Deconstruction notes

Deconstruction

Il y a toujours un qui baise et un qui tend la joue.

Il n’y a pas hors de texte.

Some ways that deconstruction ‘thinks’ about a text: 1) examining binaries or oppositions (if the concept of love is being discussed in a text, the concept of hate is often lurking there for the reader keen enough to see it); the concept of absence (what is present in the text is important; but what is left out or marginalized in the text is often extremely important and interesting); the concept of privilege (whose narrative or ideology is given special standing in the text, whose is shunted aside); the concept of trace (if some idea or concept is not discussed or is left to the side, how does it leave a trace or mark in the text).


Opening paragraph:

Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. They were coming toward where the flag was and I was along the fence. Luster was hunting in the grass by the flower tree. They took the flag out, and they were hitting. Then they put the flag back and they went to the table, and he hit and the other hit. Then they went on, and I went along the fence. Luster came away from the flower tree and we went along the fence and they stopped and I looked through the fence while Luster was hunting in the grass.

Deconstructive response to the first paragraph of The Sound and the Fury:

The opening paragraph creates an opposition between nature (flower tree space, flower trees) and the manicured space of the golf course, divided by the boundary of the fence. The text clearly asks the reader to view this binary through the lens of the superiority and greater aesthetic quality of nature. The manicured space is further structured by the opposition of the “they” versus the “I” and “we” of the flower space, and is presented as the space where “hitting” takes place and flags
(as in flags of conquest) are planted.

But the text’s privileging of the flower space fails to account for the necessity of the opposition flower tree (nature)/golf course (art). The flower space is only aesthetically superior to the manicured space through its contrast to the manicured space. Thus the flower space depends upon the manicured space in the same way that the “they” of the golfers can only exist through contrast with the “I” and “we” of the flower space. The fence creates a further difficulty: it becomes an arbitrary division between the two spaces, which as we have seen are interdependent.

Luster, subsumed in the “we” and therefore voiceless, occupies the only middle space, neither nature or art; as he hunts for the golf ball in the grass, he is the link between the two. In a sense then, Luster as a black man in this socially constructed sphere is trapped between nature and art and has no place to call his own. The question of absence and presence is further problematized here: Luster leaves his mark or trace in each of the two worlds but is only partially present in either; Benjy by contrast represents, as the result of his disability, a presence that is a pure absence.