Deconstructionism. Sophistry. Language games. Cognitive atheism. Chaos in the domain of values. Revolution in the text. Telling some people to shut up.

A nineteen-nineties point of view . . .

Deconstructionism . . . . takes the fun out of reading, on the one hand, deprives it of meaning on the other. No meaning, no interest.

Its practitioners are latter-day sophists, burnt-out cases for whom theory is all. They and their descendants, a new batch every few years, ruled the Academy in the nineties and generally inhabit the left wing of whatever house of cards you want to name.

It's enough to make a Republican out of a person.

“If literature were merely a language game, as deconstructionism suggests, we would tire of it very quickly,” wrote James Tuttleton in his Vital Signs: Essays on American Literature & Criticism.

“Many of our students,” he said, “have alas, been turned away from literature by the mind-numbing repetitive deconstruction of it."

To read, alas to dream . . . For these cats, meaning is elusive. Nihilism? No, they say, rather a free-flowing "going beyond" what's there in black and white.

Oh . . . By the way among ways we learned to meditate in the Jesuits was to use a text as pure jumping-off point. Spiritual reading, it was called. One was not to be limited to the text at hand, because that would make it straight reading and inhibit the divine, which if you were patient would worm its way into your consciousness.

And still could, by the way.

In literature, however, with this denial of meaning, it's "cognitive atheism," says E.D. Hirsch in Validity of Interpretation. Spiritual reading may have helped the 1950s novice find God, but this approach undermines the divine.

Let's have a committee . . . Today's ruling classes in Academe recognize authority in a literature class's consensus about the meaning of a text, but that's not much authority.

As for classroom consensus-taking, James Tuttleton observes that free and open classroom discussions "rarely coalesce into a . . . consensus," though "coercive teaching by a repressive and authoritarian professor will produce [merely] temporary speech agreement."

A little bit here, a little there . . . Tuttleton further suggests that the deconstructionists etc. create "chaos in the domain of values" and that this chaos serves revolutionary goals. Deconstructivism, he says, is a way to "dismantle the logic by which a [political and moral] system . . . maintains its force."

You don't find revolution in the text? Put it there, says Tony Bennett in his 1979 book Formalism and Marxism. "Actively politicizing the text, . . . making its politics for it is the task of Marxist criticism.”

Criticism is "pre-eminently political," says Bennett. "Literature is not something to be studied [but] an area to be occupied." The issue is "not what political effects are but what they can be made to be."

All this, says Tuttleton, is made possible by the idea that no essence is disclosed by the text, which provides secular spiritual reading for post-modern critics.

Relax, everyone . . . Maybe related to all this is an exchange in a recent spirited conversation in which I was characterized as "so [too] rational." But moments later, when I asked if a position was reasonable, no one said that's not a fair question. We routinely rate highly what's reasonable (rational) as a reality check, to use shrinks' phraseology, and good phraseology it is.

One is reminded of the old joke telling the difference between psychosis and neurosis. The psychotic thinks two and two equal five. The neurotic thinks they equal four, but it makes him nervous.

There's a lot of reality out there to make us nervous. But we are mostly stuck with it. Remaking the universe is not an option. So let's be rational (reasonable), or we go riding off into the sunset of our unrealizable hopes.

If I had thought of that back in my preaching days, I could have changed the course of Western civilization. Stopped the excesses of the '60s in their tracks. Sigh.

What does it all mean, anyhow? . . . It's "totalitarian" and "fascistic" to say there's a right interpretation of a literary text and others may be wrong, says critic Robert Crosman. Arguments for an interpretation produce "social discord," he says. Such an (argumentative) approach is "unsuited to modern democracy." He wants "homogenization of sexual, racial, and cultural differences," even if it means telling some people to shut up.

— Note well: The above dates from the '90s, remember, resurrected for your, ah, edification. —