Editing The Author in Literature Part 1 (section)

==== Deconstructing the Novel ====
One of the greatest ‘agents of change’, the foremost of avante garde writers of the early 20th century was James Joyce. He was undoubtedly one of the greatest literary minds ever born. Dubliners, one of his early works, is one of the most beautiful odes to a place. It is the story of a place, more than its people. It is something authors wanting to write about a place dream to achieve.

But it was James Joyce who, because of his talent and not despite of it, deconstructed the genre of the novel. Ulysses, his first such experimental work, tells the story in one day in the life of Stephen Dedalus. The story is allegorical. The plot is confusing and it takes many readings and much supplementary reading to make sense of it.

Soon the plot completely disappeared from the novel. Other writers started emulating Joyce as he was a literary giant of his age. With magical realism, all the sacred principles of good old storytelling were abandoned.

Magical realism was an understandable medium for the South Americans who built upon their experience of shamans and magical stories of the tribes. But the magical realism which seeped out to the rest of the world just destroyed the discipline.

Led by Joyce, a new technique called Stream of Consciousness was becoming very famous in the West. This style meant that the writer has to put on paper whatever came to his mind without editing, in the rawest form. He was not even allowed to organize his thoughts or even his language. For any ‘editing’ or ‘organizing’ will create a narrative which the authors dreaded like the plague.

Jacques Derrida along with Roland Barthes meanwhile was peddling that ‘writing has no meaning’, and ‘there is no inherent meaning in language’ and that ‘meaning is constructed by the reader as he goes along’.

This intellectualization of the art of storytelling resulted in the destruction of the very tools of writing, of creating literature. The degradation was quick. In Finnegans Wake, a later work of Joyce, we see that the language itself is destroyed.

Finnegans Wake is classed as a novel but it can be read forwards and backwards, from the beginning, from the middle, and starting from the last; which means that it is essentially meaningless nonsense. And I mean it literally.

Many of its pages don’t have paragraphs or proper sentences and sometimes not even words. Sometimes entire pages are filled with “..rattttttttttttttttshhhhhhhhhh…” and so. The author did not have to edit it, they said! It had to be raw they said!

The postmodernists and deconstructionists argued that not only the story, the plot, the narrative, but even language had to be deconstructed for staying true to reality, as even language is a human construct.

This is factually untrue. Language has deeper evolutionary and biological roots as proved by cognitive scientists and neurobiologists in the 21st century. But science is seldom the strong point of ideologues. As a result: not just the product, that is literature, but even the medium, that is language was also destroyed.