Time & Perspective Quote by Paul de Man

De Man’s line is a coolly destabilizing bit of theory: literature is not a container of truths so much as a machine that produces truth-effects while simultaneously sabotaging them. The phrasing “at the same time” is the tell. He’s not arguing that some books lie and others tell the truth; he’s insisting the literary act structurally entangles both. Meaning doesn’t merely wobble because authors are unreliable or readers are biased. It wobbles because language itself is a system of substitutions, tropes, and rhetorical shortcuts that can’t stop exceeding what it claims to pin down.

“Error and truth” sounds moral, but de Man is aiming at something more technical: the unavoidable gap between what a text asserts (its logical or referential “truth”) and what its figures of speech actually do (their rhetorical “error,” not as mistake but as deviation, a turning). That’s why “betrays” sits beside “obeys.” Literature “obeys its own mode of being” by following the rules of signification; it “betrays” itself by exposing those rules as unstable the moment it tries to speak clearly.

Context matters here: de Man is a central figure in deconstruction’s American moment, pushing back against humanist criticism that treats literature as ethical wisdom in elegant packaging. After the revelations of his wartime journalism, the word “betrays” also acquires an unavoidable aftertaste: biography intruding on method. Whether or not you want that shadow in the room, the sentence’s intent is consistent with his larger project: to make reading less consoling, more forensic, and to argue that literature’s deepest “truth” may be its inability to guarantee truth at all.