Oops! It's Broken.

On Deconstruction, Dracula, and Chesterton.

Ladies, gentlemen, fratlords, lend me your ears; I come to grind an ax. I have a strong preference for order and measured action. This is a reason I can’t embrace libertarianism as it stands presently. There are more reasons don’t come at me. This is also a big reason why I do not like the widespread, unmeasured amounts of deconstruction running rampant among my peers and across the internet broadly. Deconstruction is a very useful tool for understanding all kinds of things about society. Reverse engineering depends on a proper disassembly of all the component parts, however if you don’t pay careful attention to what those pieces do and where they come from you’ll end up like 12-year-old me with a bucket of disassembled old radio/CD players in your closet. The same is true for ideas.

Deconstruction is one of the primary tools of a critical approach. People have taken it too far. It seems instead of taking apart ideas because there is a problem, we are deconstructing them to find a problem. This is very dangerous. However, there is an even more irritating form of deconstruction in literature. Breaking down a book to reconfigure the themes to make a statement the book clearly is not only a waste of time, it disrespects literature that actually are grappling with those themes. This is the ax I have to grind.

The other day I had an encounter with a prospective girlfriend and we began to discuss literature. She off-handedly mentioned that Dracula and Frankenstein were not books men would understand references to because they were established in the literary canon of queer media. The precise quote was “[Those books] are for the girls and gays.” I, a 24-year-old man, scoffed at this idea because we were talking about Dracula and Frankenstein. She then told me that I was lacking in my knowledge of queer history.

This is deconstruction gone wrong. I am familiar with why someone may interpret these books in a queer way. However, that interpretation is gay and retarded. It does not take a close reading to understand that any allegorical value these books may or may not contain is not a surprise queer story. What makes vampires horrifying is the physical and spiritual rape induced by getting consumed by one, corrupting and twisting your body against your will into that of a demented and insatiable predator. To get this reading from the story you have two options: You either are incapable of understanding the world unless it is exclusively judged against your own life—this is a horrible way to live—or you do not care and are looking for territory to claim in service of your pet project.

This is where deconstruction goes wrong. Done properly, you should be able to break something down, identify its components, and then rebuild those themes, ideas (or radio/CD player you took apart), removing any defective pieces. Reconfiguring a radio into a microwave oven is not deconstruction, it is demolition and a “draculaen” offense of its own. G. K. Chesterton in his 1929 book The Thing wrote about the wisdom of not tearing down any guardrails unless you understand why guideline exists. Here is my own spin on this: Maybe you shouldn’t demolish and rebuild ideas willy-nilly in the service of your own ego, especially ones you don’t understand.

I don’t mean to wail excessively on this poor misguided girl, she is just one player in a very large game. Deconstruction is a useful tool to identify themes, structure, and rot inside things. however, just as a well-funded prosecutor can convict a ham sandwich, you can find specters of rot and decay everywhere and read in things that clearly are not there if you look hard enough. If you are going to start mass deconstructing things, I encourage you to keep an open mind and not jump to conclusions too quickly. This is how we get endless HR presentations on why we are not allowed to say phrases like “Master Bedroom” and “Mothers” because there is a possible reading of these terms to be offensive and oppressive. These hodgepodge monstrosities of misinterpretation and over-sensitivity reanimated into a hulking behemoth of rules and restrictions should remain in 2020 like many other things from that era.

Will I be going out with the aforementioned woman? Probably not. You may be surprised to know that it isn’t for her insane takes on Dracula and Frankenstein, nor is it because she is not hot. It’s because she’s French Canadian. As my good friend Brian once said, “The only thing worse than a Frenchman or a Canadian is a French Canadian. Even the French and the Canadians hate those guys.” So true Brian, so true. Oh, one last thing. You know what book was not identified as for the girls and gays? The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde.