New Criticism and Deconstruction: Two Attitudes in Teaching Poetry
Andrew P. Debicki
The differences between a New Critic and a deconstructive critic will lead the latter to ask different
questions and seek different goals than would the former. Skeptical of the possibility of discovering finite
meanings, the deconstructive critic will explore, in tentative fashion, a variety of possible readings; more
oriented to the text as a system of signs that are open to being subverted, he or she will develop that variety
of readings by looking at ways in which the parts of the text modify and undercut each other. By delaying
any attempt to discover meaning, by suspending final judgments, and by treating all interpretations as
subject to constant reversal, such a critic will, as Geoffrey Hartman suggests, take into account the
constantly unfolding nature of the text.
The implications of all this for the study of a text, and especially for its study in the context of a
classroom experience, become clear as we look at the ways in which a New Critic and a deconstructivist
might handle a poem. My first example, untitled, is a work by Pedro Salinas, which I first analyzed many
years ago and which I have recently taught to a group of students influenced by deconstruction:
Sand: sleeping on the beach today
and tomorrow caressed
in the bosom of the sea:
the sun’s today, water’s prize tomorrow.
Softly you yield
to the hand that presses you
and go away with the first
courting wind that appears.
Pure and fickle sand,
changing and clear beloved,
I wanted you for my own,
and held you against my chest and soul.
But you escaped with the waves, the wind, the sun,
and I remained without a beloved,
my face turned to the wind which robbed her,
and my eyes to the far-off sea in which she had
green loves in a green shelter.
My original study of this poem, written very much in the New Critical tradition, focused on the
unusual personification of sand and beloved and on the metaphorical pattern that it engendered. In the first
part of the work, the physical elusiveness of sand (which slips through one’s hand, flies with the wind,
moves from shore to sea) evokes a coquettish woman, yielding to her lover and then escaping, running off
with a personified wind, moving from one being to another. Watching these images, the reader gradually
forgets that the poem is metaphorically describing sand and becomes taken up by the unusual
correspondences with the figure of a flirting woman. When in the last part of the poem the speaker laments
his loss, the reader is drawn into his lament for a fickle lover who has abandoned him.
Continuing a traditional analysis of this poem, we would conclude that its unusual personification/
metaphor takes us beyond a literal level and leads us to a wider vision. The true subject of this poem is not
sand, nor is it a flirt who tricks a man. The comparison between sand and woman, however, has made us
feel the elusiveness of both, as well as the effect that this elusiveness has had on the speaker, who is left
sadly contemplating it at the end of the poem. The poem has used its main image to embody a general
vision of fleetingness and its effects.
My analysis, as developed thus far, is representative of a New Critical study. It focuses on the text and
its central image, it describes a tension produced within the text, and it suggests a way in which this
tension is resolved so as to move the poem beyond its literal level. In keeping with the tenets of traditional
analytic criticism, it shows how the poem conveys a meaning that is far richer that its plot or any possible
conceptual message. But while it is careful not to reduce the poem to a simple idea or to an equivalent of
its prose summary, it does attempt to work all of its elements into a single interpretation which would
satisfy every reader. It is thus highly “logocentric”: it makes all of the poem’s meanings reside in its verbal
structures, and it suggests that those meanings can be discovered and combined into a single cohesive
vision as we systematically analyze those structures.
By attempting to find a pattern that will incorporate and resolve the poem’s tensions, however, this
reading leaves some loose ends, which I noticed even in my New Critical perspective--and which I found
difficult to explain. To see the poem as the discovery of the theme of fleetingness by an insightful speaker,
we have to ignore the fanciful nature of the comparison, the whimsical attitude to reality that it suggests,
and the excessively serious lament of the speaker, which is difficult to take at face value--he laments the
loss of sand with the excessive emotion of a romantic lover! The last lines, with their evocation of the
beloved/ sand in an archetypal kingdom of the sea, ring a bit hollow. Once we notice all of this, we see the
speaker as being somehow unreliable in his strong response to the situation. He tries too hard to equate the
loss of sand with the loss of love, he paints himself as too much of a romantic, and he loses our assent
when we realize that his rather cliché declarations are not very fitting. Once we become aware of the
speaker’s limitations, our perspective about the poem changes: we come to see its “meaning” as centered,
not on the theme of fleetingness as such, but on a portrayal of the speaker’s exaggerated efforts to embody
this theme in the image of sand.
For the traditional New Critic, this would pose a dilemma. The reading of the poem as a serious
embodiment of the theme of evanescence is undercut by an awareness of the speaker’s unreliability. One
can account for the conflict between readings, to some extent, by speaking of the poem’s use of irony and
by seeing a tension between the theme of evanescence and the speaker’s excessive concern with an
imaginary beloved (which blinds him to the larger issues presented by the poem). That still leaves
unresolved, however, the poem’s final meaning and effect. In class discussions, in fact, a debate between
those students who asserted that the importance of the poem lay in its engendering the theme of
fleetingness and those who noted the absurdity of the speaker often ended in an agreement that this was a
“problem poem” which never resolved or integrated its “stresses” and its double vision. This mirrored the
opinions of several critics of Salinas’s poetry, who have emphasized the unresolved nature of much of his
early work and have accused the poet of a playful intellectualism that made his work less impressive, for
example, than that of Jorge Guillén or Federico García Lorca. Such attitudes make clear a very important
premise of the New Critical approach--its assumption that a single orderly resolution of a work’s meanings
is a positive standard of its value.
The deconstructive critic, however, would not be disturbed by a lack of resolution in the meanings of
the poem and would use the conflict between interpretations as the starting point for further study. Noting
that the view of evanescence produced by the poem’s central metaphor is undercut by the speaker’s
unreliability, the deconstructive critic would explore the play of signification that the undercutting
engenders. Calling into question the attempt to neatly define evanescence, on the one hand, and the
speaker’s excessive romanticism on the other, the poem would represent, for this critic, a creative
confrontation of irresoluble visions. The image of the sand as woman, as well as the portrayal of the
speaker, would represent a sort of “seam” in the text, an area of indeterminacy that would open the way to
further readings. This image lets us see the speaker as a sentimental poet, attempting unsuccessfully to
define evanescence by means of a novel metaphor but getting trapped in the theme of lost love, which he
himself has engendered; it makes us think of the inadequacy of language, of the ways in which
metaphorical expression and the clichés of a love lament can undercut each other.
Once we adopt such a deconstructivist perspective, we will find in the text details that will carry
forward our reading. The speaker’s statement that he held “her” against his “chest and his soul” underlines
the conflict in his perspective: it juggles a literal perspective (he rubs sand against himself) and a
metaphorical one (he reaches for his beloved), but it cannot fully combine them--“soul” is ludicrously
inappropriate in reference to the former. The reader, noting the inappropriateness, has to pay attention to
the inadequacy of language as used here. All in all, by engendering a conflict between various levels and
perspectives, the poem makes us feel the incompleteness of any one reading, the way in which each one is
a “misreading” (not because it is wrong, but because it is incomplete), and the creative lack of closure in
the poem. By not being subject to closure, in fact, this text becomes all the more exciting: its view of the
possibilities and limitations of metaphor, language, and perspective seems more valuable than any static
portrayal of “evanescence.”