DECONSTRUCTION

Deconstruction involves the close reading of texts in order to demonstrate that any given text
has irreconcilably contradictory meanings, rather than being a unified, logical whole. As J. Hillis
Miller, the preeminent American deconstructor, has explained in an essay entitled "Stevens' Rock and
Criticism as Cure" (1976), "Deconstruction is not a dismantling of the structure of a text, but a
demonstration that it has already dismantled itself. Its apparently solid ground is no rock but thin air."
Deconstruction was both created and has been profoundly influenced by the French
philosopher on language Jacques Derrida. Derrida, who coined the term deconstruction, argues that in
Western culture, people tend to think and express their thoughts in terms of binary oppositions.
Something is white but not black, masculine and therefore not feminine, a cause rather than an effect.
Other common and mutually exclusive pairs include beginning/end, conscious/unconscious,
presence/absence, and speech/writing. Derrida suggests these oppositions are hierarchies in miniature,
containing one term that Western culture views as positive or superior and another considered
negative or inferior, even if only slightly so. Through deconstruction, Derrida aims to erase the
boundary between binary oppositions—and to do so in such a way that the hierarchy implied by the
oppositions is thrown into question.
Although its ultimate aim may be to criticize Western logic, deconstruction arose as a
response to structuralism and formalism. Structuralists believed that all elements of human culture,
including literature, may be understood as parts of a system of signs. Derrida did not believe that
structuralists could explain the laws governing human signification and thus provide the key to
understanding the form and meaning of everything from an African village to Greek myth to a literary
text. He also rejected the structuralist belief that texts have identifiable "centers" of meaning—a belief
structuralists shared with formalists.
Formalist critics, such as the New Critics, assume that a work of literature is a freestanding,
self-contained object whose meaning can be found in the complex network of relations between its
parts (allusions, images, rhythms, sounds, etc.). Deconstructors, by contrast, see works in terms of
their undecidability. They reject the formalist view that a work of literary art is demonstrably unified
from beginning to end, in one certain way, or that it is organized around a single center that ultimately
can be identified. As a result, deconstructors see texts as more radically heterogeneous than do
formalists. Formalists ultimately make sense of the ambiguities they find in a given text, arguing that
every ambiguity serves a definite, meaningful, and demonstrable literary function. Undecidability, by
contrast, is never reduced, let alone mastered. Though a deconstructive reading can reveal the
incompatible possibilities generated by the text, it is impossible for the reader to decide among them.
My Papa's Waltz

The whiskey on your breath

Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans

Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother's countenance
Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist

Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head

With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.

Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz”: A Deconstructionist Reading

The rhyming cadence of Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz” mimics the ordered steps of
the dance alluded to in the poem’s title. Yet this structural coherence belies the actual rough pace of
the “waltz” and the conflicting representations of father, mother, and child that the waltz exposes
within the poem. The speaker’s ambiguous recollection, an account striking for its omissions and
double entendres, generates multiple narratives that undercut his nostalgic vision of home.
The first two stanzas of the poem convey the festive tenor of the domestic scene. As if giddy
from the alcohol on his father’s breath, the narrator describes the mayhem of their “romp.” Amidst the
practical equipment of the kitchen, father and son stir up delirious chaos: as pans crashed down
around them, the narrator relates, he coolly observed his mother whose face “[c]ould not unfrown
itself.”
But the pans that “[s]lid from kitchen shelf,” mirrored in his mother’s fallen face, call
attention to other such moments of discord in the narrative. Rather than a harmonious dance, the waltz
consists of gropes and clashes: the speaker clings “like death” onto his father who, with his own
“battered” hand, proceeds to “beat time” on his son’s head. The use of the word “beat” in the closing
stanza of the poem, while directly referring to a musical “beat,” also recalls the father’s “battered”
hand, evidence of physical pain. The narrator’s role as author underscores by contrast his utter lack of
authority, his helplessness as the child in the poem. Unable to control the “waltz,” he can barely keep
up with his father’s overpowering pace: “at every step [he] missed,” he explains, his own “right ear
scraped a buckle.”
The performance of the dance, rendered always as physical threat in “My Papa’s Waltz,”
continually subverts the identities of its audience and participants. Just as the child’s father plays both
idol and aggressor, the child occupies the positions of both admirer and victim. The mother becomes
negated by the double negative of her sole description--a countenance that could “not unfrown” as she
gazes on this violent—and incestuous—site of ambiguity: the father and child, whose uncertain
gender suggests at once both son and daughter.
The ironic discrepancy in “My Papa’s Waltz” between the high-class elegance of the
traditional waltz and the drunken swagger of the father whose hands are caked with dirt emblematizes
the continually fissures between language and meaning throughout the poem. An unstable term in
itself, the “waltz” shifts from elaborate dance to figure of speech in the concluding stanza as the child
is “waltzed . . .off to bed”—a linguistic slipperiness that disavows any interpretive certainty for “My
Papa’s Waltz” as well.