Deconstruction Paper "Deconstruction applied to Short Stories"

The Response to Death

The Derridean theory of reading called Deconstruction presents different elements to work with texts. One of these principles states that people, especially western people, understand and see the world in pairs, in twos, in binaries, two opposites that are always united. Because they are different, each one gives meaning to the other and can only have meaning on its own when being distinguished from the other. From the pair of binaries, there is a superiority of the first stem above the second, the binary is therefore ruled be the first element.

Short stories are only short due to the number of the words they are built on, but not because of the lack of richness of themes they can include or deal with. In the cases of “The Fly”, by Katherine Mansfield and “A Dead Woman’s Secret”, by Guy de Maupassant the binary deconstruction-construction after death resulting in multiplicity of responses is the most outstanding one.

Death can be expected and sometimes even considered a blessing. For some yet, it can be appalling, heart-breakening and life changing. In “The Fly”, the boss loses his son in circumstances that are not expected. The boss has a life so neatly constructed, so planned, so specially built for his son. Ever since the boy’s birth, the boss has worked hard on building a life for his son, regardless of his own life. “Life itself had come to have no other meaning”(Mansfield, K.). Suddenly, that dream, that perfectly organized life comes to a halt. Deconstruction takes place. The structure of his whole life is shaken as if the worst and most powerful earthquake has hit the Earth. His son is dead. The debris of his treasured dream of his son following his steps are scattered all over his office, all over his body, all over his heart and soul. “And he had left the office a broken man, with his life in ruins”. Tragedy takes over, together with sadness and sorrow. The boss can not find a way out of his misery. His friend, Mr. Woodifield, moves on, despite his own tragedy of losing his son also. But the boss does not. He wants to cry, he has the intention to, he has prepared himself for it but that does not happen. His friend talks about his son’s death …”The girls were in Belgium last week having a look at poor Reggie’s grave, and they happened to come across your boy´s…” …”but the boss made no reply…” He has not even been to his son’s grave, he can not even talk about it. He can not reconstruct his life after his son’s death. He seems to be stuck in the very same moment his son has died. He is unable to remember anything, as if time does not go by, as he is unable to move on and rebuild his life and live again. “For the life of him he could not remember”. Moreover, the boss is so deeply and terribly sad in his grief that he can not allow some other things to go on, at least not the ones he can control, like the fly that falls into the ink pot. The boss knows the insect fights for its life but he is so angry at not been able to overcome his tragedy that he takes the life of the fly as his son’s death seems to have taken his.

Though circumstances can change the point of view of someone losing a beloved one, whether a relative or a friend, it is always dramatic and grieving. In the case of “A dead woman’s secret”, the death of a beloved mother due to circumstances that may be seen as normal brings about discoveries, secrets, regrets, doubts, surprise and sorrow. The woman dies peacefully after living a life devoted to her offspring, bringing them up without a father, for he is absent, and educating them in moral values and principles. “She had…armed them with a strict moral code, teaching them religion, without weakness, and duty, without compromise”(De Maupassant, G. ). Her daughter, a devoted nun, and her son, a strong judge are there, saying their goodbyes, alone with the dead corpse of their mother, adoring her, missing her, worshipping her. While her children are weeping, remembering the good times by their mother, a terrible secret is revealed. The children realize for the first time that the life their mother has led is a lie, a firm, a wall that hides her deepest feelings and her most embarrassing sins. Both her children, owners of a sense of justice and strict judgement, stay in silence. It is in silence when they destroy the image of their mother as it has been before: perfect, pure, calm and quiet. The letters picture their mother living in a deep romance with an unknown man, someone they do not know, telling each other how much they love each other, how much passion they have for each other. An unknown picture of their mother is depicted in the letters, and her children start incorporating all these new details of their mother into the image they have of her. In silence, each of them, the nun and the judge, pass judgement on their mother and rebuild a life that would be completely different to the one they know, to the one they have lived with her. Silence is their answer, their result, their way to cope with this huge wave, this tsunami that has hit them. “Standing erect, severe…, he looked unmoved at the dead woman. The nun, straight as a statue, … was watching her brother, waiting”. In their minds, hearts and souls, they rearm themselves a new life, constructing one they will live with the rest of their days. Slowly, each of them say their goodbyes to this mother they have come to see as a stranger. Then, they leave, with a different view of love, life, and themselves. “…the son slowly left his armchair, and without looking again at the mother upon he had passed sentence,… he said: “Let us now retire, sister”. They should look at a new life now, but with a completely different past.

In life, there may be nothing more certain than death. Though man has tried to avoid it, to find a way to stop the time so death does not come, it has found its way to have a constant presence in every person’s life. Death is one of the few issues that are equal to all humans, but the reactions to it are what make humans different from one another. Tragedies bring deconstruction along, construction may not always be present afterwards and it may not be similar in every case. When tragedy happens, there might be no single aspect of a person´s life that is not shaken, disturbed, altered by such a terrible shock as the death of a beloved one is. The reactions, the responses, the consequences, what comes after, they are also different, personal, very close to one´s heart, mind and soul. How someone overcomes these tragic moments and the strategies that are used to shed some light on the dark and gloomy atmosphere are unequal to most human beings. The dead person can be blamed for his or her own death, or blamed for all he o she did or did not do in his or her life, or be blamed for the life he or she forces everyone else to live after his or her departure. In the two short stories mentioned above, the deconstruction – construction binary results in different reactions to the same trigger: the death of a beloved one. As seen in “A Dead Woman´s Secret”, the dead woman´s offspring challenge their mother after finding some secret love letters, they rebuild her life and move on with a different image of her, but still they move on, they are able to construct after deconstruction. In “The Fly”, the boss unleashes his anger, fury and sadness caused by his son´s death against an innocent flying insect, but he can not let go, he can not go on, he can not reconstruct his life. Deconstruction has taken it over.
“There are some kinds of damage that take you far beyond normal rules and systems of ethics and morality –beyond this point be monsters, as the ancients used to say (Robinson, P. 2007)”.


References
- Mansfield, K., “The Fly”, ELT Trainee Teachers Reading Group, British Council.
- De Maupassant, G., “A Dead Woman´s Secret”, ELT Trainee Teachers Reading Group, British Council.
- Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, 2003, Pearson Education Limited, England
- Robinson, P., 2007, “Friend of the Devil”, Harper Collins Publishers, New York

Originality and Intertextuality

What is originality? How can something be classified as original? It has been said before that nothing can be discovered as new or as original as manhood has already invented everything. So, day by day, man is reinventing himself in every aspect: twisting, changing, growing, cutting into pieces, reassembling one thing into another. Everything is a bettered version of the former one, or a reaction to an opponent, but the roots are all the same. This does not only happen in fields such as Technology, Medicine, Psychology and Arts, but also in Literature.

The Literature field is always evolving in a continuum of ideas: old ideas that are far explored, old ideas interpreted from a different perspective, ideas that emerge from old ideas, ideas that develop from former ideas. These ideas are expressed in texts and those texts are source for future texts. Texts are read, interpreted, meant; and every reader interprets and responds to the text differently. In the case of “The Call”, it is a response to other texts and a transformation of texts as well. There is a text about a love story that ended bitterly, a text about technology and how people communicate by different household gadgets, a text about the amazement experienced by people when using those gadgets which allow them to see, to do, to feel new experiences. Such is the amazement expressed in text as “The Telephone”, by Robert Frost. The text mingles with other texts, such is the case of the love story that ended breaking somebody´s heart mixed with the text that talks about an old love that has found a partner leaving the former lover feeling empty and unable to do something about how he feels. These different love poems could be illustrated with “2” by Emily Dickinson, “When you are old”, by W.B.Yeats and “I Loved You Once”, by Alexander Pushkin. Another text among them talks about ghosts, like “Ghosts from the Past” by T.J. Daniels: ghosts that haunt us, ghosts that live with us, ghosts from our pasts. The beginning of the text responds to the benefits of communication, the advancements of technology that enables people to do things beyond their knowledge.
Beneath the whole text, there is the love story, the heart-breakening story of an old love, the story about the one love, once so strong that now that it is gone, leaves the streets empty and hands missing other hands to touch and caress. Also, there seem to be two poems transformed by “The Call” so subtly that they become one. The amazement of light and communication is unified to the love story brilliantly, so they make one extraordinary text.


Emily Dickinson

2
You left me, sweet, two legacies,—
A legacy of love
A Heavenly Father would content,
Had He the offer of;

You left me boundaries of pain
Capacious as the sea,
Between eternity and time,
Your consciousness and me.
W. B. Yeats

When You Are Old
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

Alexander Pushkin

I Loved You Once
I loved you once, nor can this heart be quiet;
For it would seem that love still lingers there;
But do not you be further troubled by it;
I would in no wise hurt you, oh, my dear.

I loved you without hope, a mute offender;
What jealous pangs, what shy despairs I knew!
A love as deep as this, as true, as tender,
God grant another may yet offer you.
"GHOSTS FROM THE PAST"
The words & visions are there
inside me.
I must write them down
or not get any rest.
The pain that was suffered
so many years past
comes fleetingly to the surface
if only for a moment.
But once seen
recognized
and understood...
the ghosts of the past retreat
back to the
Long Ago.
Copyright © 1998 T. J. Daniels
Robert Frost - The Telephone
'When I was just as far as I could walk
From here today,
There was an hour
All still
When leaning with my head again a flower
I heard you talk.
Don't say I didn't, for I heard you say--
You spoke from that flower on the window sill-
Do you remember what it was you said?'

'First tell me what it was you thought you heard.'

'Having found the flower and driven a bee away,
I leaned on my head
And holding by the stalk,
I listened and I thought I caught the word--
What was it? Did you call me by my name?
Or did you say--
Someone said "Come" -- I heard it as I bowed.'

'I may have thought as much, but not aloud.'

"Well, so I came.'

The little black boy

The Little Black Boy

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Poems

By the Babe Unborn



If trees were tall and grasses short,
As in some crazy tale,
If here and there a sea were blue
Beyond the breaking pale,

If a fixed fire hung in the air
To warm me one day through,
If deep green hair grew on great hills,
I know what I should do.

In dark I lie; dreaming that there
Are great eyes cold or kind,
And twisted streets and silent doors,
And living men behind.

Let storm clouds come: better an hour,
And leave to weep and fight
Than all the ages I have ruled
The empires of the night.

I think that if they gave me leave
Within the world to stand,
I would be good through all the day
I spent in fairyland.

They should not hear a word from me
Of selfishness or scorn,
If only I could find the door,
If only I were born.

GK Chesterton

Quotations

by G.K. Chesterton:
The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground.

One sees great things from the valley, only small things from the peak.

Interestig, don´t you think?

From my Luis Miguel pin to my grandmother

It was a rounded piece of metal, small and colourful. Only a name and a face, a treasured accesory fo my clothes and a treasured object to me, tough a funny thing to the rest of the people. For them, it was an object which use was simply to make fun of me every time they could. Except for school and birthdays parties, I wore it constantly. It had a very sharp end and I had bleeding fingers every time I put it on my T-shirt but I could not see well under my chin. As the pin brought a safety pin beneath it I knew I would never lose it and that it would be fastened to me for ever. Every time I had to fasten something, I used my Luis Miguel pin. Just as my grandma fixed everything with a safety pin. She was a tailor, and still is in her mind. Her fingers gently touched us when she was trying out clothes on us, and every outfit was finished when she put the safety pin on. It was her seal, her personal mark. She loved making clothes for us, she would tell us we were her models to dress and we let her dream, of course we did! We played with her needles and pins, but not with the safety pins. Those were hers and hers only to play, dream and love. Now, my grandma has Alzheimer desease and lives in a home, and her bones are growing smaller and twisted. She does not see her grand-daughter in me, but if I show her a safety pin, she wants to put it on me and pretend that she is a tailor dressing a model.

XV & XVIII Century poems

EL GALÁN Y LA DAMA
Cierto galán a quien París aclama,
petimetre del gusto más extraño,
que cuarenta vestidos muda al año
y el oro y plata sin temor derrama,

celebrando los días de su dama,
unas hebillas estrenó de estaño,
sólo para probar con este engaño
lo seguro que estaba de su fama.

«¡Bella plata! ¡Qué brillo tan hermoso!»,
dijo la dama, «¡viva el gusto y numen
del petimetre en todo primoroso!»

Y ahora digo yo: «Llene un volumen
de disparates un autor famoso,
y si no le alabaren, que me emplumen».

Cuando un autor ha llegado a ser famoso, todo se le aplaude.
Tomas de Iriarte

This is a very different poem from all those ones about romance that we usually find. And that is why I like it. The theme of the poem is a universal truth, many times neglected, many times rejected. It is an endless truth, and it is applicable in our daily life. I hope it leaves a spark in you, so that our eyes are open to people like these, and we are not fooled by them.


ROMANCE
Yo me estava reposando, durmiendo como solía. Recordé, triste, llorando con gran pena que sentía. Levantéme muy sin tiento de la cama en que dormía, cercado de pensamiento, que valer no me podía. Mi passión era tan fuerte que de mí yo no sabía. Conmigo estava la Muerte por tenerme compañía. Lo que más me fatigava no era porque muría, mas era porque dexava de servir a quien servía. Servía yo una señora que más que a mí la quería, y ella fue la causadora de mi mal sin mejoría. La media noche passada, ya que era cerca el día, salíme de mi posada por ver si descansaría. Fui para donde morava aquella que más quería, por quien yo triste penava, mas ella no parecía. Andando todo turbado con las ansias que tenía, vi venir a mi Cuidado dando bozes, y dezía: «Si dormís, linda señora, recordad por cortesía, pues que fuestes causadora de la desventura mía. Remediad mi gran tristura, satisfazed mi porfía, porque si falta ventura del todo me perdería.» Y con mis ojos llorosos, un triste llanto hazía con sospiros congoxosos, y nadie lo parecía. En estas cuitas estando, como vi que esclarecía, a mi casa sospirando me bolví sin alegría.

Juan del Encina

Now, as regards this poem, I couldn´t help it. It is the ballad of the love that is not love, that forbidden love that we never have, tough we always hope for.