ory of literature. Tomashevsky wrote admiringly of how Gulliver’s
descriptions of English society defamiliarized and decontextualized its
elements by removing their “shell of euphemistic phrases and fictitious
traditions.” Shklovsky wrote a monograph on Sterne’s Tristram Shandy
to show how in “laying bare” the various devices of fiction, Sterne drew
attention to the artifice of novelistic form. Indeed, Sterne’s protracted
descriptions, misplaced prefaces, typographic games, and parodic lan-
guage seem oddly out of place for his time, making him seem a post-
modern artist miraculously transported to the past.
From Swift’s time to ours, atomization, fragmentation, and decon-
textualization have been the hallmarks of modern art and criticism. Like
Swift’s professors, modern critics have tried to untether literary texts
from authors and reduce language to its constituent elements. Avant-
garde writers have responded by creating texts that accord with the lat-
est theories.
The modern approach to literature is perhaps best exemplified by the
Deconstructionism of Jacques Derrida—a movement whose very name
epitomizes modern thought. Beginning in Cartesian dualism, Derrida
first proposes to reverse traditional binary categories of thought (such as
mind and body) and so stymie any attempt to establish a “center” of dis-
course. According to Derrida, this desire to establish a center is the root
of all error in Western philosophy and constitutes the sin of “logocen-
trism.” To keep this seductive illusion at bay, Derrida follows the
Structuralists in asserting that words (signifiers) are composed of atom-
like elements called phonemes, which function in a system of “dif-
férance” that forever frustrates their ability to communicate meaning.
Though seeming to pose a revolutionary challenge to Western philosophy,
Derrida’s system is rooted in the same nexus of Enlightenment ideas that produced
Swift’s Academy, among whose professors he would surely feel at home. In cre-
ating his deconstructive philosophy, Derrida duplicates two fundamental errors
made by Swift’s professors: He believes words can be reduced to their constituent
elements, and he believes these elements are actual things. Unfortunately for his
system, recent developments in science suggest that language cannot be reduced
to a linear chain of signifiers strung out like dice on a wire; that meaning is not per-
petually deferred, but rather pervades language down to its smallest elements. To
understand how stories and poems work, we first have to take language off the rack
on which it’s been stretched for the last three centuries and consider how it’s woven
on the mind’s enchanted loom.
In Eve Spoke,Philip Lieberman, a professor of cognitive and lin-
guistic science at Brown, disproves the first of Derrida’s premises. He
demonstrates that when we speak we don’t simply arrange discrete lin-
The Enchanted Loom: A New Paradigm for Literature 145