Examples: Deconstruction
Innocence & Experience
Professor's Introduction
I was especially impressed with the way that Michael doesn't simply reverse
the opposition he examines but demonstrates how each term is fundamentally
dependent on one another.
--Warren Hedges
Michael Janowski Eng. 300
Deconstruction Essay
Innocence and Experience
"Innocence and time," says a caption on a card I found in a fortune cookie, "once lost, can never be regained." This short sample of Chinese lore, or maybe of restaurant wisdom, provokes me to ponder the opposition between innocence and experience. Both these notions underlie a variety of cultural artifacts and religious beliefs. The motif of loosing innocence is elaborated in the first books of the Bible, becomes the pivotal subject of poems by William Blake and John Milton poems, and is explored in Tom Petty's song "Into the Great Wide Open." There is a firm and fast distinction between innocence and experience, the former being a blissful originary state that is both laudable and inherently virtuous. Moreover, innocence is presented as something that can be lost without a chance for regaining. It is the state of being sinless, pure, unable to distinguish good from evil. Children and savages are often presented as innocent, and therefore worth protecting. Experience, in turn, is shown as dependent upon innocence. It is the state of lost impeccability, the effect of sin. An experienced person is condemned to be torn apart between good and evil. This is why other oppositions, such as the one between purity and impurity, are commonly associated with innocence and experience.
The fact that innocence is commonly considered as a desirable condition can be proven by the existence of behavioral and verbal taboos in human cultures. There are lines one can not cross without the inevitable consequence of loosing one's innocence forever. In Christianity sex is undoubtedly a taboo of this kind. The taboo of human sexual activity is so important that even words pertaining to it are considered `dirty', or simply unacceptable in certain situations. This attitude is not limited to the Christian cultural environment. In ancient Greece, for instance, the only people permitted to watch Olympic Games were males and virgin girls. No woman with previous sexual experience was admitted to the place where the championships were held. The conceptual borderline between innocence and experience is also emphasized in the initiation rituals present in many cultures, whereby performing certain rites is necessary provide a young person with a safe way of passing from one state to another. The ceremony of Bar Micwah in Jewish culture could serve as a relevant example here.
The constructs of innocence and experience are not only different from one another, but they also define themselves against each other. The existence of one of those constructs is strictly dependent on the existence of the other, as they define themselves as different form one another. They are mutually necessary in order to exist. There is no innocence without experience. Without the notion of sin, Adam and Eve's innocence does not make sense; it does not exist because it cannot be compared to something else.
There is yet another way of looking at the process of loosing innocence. If we choose to understand it as a continuum, experience will be endowed with a more independent and positive existence. Ultimately, it will become the end, the final purpose of life, as opposed to existing merely as the lack of innocence. In other words, the whole life can be perceived as a continuous process of gaining experience and filling the emptiness of innocence.
The above reversal of the opposition is helpful in realizing one more aspect of innocence -- experience dependency. The way innocence is perceived, is to a great extent shaped by experience. Our mind cannot possibly grasp the nature of innocence without knowing the distinction. In other words, one must be experienced to perceive, or construct, innocence. To put it simply, we view innocence through the prism of our experience.
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