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MADISON JOURNAL OF LITERARY CRITICISM
longer expect salvation to rise from these inconsistencies, as did Marx” (73). In “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” Jacques Derrida writes: It was probably necessary to begin to think that there was no center, that the center would not be thought in the form of a being-present, that the center had no natural locus… This moment was that in which language invaded the universal problematic… when everything became a system where the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences. (225) The postmodern approach used in investigating the death of the subject in The Hairy Ape lends itself to Derridean deconstruction; it is a rather playful enterprise that necessitates understanding the infinite deferral of identity in the play’s characters, specifically Yank and Mildred, through multiple constellations of differences. That understanding, in collaboration with persistent unraveling of the spontaneous inconsistencies of the metanarratives upon which the play depends, reveals the substancelessness of Robert “Yank” Smith and Mildred Douglas, not just as narrative structures but as fictional subjects. That is to say, the activity at hand is precisely to understand these characters as non-subjects, non-selves. Whereas some deconstructive approaches begin by regarding the text externally, pulling it apart into its incompatible parts, here it is both possible and desirable to situate a postmodern critical approach to The Hairy Ape within literary discourse, to approach the text more internally. Slavoj Žižek’s discussion of ideology in his 2008 book, Violence, is a fitting entrance to the internal structure of The Hairy Ape as an anti-capitalist play. Žižek observes that “certain features, attitudes, and norms of life are no longer perceived as ideologically marked. They appear to be neutral, non-ideological, natural, commonsensical. We designate as ideology that which stands out from this background” (36). However, “it is precisely the neutralization of some features into a spontaneously accepted background that marks out ideology at its purest and most effective” (36). Žižek’s concept, applied to The Hairy Ape, leads to the conclusion that the text’s ideology is less what it explicitly says than what occupies its “spontaneously accepted background.” The target of this deconstruction, namely the ideology of The Hairy Ape, is more visible in the ramifications implicit in its structure than in the simple facts of the events depicted in the play. A useful way to begin approaching this concept is to