Literal opposition: deconstruction, history, and Lancaster.

Publication: Texas Studies in Literature and Language

Publication Date: 22-MAR-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 University of Texas at Austin (University of Texas Press)

Given his mistrust of the concept of history, and history's corresponding mistrust of deconstruction, it is striking that Derrida, in defining his hallmark concepts, often employs the language of historical periodization. On differance: "I would say, first off, that differance, which is neither a word nor a concept, strategically seemed to me the most proper one to think, if not to master ... what is most irreducible about our 'era.'" (1) On logocentrism: "The epoch of logocentrism is the moment of the global effacement of the signifier." (2) To be sure, Derrida was aware of the seeming paradox, and explained that "although I have formulated many reservations about the 'metaphysical' concept of history, I very often use the word 'history' in order to reinscribe its force." (3) Still, medievalists, always acutely sensitive to the differentness of their period of study, might well be inclined to wonder about its place in the history of deconstruction, and in the deconstruction of history: Are the Middle Ages in the era of differance? Are they in the epoch of logocentrism?

From the Derridean perspective, the answer is certainly yes. Derrida insists that "there has never been anything but writing; there have never been anything but supplements, substitutive significations which could only come forth in a chain of references." (4) No historical period--not even the Middle Ages--can be conceived as a Golden Age when readers dwelt in the immediate presence of the referent, before the fall into deferred textual meaning.

Nevertheless, the question of the relationship of the Middle Ages to what Derrida calls "our 'era'" is made pertinent by the special ambivalence of medievalists for post-structuralist theory. Not so long ago, when literary critics first brought deconstruction to bear upon medieval texts, they tended to characterize the texts as complicit in their own deconstruction. Marshall Leicester, after outlining a deconstructive reading of Troilus and Criseyde, explained, "What interests me is that Chaucer seems to have anticipated such reading and to have done it himself in his own writing." (5) Just as Leicester described Chaucer as being "like Derrida," R. A. Shoaf pointed to the most explicitly semiotic passages of Le Roman de la Rose to make the same claim for Jean de Meun. (6) Such depictions of medieval poets as deconstructionists avant la lettre met with a stinging rebuke by David Aers. This vision of "Chaucer the deconstructionist," Aers maintained, "is the product of an attempt to appropriate his writing for the projects of an alien tradition." Aers declared further, "Chaucer lived before Descartes; he lived before the Enlightenment's attempt to develop a tradition-free, absolutely certain Reason with an autonomous absolutely self-present human subject; and he lived before the problems of this project were confronted by its heirs." (7)

With this exchange, medieval literary studies was confronting (belatedly, of course) the conflict between historicism and deconstruction. (8) There were real and significant differences between the two sides, and ultimately this debate has benefited the field as a whole. We should note, however, that both sides, in their own ways, viewed the Middle Ages as exceptional. The deconstructionists claimed that the Middle Ages anticipated post-structuralism, and that medieval thinkers understood the true nature of semiotics in a way that others, from the rise of the early modern through to Derrida, could not. Historicists countered that the chronological precedence of the Middle Ages makes deconstruction foreign to the entire period. In both views, the medieval period possesses an unalterable alterity, in relation to the modern era in general and in relation to deconstruction in particular.

This debate occurred, for the most part, ten to fifteen years ago, but it seems even more remote than that, because it seems largely resolved. We have all absorbed the language and much of the underlying semiotics of deconstruction. At the same time, the predominant form of medieval literary criticism is a theoretically informed historicism. In fact, Lee Patterson has claimed that this kind of critical practice achieves the merger of historicism and deconstruction. Deconstruction, Patterson observes, "is a challenge to idealism, essentialism, and transcendentalism--to all those metaphysical gestures by which Western thought has sought to avoid the historical, the material, and the social." (9) It is, therefore, essentially a form of historicism, as it reveals the oppositions at the heart of all myths of origin. It comprises "a relentless unmasking of transcendental value as historically contingent and historically constructed" (71). Patterson makes these claims by way of a deconstruction of Lancastrian ideology, a project to which many of the most prominent scholars in the field have recently contributed, most notably Paul Strohm in England's Empty Throne. (10) The attraction of this previously neglected period may be that the Lancastrian political discourse, in contrast to that of Richard II, was extremely extensive and sophisticated. The critical analysis of Lancastrian texts provides excellent opportunities to show deconstruction working through historicism rather than against it.

But what, then, of Aers's emphatic caveat: "Chaucer lived before Descartes"? Is this not still true, and are philosophical approaches fashioned in response to post-Cartesian discourse not anachronistic when applied to periods before the modern era? Can we expect to deconstruct medieval texts in the same way that Derrida deconstructs Rousseau? I hope here to contribute to the historicist project of deconstructing the Lancastrian claim, while also questioning whether such historical analysis can properly employ a transhistorical model of deconstruction.

Like Leicester in his reading of Troilus and Criseyde, what interests me about Lancastrian political texts is that they seem complicit in their own deconstruction. But whereas Leicester can claim that Chaucer anticipates deconstruction and applies its lessons to fragmenting the textual assumptions of his own poem, the same could hardly be allowed of the fifteenth-century chroniclers who were unambiguously fashioning the Lancastrian claim to power.

The semiotic construction of these political poems and histories seems to run counter to our postmodern expectations. While Patterson would extend to medieval discourse a classically Derridean hermeneutic, one that "demystif[ies] the theology of the origin" by showing "that identity is relational rather than essential," (11) many Lancastrian texts move inexorably toward what we would expect them to efface. In such texts the relational basis of identity is ever-present; indeed, it seems the very focus of textual attention. These texts define Lancastrian identity in opposition to related but recognizably different figures, rather than in an idealized and ahistorical unity. In emphasizing the oppositions at their origin, rather than obscuring that origin with perpetually deferred promises of essential identity, they employ just the types of tropes that Derrida uses to destabilize assumptions of textual meaning: puns and plays on words; unusual attention to the supplementary power of verbal prefixes; the opposition of alphabetical characters outside of their usual phonetic contexts. Neither beyond post-structuralist theory nor suited to a transhistorical model of deconstruction, Lancastrian texts evince a unique consciousness of the underlying nature of language and therefore call for a period-specific application of semiotics.

Take, for example, John Gower, an ardent partisan of Henry of Derby and one of the first to articulate the possibility of...

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