1988 If deconstruction, as a dominant Anglo-American literary theory, was constructed on 21 October 1966 (see the entry for that date), it was profoundly shaken on 9 January 1988 with Jon Wiener’s article in The Nation (‘Deconstructing de Man’).
Wiener was indebted to a young Belgian scholar, Ortwin de Graef. De Graef (initially a disciple, and a graduate student doing a thesis on Paul de Man, the leading exponent of the new critical school) had turned up some 170 articles written by de Man during the Nazi occupation of Belgium – most of them for the country’s leading newspaper, Le Soir (known, during this sad period, as Le Soir volé – ‘the stolen Le Soir’). They were mainly hack work, but a handful offered clear evidence of party-line anti-Semitism, notably a piece published on 4 March 1941, ‘The Jews in Contemporary Literature’, which concluded:
A solution to the Jewish problem that would lead to the creation of a Jewish colony isolated from Europe would not have, for the literary life of the West, regrettable consequences. It would lose, in all, some personalities of mediocre worth and would continue, as in the past, to develop according to its higher laws of evolution.
Even if he did not know the ‘solution’ his current employers had in mind, de Man, it was pointed out, could not but have noticed the current persecution of Belgian Jews who, at this date, were banned from professional employment (not least writing for Le Soir) and branded with yellow stars. Was the deconstruction enterprise an attempt by de Man to erase his past, render it meaningless so as to soothe a nagging conscience? There was much ingenious psychobiography on the topic.
In the wake of de Graef’s revelations, and their follow-up reverberations in the Anglo-American press, other skeletons were hauled out of the deceased de Man’s cupboard: bigamy, lying to immigration officials, allowing it to be thought he had been involved with the Belgian resistance.
Deconstruction was not, as a critical procedure, destroyed by the revelation of de Man’s wartime publications and alleged malfeasance. But it was substantially deconstructed.