Deconstructing Texts

 

The latest addition to the library arrived earlier today. Even a cursory skim through this text reveals it to be like no other 'novel' I've ever encountered - if it can even truly fit that category, and I can see the connections to Borges straight away, as well as to what I'm trying to do with my own adventures in text and meta-textuality. What does a specific text say? What lies beyond the text - both directly alluded to, or indirectly (via the reader's own experiences and knowledge)? As few people in the West know much, if anything, of the Khazars, we are relying upon the author as an athority - although we can always choose to conduct our own research beyond the novel, in the 'real world'. My situation is different, in that I'm creating something pretty much from scratch (with only allusions to ideas, knowledge and events that exist outside these texts) and then presenting it - whether on a full platter, or only piece by piece, still remains to be seen, although I keep thinking that the creation of parallel and counter-narratives such as this very blog ought to serve some additional purpose beyond documentation and note-keeping, as well as the very nature of text itself, in opposition to speech (which Old English poetry is, so generally believed, to be derived from: oral traditions passed down and elaborated through time and generations, much like folk-tales, myths, and stories of 9th Century Khazars). Is speech more pure than writing (which after all came long afterwards), in the Lévi-Strauss sense of binary opposition? Derrida's Grammatology, of course, picks holes in the Lévi-Strauss point of view, but myths, taboos, legends and rules - enforcers of societies and stability (as well as power structures) - were all disseminated long before writing came along to enshrine such things in clay, stone or mechanical retrieval systems.

I suspected things would start to deviate down paths of deconstructionism sooner or later. The question is, do I have the time to get to grips with everything that entails?