Jacques Derrida Visits Cicely
51
immediate artillery support. “We’re dying out here,” he screams. “They’ve
taken out the whole western canon.” In a nutshell, this humorous exclamation of
literary horror encapsulates the devastating effects Deconstruction is thought by
many to have on literary studies.
Suddenly an enraged Shakespeare jumps to his feet. Rifle in hand, he
rushes to the door, his cry of “You dirty sons o f . . . ” being drowned out by the
gunfire that cuts him down. Sgt. Chris rushes to him. “Am I slain,” Shakespeare
asks, then utters, “It is a far, far better thing I do.”
“Shakes, that’s Dickens,” Sgt. Chris says as the playwright expires.
Shakespeare’s death causes Sgt. Chris to spring into action. Braving
continuous gun&e, he snake-crawls through the door toward the sniper. At a
berm, he raises his rifle to aim at the enemy, wiio he discovers aiming back at
him. But he cannot shoot: he is aiming at himself “You,” he whispers in
shocked disbelief
The next day, with Ray Charles’s “What’d I Say,” playing in the
background, Chris muses aloud on the air that he might have been wrong in
thinking that authorial intent is irrelevant to a literary work. What is the point of
asking “brother Ray” ^\^lat he meant, he asks, adding, “doesn’t art speak for
itself? What’d I say,” he asks again, “someone please tell me.”
The storyline concludes with a mock baseball game in wiiich Chris,
pitching, strikes out Martin, telling him that the feeling in the pit of his stomach
is what “Casey at the Bat” is really about, the implication being that this is
Thayer’s intended theme.
By having Chris realize his error in reading “Casey at the Bat” in a way
Thayer could not possibly have meant it, “The Graduate” flatly denies any
legitimacy to a view that, as Martin says, removes the author as the “final
arbiter” of the meaning of a work. In repudiating his own reading and accepting
wfiat seems to have been Thayer’s intent, Chris affirms that authors as creators
of their texts are the soince of and authority for the meanings embedded in those
text. There is a point to asking Thayer wfiat’d he say, and Chris earns
establishment approval in the form of a degree as a reward for his return to the
fold. He has also, the episode’s title implies, “graduated” to a higher level of
literary sensibility.
But, ironically, this episode, an example of ‘intertextuality,’ ends up
proving the very point it disputes. Intertextuality acknowledges that texts often
generate responses in the form of other texts. Would this episode exist if
Derrida’s texts didn’t? The ideas it defends have been around for centuries, and
the arguments Egan makes against Deconstruction have been used previously by
others who resist its conclusions. So how can Egan be credited as the originator
of this story? The episode, it would seem, contradicts itself