Deconstructing Classics

Not classics deconstructed by postmodern theorists, but the classics themselves deconstructing inherited materials. There is a deconstructive element in much of our great fiction and drama. So argues John Gardner in his classic The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers :

Shakespeare does it: “The genre is by nature righteous and self-confident, authoritarian: There is no doubt that vengeance is the hero’s duty, and our pleasure as we watch is in seeing justice done, however painful the experience. Shakespeare’s Hamlet deconstructs all this. Despite Horatio’s certainty, we become increasingly doubtful of the ghost’s authority as the play progresses, so that we become more and more concerned with Hamlet’s tests of people and of himself; and even if we choose to believe that the ghost’s story was true, we become increasingly unclear about whether Hamlet would be right to kill the king who usurped his father’s throne—at any rate, Claudius becomes less and less the stock villain, and Hamlet, as he proceeds through the play, becomes more and more guilty himself.”

Homer too, and lots of others. “All great literature has, to some extent, a deconstructive impulse,” Gardner asserts. “This is of course only natural: If the business of the first man is to create, the business of the second is at least partly to correct.”