The Scholar Who
Misread History
Late in 1987 an extraordinary literary, intellectual and political scandal
broke in a place we would least expect it: among the solemn deconstructionists
of the humanities faculty at Yale University, the Sorbonne of Connecticut. One
of the leading deconstructionists, the former Sterling Professor of the
Humanities, Paul de Man, who died four years before, proved to have pulled the
curtain on a dark stage in his wartime history. As a young man in his native
Belgium, influenced by a powerful uncle who became a leading supporter of the
Nazis, de Man had contributed some 170 articles to collaborationist newspapers.
Though largely literary, they celebrated the historical justice and destiny of
Nazism and, to put it at its least, colluded with its anti-Semitic
philosophies.
David Lehman, a poet, critic and journalist who covered the
story for Newsweek, gives a valuably detailed if sometimes highly polemical
account of the ensuing crisis. (Though a little too inclined to parody
deconstruction, the author succeeds in clarifying its doctrines and making them
accessible.) "Signs of the Times" looks at the amazing success of
deconstruction as a semipopular modern philosophy
before looking at de Man's "fall" and its implications. At several
key moments when modern history has turned -- Western Europe in 1945, Eastern
Europe now -- we have seen how moral crisis comes to those who have served a
cause that history has, fortunately for humanity, repudiated. Often this
develops into what Mr. Lehman calls "Waldheimer's
Disease," the amnesia of those who must defy or erase the record.
Such was the case with Martin Heidegger, and so it was with de
Man. He obscured his wartime past, Mr. Lehman writes, even a wartime marriage
and family. In 1948 he came to the United States, fresh-born as Gatsby, and
after various jobs was discovered as a scholar and made a member of the Society
of Fellows at Harvard. He became a distinguished teacher at Cornell, Johns
Hopkins and the University of Zurich. When in 1970, in a great seasonal
migration of academic birds, the new deconstructionists took wing and settled
in the elms of New Haven, he joined Yale, to become what a standard textbook
describes as "the most powerful and profound mind in the group of critics
who, inspired in part by the work of Jacques Derrida, made Yale a center of
deconstruction in the 1970's."
As the author of "Blindness and Insight" (1971) and
"Allegories of Reading" (1979), de Man was a leading literary
philosopher and an austere and rigorous scholar, much admired, then and still,
by academic peers. He was a demanding teacher who rejected all classroom show
biz; he was also benign, courteous and considerate. His death was widely
mourned by those who knew him and those who valued his work. Above all, he
stood for a new age of literary theory. In his most famous essay, "The
Resistance to Theory," he argued that the age of esthetic and ethical
criticism was over and that new rhetorical criticism gave the basis for a
universal theory. Even this was said with an appropriate measure of irony; he
was always judicious and temperate. In a time his own theory defined as the Age
of the Death of the Author, de Man was an authority.
Deconstruction, crudely, is a paradox about a paradox: it
assumes that all discourse, even all historical narrative, is essentially
rhetoric. Rhetoric slips and is "undecidable,"
has no fixed meaning; so when we read, we inevitably misread. It came out of
Paris and, for all its claim to universality, has an
evident history. It was born in the aftermath of existentialist anxieties about
presence and absence, the there and the not-there. It developed via
structuralism and its emphasis on linguistics and semiotics. From these sources
it derived its fundamental premise: the endless slippage of the referent, the unfixity of our attempt to name existence. It grew from two
major collapses in late 20th-century European thought: the metaphysical decline
of humanism and the dialectical decline of Marxism.
For all that, it found its own best home in the United States,
that late-modern postculture of multiplied signs and
random meanings. ("America is deconstruction," said the leading
proponent, Jacques Derrida. It later fell to him to bring back to the American
academic community the record of the master's youthful writings, unearthed by
an admiring de Manian in Brussels.) But in the 60's
and 70's, deconstruction filled -- perhaps better, emptied -- the gap left in
the American humanities by the demise of the Old New Criticism. What began as a
brilliant and creative performance philosophy soon became classroom pedagogy.
Throughout the 70's the seminar rooms on American campuses --
and then campuses worldwide -- became workshops in deconstructionist practice.
Junior misreaders worked away, becoming ever more
like C.I.A. operatives, decoding false signals sent by a distant enemy, the
writer. Deconstruction lifted itself with ever higher pretensions. As Jonathan
Culler of Cornell exulted, "The history of literature is part of the
history of criticism." Deconstruction transformed everything into a text
ready to be studied (deconstructed, if you will), as Mr. Lehman notes, and so
easily made affinities with radical feminism and latter-day Marxism, two other
philosophies that also seek to challenge the sanctity of text. According to de
Man himself, it showed itself capable of being a supra-ideological mode of
analysis, exposing the ideological aberration of others while seemingly possessing
none itself.
If deconstruction encountered resistance,
that was often seen as censorious ignorance. Gangs of
neo-deconstructionists would now come to town with their critical services and
descend on the library. One would demythologize, another decanonize, another dephallicize,
another dehegemonize, another de-fame. Literature,
the deconstructionists frequently proved, had been written by entirely the
wrong people for entirely the wrong reasons. Soon all that would be left would
be a few bare bones of undecidable discourse and some
tattered leather bindings. This would be called a conference of the Modern
Language Association.
De Man himself remained temperate and stayed apart from some
of the more extreme phenomena (with which Mr. Lehman has some justified fun).
De Man did believe in good reading, and he did not constitute all of
deconstruction. Likewise, all deconstruction was not de Man, and when he fell
from grace not everything fell with him. Even so, the most interesting part of
Mr. Lehman's book is his record of what followed the dismaying discoveries. In
all fairness, these were made by deconstructionists themselves, though they
squirmed in the telling. For, from a variety of reasons -- collegial
friendship, liberal respect for a fine mind, the need to sustain the critical
enterprise, but perhaps above all dependence on the intellectual mind-set
formed by deconstruction itself -- many of them set to work to reconstruct Paul
de Man.
The ironies grew clear. The discourse so often used to decanonize and de-fame other writers was put to work to
canonize and re-fame the master of deconstruction. More significantly, the
vacancies of his theory -- it is avowedly not esthetic, moral or ethical, and
submits creation to the eternal condition of pure discourse -- became a way to
pronounce de Man's early writings undecidable,
slipping away from their apparent meaning and their crucial historical
location. Since a text has no existential author, no absolute historical
occasion, the 170 articles could become texts in the construction of the
discourse called Paul de Man.
No one should cheer the fall of de Man. The harshest irony is
that his mature criticism was distinguished and deepened the power to read.
What these events showed was that "resistance to theory" -- and,
always the ironic Belgian, de Man reminded us that even theorists possess it --
had its point. This resistance, which grew among many critics and writers,
could be a necessary revolt against an ever more confident form of literary
theory that emptied away far more than a transcendent signified. As writers of
fiction know, the point about writing is that it is existentially real, an
active mode of discovery through the modalities of the imagination, a reaching
toward a supreme fiction. It is not a subordinate category of criticism.
When writers are censored, imprisoned, killed or threatened
with death for their writings, this is not because they are the disciples of undecidability. Writing is an act of expressed moral
responsibility. If we are to take authors and their fate seriously, criticism
must offer a portrait of creativity and of authorship as existential
self-declaration. We need to honor fiction as more than a rhetorical practice,
in fact as a mode of radical discovery. We need an ambiance around writing that
collaborates with its nature as imaginative exploration, as idea, as dream, and
that in the longer view considers creativity a prime power in the making of
intelligence, feeling and moral existence.
This was the position from which Jean-Paul Sartre started the
postwar debate, of which deconstruction is a latter-day development. He started
it because during the 1930's the word had been defamed and defigured,
the book burned, the writer erased, by forces that lay outside criticism, in
history. The tragic paradox exemplified by de Man links us again to that crisis
-- just at the time when, as much of the guiding ideology of the 20th century
wanes or collapses, we must advance the task of creative discovery on our way
to an opening, uncertain future. In the sad drama of a man who in youth misread
not text but history, the cumulative moral, political and linguistic crises of
our agonizing century are returned to us. This is surely the contemporary
meaning of the story of Paul de Man; it calls neither for the simple exultation
some might take from Mr. Lehman's book nor for the arcane circularity of Mr.
Derrida's recent defenses. You might say it calls for reconstruction -- or the
Birth of the Author.
Published in February 24, 1991
By Malcolm Bradbury
On The New York Times On The Web
Copyright
1998 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/04/01/specials/bradbury-deman.html
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articles written by Bradbury: [Next]
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