Paul de Man also has his moments of bravado, soaring high into the stratosphere of stylistics. No less impressive, and probably with more dexterity, than Bloom is a passage such as:
The erasure or effacement is indeed the loss of a face, in French FIGURE. Rousseau no longer, or hardly (as the tracks are not all gone, but more than half erased), has a face. Like the protagonist in the Hardy story, he is disfigured, défiguré, defaced. And also as in the Hardy story, to be disfigured means primarily the loss of the eyes, turned to "stony orbs" or to empty holes. This trajectory from erased self-knowledge to disfiguration is the trajectory of The Triumph of Life.
"Shelley Disfigured" in Deconstruction & Criticism (1979)
Time to take up Shelley in earnest.
