Pharaoh's Birthstool: Deconstruction and Midrash

Abstract

Interdisciplinary study, whether the most promising or the most perilous trend in the universities today, may be credited with ushering in a renaissance of the large scale analogy. With the old divisions between fields dissolving and even structuralist oppositions slipping their poles, psychology, music, literature, linguistics, anthropology and mathematics are all united under one metadiscipline, and may all be interpreted as coherent and mutually illuminating signs out of a single great code or fluid grammar. The task of the literary scholar, at such a pass, is less to plot differences than, like Valery's Leonardo, to forge resemblances, often between ideas hitherto thought irreconcilable. Recent developments in deconstruction offer a case in point, inviting us to ponder by what poetic principle those scholars nourished by Nietzschean skepticism should now reopen a debate framed in terms more willing to belief than Nietzschean negativity is used to-the Hellenism versus Hebraism debate. Of course, since the early seventies, when the first efforts of critics like Hartman, Bloom and Miller to push criticism beyond formalism gained wide recognition in Derrida's defrocking of the logos, Hellenism, at least in its benign Arnoldian guise of sweetness and light, has been on the decline. We might be surprised, though, that what are traditionally perceived as the rather stiffer requirements of the Hebraic mode have not likewise been eschewed. On the contrary, deconstructionist heirs of Nietzsche's negativity have embraced Hebraism, if not precisely the Hebraism of Arnold's, or even more recent critics', understanding.