How to Deconstruct a Text

This blog is written as a response to a task assigned by Dilip Barad sir, Department of English MKBU. In this blog there is brief introduction of Derridean deconstruction theory. 

Deconstruction Theory is given by Jacques deridda, the theory is also known as Derridean theory. It emerged in the 1960s, and has influenced many other academic fields like history, philosophy, literature, anthropology and so on. 

It came after the theory of structuralism, which studies the structure of language and culture. Derrida critiques its rigidity and gives the concept of Deconstructionism. Mostly deconstructuralism is all about trying to find new meaning that is different from the conventional one. According to Derrida the language is free play and one can give so many meanings to the words. Deconstruction happens only from the text itself. 

The meaning of the words changes with the different context. So one can read a language in two different ways and it could be vice versa. For example this quote “The pioneers have to take arrows in their back”. If we look at this sentence that says metaphorically, one who does some good work others would try to draw him back because of jealousy. 

However If we see it historically then that is connected with American History. When colonization happened and the colonizers were enriching their boundaries in America. Native people were fighting against them to save their land with bows and arrows. So the two different meanings can be seen in a sentence. 

Let’s try to apply this theory in three different poems: 

Sonnet 18: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

By William Shakespeare

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm'd;

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;

Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, 

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Analysis:

The poem is celebrated in British culture wildly. The traditional meaning that is associated with the poem is lover expresses his lover to his beloved through comparison of summer’s day. But in the deconstruction we try to look at it with different lenses. We try to find various meanings of the text from within the text. When the post-structuralist theory is applied, one has to look at it as what is the centre or main point in the poem. 

In the conventional way the centre is the lover if one looks at it differently so there are words like “I” that mean that there is also importance of the poet. It seems like there is a condition if the “I’ write the poem then and then the lover would become eternal. In another dimension if we see then there is a line “When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:” In this lion the importance is given to the poem itself. So there are various meanings that are there in the text, deconstruction theory just try to see it and find it with a new approach.

Ezra Pound’s poem ‘On a Station in the Metro’

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

Analysis: 

In the poem firstly it seems that the poem is about the contrast between nature and the modern world. If we try to look at it differently then we find different interpretations. The word “apparition” seems to suggest the anonymity of the people in the crowd,while in the second line we find the image is clear the petals are visible on the black bough. 

One can connect it with the Modernist poem and it can be connected with various other modern works of literature. One can also find the binaries of present and absent. The ghostly faces are not present and in other images petals are visible. On one side there are human beings and the other side there is nature. At the metro station there would be lots of noise that is missing ith the poem.

William Carlos William’s ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

Chickens

Analysis: 

The red wheelbarrow poem firstly seems about a farm where there is a wheelbarrow and chickens. When one deconstructs the poem then we find that the poem seems rather superficial. The wheelbarrow is used in farms that should be filthy with mud but it seems rather clean and glazed with rain water, it rather seems that the picture is not real but taken from some book. 

There only the wheelbarrow seems more colourful and neat. This image hides the real struggle of the farmer, it seems different from reality. The present in the poem says that is not present in the poem, that is reality of country life is missing from the poem. We also find the binaries of country and city life.

Words: 850

References: 

Barad, D. (2023, July 23). How to Deconstruct a Text. Bhavngar, Gujarat, India: DoEMKBU YouTube Channel. Retrieved 7 3, 2024, from https://youtu.be/JDWDIEpgMGI?si=WnmtixfH9lFYj-bJ

Ketkar, S., & Barad, D. (2012, July). Derrida and Deconstruction: Short Video Playlist. Bhavnagar, Gujarat, India: DoE-MKBU YouTube Playlist. Retrieved 7 3, 2024, from https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSmZQVxjN9_igmTIuaOKYkmb-mT3H6wDx

Pound, E. (1913, April). In a Station of a Metro. Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. Retrieved 7 3, 2024, from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/12675/in-astation-of-the-metro

Williams, W. C. (1938). The Red Wheelbarrow. In C. MacGowan (Ed.), The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Volume I, 1909-1939. New Directions Publishing Corporation. Retrieved 7 3, 2024, from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45502/the-red-wheelbarrow