It has now been ten years since a peculiar scandal first swept through
those most hermetic precincts of literary criticism. On December 1,
1987, the
New York Times reported the startling finding that deconstructionist luminary Paul de
Man had, as a young man in occupied Belgium early in World War II,
written scores of pro-Nazi articles for a collaborationist newspaper,
one of which was blatantly anti-Semitic. De Man later emigrated to
the United States, where he became an academic star with a seemingly
unimpeachable reputation for honesty and rigor. Until his death in
1983, he remained almost totally silent about his wartime activities,
occasionally engaging in obfuscatory deceptions whenever necessary.
(His reputation was certainly not enhanced by further posthumous
revelations that following the war he had engaged in shady business
dealings that resulted in his father's bankruptcy, and had abandoned
his wife and three children in Argentina only to engage in a bigamous
second marriage once in the U.S.)
What made these revelations so extraordinary was the set of
tantalizing questions and delicious ironies they offered to critics
of deconstruction, a radically skeptical approach towards textual
analysis that rejects the assumption that language can accurately
represent ideas. Deconstructionists regard language as
self-referential and ultimately self-defeating, and the jargon-filled
academic papers that resulted from this insight were hardly intended
as models of clarity. Supposing that language controls people rather
than the other way around, the theory focuses on the likely infusion
of dominant ideology into language rather than authors' supposed
intent. Literary works are correspondingly put on the same level with
all other "texts," regardless of aesthetic merit. Deconstructionist
criticism was eventually extended over other fields of study,
questioning, for example, the ideal of history as objective analysis
rather than as ideology-strewn "narrative." Subordinating the status
of history, De Man declared, "the bases for historical knowledge are
not empirical facts but written texts, even if these texts masquerade
in the guise of wars or revolutions."
So, beside the obvious question of whether de Man collaborated with
the Nazis due to ideological conviction or simple careerist opportunism,
broader questions inevitably arose concerning the value of his later
ideas. While the young Paul de Man believed that literature served the
makers of history, did his later reversal on this question reflect a
willingness to escape the judgment of history by effectively silencing
language, rendering irrelevant the "author," his "ideas," and his
conscious "meaning"? Did deconstruction offer any ethical basis for
the judgement that Naziism was evil, or could that statement itself be
deconstructed to the point of nihilism? Given deconstruction's
paralytic view of language, what accounted for de Man's own tone
of Olympian authority? What could be said of his many disciples'
supposedly keen critical faculties? And as the critic Jeffrey Mehlman
pointed out, wasn't it odd that in both his early and later writings,
de Man denounced "resistance" movements? In the first case, it was
resistance to the "German revolution," as collaborators referred to
Nazi aggression at the time. In the second, it was, as he titled one
of his essays, "Resistance to Theory"—an unfalsifiable
supposition, borrowed from psychoanalysis, that resistance to the
hegemony of deconstructionist theory only serves to prove its
overwhelming and compelling validity.
Whether critics were right to make sweeping conclusions about
deconstructionist theory based on these alarming new biographical
revelations was one thing, but it soon became clear that question had
to take a back seat to deconstructionists' own reaction to the affair.
As David Lehman chronicled in his account of the controversy,
Signs of the Times,
a surprising number of academic literary critics subjected de Man's
early wartime writings, and the controversy in general, to
deconstructionist analysis.
In
Allegories of Reading,
de Man had interpreted a passage from Rousseau's
Confessions,
in which the author describes having stolen a ribbon and blamed it on
an innocent servant girl:
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 of the two possibilities is the right one. The indecision
makes it possible to excuse the bleakest of crimes because, as a
fiction, it escapes from the constraints of guilt and innocence.
To set the tone of discourse regarding de Man's collaboration,
deconstructionist pioneer and longtime colleague Jacques Derrida
evoked much the same argument in an article in
Critical Inquiry, Spring 1988:
Unable to respond to the questions, to all the questions, I will ask
myself instead whether responding is possible and what that
would mean in such a situation. And I will risk in turn several
questions prior to the definition of a responsibility.
But is it not an act to assume in theory the concept of
responsibility? One's own as well as the responsibility to which one
believes one ought to summon others?
Aside from erasing the slate, Derrida also attempted to reverse the
terms of debate:
As for the accused himself, he is dead. He is in ashes, he has neither
the grounds, nor the means, still less the choice or the desire to
respond. We are alone with ourselves. We carry his memory and his name
in us. We especially carry ethico-political responsibilities for the
future. Our actions with regards to what remains to us of de Man will
also have the value of an example, whether we like it or not. To
judge, to condemn the work or the man on the basis of what was a
brief episode, to call for closing, that is to say, at least
figuratively, for censuring or burning his books is to reproduce the
exterminating gesture against which one accuses de Man of not having
armed himself sooner with the necessary vigilance.
In criticizing a journalistic account of the controversy, Richard
Rand, in "American Anti-Semitism," expanded greatly on Derrida's
inversion:
In its ruminations on Paul de Man,
The Nation has furnished
this nation—as well as Germany, France, England and
Switzerland—with a very neat, a very up-to-date piece of old-time
"anti-Semitism." But the truly instructive thing about the exercise
lies less in the perennial retail value of its bloodlust, than in the
undeniable validity of its insight, and in the visionary correctness
of its charge: for are not, indeed, Paul de Man and his deconstruction
somehow overwhelmingly Jewish—as Jewish as anyone, perhaps, in our
multi-national 1980s, can be?
"That Paul de Man, biographically speaking, was not himself Jewish,
is nothing to the point," Rand continued. "From the sixteenth
century onward, American anti-Semitism, along with other varieties,
has been a discourse of bigotry
displaced."
J. Hillis Miller also evoked historically loaded imagery when he
characterized "the violence of the reaction in the United States and
in Europe to the discovery of Paul de Man's writings of 1941-42" as
"a new moment in the collaboration between the university and the
mass media." Miller included as "collaborators" in this enterprise
the New York Times, the Nation,
Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, the Village Voice, the Manchester Guardian, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
Strangely enough, journalists were denounced for occasional reporting
errors, which was ironic given that deconstructionist theory
anticipates all manner of distortion as an inevitable component of
such "narrative" accounts.
Shoshana Felman, a colleague of de Man's at Yale's comparative
literature department, dwelled heavily on de Man's silence about his
wartime activities, asserting that "History as Holocaust is mutely
omnipresent in the theoretical endeavor of de Man's mature work."
De Man kept silent "not (as some would have it) as a cover-up or a
dissimulation of the past, but as an ongoing active transformation
of the very act of bearing witness." Felman quotes from the
writings of Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi, who declared that the
"true witnesses" of the Holocaust were those victims who "have not
returned to tell about it or have returned mute." (Felman apparently
overlooked the fact that de Man was anything but a concentration camp
survivor himself, and that when he did break silence it was only to
coyly suggest that he had been active in the Belgian resistance
movement!) In Felman's view, "de Man's entire writing effort is a
silent trace of the reality of an event whose very historicity, borne
out by the author's own catastrophic experience, has occurred
precisely as the event of a preclusion—the event of the
impossibility—of its own witnessing."
Many of the responses to de Man's wartime writings seemed themselves
impervious to interpretation, such as Andrzej Warminski's "Terrible
Reading (preceded by 'Epigraphs')":
A certain self-immolating self-reflection—a self-ironization—takes
place here as ... de Man's [words] about Montherlant say one thing and
mean another. But ironies do not end here—indeed irony, once it
begins (and it has already begun), never just ends, at least not just
here. No matter how self-immolating it may be, the act of
self-reflection always leaves remainders, traces, ashes—a
reste or a restance du texte, as Derrida might put it,
that resists the totalization of any oblivion, that insures a certain
memory or every forgetting, even "the most total." ... The only
memory for those remainders is the same journalistic "memory"
of the present, the one that "remembers" only the present and hence
has neither the past nor future (and hence does not happen, is not an
event, is not historical)—or only the past and the future of
total oblivion.
S. Heidi Krueger, in "Opting to Know: On the Wartime Journalism of
Paul de Man," went so far as to ascribe subversive intent to de Man,
based on his rejection, at the start of his most infamous essay, of
the sort of "vulgar anti-Semitism" that characterized much of the
shrill propaganda that appeared in the same newspaper.
Although one can argue that the irony of "The Jews in Contemporary
Literature" misfires, it is difficult, reading the article as a whole
and in the context of the articles with which it appears, to read it
as other than a calculated (and parodistic) fore-grounding of the
premises and applications of "vulgar anti-Semitism" evidenced in
the other essays on the page. The tone, moreover, is one of detached
mockery throughout the sections dealing with the Jews, and the object
of the mockery is clearly not the Jews but rather the anti-Semites.
Even the attribution of the view that the Jews have had
disproportionate influence of "occidental" literature to the Jews
themselves reads, in this context, less as the all too familiar
strategy of blaming the victim, than as tweaking the noses of the
"vulgar anti-Semites," showing them that their own most vehemently
pronounced positions are those of the scapegoats they wish to expel....
I would submit that what is wrong with "The Jews in Contemporary
Literature" is not that it is, in the first instance, anti-Semitic,
but rather that if we read it in isolation, it is almost impossible to
tell where it stands with regard to the situation of the Jews.
Rather than accept this statement at face value, it would be useful to
return to the concluding paragraph of de Man's article, from March 4,
1941, that sets forth his seemingly more genteel anti-Semitism. A
clear reading of the opening rejection of "vulgar anti-Semitism"
reveals it as a common rhetorical device to distinguish the author's
seemingly more reasonable viewpoint. It's also useful to remember that
Hitler himself, in
Mein Kampf,
used the same device when criticizing a more limited variety
of "religious" anti-Semitism he took issue with.
One realizes, therefore, that to consider contemporary literature as
an isolated phenomenon, created by the particular mentality of the
1920s, is absurd. Likewise, the Jews cannot pretend to be its
creators, nor even to have exercised a preponderant influence over its
evolution. On any close examination, their influence would appear to
have extraordinarily little importance, since one might have expected
that—given the specific characteristics of the Jewish mind—the
latter would have played a more brilliant role in such artistic
production. Their cerebralness, their capacity to assimilate doctrines
while maintaining a cold detachment from them, would seem to be very
precious qualities for the work of lucid analysis that the novel
requires. But in spite of that, Jewish writers have always remained in
the second rank and, to speak only of France, writers on the order of
André Maurois, Francis de Croisset, Henri Duvernois, Henri
Bernstein, Tristan Bernard, Julien Benda, and so on, are not among the
most important figures, and especially not among those who have had
some directive influence on literary genres. The statement is,
moreover, comforting for Western intellectuals. That they have been
able to safeguard themselves from Jewish influence in a domain as
culturally representative as literature proves their vitality. We
could not have much hope for the future of our civilization if it had
let itself be invaded, without resistance, by a foreign force. In
keeping its originality and its character intact, despite Semitic
interference in all aspects of European life, our civilization has
shown that its fundamental nature is healthy. What's more, one can
thus see that a solution to the Jewish problem that would lead to the
creation of a Jewish colony isolated from Europe would not have, from
the point of view of the West, regrettable consequences. It would
lose, in all, some personalities of mediocre worth and would continue,
as in the past, to develop according to its higher laws of evolution.
As David Lehman wryly observed, the republication of de Man's wartime
columns in the same volume as their academic interpretations (in
a volume titled
Responses)
only served to expose the latter's fallacious pretensions, effectively
deconstructing the deconstuctors.
†
