What with last season’s Pulitzer Prize going to Garry Wills’ book about the Gettysburg Address, and now a four-hour cinematic epic depicting the battle that inspired Lincoln’s greatest speech, you’d think that this, the noblest of American orations, is enjoying the high prestige it deserves-even in academe. Guess again.
Recently I lectured at Wittenberg University, a Lutheran campus in the heartland of Ohio. Copies of my book, “Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man,” had been circulated ahead of my visit; I’d been asked to speak informally on the posthumous scandal surrounding the Yale guru of deconstruction, the academically trendy literary theory that sets out to prove that all texts are indeterminate, yield contradictory meanings and can be construed to mean the opposite of what they say. De Man had, it turned out, written for pro-Nazi newspapers during World War II.
Most of the questions raised in the Q-and-A that followed my talk had little to do with my book and much to do with “canon-expansion” and other politically correct shibboleths of the moment. One young woman, for example, spoke of the need to expand the literary canon by reducing the number of “dead white European males” on required reading lists. Then she said that “the founders of this country were white male racists.”
When I commented rather gently that this statement was as “absolute and totalizing” as anything that the jargon-spewing academics are supposed to deplore, a bearded professor in a blue suit rose to her defense. To my surprise he cited approvingly the mock-deconstruction of the Gettysburg Address offered in “Signs of the Times”:
“For the hard-line deconstructionist,” I wrote, “any text, any system of signs, can be shown to compromise itself from within. Here, for example, is the opening of the Gettysburg Address: `Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.’
“Most of us will have no trouble construing this statement or its `intertextual’ relation to the Declaration of Independence, in which the phrase `all men are created equal,’ also appears; Lincoln means to exalt equality as one of the nation’s founding principles. A deconstructionist, however, might pause over `our fathers brought forth’ and `conceived,’ characterizing this trope as an attempt to appropriate for the patriarchal authorities the procreative power vested in the female body.
“`All men are created equal,’ but the deconstructionist might point out that `men’ excludes women and other `marginalized’ figures and that the document therefore promotes something other than full equality. `Government of the people, by the people, for the people,’ Lincoln urged, but the deconstructionist may argue-as H.L. Mencken once did-that it was actually the Confederate states that fought for self-determination. At work in such exercises is a kind of perverse imperative. The critic must expose the text as one would expose a scam or a sham, for all texts are presumed guilty, complicitous with a Western philosophical tradition that the procedures of deconstruction are designed to discredit.”
It had not escaped Prof. Davis-Bob Davis, the Berkeley-trained professor in the blue suit-that I had written these words in the effort to skewer and lampoon deconstruction, though he was probably unaware that the exercise had taken me all of 20 minutes.
But for Davis, my mock-deconstruction was right on the mark. The Gettysburg Address does marginalize women and does appropriate for the patriarchal authorities the maternal power of the female body. What’s more, said he, Abraham Lincoln was a racist.
We should, he added, interrogate our historical “texts.” Why, he wanted to know, was it all right for me to deconstruct Paul de Man’s pro-Nazi journalism-and why wasn’t it all right for others to do the same to the Gettysburg Address?
I asked the professor whether he really saw no difference between Lincoln’s great speech and De Man’s crude journalism. I said the Gettysburg Address was not just a “great text.” It is also an essential statement of this nation’s principles: our dedication to liberty and equality not simply as privileges inherited but as “the great task remaining before us;” our resolve to conclude the Civil War with a “new birth of freedom.”
Was it pointless to mention that Lincoln had vaulted into national prominence because of his principled opposition to slavery? It was Lincoln who issued the Emancipation Proclamation freeing the slaves, Lincoln who campaigned for passage of the 13th Amendment. Had Lincoln turned from the great emancipator into a racist by one of those deconstructive sleights-of-hand that make a thing merge with its own opposite?
The lesson is not that deconstruction, on the decline at places like Yale and Duke, is thriving at academic outposts like a lagging economic indicator, working its mischief. We always knew that deconstruction is far from neutral or value-free; on the contrary, with its strategy of reversing oppositions and dismantling hierarchies, deconstruction fosters some of the worst excesses of political correctness.
The real lesson is the sobering one about the atmosphere on campuses today, where a civil war is going on-a peculiarly low and mean-spirited species of ideological warfare in which epithets like stink bombs are hurled around wantonly and nobody does very much about the alarming, the truly terrifying ignorance that is rampant across our land. For the really sad thing is that the righteous students indoctrinated in deconstructive jive couldn’t tell the Gettysburg Address from a Pennsylvania zip code.
Ignorance is general. It is disheartening to stare at blank faces when you stand in a classroom and mention Icarus, or Thucydides, or Job, or Dante, or Robespierre, or … the Gettysburg Address. We can either read the Gettysburg Address or we can deconstruct it-there isn’t enough time to do both. We should beware of deconstructing the Gettysburg Address when the fact of the matter is that we today scarcely possess it.
If I were running the freshman writing program at Xanadu University, I would require the students to memorize the Gettysburg Address. I would have them study it as oratory-to note how Lincoln uses the word `dedicate,’ how he organizes his argument-but also as a declaration of principles that we must not take for granted.
I would dwell on the president’s rhetorical mission, his effort to impose a meaning somehow commensurate with the Civil War carnage. And I would challenge the students to see what they could accomplish in 272 words-the length of the address Lincoln made to dedicate a cemetery on the site of a battlefield in a drizzling rainfall on Nov. 19, 1863.
