1 Death and the Lighthouses (1 January 2001)

There is one brief, disagreeable episode in the history of deconstruction
which Currie is anxious to get out of the way as quickly as possible. In 1989,
Currie says, Paul de Man’s wartime journalism, “mostly inoffensive reviews
for a collaborationist newspaper in Belgium”, was discovered by a Belgian
scholar. It resulted in “a peak of absurdity” in the quarrel between textual
and contextual critics, with historicists preposterously viewing de Man’s
journalism “as confirmation of the latent fascism in deconstructive
narratology”.
This account of the de Man scandal strikes me as misleading and
dishonest. Characteristically, Currie gets the year wrong (the revelation of
de Man’s unknown wartime newspaper articles was broken by the
on December 1, 1987). When de Man died in 1984 he was America’s
leading deconstructionist, a celebrated and much admired member of the
Yale faculty. It subsequently transpired that the Belgian-born de Man, who
had first arrive d in the United States in 1948, had a number of rather
malodorous skeletons in his cupboard. It wasn’t so much the grubby,
unpleasant personal details that mattered as those wartime writings. It
turned out that de Man had written 170 articles for and 10 pieces for
(i.e. not one newspaper, as Currie wrongly says).
Here, context is everything. before the German occupation was a
leading mainstream national newspaper. As with other publications the staff
were sacked and replaced by hacks, opportunists and collaborators who
were happy to turn it into a stridently pro-Nazi paper; it became popularly
known as (the stolen ). Paul de Man wrote for these
newspapers from December 1940 until November 1942, advancing a Nazi
cultural agenda. He wrote toadying, arselicking reviews of books by the
major collaborationist writers. He saluted the bravery of the German soldier.
He praised the poetry of Italian fascism. He applauded the German
occupation of Belgium. He promoted the “blood and soil” ideology of Nazism.
A contemporary Belgian resistance pamphlet entitled
identified Paul de Man as one of forty-four contributors who were
collaborationist scum, noting “his energetic propaganda” on behalf of the
Nazis. From the tough, gruelling perspective of the rooms of the University of
Dundee’s English department at the end of the twentieth century de Man’s
articles may seem “inoffensive”, but this was not how they appeared to
citizens of Brussels under Nazi rule.
Currie says that when de Man’s wartime journalism was exposed “his
work was the subject of a kind of witch hunt”. Here Currie’s choice of words
seems to me offensive and perversely ironic in the light of what de Man
wrote about Jews and what actually happened to Belgian Jews. De Man’s
poisonously racist piece, “The Jews in Contemporary Literature”, appeared
in on March 4, 1941. De Man’s conclusion (that “a solution to the
Jewish problem” which resulted in the departure of the Jews from Europe
1 (1 January 2001) 42