Christopher Norris Remembering de Man a Review Article

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Remembering de man: A review articleChristopher Norris aa Reader in English, University of Wales Institute of Science and Technology,

To cite this Article Norris, Christopher(1988) 'Remembering de man: A review article', Prose Studies, 11: 1, 89 100To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/01440358808586329URL:http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01440358808586329

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Remembering de Man: A Review Article

The Lesson of Paul de Man. Edited by PETER BROOKS, SHOSHANAFELMAN and J. HILLIS MILLER.Yale French Studies, No. 69. New Haven:Yale University Press, 1985. 333 pp.

These essays commemorate Paul de M an's work as teacher, theorist, close-reader of texts and undoubtedly the single most controversial figure inpresent-day American literary criticism. So much at least one can say withconfidence, given the sheer volume of commentary, admiring or hostile,that his work continues to generate. But at this point the doubts andqualifications begin to crowd in. Does his writing really belong to "literarycriticism " in any sense of the term that most readers - inside or outsideuniversity departments - would recognize? Is it right to view him as anindividual thinker who arrived at certain striking and (as many would argue)utterly perverse ideas about the character of textual meaning and the futureof advanced literary studies? De Man would certainly have treated suchclaims on his own behalf with a sceptical disdain tempered by wry good

humour. Thus E.S. Burt in her brief memoir defines as a "moral trait"in de M an ' 'what we sensed to be as complete a detachment from the claimsof subjectivity or individual personality as was possible" (11). And GeoffreyHartm an is put in mind of Pascal - "le Moi est haissable" - in seekingto convey the "gentle, unrelenting exclusion of self-reference" thatcharacterized de Man's teaching and conversation. For there was, as heargued, simplyno other wayfor the study of literature to go; no questionof his having single-handedly devised a new and distinctive approach tothe reading of literary texts. Rather, those texts had always solicited justthe kind of reading that de M an now supplied, and it was only the ' 'blind-ness" of earlier critics - a blindness whose causes went deep and far back which had so far prevented its widespread acceptance. Criticism's taskfor the next few decades was to carry on the business of patiently revealingthose errors and delusions that had passed for truth merely through thepower of entrenchedbelief. And this task would necessarily be conductedin a spirit of impersonal, selfless dedication which allowed the critic no roomto dem onstrate his or her brilliance as a virtuoso reader of texts. ' 'Techni-cally correct rhetorical readings may be boring, m onotonous, predictableand unpleasant, but they are irrefutab le"(RT, 19). Thus de Man in his lateessay, "The Resistance to Theory," placing the maximum possible distancebetween his own operations and the idea of criticism as a pretext or oppor-tunity for pleasurable self-display.

Such ideas went along with the practice of literaryinterpretation, a prac-tice aimed toward discovering ever more subtle, profound or undreamt-of

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levels of meaning in the text. They promoted an image of the interpreteras one specially skilled or uniquely gifted in the bringing to light of deep-laid hermeneutic truths. For de Man, on the contrary, these truths will mostoften turn out to be wishful illusions foisted onto the text by a criticismalways seeking assurance of its own profundity and sympathetic grasp. Intheir will to reveal such occult dimensions, critics are drawn into a processof self-confirming circular exchange where nothing is allowed to resist theirdesire for interpretative mastery and power. Thus criticism becomes anendless celebration of its own capacity to realize meanings that were always(in some sense)there in the text, jus t w aiting to be discovered, bu t whichhad hitherto gone unnoticed for want of the requisite hermeneutic skill.Such is the belief among those (like the American New Critics) who devise

sophisticated techniques of reading in order to exhibit more fully the wealthof multiple meaning - of "am biguity ," "iro ny " or "p arad ox " - presentin literary texts. On the one hand these interpreters m ake a point of insistingthat poetry is a special kind of language, marked off from the discourseof plain-prose reason by virtue of its sheer rhetorical complexity. Socriticism errs if it resorts to paraphrase or to any form of rational explicationwhich ignores the uniquely privileged status of poetic language. But it takesa high degree of specialized knowledge - for one thing, an elaboratedsystem of rhetorical tropes and devices - for critics to arrive at this

advanced position. Only the interpreter equipped with such knowledge willavoid the various "fa llacie s" of misconceived method which erase the all-important line of demarcation between poetry and other forms of discourse.Hence the New C ritics' obvious conviction that theirs was the best, the mostrevealing and sensitive way of interpreting texts. That is to say, it raisedthe art of close-reading to a high point of subtlety and refinementwithoutin the process losing sight of the distinction - the ontological difference- between poetry and prose. Such a programme could claim its own kindof privilege vis-a-vis other interpretative methods while also denying anysuggestion that its language might encroach upon poetry 's sacred dom ain.There is a lot more to say about de Man's ambivalent relationship tothe New Criticism. Certainly his work was much influenced, at an earlystage, by the modes of close-reading and rhetorical exegesis which the NewCritics brought to the study of literary texts. He was also convinced likethem (though for very different reasons) that the sheer complexity of literarylanguage placed it absolutely beyond reach of paraphrase or straightforwardconceptual explanation. But here the resemblances end. For de Man, thewhole purpose of rhetorical study is to bring out the starkimpossibilityof knowing (as the New Critics claimed to know) just where to draw a firmjuridical line between literature and other sorts of language. If he continuedto make such distinctions it was only by way of insisting (1) thatall languageis to some degree "literary," in so far as it inevitably includes a certaintropological or figural d imension, and (2) that this fact is regularly ignoredor suppressed by those forms of discourse (e.g. philosophy) that prefer notto acknowledge their own kinship with rhetoric or literary style. BarbaraJohnson has an essay here ("Rigorous Undecidability") that states the issues

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R E M E M B E R IN G D E M A N 9 1

with characteristic elegance and force. "T he relation between philosophyand literature involves the repetitive set-up and collapse of their difference... philosophy is defined by its refusal to recognise itself as literature;

literature is defined as the rhetorical self-transgression of philosophy" (76).Thus de Man rejects the ontological presumptions of the "old" NewCriticism, the idea that poetry is somehowsui generis, a language possessedof its own kind of truth whose mysteries are vouchsafed only to those whoresist the various tempting "heresies" of paraphrase, biography, historicalsource-hunting and so forth. It is precisely this mystified notion of poeticform tha t de Man will deconstruct in his various writings on the aestheticideology of post-Romantic criticism. His point is to show that such claims

always rest on a willed blindness to the omnipresence of figural language,even in writings that expressly or routinely mark themselves off from"literature" as such.

So the texts of New Criticism - as de Man reads them - turn out toquestion their own ontological priorities through a play of rhetorical tropesand displacements which cannot be confined to poetry alone. The moreelaborate their strategies of reading, the less it appears possible to lay down

rules for the proper, self-regulating discourse of critical method. Theseinterpreters may argue - state categorically - that poems are "o rg an ic"entities, belonging to a separate realm of discourse where form is most aptlyconceived by analogy with nature or the processes of natural growth. Sucharguments of course go back to W ordsw orth, Coleridge and the aestheticsof transcendence identified chiefly with Romantic metaphor and symbol.They serve notice that criticism had best not confuse its own modes ofconceptual understanding with the quite distinct truth-claims embodied in

poetry or the language of creative imagination. But the organicist analogybegins to break down as critics become perforce more aware of the multiple,disruptive character of poetic meaning. In de Man's words:

instead of revealing a continuity affiliated with the coherence of thenatural world, it [New Criticism] takes us into a discontinuous worldof reflective irony and ambiguity Almost in spite ofitself, it pushesthe interpretative process so far that the analogy between the organic

world and the language of poetry finally explodes.{BI,28)And so what started ou t, in Coleridgean term s, as a hermeneutic quest for"unity in multiplicity" becomes in the end - and despite its own principles- an acknowledgement that no such unity is there to be found.

In this passage (dating from the mid-1950s) one already finds a clear,almost programmatic statement of the two main theses that de Man wasto elaborate through nearly thirty years of intensive critical work. The first

has to do with the delusory character of any such appeal toorganic ornaturalizing metaphors when dealing with questions of poetry, languageor representation. This is the source of that potent "aesthetic ideology"whose origins (principally in a certain misreading of Kant) and whose effects(not least on the politics of interpretation) de Man will set out to deconstructwith increasing emphasis and care. The other is his claim that our reading

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of critical texts can best proceed by way of noting those ironic disparitiebetween meaning and intent that seem to characterize all systematireflection on literary language. In the case of the critics whose work h

examines inBlindness And Insight,"a paradoxical discrepancy appearsbetween the general statements they make about the nature of literatur(statements on which they base their critical methods) and the actual resulof their interpretations"(BI, ix). It is for this reason that de Man seeks outthose moments of symptomatic "blin dn ess" in critical texts where theralso exists the possibility of renewed "insight" through a reading alert tsuch rhetorical tensions. And this applies equally to the language ophilosophy, a discourse that has always (or at least since Plato 's quarrwith the poets and rhetoricians) considered itself exempt from the sedutions of merely f gural language. If such beliefs still hold sway - if indeethey constitute the very self-image of philosophy and the grounds for iexistence as an autonomous discipline - then this can only be because (de Man would argue) its texts have escaped, or its practitioners activeldiscouraged, such close rhetorical reading.

So " literature" is conserved as an operative term in de M an's criticism

but not in the sense of a body of writings possessing certain distinctivattributes that mark them out for privileged treatment. One could makthe point simply - too simply - by saying that de M an 's most "orig inaachievement is to have extended the techniques of rhetorical close-readindeveloped by modern literary critics to the texts of other disciplines (likphilosophy and criticism itself) where up to now those techniques have nbeen applied. But this might suggest that de Man is simply out to blur aforms of categorical distinction and recommend that we henceforth rea

every kind of text in the way that critics normally read poems or novelEven a nodding acquaintance with de M an 's work should suffice to dispthis mistaken impression. Perhaps it is the case (as he claims at one poinin Allegories OfReading) that philosophy when analysed in terms of ittextual or rhetorical constitution will always turn out to be "an endlereflection on its own destruction at the hands of literatu re"(AR, 79). Butthis is not to say that " lite ra ture" - or literary criticism - comes out osuch reading with its traditional values enhanced by the apparent dicomfiture of "philosophy." For those values have been staked preciselon the notion of literature as adifferentkind of writing, one that is definedby whatever sets it apart from (e.g.) philosophy. And it is here that de Matakes issue with just about every basic assumption in the discourse oaesthetics and literary theory. For we simply don 't possess any workabconcept of "literature" that would justify this defensive beating oontological bounds or this desire to lay down terms and conditions fo

keeping the disciplines apart. If philosophy is in some sense compromiseby its kinship with literature - its dependence on rhetorical figures - thecritics seem just as anxious to maintain a safe distance from philosoph

It is crucially by way of theaesthetic - a category too often assumedsimply to reconcile the disjunct realms of sensuous and cognitive experien- tha t critics have managed to maintain such a state of epistemologic

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R E M E M B E R I N G D E M A N 93

innocence. For de Man, on the contrary, it is an open question "whetheraesthetic values can be compatible with the linguistic structures thatmake up the entities from which these values are derived"(RT, 25).In fact his later work was devoted in large part to showing how thislinkage remained problematical in Kant, but how the problem was easedout of sight by Schiller and other proponents of "aes thetic education" asa means of resolving such deep-laid antinomies. Hence the belief thatlanguage, especially the language of poetry, could unify the otherwisedisparate orders of what Kant calls "sensuous in tuitio n" and "conceptsof the pure understanding". This belief persists largely unchallenged inmodern criticism, and its effects - according to de Man - are responsible

for much confusion. It is therefore a major part of his project to show howmeaning cannot be reduced to any kind of phenomenal or sensory percep-tion; how there always comes a point in the rhetorical study of texts wheresignifying structures no longer match up with any conceivable form ofsensuous cognition. Such is indeed de Man 's chief claim for the critical ordemystifying power of textual analysis. "Close reading accomplishes thisoften in spite of itself because it cannot fail to respond to structures oflanguage which it is the m ore or less secret aim of literary teachingto keephidden" (RT, 24).

So de M an's work cannot be classified according to any normal academicdivision of labour. He is perhaps best described as a conceptual rhetorician,one who perceives the linguistic (or tropological) blocks in the way ofconceptual understanding, but who insists that these paradoxes cannot beresolved by appealing to a privileged aesthetic realm beyond all such hatefulantinomies. It is this refusal to come down squarely on the side of either

"literature" or "philosophy" which gives de M an 's texts their peculiar wayof resisting any kind of summary description. He is a thinker who hasengaged distinctly philosophical problems - mainly in the post-Kantiantradition of epistemological critique - with a rigour scarcely equalledamong other, more orthodox commentators. This comes of his insistencethat the texts of philosophy can claim no special dispensation from theforms of close-reading or rhetorical analysis developed by modern literarycritics. But de Man is equally determined to shake criticism out of itsdogmatic slumber by showing how often its practitioners have failed tothink through the nature of their own enterprise with anything like anadequate "philosophical" cogency or power of analytic grasp. Philosophershave tended to evade such problems by assuming that language theirkind of language - had access to a realm of clear and distinct ideas wherethe tropes could either be ignored (as belonging to mere "rhetoric") or safelyheld in check by a self-denying ordinance of style. Such was the assumptionthat enabled thinkers like Locke and Kant to devote short passages of theirwork to the problem of figural language, always with the assurance thatthinking could be put straight back onto the path of rational enquiry bysimply keeping watch for these telltale signs of tropological disruption. Infact, de Man argues, the figural dimension is omnipresent in philosophy,and never more powerful and seductive than at precisely those moments

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94 P R O S E S T U D I E S

when philosophers think to have settled accounts with it once and for aBut this is no t to say tha t literary critics - trained up in the ways rhetorical analysis - are necessarily much better placed than philosophefor observing these same disruptive effects. For criticism is prone different forms of self-induced aesthetic mystification, forms which de Msets out to analyse through the deconstructive reading of symptomatmoments in the discourse of post-Romantic critical thought.

So it is hardly surprising that his work has aroused such antagonisamong philosophers and literary critics alike. Their response bears witneto de Man's notorious "techniques for making trouble," his way ounsettling all the values and assumptions that operate in both the

disciplines. But of course - as de Man was the first to admit thowritings carry no kind of authority apart from what is achieved in thdetailed close-reading of texts. That is to say, they solicit an active, criticengagement which accepts nothing on faith and which puts up resistanat every stage on the difficult path to understanding. Few critics - aneven fewer philosophers - have been willing to acknowledge the prolematic status of their own m ost crucial arguments and truth-claims. Nis de Man himself quite immune to the suggestion tha this kind of rigorous,undeceiving rhetoric must give him a decided advantage over othepresumably less strong-minded critics. It comes out especially in his mannof responding to those various defenders of "m ain stream " philosophicor literary readings whose only concern (as de Man often implies) is to shietheir disciplines against such intrusion by "outside" pressures and interesBut this rhetoric of authority belongs to the polemical side of de Manwriting and is soon placed in doubt when he turns to the business of detail

textual explication. Here there is always an implicit understanding thatanydiscourse - his own included - will occasionally be subject to thomom ents of constitutive error or "blindness" inseparable from true insigh

The essays assembled inThe Lesson of Paul de Manpay his work thetribute of engaging persistently with its more refractory claims and nsuccumbing to a mood of misplaced solemn reverence. Thus JonathaCuller asks very pointedly how we can reconcile de Man 's insistence on terror-prone nature of reading with the need to m ake tolerable sense of harguments despite all the obstacles they place in our w ay. On the one hanthose arguments "focus on whatever resists or disrupts the hermeneutprocess and repeatedly oppose an understanding which overcomes textudifficulties so as to hear in the text what it is thought to say ." But on tother, as Culler remarks, "o ne can only make sense of his writings if oalready has a sense of what they must be saying and can allow for thslippage of concepts, working to get over or around the puzzling valuationthe startling assertions, the apparently incompatible c laim s" (106). Cullis not the only contribu tor to perceive this tension between the relentlessdemystifying drive of de Man 's criticism and the fact that comprehensicannot begin without suspending that rigour at least to a certain degreAt this point one moves like Hans-Jost Frey - to a diagnostic readinthat applies de Man's lesson to his own texts and raises the questio

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what can possibly motivate such a stance of extreme epistemologicalscepticism? "If there is no discourse that can sustain undecidability withoutdisavowing it, one can at least ask what the implications of this undecid-

ability a re " (130).Here the essays divide very roughly into those that seek out somehumanizing pathos, some subjectiveneed inde Man that drove him to adoptthis self-denying ordinance, and those that follow his own injunction notto indulge in such consoling hermeneutic strategies. Minae Mizumura hasa interesting piece which can be seen to oscillate between these positions.Her topic is de Man 's persistent concern with ideas of sacrifice, disavowaland renunciation, a concern that assumes ever more complex and tortuous

forms in the process of his critical argum entation. For the early de Manwhat has to be renounced is the dream of a language that would reconcilemind and nature, subject and object in the moment of a perfect, self-presentaccess to truth achieved through the power of poetic imagination totranscend such merely prosaic antinomies. Authentic reading would thenconsist in the courage to reject this temptation by facing up to the contin-gency of language and the fact that privileged tropes like symbol andmetaphor must always depend, in the last resort, on pedestrian orun-self-deluded figures like metonymy and allegory. But the will to renounce thisbelief - to do without what de Man calls "the nostalgia and the will tocoincide" - still goes along with a certain attachment to the idea ofrenunciation itself as a measure of authentic understanding. Hence the verymarked existentialist tonings of de M an's early essays, the suggestion tha tauthentic (undeluded) reading is capable of rising above such forms ofseductive or naive aesthetic understanding. But this standpoint presupposes

at least some residual notion of the readingself, of a subjectivity thatbecomes all the more authentic as it manages to renounce the false beguile-ments of premature meaning and method.

According to M izumura, there are still clear signs of this belief even inan essay like "The Rhetoric of Temporality" (1969:BI, 187-228), oftenregarded as a crucial turning-point in de Man's progress from a kind ofcovert existentialism to a thoroughgoing deconstructive or "textualist"stance. De Man himself took a distinctly Heideggerian view of this essayas marking a definite " tu rn " in his work, although his way of making thepoint - in terms of "a uthen tic" versus "inau then tic" reading - couldbe seen as undermining any such claim. According to Mizumura, theredoescome about a decisive transition in Paul de M an's thinking, but one thathas to wait for the yet more extreme ascetic discipline ofAllegories OfReadingand the subsequent essays. It is a turn that takes place "only whende Man's text most rigorously works out what is implied in his own

declaration that 'the cognitive function resides in the language and not inthe su bject'" (92). That is to say, it can only be achieved through the actof renouncing renunciationitself, or the will to leave behind that residualpathos that attaches to the notion of authentic reading as a facing-up tothe limits imposed upon human knowledge by the ontological gulfbetween subject and object, word and world. From this latter viewpoint

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- one that emerges inBlindness And Insightand which still exerts a verypotent appeal in "T he Rhetoric of Temporality" - it is in the nature oour predicament ashuman readers that we should always be drawn to

misinterpret texts by seeking out moments of transcendent, visionary insighwhich language is in fact, by reason of its temporal or contingent characteunable to achieve. And to recognise this inbuilt liability of humaunderstanding is also to associate a certain pathos with the undeceiveknowledge that strives to overcome it. What occurs in the later de M anaccording to M izumura, is yet another stage in the process of renunciationone that rejects even this last, lingering attachment to a rhetoric of hum aauthenticity. "The shift from a concern with human errors to a concern

with the problem inherent in language epitomizes his ultimate choice olanguage over m an " (92). It is here - at the point of renouncing every tibetween language and the will to make sense of language in humanlyacceptable terms - that de Man leaves behind that existential pathos thapersists in his early essays.

There is undoubtedly a large measure of truth in Mizumura's observations. De Man does indeed reach a point where he seems to deny thathere exists any relation between language as conceived in deconstructioniterms - conceived, that is to say, as a wholly impersonal network otropological drives, substitutions and displacements - and language as thexpression of human meanings and intentions. This volume contains onsuch piece, the text of de Man's last lecture, given at Cornell in March1983 just eight months before his death. Its theme is Walter Benjamin'cryptic essay' 'The Task of the Tran sla tor,'' and de Man here presses evefurther than Benjamin in questioning every received assumption abou

language, meaning and the powers of human communicative graspTranslation as commonly practised takes for granted the expressive viewof language wherein words give utterance to meanings, thoughts anintentions which can then be carried across, more or less intact, from onlinguistic or cultural context to another. On the contrary, says de Man: "thproblem is precisely that, whereas the meaning-function is certainlintentional, it is not a priori certain at all that the mode of meaning, thway in which I m ean, is intentional in any way" (39). Since meaning dependupon "devices" and "linguistic properties" which belong not tous asindividual speakers but to language - language in its given, autonomousalways-already constituted nature - it is not, de Man argues, "m ad e bus as historical beings, it is perhaps not even made by humans at a ll " (39In which case we can only be deluded, albeit (as de Man would no doubacknowledge) inescapably and naturally so, if we place our faith in thehum an character of language and its power, by and large, to mean whawe intend it to mean. To call de Man's position counter-intuitive is a specieof massive under-statement. Only in writers like Samuel Beckett and E. MCioran do we find anything like a comparable sense of this alien, unhom elcharacter in language, its lack of all human qualities and attributes.

The Benjamin essay is by no means exceptional in this regard. ThuMizumura cites the well-known passage fromAllegories Of Readingwhere

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de Man takes an episode from Rousseau'sConfessions(the story of thepurloined ribbon) as a case-study of the way that language works to generatenarrative pretexts quite beyond the call of tru th, conscience or authorial

self-revelation. "Far from seeing language as an instrument in the serviceof a psychic energy, the possibility now arises that the entire constructionof drives, substitutions, repressions, and representations is the aberran t,metaphorical correlative of the absolute randomness of language, prior toany figuration or meaning"(AR, 299). And to this she might have addedthe extraordinary closing paragraph from his essay "Shelley Disfigured,"where de Man reads The Triumph of Life as a poem that effectivelyfragments and destroys all sense of thematic coherence, of authorial

presence or humanly-intelligible meaning. What the poem teaches us at last,according to de Man, is "that nothing, whether deed, word, thought, ortext, ever happens in relation, positive or negative, to anything thatprecedes, follows or exists elsewhere, but only as a random event whosepower, like the power of death, is due to the randomness of its occurrence"(RR, 122). For the mainstream interpreters of Romanticism, language(especially the language of m etaphor and symbol) stands on the side of life,creativity and everything that opposes such a negative, desolating vision.For de M an, on the contrary, language is always shadowed by the fact ofits mortal predicament, its failure to transcend those random occurrences(like Shelley's own death by drowning) that block or frustrate the visionaryimpulse. Hence his strongly-marked preference for tropes like metonymyand allegory, figures that renounce the heady seductions of a rhetoric oftranscendence and thereby work to demystify the claims of that potentaesthetic ideology.

Such tropes hold out against the high Romantic dream of a perfect,unimpeded communing of mind with nature or mind with mind. They insistthat understanding is at best a timebound, a fragmentary and error-proneactivity which can offer no kind of hermeneutic guarantee that truecommunication has taken place. Thus metonymy is standardly categorizedas a trope that operates on the basis of contiguity and other such con-tingent, accidental features, while metaphor has been treated (from Aristotledown) as a touchstone of artistic creativity, involving the perception ofoccult resemblances that transcend mere particulars.of place and time. DeMan does more than simply reverse this deep-laid evaluative bias. He assertsthat metonymy is truer to the facts, not only of language but of humanexistence in the face of our common m ortality. Hence his startling and (asmany would think) quite outrageous claim in "Shelley Disfigured": thatThe Triumph of Lifeis subject to the random, aleatory forces of metonymiclanguage just as Shelley's own life was cut short by the accident of his

drowning. No reading of the poem can hope to escape this "negativeknowledge" by taking refuge in Romantic ideas of m etaphor, symbol ororganic unity. According to de Man, such readings are powerless "toprevent what now functions as the decisive textual articulation: its [thepoem 's] reduction to the status of a fragment brought about by the actualdeath and subsequent disfigurement of Shelley's body, burned after his boat

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capsized and he drowned off the coast of Lerici"{RR,120). And if it seems,as de Man suspects it will, " a freak of chance to have a text thus m ouldeby an actual occurrence," he is nonetheless determined to go yet furtheand declare that "this mutilated textual model exposes the wound of fracture that lies hidden in all tex ts"{RR, 120).

It is hard to know what to make of such claims, offered as they are ia tone of apodictic certainty which scarcely mitigates their scandaloucharacter. But if one thing is clear, it is the fact that de Man 's languagis still haunted by ideas of sacrifice, loss and renunciation; that he has noso much broken w ith this hab it of thought as attempted to generalize it fabeyond the limits of any straightforward thematic understanding.

Mizumura makes this point in her essay when she remarks that "hcontinues to speak about renunciation even in his later works when the woritself has disappeared from his text" (94). Any account of de Man thaignores this dimension will fall in too readily with his own rhetoric oimpersonal rigour and detachment. Thus, in Mizumura's words, "thimpression of deprivation comes closer to grasping the quintessence of dMan than a placid acceptance of the extreme ascesis that reigns in his work(97).And this connects in turn with the question whether de Man had indeemoved "beyond" thematic interpretation to a level of generalized reflectioon language and the limits of speculative thought that no longer answereto the title of "literary criticism." Rodolphe Gasche" sees this question acrucial to the whole current enterprise of so-called "American" deconstruction. In his view, that enterprise has suffered a kind of professionadeformation or revisionist swerve, from the strictlyphilosophical concernsthat animate Derrida's work into a version of applied interpretative theor

that basically continues the "o ld " New Criticism in a more sophisticateguise. In fact Gasche takes that singular phrase from de Man 's essay oShelley - "the wound of a fracture that lies hidden in all texts" - as measure of the distance that separates Derridean philosophy of languagfrom its literary-critical offshoot (Gasche, 1979). It is not my concern heto adjudicate this matter of just what constitutes an ec/j/-deconstructioniapproach to issues of language and representation. But clearly the phrasis open to two kinds of reading, one of which would accept its generalizin

claim that all texts are subject to this dislocating force within langua- while the other would point to its charged rhetorical character and thhints of a subdued existential pathos that still characterize de Man's latwriting.

One finds this unresolved question surfacing in various oblique oallegorical forms throughout the essays assembled inThe Lesson of PauldeMan. Several contributors (among them Culler and Michael Riffaterre

focus on the trope of prosopopeia, the figure that summons up absent, deaor ghostly individuals by making them speak, act or respond to questionas if they were still living. As Culler remarks, "the status of prosopopeand its relation to anthropomorphism is a crucial problem in de Manconception of the lyric" (100). The main text here is his late essa"Autobiography As De-Facement," where this trope becomes a virtu

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synonym for what de Man calls the "privative" power of language, its wayof apparently giving life and voice to the dead while in fact exposinglanguage to all manner of uncanny possession by forces beyond its living

control. The essay concludes with another of those strangely ambivalentpassages where the self-denying rigour, the disciplined ascesis of de M an 'sstyle suggests, once again, what an effort of repression is here taking place.Death itself, de Man writes, "is a displaced name for a linguistic predica-ment, and the restoration of mortality by autobiography (the prosopopeiaof the voice and the name) deprives and disfigures to the precise extent thatit restores" (RR, 81). Hence his frequent recourse to those passages (inWordsworth especially) where the affirmative or life-giving power oflanguage goes along with a sense of its darker, mortal implications. Suchis the "laten t threat that inhabits prosopopeia," namely that "by makingthe dead speak, the symmetrical structure of the trope implies, by the sametoken, that the living are struck dum b, frozen in their own dea th"(RR,78).

Of course these reflections take something of their uncanny force fromour knowledge of de M an 's imminent death, just as - on his reading -The Triumph of Lifecannot be understood apart from the "contingen t"

but utterly material fact of Shelley's drowning. And indeed it is difficult- a problem that these essays register in various ways - to observe thekind of rigorous separation that de Man's work seems to require between(in T.S. Eliot's phrase) "the man who suffers" and "the mind whichcrea tes." The elegaic tone of these essays is by no means confined to theearly portion of the book which contains personal tributes to de Man fromfriends, colleagues and students. It is there also in the pieces that engagewith theoretical aspects of his work, especially where these touch (as theyoften do) on themes of mourning, remembrance and poetic valediction.Thus Anselm H averkam p has a essay which moves, as if inevitably, froma close reading of de Man on Holderlin to a series of increasingly chargedmeditations on the seductive power of memory, the promise of poetry totranscend the brute facts of human separation and mortality, and itsexemplary failure to achieve such transcendence, as signalled (again) bythe double-edged character of tropes like prosopopeia. "The promise iscancelled by death; death is not overcome by promise. ... What leadsHolderlin 'beyond subjectivity' is the deconstruction of the human as echo,of lyrical subjectivity as anthropomorphism" (252 -3). As with de Man,so with his commentators: on the one hand an argument meticulouslypurged of "subjective" or "an thropom orphic" residues, on the other alanguage that cannot in the end renounce such all-too-human implications.

Geoffrey Hartman apostrophizes both aspects of de Man in a sentencethat (echoing Wallace Stevens) again moves across from recognition of the

self-denying rigour to a sense of what lay behind that extraordinary style."He made his mind increasingly more severe, and those who rememberhim listening fixedly to lectures by students or visitors know he could alwaysspot the vulnerable point tha t turned the monumental thesis into a mortalpro ject" (7). Other contributors - among them Jacques Derrida and YvesBonnefoy - likewise give a sense of this pervasive duality in de Man 's

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100 PROSE STUDIES

temperament, on the one hand his warmth, generosity and loyalty tocolleagues and friends, on the other that self-abnegating spirit that markedboth his writing and his conduct of personal relationships. The lyric poet

Bonnefoy sets out to correct any impression we might have of de Man asa joyless, unremittingly cerebral type whose sheer mistrust of the tendencyin language toward forms of delusive "naturalization" led him to renouncethe consoling possibilities of sensuous or physical life. Bonnefoy's essayis in one sense a kind of poetic rejoinder to de Man himself, a prose-poemof intensely metaphorical character which sets out to humanize his memoryby evoking a series of emblematic scenes and settings, from Ireland toZurich and Provence, Connecticut and California. But however strong this

attachment to the natural world - "prairies and forests, waves surgingamong the rocks" - de Man was none the less implacably convinced that"it was and would remain inaccessible to language and moreover, even topoetry" (328).

It is in these terms, Bonnefoy suggests, that we should seek to under-stand his otherwise inexplicable, not to say perverse insistence on the errorsand the failures resulting from the will to reconcile language and nature,word and world. "Paul loved poetry too much to refer to it too directly,and, by so doing, engage himself in it - he preferred, as in his writing,to evoke poets rather than poetry, and critics rather than poets" (328). Itis a curious kind of tribute, all the more so in that Bonnefoy's languageis unable to conceal its allegiance to a wholly different order of poetic andhuman priorities. Such is very often the case with these essays, an effectthat bears witness as many would acknowledge - to the deeply unsettlincharacter of Paul de Man's work.

CHRISTOPHER NORRIS

WORKS CITED

All references to The Lesson Of Paul de Man given by page-number only in the text. Other

sources as follows:AR = Allegories Of Reading: figural language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and Prous

(New Haven: Yale U.P., 1979).BI = Blindness And Insight: essays in the rhetoric of contemporary criticism,2nd edn.,

revised & enlarged (London: Methuen, 1983).RR = The Rhetoric Of Romanticism (New York: Columbia U.P., 1984).RT = The Resistance To Theory (Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota Press, 1986).Gasch, 1979 = Rodolphe Gasch, "Deconstruction As Criticism," Glyph, 6 (Baltimore:

Johns Hopkins U.P.) 177-215.

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Christopher Norris Remembering de Man a Review Article

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