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Paul de Man (1919–1983)

De Man was the most rigorous of the American literary critics who turned deconstruction into a practice of reading. He held that literature is the place where language’s figural, rhetorical character is least concealed, and that reading is the unending discovery that texts say something other than what they assert. Four years after his death, the discovery of his wartime journalism made him the centre of a scandal that permanently marked the movement.

Paul de Man (1919–1983), Belgian-born literary critic and theorist. He emigrated to the United States after the war, took a doctorate at Harvard, and taught at Cornell, Johns Hopkins, and finally Yale, where he became the leading figure of the “Yale school” of deconstructive criticism. Revered at his death in 1983, he was the subject in 1987 of a discovery that reopened his entire reputation.

Key concepts

Rhetoric over grammar. De Man read literary texts for the gap between what they assert and what their rhetorical operations actually do. Figure — metaphor, irony, allegory — is not decoration laid over a literal meaning but the very medium in which meaning is made and unmade; a text’s rhetoric can undo the claim its grammar seems to state.

The resistance to theory. He held that literature resists the theories brought to master it, because language’s figural dimension cannot finally be reduced to a stable, decidable sense. Reading well means staying with that resistance rather than dissolving it into a paraphrase.

Allegories of reading. His central book, Allegories of Reading (1979), was the Yale school’s most rigorous statement: canonical texts, read closely, are found to allegorize the very impossibility of reading them to a settled conclusion — each becomes a story about the unreliability of its own language.

The wartime affair

De Man had died a revered figure when, in 1987, the researcher Ortwin de Graef discovered the journalism the young de Man had written during the German occupation of Belgium — some two hundred articles for the collaborationist press, principally Le Soir, including an overtly antisemitic piece, “Les Juifs dans la littérature actuelle” (4 March 1941), which entertained the deportation of Europe’s Jews as a solution that would leave its literature undamaged. The discovery set off a furious debate, conducted partly in moral and partly in theoretical terms. Critics argued that deconstruction’s resistance to determinate meaning and stable authorial responsibility looked, in this light, like a sophisticated machinery for dissolving guilt; defenders distinguished the man’s buried past from the value of the work, and some read his later insistence on the unreliability of all confession as a displaced reckoning. Derrida — de Man’s friend — responded at length in “Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell: Paul de Man’s War” (Critical Inquiry, 1988), itself attacked for straining to defend the indefensible.

Where de Man stops

De Man’s method is built to deny that a text can be pinned to a single, accountable meaning — that what an author asserts can be read straight off as what they are committed to. It is a powerful way to read, and the wartime affair is where its costs come due. The same machinery that finds every confession unreliable and every assertion undone by its own rhetoric leaves no clean place to stand when the question is moral rather than literary: if no text means what it says, the antisemitic article resists the plain reading it plainly invites. His defenders’ best case — that his later work is a buried reckoning with the early collaboration — is itself a determinate reading of the kind his theory forbids, which is the bind the affair exposed and never escaped. De Man gave criticism an unmatched attention to the way language betrays its own claims; what his work cannot supply, and what his own history demanded, is an account of when a claim must simply be owned.

Key works

See also: Deconstruction · Derrida