French Lessons: A Memoir (20 page)

Guy had written his dissertation on irony, irony in Gerard
de Nerval. It was like pulling teeth: a year of work on a single
poem, trying to get logical inconsistencies in each metaphor. He came home from his job every day with that fivehundred-page deconstruction of Gerard de Nerval lying on
his desk like an affront. One Monday morning he walked up
to the blackboard to conjugate, looked around at a sea of
students in tractor caps, and that was the end.

Rachael called to tell me about it. She had the story directly from Guy. "He walked!" The department chair had
even called him at his father's place in Rochester and begged
him to stay-they liked him so much-and he said he was
never going back.

Rachael and I were on the phone every week our first year
out of Yale, keeping each other going. The Guy story was
one of our favorites.

"Ph.D.'s driving cabs all over the country and he just up
and resigned a tenure-track position!" she said.

"I can't believe it," I said. But I could believe it.

None of us was prepared to deal with the difference between our training and our actual work, teaching French.

11

De Man died in 1984, of a cancer that had moved very fast.
We heard stories of people at the hospital bed, jotting down
the last words-a cult till the end. De Man himself was
flawlessly brave, showing interest in his illness as though it
were someone else's. I cried when I got the news-cried for
the death of my student life, more than for the distant
teacher.

I had spent two years teaching language at the state
school, then three tough years at Columbia, a "revolving
door" position with no job security but opportunity for career advancement. It worked-I finally landed my dream
job at Duke, where I could teach twentieth-century literature to undergraduate and graduate students, and where I
got tenure.

Guy went into a retraining program for Ph.D.'s. It turned
out he had a genius for technical writing-he could now
cultivate that sense of philological detail he had tried to ignore in graduate school. Around this time he met a woman
and fell in love and got married. She understood about
Guillaume Dore, I think, but she loved and rooted for Bill.
Both of them had had difficult family lives, and a series of
unhappy relationships, and now they had found their main
chance. The former deconstructionist was going to have
kids and a house and a garden-the whole picture, no apologies. When I saw them in upstate New York one summer,
he was beaming. And wearing overalls. I remembered how
de Man had said to us in class, "don't confuse any of this lit erary theory with your lives"-how we hadn't believed him,
how we had wanted our criticism to tell us how to think and
how to speak and how to live. De Man made literature matter more than anything in the world and then said it was
only literature. He had put us all in a bind.

III

The year Bill Golden fell in love and married, word trickled back from a conference in Alabama: a Belgian graduate
student had discovered that de Man, our de Man, had written literary and political columns for a collaborationist Belgian newspaper during the war. A job he got from his uncle.
Some of the articles were pro-Nazi; one was anti-Semitic.
Our teacher had been a collaborator.

There was ugly scandal-mongering in the newspapers. Everyone who had ever competed with de Man, who had ever
resented his success, came out of the woodwork with their
statement. His first wife implied he was a bigamist. He had
come to New York after the war and started life anew, hung
around with the Partisan Review crowd in New York, taught at
Bennington and married the daughter of a U.S. Senator,
who smoothed the way for his new visa. Various people
claimed they had known all along. The de Manians said:
"This is a non-event; the revelation is a pure rhetorical construction, perpetrated by the media."

But de Man had written that if French Jewish novelists
were sent to a Jewish colony, the literary life of Europe
wouldn't suffer. That sentence had been lying around in the
old-newspaper room; now it was in photocopies on the
desk of every literary theorist in the country.

The people who were most attached to deconstruction
were the most vociferous about how inferior, stupid, unreliable, vulgar, and irresponsible was the journalism being
written about the de Man scandal.

You could smell the disdain on one side and the glee on
the other.

As for me, I was finally going to get that long overdue
"Honors" for originality. I was a literary critic who had been
at Yale in the heyday of deconstructionist criticism, who
had studied collaborationist intellectuals of the 193os and
ig4os in de Man's department. I knew the books de Man
had reviewed at Le Soir, the Belgian newspaper he had
worked at, because they were the books I read for my dissertation. I knew the people he referred to in the books. If I
didn't, I knew how to find out who they were. I knew exactly what to do. I waxed tragic but I had an adrenaline rush
that lasted for months. I got the bound volumes of Le Soir,
with de Man's articles in them. Under his by-line was every
fascist cliche, every inane argument I had catalogued about
the New Europe: one month, a glowing reference to futurism as the poetry of the New Europe; the next, a joke about
Celine. There were distinctions within the collaborationist
rhetoric that showed he was discerning, even as he was toeing the line; there was a review of Brasillach, calling him a
softie who confused politics with art. I crouched on the
floor of my office with yellow legal pads and breathed in the
dust and in two months wrote an article that ordinarily
would have taken me a year. I put all my erudition to work,
with a vengeance. Suddenly this dissertation work, this
topic that had seemed completely irrelevant to literary
theory circa 1978, was relevant. Every deconstructionist in
the country wanted to know what fascism was, and I was in a position to tell them. None of these theorists had ever
thought that the political history of France in World War II
was worth a damn for thinking about literature; let them
work at it now, I thought, let them look up all the proper
names and the political parties and the dates, let them trace
the lines of demarcation on a map. Let them struggle the way
I had struggled with fascism-and let them worry about it!

The Oxbridge don, the one who had lectured during my
first year at Yale, who had had his pencil poised in the question period for de Man's every word, now quoted from my
book on fascist aesthetics in his article about the de Man
scandal.

My happiness was complete.

Here is the irony. In my long article on de Man's wartime
journalism, I didn't take sides. I said I didn't want to condemn or moralize, merely to describe. I set it out for all to
see: the left-wing socialists who had turned to the right and
made a national coalition in the interests of Belgian nationalism. The Flemish prejudice against the French. The contentment of the Belgians that the Germans had finally put
one over on the French. At the end was my flourish of
memory about de Man at Yale-remembering how he told
us not to confuse theory with life. This is impossible advice,
I said, implying that it was now difficult, if not impossible, to
think about deconstruction without thinking about de
Man's collaborationist past. That was where I ended-with
impossibility and the confusion of theory and life.

Bill Golden wrote and said my historical research was useful, but he still wanted to know the answer to my flourish at
the end: what part that job at the newspaper played in making de Man, the cool ironic theorist of language from whom we had tried to learn. "God, why did I always have the feeling he never talked to one," he wrote. That was Guy, not
Bill-at the very moment when he's trying to say how angry
he was that de Man had ignored him, he goes impersonal on
his pronoun. Why, after all this time, couldn't he say, "the
man never really talked to me"?

Dan wrote from his law practice in California to say that
the news about de Man made his connection to literary criticism feel even more remote. He hadn't read de Man's wartime journalism yet, but from my description it sounded as
though de Man had been misled by some backfiring idealism gone wrong. Wasn't I too easy on him, in my article?
Didn't I have to pass judgment? Had I forgotten how suspicious everyone had been of my dissertation and wasn't I
mad?

Someone at Yale called and said she admired the cool of
my article but she could tell that I hadn't really loved him.

I had gone for the cool disinterest. At the moment of my
greatest glee, the moment when I finally had something on
my most enigmatic, famous teacher-just what I had always
longed for!-I had reproduced the dry analysis, emotional
deadpan, and the confusing flourish at the end. De Man's
way.

"I've got it! I've got it!" I was screaming inside. But on the
outside: "Well, you see, it goes like this ... But please be patient, it's extremely complicated."

At Duke, the students were mad and excited and disgusted with us, their elders. "Jesus, theory is dead"-a
woman named Serena. "It's corrupt, it's all based on shit!"
They interviewed students and faculty to see what various
people had to say about the scandal. There was the famous
pragmatist on campus who said, well, World War II was the last time in American history that everyone agreed about
who the good guys and bad guys were and, he concluded,
this is what makes the scandal so satisfying-we are relieved
to be thrust temporarily into the realm of good and evil
again. A student started a correspondence with a reporter
from Time who had written an article about the de Man scandal he disagreed with. Another student, cynical and wary,
said that the de Man affair was an interpretive machine,
that everyone would use it to do battle for their latest theory
and that the whole event was a career opportunity for
people desperate to publish.

Linda Orr-my first teacher at Yale and now my
colleague-and I were teaching a seminar together on War
and Memory, listening to all this talk, and I felt it coming
back at me from them-my old struggle with teachers,
wanting to know more about them than they knew about
themselves.

For the first time, because of the de Man scandal, I was
called on to narrate my own intellectual history. I needed to
make the students understand, with only fifteen years' distance, what that atmosphere around deconstruction was,
what I had learned from it, and how it made me react against
them, with their consuming passion for history and politics
and context. So much had changed.

Deconstruction was good for us. We were all reading the
same books, trying to think together. It was an atmosphere
of overwhelming curiosity and respect for the difficulty of
thinking about literature. All that talk about "margins"-we
knew we were at the center of intellectual life. We were
sharpening our minds like razors, because we were the
carriers of a new way of reading: the most advanced,
thorough-going, questioning reading that had even been done on a text. Everything that has come since in
literature-the smorgasbord of disciplines and methods
that passes as "interdisciplinary work," the debate on the
canon with its sad obsession with limited resources and
turf-all seems unworthy by comparison. Deconstruction
gave us a sensitivity to language, a need to look up close, and
a sense that language is tricky-the ultimate adversary.

It was also bad for those reasons. The rigor about language
constrained our imaginations. We suffered, because we
thought there was only one way to be rigorous. That student
who walked out of class-what was left for him, since he
was outside the dominant conversation? And Guy, how
many like him got too far into deconstruction, taking language apart into such tiny pieces that there was nothing left?
If de Man had been a better teacher he would have seen the
trouble Guy was having; he wouldn't have given up on pedagogy. De Man thought he had left persuasion behind for
good in the War; he had fled a disaster of opinion, and opinion dogged him everywhere he went.

De Man would have been a better teacher if he had given
more of his game away. He was Belgian. The problems he
was interested in were related to Belgian culture, that odd
mixture of Flemish and French elements and the conflicts
of national identity that all got played out during the German Occupation. In his articles in Le Soir, de Man kept measuring the French national character against the German
national character. We were getting the same debate in graduate school, the mixture of French and German texts I
couldn't figure out. He didn't let on why he was attracted to
those texts. Romanticism was the key to his thought-but
why? Romanticism was at the root of fascism-giving one's
self to the revolution, linking aesthetics and politics. He was working through his confusing relationship to European
culture, being Flemish but French-educated. He was interested in autobiography-as an impossible genre, a kind of
emblem of deconstruction, where the more you try to confess, the more you lie. The root of de Man's intellectual
questions was in his own experience and pain.

Personal motivation. We didn't think about personal motivation. We thought of ourselves in the service of difficulty,
absence, impossibility. The ground was too high; we
couldn't possibly stay on it. We never thought about ourselves as writers. We were too literary. Curiosity about too
many things was discouraged; author's lives, for example,
were beneath us. We were told never to publish too soon,
we were encouraged to take our time, endless time, because
thinking was hard and exquisite. There weren't very many
jobs, and of course we were there out of abstract dedication, not ambition. The standards made us miserable: we
were a tense, ambitious, and fearful lot.

Guy didn't make it: he thought his dissertation had to be
the shining truth and it ended up so difficult it was unreadable. He walked out of the classroom before he ever had to
try his thinking in the world. His friends should have told
him that what he was writing was unreadable. Not theoretically unreadable-plain unreadable.