French Lessons: A Memoir (18 page)

Guy and I were in de Man's "Introduction to Literary Theory." It was for first- and second-year students only. The class
met in a windowless seminar room in Cross Campus Library, an undergraduate library that had been built underground, beneath the quad. Afterwards a bunch of us would
gather in Machine City, a lounge set behind the walkway
leading from Cross Campus to the venerable old Sterling Library. We'd settle in a small formica booth, drink bad coffee
and eat Lorna Doones from the vending machine as we tried
to fathom what had gone on in class. The big question was,
"What is deconstruction?" Guy had the surest answer, "deconstruction is when you figure out that a story or a poem is
in the wrong-not because the author is lying, but because
there is something inherently deceitful about language. Language can never tell the whole truth. It's the deconstructive
critic's job to find the places where language breaks down,
by looking up close and finding language's sleight of hand."

De Man was working on the rhetorical figure known as
"catechresis" (I kept thinking about it in my mind as "catechism"). It was the key to the whole way we students tried to
think about language. A figure of speech is usually a substitute for the "real" "proper" meaning. Metaphor, for exam ple, means "jumping over" the basic meaning of a word to
get to the poetic meaning. When you call dawn "rosy fingered," you're making the sun into a hand and its rays into
fingers. Metonymy works with another kind of substitution: you identify a person or thing by some part of them,
you call the man with red hair "Red." Metonymy is the figure
of selection and desire: you nickname your friend after the
part of them that you like and notice most. But sometimes
substitutions break down. Certain words don't have a meaning of their own; they borrow their meaning from another
realm. Like "leaf" for a page of a book (from the world of
trees) or "leg" for a table (from the human body). "Table leg"
and "book leaf" are both instances of "catechresis." With
catechresis, the substitute figure (leg, borrowed from the
human anatomy; leaf, borrowed from nature) is the only
word available: there is no proper meaning underneath, no
foundation for the figure, no literal meaning. That was a deconstructive insight.

In the class, I wrote down de Man's examples, and even
his asides; the key to the mystery might be anywhere. The
man who began to look like his dog (an example of
metonymy); how he taught for Berlitz when he first came to
this country; jokes about marriage. The concept of "mise en
abime" was a big deal. De Man explained "mice en abime"
by describing a cocoa can with a girl on it holding a cocoa
can with a girl on it holding a cocoa can. When does it stop?
There are problems, concluded de Man, with trying to represent reality.

The first step in any systematic literary analysis, de Man
taught us, was to chart the polarities, the systems of oppositions in the language of a text. For a metaphor to function, it
has to be convincing. Shades of Proust: "the duchess's eye, blue like a ray of sun." A sun looking over the world-like
an eye. The image involves an inside, an outside, nature and
art, hot and cold. How can a ray of sun be cold and blue?

At the heart of this question was another, simple and basic, that de Man had extracted from the rhetorical logic of
literary language. Metaphor needed to convince by sensual
means, and one metaphor had a way of engendering another, until you could find a whole set of transformations
that made up the solidity of the text, the recognizability of
style or author. A sun can't be cold and blue unless it turns
away from itself, as an eye, a glance, can turn away from
anything-except itself. Why, de Man asked us, are blindness and insight such powerful combinations? Because the
sun makes it possible for us to see, but if we look at the sun
too hard, we go blind. Oedipus saw the truth about his
mother and father, and he went blind. Too much light is
blinding.

Too much light is blinding; too much knowledge is ignorance: the polarities were swimming around in my brain on
the day a student walked out of class. He was a very formal
person, an older student who wore a three-piece suit and
carried a Cross pen-and-pencil set. He stood up and read
a paragraph to the class from the assignment for the day,
an article by Gerard Genette called "La Metonymie chez
Proust" (metonymy in Proust). "I don't understand this paragraph. And, furthermore, I don't think it's capable of being
understood." That's the way he talked. And then he left.

It was a clincher: by leaving, he made the rest of us feel
like survivors. We were the ones who stayed, we were banking on our ability to understand. But sometimes I think
about him, and I think that he was a hero. He knew what he
wanted and wasn't afraid to say it. He wanted to under stand-what was so bad about that? He had more courage
than the rest of us, pretending we understood when we
didn't.

Understanding, de Man intoned, was only a metaphor
borrowed from the physical world. To understand is to
"stand under," to support. To put up with something!
Most of the vocabulary of knowledge was borrowed from
the physical realm, he reminded us, from the world of sight
(now I see) or the world of eating (I'm digesting an
argument).

The weirdest part of the episode with the student was that
de Man didn't mind his departure. He was more sympathetic towards the departing student than he was towards
those of us who stayed. He wouldn't let us scorn the deserter. He didn't think that deconstructive theory could be
taught or even understood. He pointed out that every human being had a limited amount of reading time in life
and that we ought to decide what we wanted to spend it
on. Reading a single sentence by the French philosopher
Jacques Derrida could take hours. We had to figure out if
we'd rather spend it on a novel. We could probably get
through Proust's entire Remembrance of Things Past in the time
it took to read Derrida's Grammatology.

This was how de Man undercut his own authority. Or like
this: after a student made a comment, he muttered "bien"well done. As soon as he said it, he got that wistful smile on
his face and he apologized, saying how much he hated the
set-up where the student waits for the teacher to say "bien,"
like a dog waiting for a bone. When I first thought about it I
felt grateful to him for refusing to manipulate us but later I
got mad: the way he told it, we were just eager dogs, needy
and vulnerable. Did he think we would scrounge for any
scrap?

When our first paper was due he told us, out of the blue,
that anyone who could come up with an original paper
would get "Honors" (we were graded "Pass," "High Pass," or
"Honors"). Originality? We had never heard about originality from de Man before. What could originality mean
when reading itself was well nigh impossible? Of course
people blocked on the paper-every idea seemed so obvious. Or else they slavishly tried to do exactly what they
thought de Man would do: the disinterested close analysis.

That year de Man and a couple of his colleagues published a book of essays called Deconstruction and Criticism. Suddenly it was named, it was a school, and we were in it and
liable to be asked to explain it at dinner parties. Roger Shattuck, a critic in Virginia, wrote an angry article in the New York
Review of Books saying that we, graduate students at Yale, were
a bunch of anti-humanists, inferior to our learned teachers.
We were deluding ourselves with the crazy fantasy that we
could be like social scientists with foolproof methods.
What we should be doing, Shattuck said, was reading poetry
out loud and feeling its beauty. We had lost touch with
literature.

But Shattuck was wrong. No one had ever paid more attention to literature than de Man did. We responded to him
because of his ability to trim away anything that wasn't
literature-he was the only literary critic we had ever encountered who seemed to know exactly what he was
studying.

When de Man's students went in to see him he had to remind them to think about practical matters-what was the
right topic for the market, who should be on their committee, who could write them a grant letter-because none of
them ever talked about that. They talked about literature.

The establishment critics (the adults out there) hated him, because he was indifferent to so much of what had
come to pass for criticism: evocation of context; celebration
of great ideas; appreciation of what was beautiful. De Man
wanted to know what literature was; and unlike most critics,
he was willing to take the next step and see where what he
knew broke down, where literature made a fool of his attempt to understand it. That's what put the twinkle in his
eye, that final step of undoing-that was his originality and
the source of his power.

Rachael, who came to graduate school from California my
second year, described the essence of deconstruction as
"hunkering down over a text": the way de Man could take a
perfectly ordinary paragraph and make it contain all the
mysteries of language and knowledge. There was a religious
quality to the reading he inspired. Rachael's boyfriend in
Boston liked to get stoned with his friends and take turns
reading from de Man's "The Rhetoric of Temporality" out
loud ... just to feel how hard and mysterious the words
were.

I remember the feeling of reading a de Man article. The
beginning was lucid, too lucid. He would go on for five, ten,
fifteen pages. It was literary history, chronology, as plain and
reassuring as can be. He would start with a cliche of romanticism, a received idea about allegory, a distinctionallegory versus symbol, or metonymy versus metaphorthe kind of distinction that critics rely upon to do their job.
He showed how much he knew, casually.

Thrilling, this first part, because you knew it was a mask.
The world, the text, weren't transparent. Enjoy being lulled
because the mask is going to come off.

In the first fifteen pages of the article would come the Passage from the Text. In de Man articles the quotation that was going to serve as the kernel for a deconstructive reading was
big, it was generous, a text that you could get your teeth into.
Being a critic meant reading: the article really started here.
You would read through the passage six or seven times to
see if you could anticipate the blind spot he was going to
find. Like reading through a hospital mortality report to see
if you could figure out what the patient died from before
you got to the end.

My memory of the body of de Man's text gets hazy, right
here where the important part begins. The point in the article where he zeros in on the blind spot. It usually has to
do with rhetoric, with the promise of the rhetorical figure
to be just that, with its failure to be only that. With its manipulativeness, its unexpected something elseness. There's always a trick at work. The critic has to show why a metaphor
is believable, and how it transforms what it describes. De
Man used Hitchcock's film North by Northwest to explain the
power of metaphor. He talked about the moment in the
film when Cary Grant kisses a girl in a train compartment,
and the camera switches to a shot of a train going into a
tunnel. The train going into a tunnel was a metaphor, because foreplay, in a heterosexual world, leads to penetration. It seems natural to show a train going through a
tunnel because the two main characters are seated in a
train, but it's also a metaphor for sex. This all happens in
the split second of a film frame, just as metaphor happens
in the split second of one word substituted for another.
The substitution is so fast you hardly know what's going
on. When you think of it, you laugh.

As we got closer and closer to writing our term papers,
Guy lost interest in sex. "La femme est toujours en rut" ("woman is always in heat"): he quoted Baudelaire at me accusingly when I sidled up to him on our walk home from
class. He couldn't spend the night. He had a paper to write
on metaphor.

We tried studying together at Guy's apartment. Bolstered
by his Random House dictionary, his Old French dictionary,
his Petit Robert Dictionary, he was reading, quoting, scrutinizing, while I raced through my assignments, impatient,
hungry for plot, hungry for dinner, too, and a little human
contact. When Guy went to the kitchen to get us a sandwich
I snuck a look at one of his papers from the medieval
French seminar he had taken first year, a course he never
talked about. It was sitting on his desk as though he wanted
me to see it with comments all over it. The comments were
dithyrambic, the professor practically begging him to turn
the paper into a full-fledged dissertation, detailed philological study, words and their history. But Guy was attracted to
the big stuff, Meaning, not meanings. He didn't value what
he was good at.

Guy came to my house to study next. He made a crack
about how few books I had, and I thought, What the fuck am
I doing here? I had sold all my textbooks when I was an undergraduate, in California. I wasn't an intellectual. Intellectuals don't sell their books back to the bookstore.

We were getting down to the wire. I couldn't concentrate
on reading for as long as Guy could. I didn't recognize the
names of literary characters alluded to in the criticism; the
examples of rhetorical figures and narrative devices were
from books I hadn't read. I didn't know half the authors being talked about: German philosophers from the nineteenth century in addition to the whole canon of French
basics that I had skipped over in college to get to the con temporary work. I had cut corners in classes all semester,
not reading through to the end. I hadn't had any training in
philosophy. Often it seemed like I had been following the
changes in the professors' tones of voice, more than what
they were saying. "That last part was the punch line," I would
think, not knowing what it meant. I wondered if I was really
a survivor.

Guy had set himself a military schedule for writing his
metaphor paper. I was supposed to be writing on metonymy, the trope of desire, in the works of Benjamin Constant. I called Guy on Friday night and told him I had to see
him. He came over, annoyed. He didn't want to spend
much time, five or ten minutes. I demanded he stay the
night. I clung to his sleeve; he yelled; I yelled louder; he stiffened up; I grabbed harder. He slapped me across the face.
Hard.