The furor over Paul de Man

National Review, Dec 9, 1988 by Jeffrey Hart

YALE PROFESSOR Paul de Man, who died of cancer in 1983, was a man of great eminence in academic literary-critical circles-of which more in a moment. He was dearly loved by his New Haven colleagues and virtually worshipped by his disciples and students.

In 1987, the roof fell in when a graduate student discovered that Professor de Man, during the Nazi occupation of his native Belgium, was an intellectual collaborator. He wrote more than a hundred articles for the collaborationist newspaper Le Soir, the largest paper in the country. These articles were mostly on books and culture, but one of them, "The Jews and Contemporary Literature," was flagrantly anti-Semitic. It proposed the establishment of a European Jewish colony isolated ftom the rest of European culture, and doubted that much would be lost to culture thereby. In its original format, his essay was surrounded with disgusting and puerile anti-Semitic cartoons. De Man was in his early twenties at the time.

All the early de Man material is now being published, along with a separate volume of commentary expressing a range of reactions: outrage, sorrow, defensiveness about his later work and academic career (which show not a trace of anti-Semitism), anguish, et cetera. Symposia on this cause celebre are being held regularly in the academy.

Now Paul de Man, at the time of the occupation, was vastly erudite, attractive, and upper bourgeois in background, but he was not a very nice person at all. Beyond the Nazi writing, he bankrupted his father through shady business deals, married and fathered three children, and then abandoned them when he fled to America to escape prosecution and jail as a result of those business deals, and married one of his Bard College students before he had been divorced. In his later years at Yale, however, he struck his friends and students as gentle to the point of saintliness.

De Man's intellectual fame rests on his role as the foremost American expositor of the French school of criticism founded by Jacques Derrida and known as "deconstruction." This took the Yale English Department by storm. Exercises in deconstructivist criticism, including de Man's, are always written in an impenetrable style (I've got a secret) complete with a full course of neologisms, but the whole idea is not difficult at all. Stripped of its poses and its jargon, deconstruction merely exploits a rather sophomoric version of the branch of philosophy known as epistemology, or the study of knowing. Deconstruction asserts a radical skepticism about "knowing" at all, and specifically asserts that we cannot know the meaning of the words in a literary text. All texts, under this method of criticism, dissolve into meaninglessness or else become helpless before the subjective assertion of any meaning whatsoever.

Oh, come on. "My love is a red, red rose" may not be a scientific statement, but it's not about the World Series either. Short of a radical skepticism, there certainly are "zones of meaning" engaged by any text, "To be or not to be" was not about tbe Challenger launch, problematic though its many meanings may be. Deconstruction is a Sorbonne game that somehow awed the boys in New Haven. If they have a taste for that sort of thing, they should have studied some real philosophy.

Some of de Man's academic followers are concerned that his remote Nazi past may be used to "discredit" deconstructionism. They should rest easy. Despite some murky speculation, deconstruction and de Man's past are not related. Nor is there any need to discredit deconstruction for the wrong reasons when there are abundant correct reasons to discredit it, such as that it does nothing to illuminate any work of literature, and that it is philosophically naive in the extreme.

It WOULD HAVE been so much better if Paul de Man, before he died, had said, "I was wrong. I am sorry." But his scandalized colleagues ought to let it go. After all, Pablo Neruda never apologized for those odes to Stalin, and he got the Nobel Prize for Literature.

This last point deserves a moment of reflection, especially as Marxism is enjoying a revival among literary critics; they tend to call it a "perspective" -rather as if they were adopting a Ptolemaic "perspective." And the current furor over the de Man revelation suggests that his former colleagues find it shocking and virtually unthinkable that such a man could have harbored Nazi and racist sympathies. Yet this represents a failure of memory. Nazi and proto-Nazi sympathies are discernible in the lives and works of such figures as Martin Heidegger, William Butler Yeats, and the young Thomas Mann.

And, again, unrepentant Stalinists can remain cultural heroes, and this tells us something. Unlike an earlier and principled liberalism, present-day liberalism (and not only on the campus) is not closed to totalitarianism in its Communist form. Paul de Man should have announced that he had been a Communist all the time, in deep cover.

Actually, when the dust has settled, I don't think we will see this as an unusually nasty campaign. Neither candidate had a feeling for the jugular. Americans like to recall, with admiration, Harry Truman's come-from-behind upset victory in 1948, but his campaign was much rougher. He compared Dewey to Hitler and Mussolini.