Intro
Proust's multi-volume novel Remembrance of Things Past gives us every little detail of the life and times of its protagonist, the narrator. Like, every detail. He eats a pastry and it takes multiple hundreds of pages. Sure, it's 'cause it makes him reflect on his whole life up to that point, but still. A pastry.
Proust's style is really dense, and he layers image upon image upon image until the whole book becomes a close reader's dream. No wonder de Man loved it so much: the book's language is richer than a triple chocolate fudge brownie sundae, with ambiguity sprinkles and a juicy red paradox on top.
de Man's Allegories of Reading opens with an interpretation of one of Proust's particularly gooey passages, and de Man later returns to the same part to deconstruct it some more. His readings set the stage for deconstructive and poststructuralist readings of literature—not that he didn't care about philosophy, too.
Quote
I had stretched out on my bed, with a book, in my room which sheltered, tremblingly, its transparent and fragile coolness from the afternoon sun, behind the almost closed blinds through which a glimmer of daylight had nevertheless managed to push its yellow wings...the sensation of the light's splendor was given me only by the noise of Camus...and also by the flies executing their little concert, the chamber music of summer: evocative not in the manner of a human tune that, heard perchance during the summer, afterwards reminds you of it but connected to summer by a more necessary link...
Analysis
Let's start easy. The narrator's lying on his bed. He's got a book. It's summer. The blinds are closed, mostly. He's half listening to some chatter outside and the flies buzzing, but other than that he's pretty shut off in his little chamber. Still, homeboy is feeling pretty awesome because he's able to imagine the whole idea of what summer means to him way better than he'd be able to if he was actually outside trying to take it all in. Why play in the sprinklers when you can lie in the dark and think about it?
So along comes de Man and asks us to think about what Proust seems to be saying about the difference between metaphor and metonymy here. On the surface, Proust is saying that metaphor is aesthetically superior to metonymy. He draws attention to the "necessary link" that connects the buzzing of the flies with the image of "summer" that he holds in his mind.
But, if we look more closely at passages that follow, we'll see that there's a paradox here. de Man's close reading of the chapter shows us that even though Proust says he's all for metaphor, he's making that point through the use of metonymy. See, even though he's all emphasizing the link between bees and summer, it's those bees that end up being a stand-in for the idea of summer as a whole. Metonymy. Boom.
So why does this matter to de Man, and why should you care too? Well, de Man's first point is that literary language is so chock full of figurative language that it's impossible to trust that it actually says what it says it's saying. Wrapped your mouth around that yet? You have to peel back the layers, or listen through the bees, to find the grains of what's actually being talked about.
(See what we did there? Peeling layers? Listening through bees? Something about grain? We're just talking about getting what de Man is talking about).
And there's more. If you think all that stuff's already paranoid, wait 'til you see what de Man's really getting at. It's not just literature that does this, he says: everything does. We can't even trust the texts that we think are most true. Not encyclopedias, scientific papers, philosophy, scriptures, not anything. They're all built up like beehives anyway to the point that sometimes we can't even find the honey inside.
So. Language is always deconstructing itself. And according to de Man, our job is to look for the cracks. Or the honeycomb.