When relevations about Paul de Man's past first came to public attention last December, those on the attack as well as those for the defense found themselves turning to his influential Allegories of Reading (1979) in an effort to "read" de Man himself. Not surprisingly, what they found there was hardly conclusive:

All that will be represented in such an allegory will deflect from the act of reading and block access to its understanding. The allegory of reading narrates the impossibility of reading.... Everything in this novel signifies something other than what it represents, be it consciousness, politics, or art.

Granted, de Man was talking about Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, but he might as easily have been speaking to the contradictory, often elusive signifiers of his own life. For those writing in the popular press, the fact that de Man had contributed articles to collaborationist Belgian newspapers was disturbing enough; that his cultural pronouncements also included anti-Semitic echoes of the Nazi party line was devastating. But how to "read" this de Man in the context of the Yale professor many had come to know as an influential theoretician and teacher, how to conjoin signifiers with the signified remains a perplexing question. Allegories of indirection may well be the best way to proceed, given what we now know about de Man himself and what he has taught us about the "impossibility of reading."