Reading de Man Reading, and: Responses: On Paul de Man's Wartime Journalism (review)

126 the minnesota review invitation but actively undermines any meliorist implication to the production of the realist referent. It may well be that Petrey could answer these objections and integrate Flaubert's supposed realism into his critical scheme. In any case, his readings of Balzac, Stendhal, and Zola in this stimulating book are consistently new and illuminating and should be read by anyone interested in the fascinating question of what constitutes that strangely self-contesting genre, fictional realism. CHARLES BERNHEIMER Reading de Man Reading edited by Lindsay Waters and Wlad Godzich. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. viii + 320 pp. $14.95 (paper). Responses: On Paul de Man's Wartime Journalism edited by Werner Hamacher, Neil Hertz and Thomas Keenan. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989. xxii+480pp. $19.95 (paper). This review is belated. By now, the discovery of Paul de Man's wartime writings—and the ensuing series of condemnations and defenses—is old news, consigned to the bin of the media archive. To be exact, it's been five years since Ortwin de Graef happened upon de Man's signature in Het Vlaamsche Land and the New York Times carried a front-page story, and nearly three years since the publication of these lengthy collections. For a time, the news of the wartime writings dominated the academic airways. It seemed as if no one could talk about anything else. De Man was roundly attacked in mainstream journals from Newsweek to The Nation, and academic journals carried the debates among detractors, supporters, and equivocators. Critical Inquiry, a fairly reliable indicator of the state of high theory, devoted nearly two full issues to the debate (see especially Derrida's tortured apology in the Spring 1988 issue and the round of responses in the Summer 1989 issue). Indeed, it seemed as if it would no longer be possible to write on Paul de Man's work without talking about the wartime writings and invoking the spectre they raised. Since then, though, the critical conversation has moved on. Of late, there has been an increasingly prodigious amount of material evaluating de Man's later work, as evidenced by articles in recent issues oí Diacritics, Criticism, Representations, Journal of Narrative Technique, Textual Studies, to name a few, and by books like Jonathan Loesberg's Aestheticism and Deconstruction and Don Bialostosky's Wordsworth, Dialogics, and the Practice of Criticism. In other words, the storm has now passed, although it has subtly alterred the course of criticism on de Man. Set against this backdrop, both Reading de Man Reading and Responses mark signal moments in the first phase of de Man criticism, the startup cycle of the de Man industry. Reading de Man Reading stands as a kind of false start in that cycle. Although not so labelled, it posthumously presents a festschrift-type collection of essays honoring de Man and his work (de Man died in 1983). It collects fourteen unabashedly theoretical and sometimes turgid essays on de Man's work by friends, students, allies and sympathizers, including Geoffrey Hartman, Jacques Derrida, Deborah Esch, Neil Hertz, Carol Jacobs, Kevin Newmark, Hillis Miller, Werner Hamacher, H. R. Jauss, Geoffrey Bennington, Bill Readings, Timothy Bahti, and Rodophe Gasche. The collection hangs precisely at the moment immediately preceding de Man's fall. It bears an editor's note, almost a disclaimer, explaining that the book was in preparation from 1983 on and so, except for Hartman's essay, does not deal with the wartime writings. Hartman's essay, "Looking Back on Paul de Man," exemplifies the fracture of the two moments, before and after the fall. The first part, "Radical Patience," is an admiring homage to de Man, reviews 127 surveying his work, noting his terse tone and his closeness to texts (as Hartman handily puts it, "like a tightrope...one inch from the text"), his intellectual style and thinking, his relation to philosophy, and so on. The second half, "Radical Impatience," is a tortured meditation on the wartime de Man. To his credit, Hartman is balanced and fairminded: he doesn't castigate de Man and certainly doesn't dismiss him, but expresses sadness and shock at the revelation of de Man's collaboration while at...