Legacies of Paul de Man

Professing Literature: John Guillory’s Misreading of Paul de Man

Professing Literature: John Guillory’s Misreading of Paul de Man Marc Redfield Both the title and the overall rationale of this essay—a review-essay focused on a book, John Guillory’s Cultural Capital, that appeared a good decade ago—merit a word of explanation. My subtitle, chosen for clarity, will have its pugnacious thrust slightly (if only slightly) muffled over the following pages, which thematize ‘‘misreading’’ not, or not only or primarily , as a mode of contingent error, but rather as a condition of all interpretation, especially forceful interpretation that ends up making a difference . Whether Guillory’s book has genuinely made a difference— whether it may truly be said to constitute an event in an intellectual or institutional history that we find ourselves required to confront as our own—is no easy question; but Cultural Capital has certainly proved an important and influential book in the ordinary sense we give to such adjectives , to the point of becoming a canonical text within ongoing debates about the ‘‘canon’’ and the role of literary study at the university. With regard to the reception of de Man, its contribution is harder to characterize . Guillory’s book has no doubt lent succor to those who have sought, and still seek, to consign de Manian theory to the outer darkness—as an outdated, erroneous, ultimately superficial (if always strangely threatening ) ‘‘discourse of mastery’’1 —but apart from that negative role, Cultural Capital cannot be said to have left much of a mark on de Man studies, 93 94 Marc Redfield within which, barring a few exceptions, it has received little notice. Though Guillory’s book has at times been critically reviewed, neither the accuracy of his account of de Man nor the filiations linking that account to his book’s broader claims about literary canon-formation have been carefully examined.2 And that is a pity: not just because serious mischaracterizations (and there are quite a number in Guillory’s representation of de Manian theory) ought to be corrected, but because Guillory’s interesting and influential broader theses about the literary institution arguably cannot be fully evaluated unless one accounts for his long, passionate chapter on de Man—the longest and by a good degree the most polemical chapter in the book. Furthermore, at the risk of sounding more paradoxical than one ought in an introductory paragraph, I want to suggest that Guillory’s polemic manages to be at one and the same time unoriginal and brilliant. His de Man chapter speaks with a voice that, without exaggeration or malice, we may characterize as an institutional voice, yet what it says allows us, against its own intention and manifest argument, to read the degree to which de Man was a theorist of institutionalization and institution (‘‘of’’ here to be taken as governing both a subjective and an objective genitive). Guillory’s genius cannot be teased apart from his conventionality, nor (as the de Manian figure has it) his insight from his blindness. Put less metaphorically: his chapter on de Man is driven by his book’s aestheticideological agenda, and offers us a finely symptomatic example of aestheticinstitutional resistance to theory. Yet this chapter’s violent reduction of de Manian theory to sociological symptom releases a truth that more timid or technically ‘‘accurate’’ accounts of de Man are likely to overlook. I Let me first do my best to recall Guillory’s overall project, and draw attention to some of his argument’s vectors and fault-lines. Cultural Capital’s fundamental proposition, which has deservedly claimed readers’ attention and has known considerable influence, is twofold: first, that the ‘‘canon debate’’ has been ‘‘misconceived from the start,’’ and second, that this misconceived debate symptomatically registers a ‘‘crisis in literary study.’’3 The debate is misconceived insofar as it reduces the problem of canonformation to a question of representation, falsely rendering symbolic representation in the canon analogous to political representation in a polity. Guillory rightly observes that ‘‘those members of social minorities who enter the university do not ‘represent’ the social groups to which they 95 John Guillory’s Misreading of Paul de Man belong in the same way in which minority legislators can be said to represent their constituencies. The sense in which a social group is ‘represented’ by an author or text is more tenuous still’’ (p. 7). Such a representational notion of the canon...