Unit 1: Introduction to poststructuralist

theories

Roland Barthes / Jacques Derrida

LITERARY TEXT: “A REFUSAL TO MOURN THE DEATH, BY FIRE, OF A

CHILD IN LONDON”

1.- CONTEXT

The author of this poem is Dylan Thomas (1914-1953). He was a welsh poet (from
Wales), he was born in the city of Swanesa (bombed as well during the Blitz –World War
II). He lived in London, the city which most dramatically suffered the consequences of
these bombings.

The title “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London”, is

❖ A declaration of intention: the title announces what the poem will do, although
then it ends up just the opposite.
❖ “, by fire,”: stresses that this is a sacrificial death.
The poem was first published in 1945 in a journal, towards the end of World War II. A girl
who died during the Blitz in London inspired him to write this poem.
Thomas´s work is developed in modernism, a literary movement developed during the
first half of the 20th century, characterized by formal experimentation. It is the movement
that most directly reflects the effects of the two great world wars

2.- FORM AND CONTENT

The poem belongs to the genre of poetry, more specifically lyrical poetry and Elegy.
• ELEGY: an elaborately lyric formal poem lamenting the death of a friend or
public figure or reflecting seriously on a solemn subject.

• LYRIC POETRY: the most extensive category of verse, by comparison to

narrative and dramatic poetry. The most usual emotions presented are those of
love and grief.

• The poet is not the lyrical speaker

• LYRICAL SPEAKER / POETIC SPEAKER / VOICE / PERSONA: the
person who “speaks” in a poem, as opposed to the
poet him-/herself.

2.3.1.-METAPHORS & PERSONIFICATIONS

• Fathering: metaphor and personification. Creating (fathering) is becoming
the father of a child. Masculine metaphor which contrasts the figure of the
mother (last stanza)

• The sea tumbling in harness: sea = violent horse; harness = to keep it

under control
• Metaphors with judeo-christian biblical connotations suggesting peaceful
and protected spaces:
o The round zion of the water bead: a metaphor inside a metaphor ⇒
water drop = water bead (bubble, drop...) = the city of zion
o The synagoge of the earn of corn
• The last valley of sackcloth: suggesting the biblical phrase “valley of tears”
• My salt seed: combines the two central events to the poem salt=death
(mourning) seed = rebirth (engendering)
• The dark veins of her mother: this reminds of a pregnancy; the girl is now
reunited with Mother Earth where she’s now buried
• Robed in the long friends: the child is buried among other bodies who had
been buried there in the past
• The riding Thames: it’s the River Thames, it doesn’t mourn but seems to
ride its own waves
 2.3.2.- IMAGERY
The use of language to represent objects, actions, feelings, thoughts, ideas,
states of mind and any sensory or extra-sensory experience.
• BIRD, BEAST AND FLOWERS: The binary opposition light-darkness

❖ Poem arranged in STANZAS and LINE-BREAKS (break and divide the

text into different lines). It follows the REGULAR STANZAIC FORM= 4
stanzas of 6 lines each

❖ RHYME SCHEME: regular “abcabc”

❖ ALLITERATION: “mankind making”; “bird beast”, “last light”, “sow my salt
seed”
❖ METRE and RHYTHM:
• Traditional English rhythms:
o Long verses: 4 beats (stressed syllables)
o Short verses: 3 beats (verses 2 and 5)
o Variation in the length of the lines: from 5 syllables: “beard
beast and flowers” to 11 “the majesty and burning of the
child´s death”

o NON-STANDARD SYNTAX and PUNCTUATION

o First sentence covers 1st, 2nd and the first line of the 3rd stanza= a
syntactically complex TIME—AGENT (main verb in the 20th line= “Shall I
let pry”)

o Intentional breaking of the first sentence into 3 stanzas: function of

breaking down of the language in correspondence with its subject matter
(decomposition; the end of the world)

o ENJAMBMENT
• “... the round /Zion...”
• “... to mourn / the majesty and burning of the child´s death”
o GERUNDS around the first stanza (making, breaking, tumbling...):
suggests action in progress

o The recurrence of the conjunction “and” (6 times within the first 13 lines)

• Themes formulated in abstract terms

• Possible themes:
 “the anticipation of apocalypse”
 “the deferral of an intention”
• The death of a little girl because of a German Bomb during the Biltz in
London in 1940-1941 and the rebirth.

3- INTERRELATION FORM-CONTENT
• The poem’s rhythm and syntax as related to the content
• Rhythm and syntax that recall the solemn style of a preacher and the
Biblical quality of some images

• The form reflects the speaker´s confusion, shock and expresses the
contradiction between intending not mourn and ending up doing so.
4- THEORY AND CRITICISM
• Post-structuralism does not take into account the author’s supposed
intentions.
• Post-structuralism: looks for disunity, rejects fixed meanings.
• Looks for contradictions and paradoxes (Barry’s “verbal stage”)
 Paradox: an apparently self-contradictory (even absurd) statement
which, on closer inspection, is found to contain a truth reconciling
the conflicting opposites
• “Never” and “until”, “the still hour [...] tumbling”, the “majesty and burning”,
“tell with silence”
• Look for binary oppositions (Barry’s “verbal stage”).
 Binary opposition: the principle of contrast between two mutually
exclusive terms; each term is dependent on the other to constitute
itself.
• Consider whether binary oppositions are neutralized or reversed. In the
poem, light-darkness.
• Look for discontinuities in the text (Barry’s “textual stage”). Personal vs.
Impersonal, an important omission.
• Considering Barry’s “linguistic stage” would imply looking at the whole
poem.
• Refer to Barry’s post-structuralist analysis of the poem in Beginning
Theory
 THEORY AND CRISTICISM: “POST-STRUCTURALISM AND
DECONSTRUCTION”
1.- SOME TTHEORETICAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN STRUCTURALISM AND
POST-STRUCTURALISM
Post-structuralists accused structuralist of not following through the implications
of the views about language on their intellectual system is based. One of
structuralism’s characteristic views is the notion that language doesn’t just reflect
or record the world: it shapes it, so that how we see, is what we see.
The post-structuralism maintains that the consequences of this belied are that we
enter a universe of radical uncertainty, and hence we have no certain standard
by which to measure anything. Without a fixed point of reference against which
to measure movement you cannot tell whether or not you are moving at all.
Post-structuralism says that fixed intellectual reference points are permanently
removed by properly taking on board what structuralists said about language.
This situation is one way of describing what post-struc call the decentered
universe, on which we cannot know where we are, since all the concepts have
been ‘deconstructed’, or undermined, in the manner described later.

STRUCTURALISM POST-STRUCTURALISM

⎯ From linguistics: objective ⎯ From philosophy: difficulty of achieving

knowledge can be stablished secure knowledge about things.
Nietzsche: “there are no facts, only
ORIGINS ⎯ Scientific outlook: method, interpretations
system and reason to establish
reliable truths ⎯ Scepticism: regarding any confidence
in the scientific method as naïve
(ignorant, simple)
⎯ Its writing: abstractions and ⎯ Its writing: more emotive, urgent and
generalization euphoric tone.
TONE AND
STYLE ⎯ Neutral and anonymous style ⎯ Titles and/or central lines often
(typical of scientific writing) containing puns (word-play) and allusions

⎯ No access to the reality other ⎯ We are not fully in control of the

than through the language language: meanings are fluid, subject to
ATTITUDE constant “slippage”.
TO ⎯ We need to use language to
LANGUAGE think and ⎯ Words don’t have pure meaning, they
perceive with are contaminated by their opponents or
they are interfered by their own history
 It questions our way of It distrusts the notion of reason, human
PROJECT structuring and categorizing the being is not an independent entity, but it
(fundamental reality and incite to escape from is a “dissolved” or “constructed” subject:
aims of each habitual modes of perception, it the individual = a product of social and
movement) believes that we can thereby linguistic forces, not an essence at all.
(this way) attain a more reliable
view of things.

2.- POST-STRUCTURALISM: LIFE ON A DECENTRED PLANET

Post-structuralism emerged in France in the late 1960s. The two figures
associated with this emergence are Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida.
Barthes’ work around this time began to shift in character and move from a
structuralist phase to a post-structuralist phase. The difference can be seen by
comparing two different accounts of the nature of the narrative, one from each
phase, namely ‘The Structural Analysis of Narrative’ (1966) and The Pleasure of
the Text (1973). The former is detailed, methodological, and forbiddingly
technical, while the latter is just a series of random comments on narrative,
arranged alphabetically, emphasizing the randomness of the material. The essay
‘The Death of the Author’ (1968) is the “hinge” around which Barthes turns from
structuralism to post-structuralism.
In that essay, he announces the death of the author, a rhetorical way of asserting
the independence of the literary text and its immunity to the possibility of being
unified or limited by any notion of what the author might have intended. It makes
a declaration of radical textual independence: the work is not determined by
intention, or context. The text is free by its very nature of all such restraints. The
RESULT= ____
corollary of the death of the author is the birth of the reader.
The difference between the 1966 essay and the 1973 book is a sift of attention
from the text seen as something produced by the author to the text seen as
something produced by the reader by language itself; in the absence of an author,
the claim to decipher a text becomes futile. ———————————————————————————————————-
This early phase of post-structuralism UNPRODUCTIVE
seems to license and revel in the endless free play of meanings and the escape
from all forms of textual authority. There is an inevitable ship from this textual
permissiveness to the more disciplined and austere textual republicanism
suggested in the quotation from Barbara Johnson. For her, deconstruction is not
a hedonistic abandonment of all restraint, but a disciplined identification and
dismantling of the sources of textual power.
The 2nd key figure in the development of post-structuralism in the late 1960s of
post-structuralism is the philosopher Jacques Derrida. The starting point of post-
structuralism may be taken as his 1966 lecture ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the
Discourse of the Human Sciences’. He sees in modern times an intellectual
“event” which constitutes a radical break from past ways thought, associating this
break with the philosophy of Nietzsche and Heidegger and the psychoanalysis of
Freud. Prior to this event the existence of a norm or a centre in all things was
taken for granted: thus ‘man’ was the measure of all other things in the universe:
provided a firm centre against which deviations, aberrations, variations could be
detected and identified as ‘Other’ and marginal. In the 20th century, these centres
were destroyed or eroded; sometimes this was caused by historical events;
sometimes it happened because of scientific discoveries and sometimes it was
caused by intellectual or artistic revolutions.
In the resulting universe there are no absolutes or fixed points, so that the
universe we live in is “decentred” or inherently relativistic. Instead of movement
or deviation from a known centre, all we have is “free play”. Derrida embraces
this decentred universe of free play as liberating, just as Barthes in ‘The Death of
the Author’ celebrates the demise of the author as ushering in an era of joyous
freedom. The consequences of this new decentred universe are impossible to
predict, but we must endeavor not to be among ‘those who … turn their eyes
away in the face of the yet unnameable which is proclaiming itself’. This powerful
appeal to us not to turn our eyes away from the light is typical of the often-
apocalyptic tone of post-structuralist writing. If we have the courage we will enter
this new Nietzschean universe, where there are no guaranteed facts, only
interpretations, none of which has the stamp of authority upon it, since there is
no longer any authoritative centre to which to appeal for validation of our
interpretations.
Derrida’s rise to prominence was confirmed by the publication of three books by
him in the following year (Speech and Phenomena, Of Grammatology, and
Writing and Difference). These books are on philosophical rather than literary
topics, but Derrida’s method always involves the highly detailed ‘deconstructive’
reading of selected methods have been borrowed by literary critics and used in
the reading of literary works. The deconstructive reading of literary texts tends to
make them emblems of the decentred universe. Texts previously regarded as
unifed artistic artefacts are shown to be fragmented, self-divided, and centerless.
They always turn out to be representative of the “monstrous births” predicted at
the end of Structure, Sing, and Play’.
3.- STRUCTURALISM AND POST-STRUCTURALISM: SOME PRACTICAL
DIFFERENCES
Post-structuralism often claims that it is more an attitude of mind than a practical
method of criticism. This is quite true but no more true of post-structuralism than
of any other critical orientation.
The post-structuralist literary critic is engaged in the task of ‘deconstructing’ the
text. This process is given the name ‘deconstruction’, which can be defined as
applied post-structuralism. It is often referred to as ‘reading against the grain’ or
‘reading the text against itself’ with the purpose of ‘knowing the text as it cannot
know itself’. Deconstructive reading uncovers the unconscious rather than the
conscious dimension of the text, all the things which its overt textuality glosses
over or fails to recognize. This repressed unconscious within language might be
sensed in the example when we said that the word ‘guest’ is cognate with the
word ‘host’, which in turn comes from the Latin word hosts, meaning an enemy.
This hints at the potential double aspect of a guest or as changing from one to
the other. This notion of ‘hostlity’ is like the repressed unconscious of the word,
and the process of deconstruction might draw upon such disciplines as etymology
in this way.
The deconstructionist practices what has been called textual harassment or
oppositional reading, reading with the aim of unmasking internal contradictions
or inconsistencies in the text, aiming to show the disunity which underlies its
apparent unity. The aim of ‘New Critics’ of the previous generations had been the
opposite of this, to show the unity beneath apparent disunity. The deconstructive
process will often fix on a detail of the text which looks incidental and then use it
as the key to the whole text, so that everything is read through it.
Structuralists look for such features in the text as parallels, echoes, reflections,
and so on. The effect of doing this is to show a unity of purpose within the text.
By contrast, the deconstructionist aims to show that the text is at war with itself:
it is a house divided, and disunified. The deconstructionist looks for evidence of
gaps, breaks, fissures and discontinuities of all kinds.
4.- WHAT POST-STRUCTURALIST CRITICS DO
1. They ‘read the text against itself’ so as to expose what might be through
of as the ‘textual subconscious’, where meanings are expressed which may
be directly contrary to the surface meaning.

2. They fix upon the surface features of the words (similarities in sound, the
root meanings of words, a ‘dead’ -or dying- metaphor) and bring these to the
foreground, so that they become crucial to the overall meaning.

3. They seek to show that the text is characterized by disunity rather than unity.
4. They concentrate on a single passage and analyses it so intensively that
it becomes impossible to sustain a ‘univocal’ reading and the language
explodes into multiplicities of meaning’

5. The look for shifts and breaks of various kinds in the text and see these
as evidence of what is repressed or glossed over or passed over in silence
by the text. These discontinuities are called “fault-lines”, a geological
metaphor referring to the breaks in rock formations which give evidence of
previous activity and movement.

5.- DECONSTRUCTION: AN EXAMPLE

The three stages of the deconstructive process are called the verbal, the textual and the
linguistic. They are illustrated using Dylan Thomas’ poem ‘A Refusal to Mourn the Death,
by Fire, of a Child in London’
The verbal stage is very similar to that of more conventional forms of close reading. It
involves looking in the text for paradoxes and contradictions, at what might be called the
purely verbal level. For instance, the final line of Thomas’ poem reads “After the first
death there is no other”. This statement contradicts and refuses itself: if something is
called the first then a sequence is implied of 2nd, 3rd, 4th and so on. So, the phrase “the
first death” implies, at the literal level, that there will be others. Internal contradictions of
this kinds are indicative, for the deconstructionist, of language’s endemic unreliability and
slipperiness.
Other facet of post-structuralism is its tendency to reverse the polarity of common binary
oppositions (male and female / day and night), so that the 2nd term is ‘privileged’ and
regarded as the more desirable. In the poem, it seems to be darkness, rather than light,
which is seen as engendering life, as the poet talks of ‘the mankind making / Bird beast
and flower / Fathering and all humbling darkness’. This paradox reflects the way the
world of this poem simultaneously a recognizable version of the world we live in, and an
inversion of that world. For the deconstructionist such moments are symptomatic of the
way language doesn’t reflect or convey our world but continues a world of its own, a kind
of parallel universe or virtual reality. Identifying contradictory or paradoxical phrases is
the first step in going against the grain of the poem, reading it ‘against itself’, showing
the ‘signifiers’ at war with the ‘signified’, and revealing its repressed unconscious. This
first stage will always turn up useful material for use in the later stages.
The ‘textual’ stage of the method moves beyond individual phrases and takes a more
overall view of the poem. At this 2nd stage the critic is looking for shifts or breaks in the
continuity of the poem: these shifts reveal instabilities of attitude, and the lack of a fixed
and unified position. They can be various kinds, they may be shifts in focus, shifts in
time, or tone, or POV, or attitude, or pace, or vocabulary. They may well be indicated in
the grammar in a shift from 1st person to 3rd, or past tense to present. They show paradox
and contradiction on a larger scale than is the case with the 1st stage, taking a broad
view of the text.
In the case of ‘A Refusal to Mourn’, there are major time shifts and changes in
viewpoint, not as smooth chronological progression. The first two stanzas imagine the
passing of geological aeons and the coming of the ‘end of the world’. But the 3rd stanza
is centred on the present. The final stanza takes a broad vista like the first two, but it
seems to centre on the historical progression of the recorded history of London. No single
wider context is provided to ‘frame’ and contextualize the death of the child in a defined
perspective, and the shifts in Thomas’ poem make it very difficult to ground his meaning
at all. Omissions are important when a text doesn’t tell us things we would expect to be
told.
The ‘linguistic’ stage, involves looking for moments in the poem when the adequacy of
language itself as a medium of communication is called into question. Such moments
occur when there is implicit or explicit reference to the unreability or untrustworthiness of
language. It may involve, saying that something in unsayable; or that it is impossible to
utter or describe something and then doing so; or saying that language inflates, or
deflates or misrepresents its object, and then continuing to use it anyways. In ‘A Refusal
to Mourn’, the whole poem does what it says it won’t do: the speaker professes his
refusal to mourn, but the poem itself constitutes an act of mourning. In the 3rd stanza the
speaker says that he will not ‘murder / The mankind of her going with a grave truth’.
This condemns all the accepted ways of speaking about this event, and the poet
professes to stand outside the available range of clichéd, elegiac stances or ‘discursive
practices’, as if some ‘pure’ stance beyond these necessarily compromised forms of
utterance were possible. Yet this is followed by the solemn, quasi-liturgical
pronouncements of the final stanza: “Deep with the first dead lies London’s
daughter”, the speaker proclaims, which sounds very traditional panegyrical oratory,
with the dead person transformed into some larger than life heroic figure, becoming
‘London’s daughter’, ‘robed’ as for some great procession of the dead of all ages and
now reunited with Mother Earth in the form of the London clay in which she is now buried.
In this poem, Thomas identifies the language trap and then falls into it. Once the grain of
the poem is opened up, then it cannot long survive the deconstructive pressures brought
to bear upon it, and reveals itself as fractured, contradictory, and symptomatic of a
cultural and linguistic malaise. The deconstructive reading, aims to produce disunity, to
show that what looked like unity and coherence contains contradictions and conflicts
which the text cannot stabilize and contain. In contrast, more conventional styles of close
reading had the opposite aim: they would take a text which appeared fragmented and
disunified and demonstrate an underlying unity, aiming to separate the warring dogs and
soothe them back to sleep with suitable blandishments. The two methods suffer from the
same drawback, which is that both tend to make all poems seem similar. The close
reader detects miracles of poised ambiguity alike in Donne’s complex metaphysical
lyrics, and simple poems like Robert Frost’s, which receive the full-scale explicatory
treatment of the ten-page article, so that the experience of reading them loses all its
particularity. After the deconstructionist treatment all poems tend to emerge as angst-
ridden, fissured enactments of linguistic and other forms of indeterminacy.
For the deconstructionist
1. Exposing contradictions or paradoxes might involve showing that the feelings
professed in a poem can be at odds with those expressed.

2. Pointing to breaks, gaps, fissures, discontinuities is a way of implying that the text
lacks unity and consistency of purpose. There may be changes in tone,
perspective or POV for example.

3. The ‘linguistic quirks’ include several kinds of linguistic oddity or non-sequitur

of the kind which undermine secure meanings.
It is often said that Roland Barthes’ 1968 essay ‘The Death of the Author’ marks the
transition from structuralism to post-structuralism, and in that essay, Barthes says that in
the text “everything must be disentangled, nothing deciphered”. The aporia is a textual
knot which resists disentanglement, and several of the elements discussed as
contradictions, paradoxes, or shifts might equally be classified under the more general
heading of aporia.
While it is easy to see why this process might be called reading against the grain, it is
misleading to suggest that the poem has an obvious ‘grain’ or overt meaning which the
critic has merely to routinely counteract.

CRITICAL AUTHORS
1.- ROLAND BARTHES ‘THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR’

• CAPITALIST IDEOLOGY Individualism = a defining feature of capitalism.

• ALLEGORY: “a story, play, poem, picture.... In which the meaning is represented
symbolically...it involves personification = representation of human ideas,
feelings, virtues, vices, experiences... with symbolical human figures carrying
symbolical objects that allow to identify their meaning”
• SIGNIFIED: “Every sign (a word). It has two elements:
▪ SIGNIFIER (what you can physically perceive through a sound or a
graphic mark)
▪ SIGNIFIED (what the sound or graphic marc conceptually refers to).
• “THE “PERSON” OF THE AUTHOR” (line 6) he links the capitalist notion of the
individual to the notion of the “individual or person who writes”, = the author.
• ORDINARY CULTURE reads and interprets literature through its author (his life,
his testes, his passions), while MALLARMÉ and VALÉRY (French poets)
emphasizes “writing”, “linguistic activity” and “the essentially verbal condition of
literature” over the person of the author.
• For ordinary culture, the AUTHOR:
o the person who produces literary work
o is solely responsible for the meaning of that literary work
o the father of the book (= his child over whom he holds authority)
• MODERN SCRIPTOR: not responsible for a book in the same way as the author
→ She wrote the text, but does not have authority over it
→ We must not give him this authority by trying to ascertain what he meant,
his ideas, life...
→ Is “born simultaneously with the text”. Since the text is “played” (as a
musical instrument) every time a reader reads and interprets the text, the
modern scriptor is also the reader himself, his act of reading.
→ So is half-way between the text and each individual reader´s reading of
the text.
• Author must “die” in order for the reader to be “born”: the reader must not look for
authority in the Author, must eliminate the Author to liberate meaning through the
act of reading.
• The reader interprets the text creatively and this creative reading is far more
important than the Author´s intentions and ideas, which are no longer relevant or
important.
• He uses terms like AUTHOR-GOD, THEOLOGICAL, ANTI-THEOLOGICAL,
TO REFUSE GOD ...: to seek meaning in a text through its author it is like
searching for a transcendent being or God who can confer ultimate, fixed
meaning on everything.
• To interpret a text through the Author = “to close the writing”. Meaning is liberated
only if writing is linked to an “antitheological” practice; writing must “refuse to fix
meaning...” and “refuse God”.

2.- JAQUES DERRIDA: OF GRAMMATOLOGY

• SIGNIFIED: meaning
• SIGNIFIER: word
• REFERENT= signified. It refers to the concept to which the signifier is related.
• TRASCENDENTAL SIGNIFIED:
  An ultimate, fixed meaning (the theological message of the Author-God for
Barthes).
 Derrida is critical of the search for a transcendental signified or supreme
meaning

“relationship, unperceived by the writer, between what he commands and what he

does not command of the patterns of the language he uses”
He’s sceptical of the writer´s supposed authorial/ authoritative command (dominio) over
what he produces. Only the reader can perceive the tension (relationship) between what
a writer thinks he can control and what he cannot (what he commands and what he does
not command). He questions the validity of a reading which accepts the writer’s authority
over his text and its meaning, and encourages a critical reading instead, which perceives
the text’s discrepancies and contradictions and from which meanings will emerge.

“Yet if reading must not be content with doubling the text, it cannot transgress the
text toward something other than it(self), toward a referent or a signified outside
the text whose content could take place, could have taken place outside of
language, that is to say, (...) outside of writing i general. (We propose) the absence
of the referent or the transcendental signified. There is nothing outside of the text.
There has never been anything but writing; (...) Although it is not commentary, our
reading must be intrinsic and remain within the text”:
Reading cannot simply reproduce a text. Neither can it look for meaning (a referent, a
signified) which may be historical, biographical, psychological... outside the text. Reading
can only seek meaning inside a text: “Our reading must remain within the text”. Ultimate
meaning or meaning which lies beyond the text (transcendental signified) does not exist.