Paul de Man became the symbol of what made people anxious about literary theory. Illustration by Delphine Lebourgeois

The idea that there is literature, and then there is something that professors do with literature called “theory,” is a little strange. To think about literature is to think theoretically. If you believe that literature is different from other kinds of writing (like philosophy and self-help books), if you have ideas about what’s relevant and what isn’t for understanding it (which class had ownership of the means of production, whether it gives you goose bumps, what color the author painted his toenails), and if you have standards for judging whether it’s great or not so great (a pleasing style or a displeasing politics), then you have a theory of literature. You can’t make much sense of it without one.

It’s the job of people in literature departments to think about these questions, to debate them, and to disseminate their views. This is not arid academicism. It affects the way students will respond to literature for the rest of their lives. But it’s also part of an inquiry into the role of art in human life, the effort to figure out why we make this stuff, what it means, and why we care so much about it. If this is not the most important thing in the world to understand, it is certainly not the least.

Twenty-five years ago, literary theory went through a crisis, and it has never really recovered its reputation. The crisis would have happened even if Paul de Man had never existed, or had never left Belgium, from which he emigrated to the United States, in 1948. But de Man became its symbol. His story, the story of a concealed past, was almost too perfect a synecdoche for everything that made people feel puzzled, threatened, or angry about literary theory.

Evelyn Barish’s new biography, “The Double Life of Paul de Man” (Liveright), is an important update on the story. Barish worked in Belgian archives, and she interviewed many people who knew de Man, including both of his wives. She’s not a hundred per cent reliable on the historical background; she is a little over her head with the theoretical issues; and she sometimes characterizes as manipulative or deceptive behavior that might have a more benign explanation. Her book is a brief for the prosecution. But it is not a hatchet job, and she has an amazing tale to tell. In her account, all guns are smoking. There are enough to stock a miniseries.

Starting in 1960, de Man taught at three American universities whose literature departments were industry leaders: Cornell, Johns Hopkins, and Yale, where he was a professor in the departments of French and comparative literature from 1970 until his death, in 1983, at the age of sixty-four. Within the profession, de Man had a mystique. There were doubters and dissenters, of course, but he was generally admired as a thinker, esteemed as a colleague, and idolized as a teacher.

Faculty found him erudite but ironic, cool but not aloof; students found him intimidating and charismatic. “Rigorous” is the word people used to describe the work; “austere” is one of the ways people described the man. Several of his articles became celebrated and much studied texts, and a number of his graduate students went on to have distinguished careers at Yale and elsewhere.

It’s common to exaggerate—I think Barish exaggerates a little, even though she is a retired English professor—the extent to which the kind of criticism de Man wrote and taught permeated American literature departments. Literary studies is a very big tent. A small number of professors were drawn to the criticism that de Man and his colleagues were writing, and a number probably equally small actively animadverted against it. But it was not the only game in town. You did not need to pass a quiz on “Semiology and Rhetoric” to have an academic career in literature in the nineteen-seventies.

At the same time, everybody was aware of what those critics were up to. They were important not because there were so many of them but because their heads were visible above the horizon of university literature departments. They got the attention of professors in other fields and, eventually, of people outside the academy—people who write for journals of opinion, people in the art world and in the law, people at the New York Times.

Some of this attention was respectful; a lot of it was not. But it gave a glamour to literary studies. The word was out that world-shaking claims were being made, not just about how to read a poem but about language and interpretation and meaning—ultimately, about knowledge, which is what universities are in business to produce. Literary criticism was getting a lot of traffic. Times were good.

So when it was learned, in the spring of 1987, three and a half years after de Man’s death, that he had written during the war for two Belgian newspapers controlled by the Nazis more was at stake than the reputation of a deceased academic. The articles were found by a Belgian graduate student named Ortwin de Graef; he informed two former students of de Man’s, and they spread the news among the de Manians, all of whom were stunned. For the few people who knew, or thought they knew, anything about de Man’s past—de Man was always highly discreet about personal matters—the revelation upended the image they had formed. There was a vague understanding that de Man had had a complicated war, but it was assumed that this was because of his antipathy to the German occupiers, not, as it now appeared, the other way around.

At a conference at the University of Alabama in October, 1987, a group that included some of de Man’s former students and colleagues decided to publish all the wartime journalism—some two hundred articles, most of them column-length, that de Man wrote for the two German-controlled papers, plus pieces he published in other venues between 1939 and 1943—along with a companion volume of thirty-eight scholarly responses.

The goals—full disclosure and open discussion—were worthy, but the timing was bad. By the time the two, scrupulously edited volumes came out, de Graef’s revelation had been reported widely in the press; the Times Magazine had published an article on de Man’s past that contained additional damaging information (specifically, that he was a bigamist); and the people who wrote for journals of opinion had mostly savaged de Man, his work, and academic literary theory. The public-relations battle, probably unwinnable under the best of circumstances, was already over.

As it turned out, full disclosure did not make the case any less unpalatable. The record showed that, for all intents and purposes, the young de Man was a fascist. His eyes were open; he did not write in the shadows. The paper he did most of his journalism for, Le Soir, was the biggest daily in Belgium. The Germans took it over almost immediately after occupying the country, in May, 1940, and staffed it with collaborationists. Anti-Semitic articles were sometimes a front-page feature.

De Man started writing for the paper in December, 1940, just after his twenty-first birthday. His articles—he eventually had a weekly column, called “Our Literary Chronicle”—largely followed the Nazi line, as did the pieces he contributed to a smaller German-controlled paper, Het Vlaamsche Land (The Flemish Land). He championed a Germanic aesthetic, denigrated French culture as effete, associated Jews with cultural degeneracy, praised pro-Nazi writers and intellectuals, and assured Le Soir’s readers that the New Order had come to Europe. The war was over. It was time to join the winners.