THE DECONSTRUCTIVE ANGEL--M.H.ABRAMS

THE DECONSTRUCTIVE ANGEL

M.H.ABRAMS

Critical summary by Dr. S. Sreekumar for students of Indian Universities

[The PAPER is closely linked to ‘The Critic as Host’ by J. Hillis Miller, the summary of which is available in this blogspot]

M.H.Abrams——a brief biography

Meyer Howard Abrams (M.H. Abrams) was an American literary critic known for his works on English Romanticism. He was also the editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature.  

Abrams was born on July 23, 1912, in New Jersey as the son of East European Jewish immigrants. He was the first in his family to go to college. He entered Harvard University as an undergraduate in 1930. After earning his bachelor’s degree, Abrams won a Henry Fellowship to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where his tutor was I. A. Richards. He returned to Harvard for graduate school and received a master's degree and a Ph.D.

In 1945 Abrams became a professor at Cornell University. The literary critics Harold Bloom, Gayatri Spivak and E. D. Hirsch, and the novelists William H. Gass and Thomas Pynchon were among his students.

The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded Abrams the National Humanities Medal in 2013 “for expanding our perceptions of the Romantic tradition and broadening the study of literature.” President Obama presented the medal at a ceremony at the White House.

Abrams died on April 21, 2015 in Ithaca, New York, at the age of 102.

Major Works

The Mirror and the Lamp

It was published in 1953. In 1998, Modern Library ranked the book as one of the 100 greatest English-language non-fiction books of the 20^th century.  In it, Abrams shows that until the Romantics, literature was typically understood ‘as a mirror reflecting the real world in some kind of mimesis’.  But for the Romantics, ‘writing was more like a lamp: the light of the writer's inner soul spilled out to illuminate the world’.  In a 2011 interview, the literary scholar Harold Bloom, who studied with Professor Abrams as an undergraduate, said that The Mirror and the Lamp was “a remarkable piece of critical and literary history that describes the transition from mimetic theories of representation to Romantic ideas of creation — what one might call mystical or visionary theories.”

The Norton Anthology of English Literature

Abrams was the general editor (first seven editions) of The Norton Anthology, a ‘virtual Bible in literature survey courses’.  Throughout the anthology, Abrams insisted on informative and authoritative introductions, while providing explanatory footnotes targeted at the undergraduate level. More than 8 million copies of the anthology had been printed by 2006, when the eighth edition came out.

A Glossary of Literary Terms (1957)

M.H. Abrams is more familiar to Indian students as the author of this standard book for undergraduates. The book has gone through several editions and is still being reprinted almost every year.

The Milk of Paradise: The Effects of Opium Visions on the Works of De Quincy, Crabbe, Francis Thompson, and Coleridge,  The Fourth Dimension of a Poem, and Other Essays,  The Correspondent Breeze, and  Natural Supernaturalism  are his other major works.

COMMENTS OF DAVID LODGE ON ‘The Deconstructive Angel’

  This paper was originally delivered at a session of the Modern Language Association (MLA) in December 1976. The session held under the chairmanship of Sheldon Sacks brought Abrams, Hillis Miller and Wayne Booth together. All of them had participated in the debate on the theoretical and methodological implications of Natural Supernaturalism under the general heading of ‘The Limits of Pluralism’. Their papers were subsequently published in Critical Inquiry 3 (1977). Abrams’s contribution, ‘The Deconstructive Angel’, is ‘both a lucid exposition of the deconstructionist theory of discourse’, and ‘a trenchant attack on it from the standpoint of traditional humanist scholarship’.

Abrams’s most telling argument is perhaps his claim that, in their own discursive practices, deconstructionists rely on the communicative power of language which they theoretically deny.

The deconstructionists’ reply is that such paradoxes and contradictions are to be found everywhere in language as soon as one probes beneath its surface.

DETAILED SUMMARY WITH NOTES AND COMMENTS

Introduction

At the outset Abrams explains the ‘origin’ of the paper. He had published a book, Natural Supernaturalism and consequently there was a dialogue between him and Wayne Booth [American critic whose The Rhetoric of Fiction is a ‘must read’ for Literature students. The summary of an extract from the book is given in this BlogSpot] regarding the historical procedures adopted in the book. J. Hillis Miller wrote a review of the book and was drawn into the dialogue.

The Issue raised by Miller

Earlier, Abrams had agreed with Wayne Booth that pluralism (diverse points of view on a subject, with diverse results) is necessary to the understanding of literary and cultural history. Convergence of diverse points of view is the only way to achieve depth in vision.

However, Abrams believes that Miller’s principles of deconstructive interpretation go beyond the limits of pluralism making literary and cultural history impossible. Abrams says that Miller’s principles question the validity of the premises and procedures of traditional inquiries in the human sciences.

Premises of traditional historians

Abrams then points out some of the premises (a proposition supposed or proved/ a fundamental concept) he shares with traditional historians. Miller tries to subvert these premises.

1. Basic materials of history are written texts. The authors of these texts exploited the possibilities and norms of their language to say something determinate. They assumed that competent readers who shared their own linguistic skills would be able to understand what they said.

2. The historian interprets not only what the passages mean ‘now’ but also what they meant when they were written. He interprets using his own language and also the language of the author. This interpretation ‘approximates, closely enough for the purpose at hand’, what the author meant.

3. The historian presents this interpretation to the public with the hope that the expert reader’s interpretation would approximate his own. The author knows that some of his interpretations will turn out to be false. But such errors will not seriously affect the soundness of his overall history. However, ‘if the bulk of his interpretations are misreading, his book is not to be accounted a history but an historical fiction’. 

Abrams’s views on language

Miller had stated:

“A literary or philosophical text, for Abrams, has a single unequivocal meaning “corresponding” to the various entities it “represents” in a more or less straightforward mirroring”.

Abrams wonders: ‘I don’t know how I gave Miller the impression that my ‘theory of language is implicitly mimetic,’ a straightforward mirror’ of the reality it reflects’. Miller would have assumed, says Abrams, that ‘all views of language which are not in the deconstructive mode are mimetic views’.

Abrams’ views on language are ‘by and large functional and pragmatic: language, whether spoken or written, is the use of a great variety of speech-acts to accomplish a great diversity of human purposes’.

The root of Abrams’ disagreement with Miller

Abrams admits that many of the passages he had cited ‘are equivocal and multiplex in meaning’. But he can claim like any traditional historian that he meant [‘at a sufficient approximation’] at least ‘this’ [the meaning conveyed by the present sentence]. The ‘this’ is sufficient to the story he undertakes to tell.  Other historians who want to tell different stories may interpret different aspects of the meanings in the same passage.

However, that is not the root of disagreement with Miller. Miller’s central argument is not simply that Abrams has wrong interpretation, but instead that Abrams can never be right in his interpretation. He said that because he had agreed with Nietzsche’s challenge of ‘the concept of ‘rightness in interpretation,’ and with Nietzsche’s assertion that ‘the same text authorizes innumerable interpretations. Since there are numerous interpretations, there is no “correct” interpretation. According to Miller, Nietzsche’s views of interpretation are relevant to the deconstructive theorists who have ‘reinterpreted Nietzsche’ or have written directly or indirectly under his guidance.

After this fairly long introductory note, Abrams comes to the main paper, which he has divided into three parts:

1

Derrida subordinates all inquiries into an initial inquiry into language. Like other French structuralists, he shifts his inquiry from language to écriture, the written or printed text, and he ‘conceives a text in an extraordinarily limited fashion’.

Derrida’s views on language

Derrida’s initial method is to challenge the traditional views on language. He gives priority to writing over speech. According to him writing is primary and speech is secondary. His written text consists of ‘what we find when we look at it...a text already written, black on white’. When we read, what we read is black marks on white paper. They are not imaginary, illusions or phantasms. 

The only things that are patently there when we look at a text are ‘marks’ that are demarcated, and separated into groups, by ‘blanks’; there are also ‘spaces’, ‘margins’, and the ‘repetitions’ and ‘differences’ that we find when we compare individual marks and groups of marks.

Objections to this view

·         Abrams says that Derrida invites us to move from the closed ‘logocentric’* model of all traditional or ‘classical’ views of language to what ‘I shall call his own graphocentric model, in which the sole presences are marks-on-blanks’. [*The ‘logocentric’ view of language is based on the illusion of a Platonic or Christian transcendent being or presence, serving as the origin and guarantor of meanings].

·        According to Abrams, the ‘graphocentric model of marks- on- blanks’  proposed by Derrida removes every norm, control, or indicators which, in the ordinary use and experience of language, set a limit to what we can mean and what can be understood to mean’.

·        Since what is there is only existing marks, we are denied ‘the choice of a speaking or writing subject, or ego, or cogito, or consciousness, and so to any possible agency for the intention of meaning something’. The ‘speaking or writing subject, or ego, or cogito, or consciousness’ is downgraded to the status of fiction generated by language, readily dissolved by deconstructive analysis.

·        Derrida leaves us no place for referring to how we learn to speak, understand, or read language, and how, through interaction with more competent users and by our own developing experience with language, we come to recognize and correct our mistakes in speaking or understanding.

·        For Derrida the author becomes one more mark among other marks, placed either at the head or end of a text or set of texts.

·        Even syntax is given no role in determining the meanings of component words. According to the graphocentric model, when we look at a page we see no organization and only a chain of grouped words, a sequence of individual signs.

Derrida’s notion of Sign

The notion of ‘sign’ gives ‘meaning’ to the random markings on a page. Signs have dual aspects as signifier and signified. They are ‘marks-with-meaning’. But these meanings may not be visible on the page. Saussure had suggested that the sign does not have positive attributes. Their difference from other sounds and other significations make them meaningful. The notion of difference suggested by Saussure is available to Derrida because inspection of a printed page shows that some marks are different form others. ‘Difference’ supplements the static elements of a text with an essential momentum. Difference sets in motion the ‘incessant play (jeu) of signification that goes on within the seeming immobility of the marks on the printed page’.

Trace

This is what is special about the signification of a sign according to Derrida. ‘Trace’ is not a presence, though it functions as a kind of ‘simulacrum’ [faint trace or semblance, image or representation] of a signified presence.

Any signification that difference has activated in a signifier in the past remains active as a ‘trace’ in the present instance as it will in the future, and the sedimentation of traces which a signifier has accumulated constitutes the diversity in the play of its present significations.

The ‘trace’ is elusive. It plays a role without being ‘present’. It ‘appears/disappears’, in presenting itself it effaces itself’.

Any attempt to define or explain a sign is nothing more than putting in its place another sign. ‘Traces’ in ‘Sign-substitutions’ defer laterally, from substitution to substitution. In this chain we vainly search for a fixed or present meaning.  The play of signification never comes to rest in a determinate reference. It is continuously deferred, put off, delayed. Derrida calls this ‘differance’ [which is a portmanteau-fusion of differ and defer.]. This term indicates the endless play of generated significances, in which the reference is interminably postponed. The conclusion is that ‘the central signified, the originating transcendental signified’ is never absolutely present outside a system of differences, and this ‘absence of an ultimate signified extends the domain and play of signification to infinity’. 

Derrida’s conclusions and certain problems

Derrida’s conclusion is that ‘no sign or chain of signs can have a determinate meaning’. But Abrams says that Derrida reaches this conclusion by a process which is based ‘on an origin, ground, and end’ and which is also ‘teleological’ [pertaining to teleology, showing evidence of design or purpose]. [Derrida had previously deconstructed all these notions]. His origin and ground are his graphocentric premises, the ‘close chamber of texts for which he invites us to abandon our ordinary realm of experience in speaking, hearing, reading, and understanding language’. 

For Derrida’s chamber of texts is a sealed echo-chamber in which meanings are reduced to a ceaseless echolalia [the immediate, involuntary, and repetitive echoing of words or phrases spoken by another] a vertical and lateral reverberation from sign to sign of ghostly non-presences emanating from no voice, intended by no one, referring to nothing, bombinating [buzzing/humming]  in a void.

Traditional interpretation tries to determine what an author meant. Derrida proposes an alternative that we ‘deliver ourselves over to a free participation in the infinite free-play of signification opened out by the signs in a text. Derrida asks us to look, ‘not with Rousseauistic nostalgia for a lost security [see notes 1 ] as to meaning which we never in fact possessed’. But he asks us to look instead with ‘a Nietzschean affirmation, the joyous affirmation of the play of the word and of the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs without error, without truth, without origin, which is offered to an active interpretation’[see notes 2]. It plays in absolute chance, and surrenders itself to ‘genetic indeterminacy, to the seminal chanciness of the trace’. ‘The graphocentric premises eventuate what is patently metaphysics, a world-view of the free and unceasing play of difference which we are not able even to name’.

Derrida’s vision is thus, as he puts it, of an ‘as yet unnamable something which cannot announce itself except...under the species of a non-species, under the formless form, mute, infant, and terrifying, of monstrosity.  

2

Canny Critics & Uncanny Critics

Miller sets up a distinction between two classes of structuralist critics—the canny and uncanny.

·        The canny critics support the possibility of a ‘structuralist inspired criticism as a rational and rationalizable activity with agreed-upon rules of procedure... and measurable results’.

·        The uncanny critics have renounced such nostalgia for ‘impossible certainties’. As an uncanny critic, Miller persistently tries to highlight in each of the different works he criticizes, its ‘self-deconstructive’ disclosure of ‘interminable free-play of indeterminable meanings’.

‘Innocent black marks on a page’ ‘endowed with traces, or vestiges of meaning’ constitute the written text for Miller (and Derrida). Miller employs a variety of strategies to maximize the number and diversity of the possible meanings while minimizing any factors that might limit their free-play. Abrams makes a brief note of two of the strategies:

1. Miller applies the term ‘interpretation’ and ‘meaning’ in an ‘extremely capacious’ [large, voluminous, spacious] way. He brings together/ fuses into a single entity linguistic utterances or writing with ‘any metaphysical representation of theory or of ‘fact’ about the physical world. These different areas are treated equally as ‘texts’ which are ‘read’ or ‘interpreted’. Miller ‘leaves no room for taking into account that language, unlike the physical world, is a cultural institution that developed expressly in order to mean something and to convey what is meant to members of a community who have learned how to use and interpret language. Within the area of plainly verbal texts, he allows no distinction with regard to the kinds of norms that may obtain or may not obtain for the ‘interpretation’ of the entire corpus of an individual author’s writings, or of a single work in its totality, or of a particular passage, sentence, or word within that work. As a critical pluralist, Abrams agrees that there are different interpretations of the play King Lear, yet he claims to know exactly ‘what Lear meant when he said, ‘Pray you undo this button’.

2. Miller’s second strategy is connected to ‘trace’. Like Derrida, Miller excludes ‘any control or limitation of signification to the uses of a word or phrase that are current at the time an author writes, or to an author’s intention, or to the verbal or generic context in which a word occurs’. Any word in a text can signify any and all of the different things it has signified in the varied forms that the signifier has assumed though its history, not only in a particular language but back through its etymology in Latin and Greek all the way back to its Indo-European root. Therefore, Miller frequently resorts to etymology in expounding the texts to which he turns his critical attention.

Every word has sedimented meanings accumulated over its total history. When there is no norm for selecting some and rejecting other meanings, the word becomes a ‘vibratory suspension of equally likely meanings’. These meanings are bound to include ‘incompatible’ or ‘contradictory’ meanings. Miller’s conclusion is that a key word, or a passage or a text, since it is a ceaseless play of anomalous [irregular, strange, abnormal] meanings, is ‘indeterminable’, ‘undecipherable’, ‘unreadable’, ‘undecidable’. ‘ALL READING IS MISREADING’. ‘Any reading can be shown to be misreading on evidence drawn from the text itself’. But in misreading a text, the interpreter is merely repeating what the text itself has done before him, for ‘any literary text, with more or less explicitness or clarity, already reads or misreads itself’.

       

To say that this concept of interpretation cuts the ground out from under the kind of history I undertook to write is to take a very parochial [narrow-minded] view of what is involved; for what it comes to is that no text, in part or whole, can mean anything in particular, and that we can never say just what anyone means by anything he writes.

Here Abrams asks a pertinent question.

If all criticism/history can deal only with a critic’s own misconstruction, why bother to carry on the activities of interpretation and criticism? Miller too asks this question. He answers this question with his favorite analogues [something that bears an analogy (resemblance or equivalence) with something else] for the interpretive activity. The analogous figure is the Cretan labyrinth, and also the texture of a spider’s web. The two figures ‘have been fused in earlier conflations in the myth of Ariadne’s thread, by which Theseus retraces the windings of the labyrinth, and of Arachne’s thread, with which she spins her web. [see notes 3 ]

Abrams quotes Miller’s ideas on the critical enterprise:

Pater’s writings, like those of other major authors...are at once open to interpretation and ultimately indecipherable, unreadable. His texts lead the critic deeper and deeper into a labyrinth until he confronts a final aporia. This does not mean that the reader must give up ... the attempt to understand Pater. Only by going all the way into the labyrinth, following the thread of a given clue, can the critic reach the blind alley, vacant of any Minotaur, that impasse which is the end point of interpretation.

Abrams says that from the passage one can understand that the deconstructive critic’s act of interpretation has a beginning and an end; that it begins as an intentional, goal-oriented quest; and that this quest is to end in an impasse.

The interpretive aporia or impasse (‘the uncanny moment’)

This is what Miller calls ‘the uncanny moment’. This is the moment in which ‘the critic thinking to deconstruct the text finds that he has simply participated in the ceaseless play of the text as a self-deconstructive artifact’.

Miller’s and Derrida’s procedure

The procedure is otherwise called ‘deconstruction’ which Miller explains thus:

Deconstruction as a mode of interpretation works by a careful and circumspect entering of each textual labyrinth.... The deconstructive critic seeks to find, by this process of retracing, the element in the system studied which is alogical, the thread in the text in question which will unravel it all, or the loose stone which will pull down the whole building. The deconstruction, rather, annihilates the ground on which the building stands by showing that the text has already annihilated that ground, knowingly or unknowingly. Deconstruction is not a dismantling of the structure of a text but a demonstration that it has already dismantled itself.

‘Mise en abyme’ [see notes 4]

The uncanny moment in interpretation is a sudden ‘mise en abyme’. The bottom drops away in the endless regression of the self-baffling free play of meanings in the very signs which both reveal an abyss and , by naming it, cover it over, we catch a glimpse of the abyss itself in a ‘vertigo of the underlying nothingness’.

Endeavour of the deconstructive critic

Miller says that the deconstructive critic tries to find the ‘alogical element’ in the text. When this element is pulled, it will unravel the whole texture. This method works, because ‘it can’t help working; it is a can’t fail enterprise’.

The uncanny critic, whatever the variousness and distinctiveness of the texts to which he applies his strategies, is bound to find that they all reduce to one thing and one thing only.

Miller says that each deconstructive reading done on any literary, philosophical or critical text reaches the same moment of aporia. The reading [with different texts] reaches again and again the same impasse.

Assessment of deconstructive criticism by Abrams

Ø Deconstructive criticism dismantles our common experience of the uniqueness, rich variety, and passionate human concerns in works of literature, philosophy, or criticism. These become just linguistic illusions for DC.

Ø In reading Miller (and Derrida) there are rich rewards. This includes ‘a delight in the resourceful play of mind and language and the many striking insights’ yielded by ‘wide reading and a sharp eye for unsuspected congruities and differences in our heritage of literary and philosophical writings’.

Ø However, for these rewards the common reader has to pay a price. The rewards are given in a way that is always to the ultimate experience of vertigo, the uncanny frission of teetering on the brink of the abyss. Even the shock of this discovery is ‘soon dulled by its expected and invariable recurrence’.

Final example

A final passage, as an example for Miller’s ‘rhetoric, punning, and figuration’ is provided by Abrams. This passage gives Miller’s ‘formulations of the mise en abyme a charm that is hard to resist’. In this passage Miller fuses the analogues of labyrinth and web and abyss on the black-on-blanks which constitute the elements of the deconstructive premises:

Far from providing a benign escape from the maze, Ariadne’s thread makes the labyrinth, is the labyrinth. The interpretation or solving of the puzzle of the textual web only adds more filaments to the web. One can never escape from the labyrinth because the activity of escaping makes more labyrinth, the thread of a linear narrative or story. Criticism is the production of more thread to embroider the texture or textile already there. This thread is like a filament of ink which flows from the pen of the writer, keeping him in the web but suspending him also over the chasm, the blank page that thin line hides.

Abrams applies what Miller says about the process of deconstruction to Miller himself:

Miller himself is suspended by the ‘labyrinthine lines of textual web over the abyss’ created by black lines on the blank page. He tries ‘to unravel the web that keeps him from plunging into the blank abyss but finds that he can do so only by an act of writing which spins a further web of lines, equally vulnerable to deconstruction’.

In conclusion, Abrams rather sarcastically quotes Miller’s comment on the process of DC.

‘In one version of Ariandne’s story she is said to have hanged herself with her thread in despair after being abandoned by Theseus’. [see notes 5]

3

 The Deconstructive Angel

Abrams wants to find out a method to respond to the abysmal vision of the textual world of literature, philosophy and all the other achievements of humanity in the medium of language. He feels that the response of William Blake to the Angel in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is adequate. The Angel reveals to Blake a ghastly vision of hell as an ‘infinite abyss’. But when the Angel departed the vision was no more and the poet found himself sitting on a pleasant bank beside a river by moonlight. When the Angel asked him how he escaped, the poet replied: ‘All that we saw was owing to your metaphysics’.

Hillis Miller, as a deconstructive angel, is not serious about deconstruction. He does not entirely and ‘consistently commit himself to the consequences of his premises’.

He is in fact... a double agent who plays the game of language by two very different set of rules. One of the games he plays is that of a deconstructive critic of literary texts. The other is the game he will play in a minute or two when he steps out of his graphocentric premises onto this platform and begins to talk to us.

Abrams makes it clear what he means by the above statement (underlined). He means that Miller ‘will have determinate things to say and will masterfully exploit the resources of language to express these things clearly and forcibly’.... Miller will also address the audience with the confidence that those among them who have mastered the norms of ‘this kind of discourse’, ‘will approximate what he means’. Again, the audience will ‘correctly anticipate’ the general tenor and distinctive style of Miller’s discourse.

Abrams carries his argument forward about Miller’s paper to be presented in the conference.

Before coming here, Miller worked his thoughts (which involved inner speech) into the form of writing. On this platform, he will proceed to convert this writing to speech; and it is safe to say...that soon his speech will be reconverted to writing and presented to the public.

When the paper is published Miller’s parole will become écriture. It will certainly make a difference, but ‘not an absolute difference’. There will not be an ‘ontological’ gap between the parole and écriture. Each of Miller’s readers will be able to reconvert the ‘black-on-blanks back into speech’, which he will hear in his ‘mind’s ear’. The reader will see the words neither as marks nor as sounds, but as already invested with meaning. 

There is no law to prevent a deconstructive critic from ‘bringing his graphocentric procedures to bear on the printed version of Hillis Miller’s discourse——or of mine or of Wayne Booth’s....’ 

If any critic deconstructs Miller’s paper, he will unfailingly be able to translate the text into ‘a vertiginous [affected with vertigo, dizzy] mise en abyme ‘. But those who refuse to apply deconstruction to ordinary skill and tact at language will also be able to understand the text very well.

Reading the text of Miller’s paper is better than listening to it because printing will make the fleeting words of speech durable. Printing will also help the reader to choose his own and not the speaker’s time to attend to it. He can further re-read the paper, collocate or ponder until he is satisfied that he has ‘approximated the author’s meaning’.

Conclusion

Concluding the paper, Abrams says that his disagreement with Miller’s strategies will continue. Similarly, Miller also will continue to disagree with him. This means simply that neither of them will find the other’s reasons compelling. A better mutual understanding is possible if both of them try, in the old-fashioned way, what the other means by what he says.

After all, without that confidence that we can use language to say what we mean and can interpret language so as to determine what was meant, there is no rationale for the dialogue in which we are now engaged.

NOTES

1. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Francophone Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer of the 18th century. His political philosophy influenced the Enlightenment in France and across Europe. His views on language were essentially humanistic and he believed that humans invented language for their development. He focused on deciphering the truth and origin of language and its many signs, an often exhaustive occupation.

2. Nietzschean affirmation (also known as life-affirming) is a concept in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche celebrated the Greeks who, facing up to the terrors of nature and history, did not seek refuge in 'a Buddhistic negation of the will,' as Schopenhauer did. They created tragedies in which life is affirmed as beautiful in spite of everything. Schopenhauer’s negation of the will was a saying "no" to life and to the world, which he judged to be a scene of pain and evil. Against Schopenhauer’s place as the ultimate nay-sayer to life, Nietzsche positioned himself as the ultimate yes-sayer.

Jacques Derrida applies this concept specifically to language, its structure and play. This application acknowledges that there is, in fact, no center or origin within language and its many parts, no firm ground from which to base any Truth or truths. This shock allows for two reactions in Derrida’s philosophy: the more negative, melancholic response, which he designates as Rousseauistic, or the more positive Nietzschean affirmation. Rousseau's perspective focuses on deciphering the truth and origin of language and its many signs, an often exhaustive occupation. Derrida's response to Nietzsche, however, offers an active participation with these signs and arrives at, in Derridean philosophy, a more resolute response to language.

In "Structure, Sign, and Play", Derrida articulates Nietzsche’s perspective as: ‘…the joyous affirmation of the play of the world and of the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin which is offered to an active interpretation’.

3. Ariadne was the daughter of King Minos of Crete. She is best known for her pivotal role in the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. The king of Crete imposed a heavy burden on Athens. He demanded that seven young men and seven young women be sent to Crete every year in order to be sent for sacrifice into the Labyrinth underneath Minos' palace, where the Minotaur, a half-bull, half-human, dwelt.

Theseus, son of King Aegeus of Athens, volunteered to be sent in order to kill the Minotaur and end the sacrifices. When they arrived in Crete, Ariadne fell in love with Theseus and decided to help him in his quest. She gave him a sword to fight the Minotaur, as well as a ball of thread and advised him to tie one end near the entrance of the labyrinth and let the thread unroll as he delved deeper into the twisting and branching paths. When Theseus found the Minotaur, he managed to slay him, and then followed the thread back to the entrance, where Ariadne was waiting. She then eloped with him on his way back to Athens.

Arachne in Greek mythology was a weaver who challenged Athena and was consequently transformed into a spider. There are three versions of the myth.

The myths of Ariadne and Arachne are sometimes clubbed together.

4. Mise en Abyme

This is a French term derived from the heraldic device of inserting a small shield within a larger shield bearing the same device. The term literally means "placed into abyss". In literature the term denotes self-reflection within the structure of a literary work. A book within a book, a play inside a play, a picture in a picture, these are examples of mise en abyme.  In literary theory the term indicates ‘infinite regression’.

Andre Gide mentions ‘The Mousetrap’, the play within a play in Hamlet. The actions of the characters within the play, specifically the murder of the king is a meta-theatrical device as the audience becomes aware of the effect of a play on an audience. ‘We are in fact watching people watching a play, looking over their shoulders, and so we can, as it were, see our own backs and understand what we are doing when we watch a play’.

5. In one version of the Ariadne myth, she hangs herself with the thread she has made. [see notes 3 for a detailed account] 

Study materials for the students of Indian Universities. Prepared by Dr. S. Sreekumar. 

If you need any clarification regarding any part of this essay please feel free to contact <kumarbpc2@gmail.com>