Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism

Citation preview

Paul de Man

IN_SIGHT ~Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism

NEW YORK

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

1971

Copyright ©

I

97 I by Paul de Man

Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: 77-83oi I Printed in the United States of America

Cette perpetuelle erreur, qui precisement la "vie" . ..

est

PROUST

Foreword

The group of essays brought together in this volume claims in no way to be a contribution to the history of criticism or to offer a survey, however sketchy, of the trends that make up present-day literary criticism in Europe. It is concerned with a different problem. Each essay deals with a question of literary understanding but none approaches this question in a systematic way. They were written for specific occasions-conferences, lectures, homages-and reflect interests that are bound to occur to someone whose teaching has been more or less evenly divided between the United States and Europe. The topics were chosen because of a spontaneous, sometimes personal, interest in a particular critic, without trying to present a comprehensive selection. Many essays are by-products of a more extensive study of romantic and post-romantic literature that does not deal with criticism. The recurrent pattern that emerges was established i~~~ecf7 and any resemblance to ~l?!~.:::~"~1gJ?!L~-h~d theories of Titerary inter- f pretation is entirely coincidental or, in tlie~terminology of the book, ! blind. I have made no attempt to bring the terminology of the 1 Vll

viii

FOREWORD

earlier essays up to date and, except for minor changes, have left them as they were originally written. I stress the somewhat unsystematic aspect of the volume in order to dispel a false impression that could be created by the emphasis on criticism at the expense of general literature. My int~resLin~.critifi?Il!_i~~ ?!:IJJo~~clii?:~!~-t9~ 111Y in t~E~s~}I?: E~!B}aqrJi terary ~t~.xts~J ust as I disclaim any attempt to contribute to a history of ~odern criticism, I feel equally remote from a science of criticism that would exist as an autonomous discipline. My tentative generalizations are not aimed toward a theory of criticism but toward Ji!~Iill:Y~l~Eg~i!g~jn~_.g~~l!eral. The usual distinctions between expository writing on literature and the "purely" literary language of poetry or fiction have been deliberately blurred. The choice of critics who are also novelists or poets, the use of expository critical texts by such poets as Baudelaire or Yeats, the predilection for authors who combine discursive, essayistic writing with the writing of fiction, all tend in this same direction. I am concerned with the distinctive quality that all these modes of writing, as literary texts, have in common and it is toward the preliminary description of this distinctive quality that the essays are oriented. Why then complicate matters further by choosing to write on critics when one could so easily find less ambivalent examples of literary texts among poets or novelists? Jh~--E~a~()f1_J§~tha_!~prior to tbeoiizing about literary language, one has to become g\Ya~-e_ of the '---~complexities of reading.';And since critics are a particularly selfconscious and specialized kind of reader, these complexities are displayed with particular clarity in their work. They do not occur with the same clarity to a spontaneous, non-critical reader who is bound to forget the mediations separating the text from the particular meaning that now captivates his attention. Neither are the complexities of reading easily apparent in a poem or a novel, where they are so deeply embedded in the language that it takes extensive interpretation to bring them to light. Because critics deal more or less openly with the problem of reading, it is a little easier to read a critical text as text-i.e. with an awareness of the reading process involved-than to read other literary works in this manner. The study of critical texts, however, can never be an end in itself and has value only as a preliminary to the understanding of literature

FOREWORD

ix

in general. The problems involved in critical reading reflect the gistinctive characteristics of literary language. The picture of reading that emerges from the examination of a few contemporary critics is not a simple one. In all of them a paradoxical discrepancy appears between the general statements they make about the nature of literature (statements on which they base their critical methods) and the actual results of their interpretations. Their findings about the structure of texts contradict the general conception that they use as their model. Not only do they remain unaware of this discrepancy, but they seem to thrive on it and owe their best insights to the assumptions these insights disprove. I have tried to document this curious pattern in a number of specific instances. By choosing the critics among writers whose literary perceptiveness lies beyond dispute, I ,~~ggg~~L!h~t,th~ patt~J-:n,!lL,discrepanc;y,far fro111 being the consequence of 1ila1vidual 9E~~