Tag Archives: de Saussure

This One’s for Holland-Dozier-Holland…

You’re going to have to indulge me for a moment. I promise this post is relevant…

The lyrics below were written by Stephen Merritt, the impetuous darling of the indie-geek songwriting scene and frontman for the Magnetic Fields. Since the mid-90s, Merritt has rightfully earned a reputation for his hyper-literate love songs. As I read Scholes’s comments on deconstructionist criticism, I got out my ipod and pulled up “Ferdinand de Saussure.”

I met Ferdinand de Saussure
On a night like this.
“On love,” he said “I’m not so sure
I even know what it is.
No understanding, no closure,
It is a nemesis.
You can’t use a bulldozer
To study orchids.”

He said:

“So, we don’t know anything
You don’t know anything
I don’t know anything
About love.”
“But we are nothing, (Whoa-oh, whoa-oh)
You are nothing
I am nothing
Without love.”

I’m just a great composer,
And not a violent man.
But I lost my composure,
And I shot Ferdinand,
Crying, “It’s well and kosher,
to say you don’t understand,
but this is for Holland-Dozier-Holland!”

When I first encountered this song during my first year at college, I’d never heard of de Saussure. In an interview, Merritt claimed the song was about the universality of love and a challenge to academics (like de Saussure) that assert we can never truly “know” anything. Love, claimed Merritt, was a universal that could be understood by everyone; it was the only appropriate subject matter for the “perfect” pop song.

We must have a certain degree of cultural knowledge to fully understand the song. First, we must know about Ferdinand de Saussure. Second, we must know that Holland-Dozier-Holland was a songwriting team for Motown during the 1960s. The trio penned some of the era’s greatest pop songs, often on the subject of love [such as, “(Love is like a) Heat wave,” “How Sweet It Is (to be Loved by You),” and “Where did our Love Go?”]. These two bits of knowledge clarify the song’s narrative. In the first verse, de Saussure suggests that writing about love is like using “a bulldozer to study orchids.” In the second verse, the composer shoots de Saussure, with the desperate cry: “this is for Holland-Dozier-Holland!”

So what does all of this have to do with Scholes and textuality? Though I’ve never read de Saussure, I have read Derrida and Foucault. Simply put, reading deconstructionist theory usually makes me feel like the composer in “Ferdinand de Saussure.” I’m as frustrated by the theoretical claim that we can never know anything as I am by the nonsensical nature of the actual words on the page. De Saussure, apparently, is so convoluted that many of his texts require an “expositor” (Culler) to explain to us idiots what in the hell it is that he’s talking about.

My main question regarding deconstructionist theory and criticism is simple: how is this useful to us, as teachers? I understand that Scholes is using a deconstructionist approach to break down assumptions about the structure of literary scholarship. However, he also states that he wants to use critical debates to help students develop their own interpretive skills, specifically their ability to express themselves in writing (15-16). I’m sorry, but what teacher would encourage students to produce ridiculously vague Jamesonian statements such as: “…human sexuality is thus something like a fixed capital” or “The dialectic of desire is thus…something like a negation of a negation”? (Jameson in Scholes, 83). Is anyone else with me here?

I agree with many of Scholes’s points, and I believe it is important for literary educators to have this theoretical background knowledge—if only because it means they’re “keep[ing] up” with their field. However, I do question the basic usefulness of much post-Modern, post-structuralist, and deconstructionist writing. Scholes’s discussion of de Saussure et al immediately brought me back to my undergraduate frustrations. In fact, the following quotation from Derrida’s Speech and Phenomenon prompted me to throw Scholes across the room:

In affirming that perception does not exist, or that what is called perception is not primordial, that somehow everything “begins” by “re-presentation”…and by reintroducing the difference involved in “signs” at the core of what is “primordial”…we are here indicating the prime intention—and the ultimate scope—of the present essay (93).

Excuse me? What? Gee, thanks for clearing that up, Derrida!

I suppose my post can be boiled down to one question: How are we supposed to engage students in critical academic debates (as suggested by Scholes, Graff, and others), when this is what they are going to be faced with?

-Sara