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VI

A strong case for deconstructive criticism can be made, and anyone who has given careful thought to the implications of the distinction between texts of documents and texts of works could make a stronger one than any presented by the five writers in Deconstruction and Criticism.

It is remarkable that a group of critics so preoccupied with theoretical matters should have failed to include in their discussions some recognition of the difference between the stationary arts (like painting and sculpture), which use tangible media, and the sequential arts (like literature and music), which use intangible media and which can therefore be preserved only through instructions for their repetition. My comments here do not constitute a criticism of deconstruction but rather a criticism of five essays that, in their various ways, reflect some of the attitudes of deconstruction. What I hope has become clear is that the traditional concerns of textual criticism help to clarify the issues that deconstructive critics must face.

Those who have been called textual critics and those called literary critics are alike in making critical judgments about literary works. All of them must follow, explicitly or implicitly, a theory of literature, and any theory of literature must take into account the implications arising from the intangibility of the medium of literature. One may choose to be interested or uninterested in history, but one must recognize how the medium of literature requires, in either case, that textual decisions be made. Language, like the other parts of what we think of as the world we inherited, can indeed be treacherous and unaccommodating. So, for that matter, is the nervous system through which we hope to assert our existence. But whatever we attempt to express, in one medium or another, is a historical fact, a part of the record of human sentience. Even if language always subverts what we think we have to say, we persist in selecting certain words rather than others, and arranging them in one order rather than another, in our effort to communicate—or even to assert that there is not or should not be such a thing as communication.

Whenever we wish to examine an effort of this kind from the past, we are forced by the nature of verbal transmission to include in our deliberations a questioning of the accuracy of the available texts that claim to represent it, and to accept as well the consequent possibility of altering those texts. When, on the other hand, we do not wish to receive groupings of words as evidence of previous human expression, we are then not inhibited by any historical argument from altering those words or their arrangement so that they seem more pleasing or effective or interesting to us. Either way, we have to consider making alterations in what has been passed down to us; either way, there is no coherent argument for considering inherited texts as inviolable. Critics who fail to question the constitution of documentary texts cannot argue convincingly for either of these approaches, and indeed are likely to confuse the two. Deconstruction raises questions about the role of history in human discourse,

and it must therefore assess the historical status of preserved texts—the tenuous relation of the texts of artifacts to verbal communication—if it is to offer a satisfying model of human thinking.