The Two Rhetorics: George Eliot’s Bestiary

Abstract

In an essay published in 1983, ‘Composition and Decomposition: Deconstruction and the Teaching of Writing’,1 I argued that all good readers as well as all good writers have always been ‘deconstructionists’. Deconstruction was defined as presupposing a methodical awareness of the disruptive power that figures of speech exert over the plain construable ‘grammatical’ sense of language, on the one hand, and over the apparent rigour of logical argumentation on the other. I concluded from this that rhetoric in the sense of knowledge of the intricacies of tropes should be taught in courses in composition, along with grammar and rhetoric in the sense of persuasion. Knowledge of figures of speech should also be taught in courses in reading. In the process of arguing that more attention should be given in courses both in reading and in writing to knowledge of figures of speech and their disruptive power, I discussed briefly (as examples of the way the great writers are all ‘deconstructionists’ before the fact) a passage from Plato and one from George Eliot. I propose here to analyse those passages in more detail in an attempt to identify their deconstructive rigour. It should be remembered that ‘deconstruction’ is not something that the reader does to a text; it is something that the text does to itself. The text then does something to the reader as she or he is led to recognise the possibility of two or more rigorously defensible, equally justifiable, but logically incompatible readings of the text in question.