Paul de Man’s Rigour and Marcel Proust’s Metaphors

Abstract

Paul de Man’s interpretation of Proust’s metafigural argument is fundamentally correct. Both critics of this interpretation and some of de Man’s defenders have misunderstood how metaphor functions in Proust’s reminiscence of summer, which uses resemblance to evoke reconciliatory totalities. Proust’s passage contains classical metaphors—not synecdoches that merely resemble metaphors. But de Man’s attempts to justify his interpretation are unpersuasive. Indeed, they are so unpersuasive that they become allegorical: though he claims that there is an undoing of metaphor by metonymy in Proust’s text, de Man’s own text relies on metaphor. Detractors like John Guillory are wrong about Proustian metaphor, but they discern some of the genuinely aberrant features of de Man’s discourse. Allegories of Reading allegorically subverts claims made for de Man’s rigour, which is a dead metaphor susceptible to the kind of rhetorical reading he performs on Proust.