and trees.

Then Miller brings Heidegger into the analysis in order to say more about the nature of “thing.” This is surprising from the perspective of traditional criticism, as there is not much connection between Wordsworth and Heidegger. But deconstruction encourages us to make far-flung connections in order to play with or open up meaning.

Then the analysis takes another turn, and we are given a reading of the poem as, in Miller’s words, “an obscure sexual drama” (p. 180). I find this indeed obscure. The sexual drama has something to do with Lucy being both sexually penetrated and virginal at her death (which is related to the line “The touch of earthly years” as well as to Wordsworth’s anthropomorphic view of nature), and it has something to do with the speaker of the poem being “the displaced representative of both the penetrated and the penetrator, of both Lucy herself and of her unravishing ravisher, nature or death” (p. 182).

And what about the identity of “Lucy”? Whatever else Lucy may be (and again the name does not appear in the poem), she is also, Miller tells us, Wordsworth’s mother, who died when Wordsworth was eight. The poem is then also an interpretation of Wordsworth’s mother’s death using the old trope of the lost sun (Lucy means “light”). But light is also logos, the “fount of meaning,” and so the loss of Lucy/mother is the loss of the logos or meaning itself (p. 183). And this is apparently “the drama of all Wordsworth’s poetry” according to Miller (p. 184). Without the logos, of course, the meanings of the words are unstable and become contradictory.

Luckily, this is about where Miller’s analysis ends. We have arrived at various contradictions. Of those I have mentioned, we have “thing” (woman) vs. “thing” (inanimate object) and “sexually experienced” vs. “virginal”; we have “Lucy” (mother) vs. “Lucy” (light) vs. “Lucy” (logos). As Miller writes, “The reader is caught in an unstillable oscillation unsatisfying to the mind and incapable of being grounded in anything outside the activity of the poem itself” (p. 182).

And what is the ordinary lover of literature to make of all this? Personally, I find that my appreciation for this form of criticism really depends on my mood. Sometimes I find it amusing and stimulating, at other times tedious and exhausting. I think whether you will enjoy this kind of meaning dissemination or “over-reading” (as Abrams sometimes calls it) will depend on your personality and maybe even your mood at the time. Aside from these personal issues, there are a number of philosophical arguments against the deconstructive procedure. Perhaps I’ll address criticisms of deconstruction another time.

Hopefully, though, this gives you a taste of the deconstructive method (if you’re not already familiar with it) and brings this esoteric topic down to earth just a bit. Basically, then, deconstruction is a kind of double reading. The first reading establishes the meaning of the text using traditional methods (oriented toward author-meaning); the second reading shows how this traditional meaning opens out into a network of conflicting (“aporetic,” as they say) and undecidable meanings.

References

Abrams, M. H. “Construing and Deconstructing” (1986). Collected with Abrams’ other essay on deconstruction in Doing Things with Texts (1989).

Kakoliris, Gerasimos. Derrida’s Deconstructive Double Reading: The Case of Rousseau (2022).

Miller, J. Hillis. “On Edge: The Crossways of Contemporary Criticism” (1979). Collected in Theory Now and Then (1991); also available here.