The (de) Man Who Put the Con in Deconstruction

At the time of his death in December, 1983, Paul de Man had become America’s arch-deacon of deconstruction. Among proponents of this esoteric but academically entrenched critical methodology, the Belgian-born Yale professor’s influence was exceeded only by that of the movement’s originator, Jacques Derrida. An unlikely guru, de Man was celebrated for his rigor and ruthless “intellectual honesty,” for his brilliant thrusts in debate (a Yale colleague likened him to the fencer in The New Yorker cartoon who neatly cuts off his opponent’s still-smiling head), and for the purity of his devotion to literary theory. A cult of worshipful acolytes had formed around him. The adulation continued for four years after his death.

Then came the revelation that de Man had written nearly 200 articles for collaborationist newspapers in Nazi-occupied Belgium during World War II. The New York Times broke the story a few days after last Thanksgiving. As photocopies of the damning articles circulated among scholars and critics, initial shock and dismay soon gave way to a heated debate over the merits of the theories that de Man espoused--and the question of whether, and to what extent, a writer’s deeds may be said to discredit his ideas.

The de Man scandal has also made people wonder again about the attractions fascism evidently held for upper-class European intellectuals in the 1930s (see Page 6), that “low, dishonest decade,” in W. H. Auden’s phrase. A grim joke making the rounds of American faculty clubs conveys the magnitude of the scandal--and the acrid taste it has left in many big academic mouths. Why didn’t de Man ever own up to his guilt? He couldn’t remember, goes the bitter punch line, because he had a severe case of “Waldheimer’s Disease.”

A Belgian researcher named Ortwin de Graef made the startling discovery last summer. In all, the young de Man (then in his early 20s) wrote no fewer than 169 articles for the pro-Nazi newspaper Le Soir--as well as a number of articles for a Flemish-language periodical similarly tarred with a collaborationist brush. In his Le Soir article of Oct. 28, 1941, for example, de Man announced that “Hitlerism,” far from being an aberration in German history, promised “the definitive emancipation of a people that finds itself called upon to exercise hegemony in Europe.” Other pieces saluted the valor of the Nazi soldier, propounded an anti-Semitic line at a time when the Jewish people faced the threat of annihilation and depicted fascism as a force for cultural renewal.

It was never a secret that the presumably impressionable young man was the nephew of Henri (or Hendrik) de Man, a prominent Socialist theoretician who turned quisling in the collaborationist government of Nazi-occupied Belgium. But neither de Man’s academic allies nor his sparring partners could have suspected the extent of his fascist involvement--or its duration.

The earliest of de Man’s Le Soir pieces is dated Dec. 26, 1940; the latest, Nov. 29, 1942. The article that has caused the greatest furor is titled “The Jews and Contemporary Literature” and dated March 4, 1941. The writer begins by treating the question of “vulgar anti-Semitism,” which portrays Europe as “degenerate and decadent because Judaized (in French, enjuive ) . “ He rejects this argument on the grounds that European culture was healthy enough to resist the nefarious Jewish influence. Jewish writers are invariably “of the second rank,” he writes. Thus, he concludes, “A solution to the Jewish problem” entailing “the creation of a Jewish colony isolated from Europe” need not have “deplorable consequences for the literary life of the West.” Europe stood to lose “at most a few personalities of second-rate (in French, mediocre ) worth.”

A quote box below de Man’s byline contains an anti-Semitic slur that Le Soir ascribes falsely to Benjamin Franklin. It’s worth quoting to give you an idea of what kind of newspaper this was: “A leopard cannot change its spots. Jews are Asiatics; they are a menace to the nation that admits them, and they should be excluded by the Constitution.”

According to Yale colleagues and former students, a number of whom are Jewish, de Man never exhibited a hint of anti-Semitism in his professional or social life. Some will charitably excuse his failure to acknowledge his wartime journalism. Others will chalk it up to a character flaw and leave it at that. But certain nagging questions won’t go away. Most prominent among them is the problem of deconstruction itself, which has troubled traditional humanists all along precisely because it seems to make no provision in literature for moral action.

Punning on the hero of TV’s “All in the Family,” de Man fancied himself an “arche de-bunker” of literary texts, and it should be noted that the word texts in deconstructionist parlance embraces everything from comic books to the Pledge of Allegiance, from poems and novels to any abstract ideal expressed in words. At the heart of this critical enterprise is the theory that words manipulate us instead of the other way around. It’s a very anti-biographical way of approaching literature. The author’s conscious intention and the circumstances of his life are deemed irrelevant. Nothing counts except the text, and the text is an arena of contradictory impulses. As a follower of de Man, you don’t exactly interpret a text; what you do, rather, is show how the text--by those contradictory impulses--undermines itself; you deconstruct it by revealing that it was a house of cards in the first place.

To those who value the aesthetic or moral dimension of literature, de Man’s application of his radical linguistic notions would seem to promote a skepticism so extreme that it verges on nihilism. And here’s the crux of the problem: Doesn’t de Man’s theory of language seem, in retrospect, to have been remarkably self-serving? Toward the end of “Allegories of Reading”--in a now-famous sentence--de Man writes, “It is always possible to face up to any experience (to excuse any guilt), because the experience always exists simultaneously as fictional discourse and as empirical event, and it is never possible to decide which one of the two possibilities is the right one.” If there are secrets you’d rather keep from getting out, this is a convenient way to see things. Instead of taking the blame yourself for the shameful things you said, you put the blame on language itself. Instead of stepping into an unwelcome spotlight, you slip off into a linguistic night in which all cats are gray.

Still, can one man’s youthful mistakes be used to indict a critical theory that began many years later--and in another man’s mind? (Both sides of the de Man controversy await with interest the publication next month in Critical Inquiry of a reported 90-page essay by Derrida, the Algerian-born Jew who founded deconstruction.) One longstanding opponent of deconstruction urged me against judging the theory in the light of the de Man disclosures. “That’s reading history backwards,” he said. Yet the behavior of the de Man apologists these past weeks leaves one with the feeling that maybe there really is something fundamentally rotten with their sacred doctrine.

Take Christopher Norris’ equivocal stand in the London Review of Books (February, 1988). “Though their existence (the existence of de Man’s Le Soir articles) remained a secret all those years, de Man would, I think, have acknowledged their discovery with the attitude scripta manent: that what is written is written and cannot be tactfully ignored, no matter how far his convictions had changed in the interim.” The use of a conditional construction is bizarre considering that what de Man did all his life was--precisely--to “tactfully ignore” his guilty past.

A letter sent to me by an avid deconstructionist argues that in a Newsweek article, I misrepresented de Man’s Le Soir article about the Jews, the one from which I quote above, the one in which de Man airily dismisses Jewish writers as mediocrities whose deportation en masse would not injure European culture. I labeled the article “blatantly anti-Semitic.” My correspondent objects, maintaining that in this article, de Man in fact repudiates what he calls “vulgar anti-Semitism.” He may, indeed, but what then does his article promote? Genteel anti-Semitism? More to the point, is my correspondent’s reading of the Le Soir article a fair example of deconstructionist text-interpretation at work?

Another letter suggests that de Man’s decision not to acknowledge his wartime journalism was a principled one, based on de Man’s statement, in “Allegories of Reading,” that “no excuse can ever hope to catch up with such a proliferation of guilt.” The letter writer tactfully ignores de Man’s subsequent sentence, “There can never be enough guilt around to match the text-machine’s infinite power to excuse,” a sentence that makes confession sound effortless. But deciding which of these two apparently contradictory principles may be operative is not the point; the point is that de Man’s disciples seem to be going to great lengths to deny the relevance of the Le Soir papers and to put their fallen idol in the most favorable light. Whatever the deconstructionists may say to the contrary, the noises coming from them suggest that they are running scared. How peculiar and how poetically just it would be if so anti-biographical a theory of literature should be vanquished by the discovery of a ruinous biographical fact.