Malcolm Bradbury on Paul de Man and "Signs of the Times"

The New York Times Book Review 
February 24, 1991

The Scholar Who Misread History

By MALCOLM BRADBURY [pictured left]

SIGNS OF THE TIMES Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man. By David Lehman.

ate 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 [Paul] de Man [pictured elft]. 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 [pictured left]. 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 [de Man wrote for Nazi-controlled newspapres in wartime Belgium] 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.

"Malcolm Bradbury is a novelist, critic and professor of American studies at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England.Bradbury was knighted in the year 2000." His novels include The History Man. Below, the cover of the New York Times Book Review (May 1992)  with David Lehman's afterword for the paperback edition of Signs.

Comments

[Cheryl Weissman]

*Signs of the Times* is a superb book. As a veteran of the world of Deconstruction in academia (1970s and early 80s) I found it fascinating and stunningly revelatory. I hope today's students of literary criticism don't fail to read it.

[Dave Read]

It is no innocent coincidence that European ideologues found such firm footing atop America's "learning" establishment while her "governing" establishment was being transformed by the embedding of European/British-style espionage into the executive branch. Since knowledge is power, to grant the executive a monopoly on it is to re-subject the people to kingly rule.

It was Nixon, not Trump, who said, "When the president does it, that means it's not illegal."

Is it ironic or demonic that the republican party de-republicked the USA? Their seeding of the Ivies with literary lunacy was a useful smokescreen, and an incidental boon to the book business. As Gutenberg broke religion's monopoly on knowledge, so too the Internet has made the university obsolete.