![]() Her psychological interpretation of her subject is less impressive. Unearthing buried facts and sifting through others about which contradictory views have been proposed are Barish’s long suit. In all that pertains to the facts of de Man’s life, Barish seems entirely reliable, and for this readers should be grateful to her. A Belgian cousin reports that the young de Man once said to him, “Principles are what the idiots substitute for intelligence.” One should add that he was an extraordinarily gifted con man, persuading the most discerning intellectuals that he had credentials he did not possess and a heroic personal history, rather than a scandalous one, while he worked his charm on generations of students. What she shows is that from the beginning, de Man was a person who flagrantly disregarded rules and obligations, shamelessly and repeatedly lied about himself, and had a criminal past. The full picture is actually far worse than any of these initial condemnatory reports, as Barish demonstrates in carefully documented detail. He then went on to teach at Cornell, briefly at Johns Hopkins, and most significantly at Yale, where he became a “seminal” scholar and an altogether revered figure. Eventually he would be admitted, with a considerable amount of falsification on his part, to the doctoral program in comparative literature at Harvard, from which he would receive a degree, in somewhat compromised circumstances, in 1960. But that, as Barish’s account makes clear, was the least of his infractions of the law. He would remain in this country illegally after the expiration of his temporary visa, on occasion finding ways to elude the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Paul de Man arrived in the United States from his native Belgium in the spring of 1948. But the meteor has long since faded: over the past decade and more, I have only rarely encountered references to de Man in students’ work, committed as they generally are to marching with the zeitgeist. In the 1970s and 1980s, he was a central figure, an inevitable figure, in American literary studies, in which doctoral dissertations, the great barometer of academic fashion, could scarcely be found without dozens of citations from his writings. De Man is now scarcely remembered by the general public, though he was the center of a widely publicized scandal in 1988, five years after his death at the age of 64. Yet there is considerable truth in what she says. Evelyn Barish begins her impressively researched biography by flatly stating that “Paul de Man no longer seems to exist.” This may be an exaggerated expression of frustration by a biographer whose long- incubated work now appears after what might have been the optimal time for it.
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