The Method and Madness of Deconstructionism

Universal Pictures

Commentary

This is not a review of the movie “The Odyssey.” I’ve not seen it. But every review notes how the director Christopher Nolan relied on a translation of Homer’s epic poem by Emily Wilson, a British-American classicist, professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Appearing in 2017, her translation of Homer’s “Odyssey” was the first by a woman into English verse.

You might ask: why does the gender of the translator matter? She says it does. She is “a woman and a gender-aware feminist,” and it is from that perspective that she has corrected “unexamined biases.” At the same time, she does not want people forever to point to her womanness because no prior translator has been routinely characterized as a man.

She is going to be mad either way. So too in her translation, in which Odysseus is stripped of his valor and instead is presented as a mass murderer, a colonial invader, a pirate, thief, adulterer, a liar, and so on, themes that are reportedly reflected in the movie version (though not enough for the translator’s taste).

And yet isn’t the goal of translation merely to render the author’s intentions in a different language and in a way that preserves the spirit of the original? That’s what the hoi polloi believe.

In the academy these days, the new orthodoxy is that words like “intention” and “spirit of the original” mask unconscious bias toward a patriarchal, racist, and colonialist outlook. The only real escape is for a person of some marginalized demographic to re-render the meaning itself according to lived experience.

Yes, you can start rolling your eyes because all these incantations are really getting old and tired. It’s been the emerged and entrenched orthodoxy in the higher realms of academia now for many decades.

The school of thought here is called deconstructionism or poststructuralism. It’s the theoretical invitation to tear up the pea patch, which is much more fun than carefully curating a vegetable garden. Deconstructionism began by ruining literary criticism. It advanced toward the real goal of bowdlerizing the texts themselves, which I can only assume is what is happening here. It ends by corrupting everything it touches, including films made from the ruined texts.

Let’s march through the steps of logic, such as it is, of deconstructionism.

Step one: debunk the idea of author intention. The old-school idea was to discern what the author wanted to convey in the text. But ultimately, meaning is what the reader perceives, not what the author wrote, the theory goes. The author himself might have a meta-meaning that gets lost in bias, culture, the static of the historical moment, the need for self-censorship, and so on. The goal of genuine understanding, therefore, cannot be about discernment for meaning outside reader experience.

Stop looking for cap-T truth or cap-M meaning, says this view. Language functions as a system of inchoate signs (signifiers) that point to concepts (signifieds), but these are not anchored in a stable authorial mind. Once a text is written, it enters a “chain of différance” where meaning is endlessly postponed through relations to other signs rather than tied to an original intent. The text “lives” independently, open to contexts the author could not control. Result: Interpretation cannot be grounded in biography or declared purpose.

Step two: debunk unstable binary oppositions. With authorial intent set aside, attention shifts to how texts construct meaning via hierarchical binaries: speech/writing, presence/absence, nature/culture, male/female, art/folk, white/POC, harmony/noise, center/margin. Western thought and literature privilege one term as primary or superior while subordinating the other. These binaries are constructed within the text itself. Close reading requires revealing unstated privileges of implicit hierarchy.

Already, you are thinking: I need to un-enroll from this class! Probably you should. Or you can do what most students do, which is memorize the jargon, hate on the classics, trash all traditional understandings of everything, affect a lefty vibe, deploy some disconnected large words in random orders, and sail through this course with an A.

Step three: the subversion of hierarchies. To discern the higher messaging of text requires the inversion of privileged position such that the marginal becomes the center, the absence becomes the presence, the writing becomes the speech, the inferior becomes the superior. Only through this inversion and subversion, including the construction of intersectionality, can we perceive the actual cultural import of text. The hierarchies collapse and reveal a narrative. Even if the result is chaos, that’s fine because the author himself hid the chaos that the interpreter is obligated to put in high relief.

Step four: prevent the closure. You might think that this process creates an enormous mess that collapses into nihilism, but the theorists say no: preventing the emergence of narrative is the whole point. Closure is an artifice; there is never a conclusion or even a thesis. Storytelling is only an aimless conversation and an endlessly roiling discussion among subjective insights and observations. The result is a multiplicity of felt emotions extending from lived experiences that cannot be accessed outside the subjective mind.

Step five: debunk the author and the text entirely and present an interpretation that is wholly unrelated. Spot the contradictions. Drive a truck through them to make what is plain and obvious obscure and untenable. Tear up the text. Put it back together again. If the result doesn’t make any sense, merely observe how historically and culturally the idea of making sense is an artificial overlay in our own ghastly history. The only real escape from the prison of the past is to shred it to bits and live with the results.

This is precisely what Emily Wilson has done, according to Valerie Stivers:

“The internet is littered with admiring—and sometimes perceptive—articles claiming that Wilson’s Odyssey contextualizes it ‘within our current political climate’ or ‘engages the characters’ moral ambiguity in a more critical way.’ Wilson herself has been quoted as saying that she is ‘making visible the cracks in the patriarchal fantasy.’ Maybe so. But it’s impossible to simultaneously hold that Wilson’s translation critiques patriarchy, and that she has rendered the text faithfully, without violating the law of noncontradiction. What did Homer know of the contemporary political climate or the ‘patriarchal fantasy’? … there is something brutal about taking a classic work, rewriting it against its own grain, and then passing it off as true to the original.”

In the classroom, I’ve seen these feats performed on texts written in English for English audiences, such that a single word in a 1,000-page work operates as an invitation to debunk and reverse the plain intentions of the author and come out on the other side amidst a blizzard of babbling lunacy. It’s a pained process littered with neologisms and armloads of academic references and tripe.

The result of these fits of debunkery is always the same: the loss of meaning and the presence of confusion, as my own mentor Murray Rothbard explained when this school of thought made inroads into economics. With this method of interpretation, the critique that it strays too far from intention packs no punch because there is no meaning. But, hey, it gets you promotions and tenure, which is the whole point.

I cannot even imagine what applying this method would do for rendering an ancient text in modern vernacular. There are enough troubles with attempting such a thing, which is why there are hundreds of translations of “The Odyssey” written over hundreds of years. But when you overlay a difficult task with a cockamamie theory rooted in nihilistic ideology, you end up in places no one can recognize. And yet here we are, with a movie that reflects that very enterprise.

I guess I have to see it at some point but I dread it. Whether the movie is good or bad, I know from the underlying theory of the source text that I won’t be seeing “The Odyssey” as rational people have understood it for thousands of years.