I HAVE BEEN WATCHING the deconstructionists in the English department and I’ve decided it’s an occupational hazard. They study and teach the same short stories or novels over and over again until they begin to obsess about them. They need to add to them, explain them, pull them apart and carry the pieces around and show them to each other. They have conferences in Lyon, France, and pull apart Eudora Welty’s stories, conferences in Oxford, Mississippi, and sit in panels to dissect Faulkner’s novels.
They can’t leave it alone. Instead of calling all their fellow Welty lovers together and saying, listen, I’m going to read you something wonderful and reading The Ponder Heart or “The Wide Net” or “A Worn Path” out loud, leaving their listeners full of beauty and mystery and music, they start talking about Uncle Daniel’s dysfunctional family or why Doc lived all alone in the country. Come on. It used to make me mad when I was not near academia and only had to watch this sad silliness from afar. Now it makes me sad because some of the people who are doing it are the nicest, most hardworking people in English departments in universities that I love.
Every one of them is a frustrated writer who can’t get up the will or whatever it is that lets real writers stay up all night making up stories and poems. They usually are people who wanted to write and gave it up in the face of greater talents. They are good people. They don’t waste the rest of their lives in jealousy. They hook up with some writer or group of writers they like to read and become experts on something that doesn’t need expert help.
All you need to do is read The Ponder Heart, for God’s sake. All you need to do is read “The Equilibrists” or “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter” or “Directive” or “The Rocking-Horse Winner.”
If you want to write something go back to your real desire and write a short story or poem of your own. I would like to sentence every deconstructionist I know to write ten short stories, twenty poems, and a novel. By the time they were finished they would know the secret. The work of art is its own true thing. It is finished. It is sealed. It came from the artist but not of the artist. Once it is fully imagined it no longer belongs to the psyche that brought it into being. It exists to witness to the mystery of all human experience. It is a study in existence.
The good thing about deconstructionism is that it will remain an acquired taste among a few people who come from the set of good people who keep literature alive by teaching it. God bless them every one. Every time I hear them start deconstructing something it reminds me to get out the book and read the real thing. I do that and am healed from whatever wrecking hammer they had put in my brain.
What next in a finite world? “We’re walking along in the changing time,” as old Doc said in “The Wide Net.” “Everything just before it changes seems to be made of gold.”