AP English Practice with Deconstruction
The best way to grasp this procedure is to try it. Let’s do so with Robert Frost’s wonderful poem “Mending Wall.”
Mending Wall
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
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That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
“Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, “Good fences make good neighbors.”
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Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
“Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
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What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.” I could say “Elves” to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
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He said it for himself. I see him there,
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”
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A New Critical reading of the text—What is the central tension at work in this poem, and how is it resolved in the poem’s unified advancement of its main theme?—is often a useful first step in deconstructing a literary work because such readings can almost always be found to rest on a binary opposition in which one member of the pair is privileged over the other. This binary opposition is usually the key to the text’s ideological framework (or at least one of the text’s ideological frameworks). Once a New Critical reading is formulated, the binary opposition on which it rests can be deconstructed: that is, it can be examined to find the ways in which the opposing elements in the text overlap or

aren’t really opposed. And this is how we can learn something about the limitations of the ideology the text
(consciously or unconsciously) promotes.
1.
What oppositions do you see in this poem?
2.
What in the poem supports this reading? Consider imagery, attitude of the speaker, etc. Be sure to not line numbers, etc.
So far we’ve located the binary opposition that thematically structures the poem: nonconformity/conformity, which, given the nature of the textual evidence we found to support it, could also be expressed as progressivism/ conservatism or nature/tradition. And we’ve determined which members of the oppositions are privileged in the poem: nonconformity, progressivism, and nature. The next step is to deconstruct this opposition by finding everything in the poem that conflicts with or undermines this hierarchy. That is, we must find textual evidence that contradicts the evidence we have just gathered in support of our New Critical reading of the poem’s main theme. This contradictory evidence is the kind that tends to be overlooked when one is searching for a unified meaning in a literary text, as the
New Critics did. Our goal now is to show that, once we begin to focus on the poem’s internal contradictions instead of its unity, the poem reveals that neither side of the binary opposition(s) supporting the main theme can be privileged over the other. In other words, though most readers have not been trained to see it, we will show how the poem deconstructs itself.
3.
In what ways does the poem contradict this binary? How does the some of the imagery or attitudes contradict a simply contrast between the speaker and his neighbor?
Now that we’ve shown how the poem quietly collapses the binary opposition(s) supporting its own main theme, the final step of our deconstruction is to consider the implications of this collapse. It would seem, for example, that the meaning, importance, and power of conformity and the meaning, importance, and power of nonconformity are not as easily placed in opposition as “Mending Wall” initially appears to suggest. The poem calls for a rational abandonment of a seemingly empty tradition, an attitude easily associated with the scientific and technological progress that occurred during the five decades preceding the poem’s publication in 1914. Yet the value of that tradition, and the dubious nature of the attempt to abandon it, form a powerful counterweight against that call.
Perhaps this conflict in the text suggests that much of the power of tradition lies in its ability to influence our attitudes without our being aware of its presence.
4.
How does this ambiguity help us understand something about our society, if we’re not going to have a clear theme that is fully supported by our traditional understanding of literary analysis?
As this reading of “Mending Wall” illustrates, deconstruction does not try to resolve the thematic tensions in literary texts into some stable, unified interpretation, but rather tries to sustain those tensions in order to learn from them. That a literary work has conflicting ideological projects that are not absorbed in some overarching purpose or theme is not considered a flaw, as it was for New Criticism, but a necessary product of the instability and ideological conflict inherent in language, and they are a product that can enrich our experience of the text. This is a vision of art as a seething cauldron of meanings in flux. As a dynamic entity tied to both the culture that produced it and the culture that interprets it, art becomes a vehicle for understanding our culture, our history, our language, and ourselves.