Deconstructing the Bible

Hopefully I can make some sense here:

As I navigate the wide world of literature, I find myself delving deeper and deeper into the critical method, and what implications that may hold for my enjoyment of the literary world.

For example, recently, I have been taking a course on critical literary theory and criticism (LIT 300), and have been studying Jacques Derrida and his work in Deconstruction. You can read an outline of the theory here, but in essence, the theory sends the reader spiraling into an abyss of questions that always end the same: there is no universal meaning, and we are all trapped in an abyss of nothingness.

I am of course, being dramatic, and simplifying the theory a substantial amount, but the situation I find myself in is that the farther and farther I make my way into the critical world, the more I begin to question whether or not literature should hold the effect it has over me.

Many of my favorite works (East of Eden, Harry Potter, and a couple billion others) have affected me on a deep emotional level, which, as Northrop Frye describes in his work The Archetypes of Literature, “Casual value-judgments belong not to criticism but to the history of taste, and reflect, at best, only the social and psychological compulsions which prompted their utterance.” (Norton Ant. of Crit. Theory 1447)

I do not (yet) analyze literature on a fully critical level, while I can make an argument for or against something based on a given theory, when I place literary value on something, I am in a large part governed by how that book speaks to me, how it affects me on an emotional level, how it makes me laugh, and how it makes me cry.


So, we come to the bible, which, in the simplest terms, is a critical nightmare. I mean, come on, Derrida would look at one page, turn his nose up in the air while extinguishing his cigarette with the other and pronounce: “this work is the epitome of meaninglessness”.

I have been enjoying the bible immensely on the other hand, and partially it is because of the rather casual, visceral enjoyment I get from a mythological work. Is this correct? I don’t know. Maybe the gut feeling, the moral feeling that I get from reading the good book is the only intent or interpretation I should take.

I like to think that the most important thing I can get from literary study is a continual thirst for learning, and the devouring of great works.

Derrida be damned.