The Rhetoric of Deconstruction: Donato and Flaubert

"Deconstruction" is a misnomer. This critical approach actually generates the structures that are its object of study. Eugenio Donato's fine essay on Bouvard et Pécuchet effectively illustrates the oversights that can result. He sees the title characters as systematizing alazons when actually they are unwitting eirons, whose childlike logic exposes the absurdities of dogmas and institutions. It is their headlessness, spontaneity, and sexuality that get them into trouble, rather than a hubristic attempt to impose the static categories of the museum and geology on a thermodynamic world. By the end of the novel, their intellectual honesty has led them to accept chaos. (LMP)