A Critical School for Scandal?

Little or nothing appeared to explain what lay behind his journalism, or to examine his roots, or to understand that factors that had influenced him and the culture from which he derived. Like his own approach to literature, he seemed to have no history. What had really happened in Belgium in the 1930s and early 1940s, and who de Man had been before and after he wrote for its newspapers, what kind of social position and family he came from—all the details of life that might give context to his attitudes as a young man—were left uncertain, supported only by hearsay.

Not only does the publication, earlier this year, of Evelyn Barish’s The Double Life of Paul de Man shed new light on the critic’s early, wartime, and post-War years—up until his U. S. academic career was fully up and running (1960); it demonstrates that the de Man controversy is mired about where it was when last prominent in the public eye (let’s say 1988–89 and following, with the appearance, by the University of Nebraska Press, of de Man’s Wartime Journalism, 1939–43 and the Responses culled from 37 scholars with varying interests in his teaching and career and with different spins on the still-disconcerting documents and related disclosures). Taking a cue from de Man’s own early foray into journalism as an arena for professional and intellectual advancement, Barish’s biography breaks new ground in the historical retrospect accorded a colleague’s intellectual contributions. The vast preponderance of the attention that we devote to our teachers and contemporaries in the fields of literary and theoretical studies tends to be on their insights and innovations added to the methodological toolbox. As the citation at the head of this piece indicates, the downbeat in Barish’s study is on nailing down the chains of events and details and on fleshing out the context for de Man’s later intellectual contributions. These she tends to relegate to their boiler-plate, mass-circulation nametags: “deconstruction,” “theory.” There is no doubt that she has unearthed specifics not available in prior accounts and that she has tightened the running narrative of de Man’s whereabouts, doings, and the predicaments he faced from youth to 1960. Even in the above citation, there is a quick slide between the life and the “approach to literature.”

Barish covered considerable ground (“Belgium, France, the United States, Switzerland, and Canada”), on the way garnering significant institutional support, in pursuit of the documentary trail generated by four closely intertwined strands of the tortuous de Man personal history. By her own account, the checkered path eventuated on pioneering and still-pivotal work—devoted to philosophically and rhetorically informed reading practice, Romantic theory, and the parameters of criticism and cultural elucidation from the Enlightenment through the generations immediately succeeding World War II. The lines of documentation encompassed by Barish’s inquest concern de Man’s early years and family life—marred by the suicide of his mother, Madeleine, in 1937 when he was sixteen—in Antwerp and surroundings; his business dealings with such Belgian publishing ventures as the Editions de Toison d’Or, the Cahiers Européens, the Bibliographie Dechenne, and Hermès during and following the War; the complexities of a domestic situation in which an early marriage and dangling post-War domestic arrangements with Anna Baraghian Jaeger de Man Brajatuli von Orland-Ipsen and children coincided for ten years with a second marriage, in 1950, to Patricia Kelley de Man, whom he had met while teaching at Bard College; his dealings, as an illegal alien, with the U. S. Department of Immigration and Naturalization; and their repercussions on his academic standing at the Harvard Comparative Literature department, then led by Harry Levin and Renato Poggioli. Compared to the humdrum lives that the vast majority of literary scholars lead in the name of keeping up with a few conceptual “lines of flight” and periodically generating the odd intervention stamped with the tinge of innovation, this is...