The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [22]
In Week Four, Zipperstein assigned Umberto Eco’s The Role of the Reader. It hadn’t done much for Madeleine. She wasn’t all that interested, as a reader, in the reader. She was still partial to that increasingly eclipsed entity: the writer. Madeleine had a feeling that most semiotic theorists had been unpopular as children, often bullied or overlooked, and so had directed their lingering rage onto literature. They wanted to demote the author. They wanted a book, that hard-won, transcendent thing, to be a text, contingent, indeterminate, and open for suggestions. They wanted the reader to be the main thing. Because they were readers.
Whereas Madeleine was perfectly happy with the idea of genius. She wanted a book to take her places she couldn’t get to herself. She thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it. When it came to letters and literature, Madeleine championed a virtue that had fallen out of esteem: namely, clarity. The week after they read Eco, they read portions of Derrida’s Writing and Difference. The week after that, they read Jonathan Culler’s On Deconstruction, and Madeleine came to class ready to contribute to the discussion for the first time. Before she could do so, however, Thurston beat her to it.
“The Culler was passable at best,” Thurston said.
“What didn’t you like about it?” the professor asked him.
Thurston had his knee up against the edge of the seminar table. He pushed his chair up on its back legs, scrunching up his face. “It’s readable and everything,” he said. “And well argued and all that. But it’s just a question of whether you can use a discredited discourse—like, say, reason—to explicate something as paradigmatically revolutionary as deconstruction.”
Madeleine searched along the table for mutual eye-rolling but the other students seemed eager to hear what Thurston had to say.
“Care to elaborate?” Zipperstein said.
“Well, what I mean is, first off, reason is just a discourse like any other, right? It’s only been imbued with a sense of absolute truth because it’s the privileged discourse of the West. What Derrida’s saying is that you have to use reason because, you know, reason is all there is. But at the same time you have to be aware that language is by its very nature unreasonable. You have to reason yourself out of reasonableness.” He pulled up the sleeve of his T-shirt and scratched his bony shoulder. “Culler, on the other hand, is still operating in the old mode. Mono as opposed to stereo. So from that point of view, I found the book, yeah, a little bit disappointing.”
A silence ensued. And deepened.
“I don’t know,” Madeleine said, glancing at Leonard for support. “Maybe it’s just me, but wasn’t it a relief to read a logical argument for once? Culler boils down everything Eco and Derrida are saying into a digestible form.”
Thurston turned his head slowly to gaze across the seminar table at her. “I’m not saying it’s bad,” he said. “It’s fine. But Culler’s work is of a different order than Derrida. Every genius needs an explainer. That’s what Culler is for Derrida.”
Madeleine shrugged this off. “I got a lot better idea of what deconstruction is from reading Culler than from reading Derrida.”
Thurston took pains to give her point of view full consideration. “It’s the nature of a simplification to be simple,” he said.
Class ended shortly after that, leaving Madeleine fuming. As she was coming out of Sayles Hall, she saw Leonard standing on the steps, holding a Coke can. She went right up to him and said, “Thanks for the help.”
“Excuse me?”
“I thought you were on my side. Why didn’t you say anything in class?”
“First Law of Thermodynamics,” Leonard said. “Conservation of energy.”
“Didn’t you agree with me?”
“I did and I didn