Lives in Writing (15 page)

Terry Eagleton has a special place in the history of Theory, both in Britain and internationally. He was something of an
enfant terrible
as a tutor and lecturer at Cambridge in the early 1960s, where he obtained his BA and doctorate, and retained this aura after moving to Oxford where he eventually became Thomas Wharton Professor, characteristically attacking the previous occupant, John Bayley, in his inaugural lecture. Prince Charles once remarked to a group of Rhodes Scholars at Oxford that he hoped they were not taught by ‘that dreadful Terry Eagleton’, the only recorded comment on a literary critic by a member of the Royal Family. Eagleton revelled in shocking the academic establishment, and for a time the Roman Catholic establishment too. A working-class Catholic by birth and upbringing, he joined the Young Socialists while still at school, and as a student at Cambridge he was taught by Raymond Williams, the leading left-wing literary critic of his generation, with whom he had a somewhat Oedipal relationship for many years, being both indebted to and disapproving of different aspects of Williams’s work. Through the Blackfriars communities in Cambridge and Oxford he also came under the spell of two politically and theologically radical Dominican friars, first Laurence Bright and later Herbert McCabe (no relation to Colin). In the 1960s Eagleton was deeply involved in the production of a short-lived but lively left-wing Catholic periodical called
Slant
which identified the Kingdom of God with the Marxist ideal of a classless society, and condemned the then popular service of Benediction (in which a consecrated host is exposed and venerated to the accompaniment of prayers and hymns) as a liturgical perversion that turned the shared bread of the authentic Eucharist into a reified commodity.

Eagleton’s first, precocious monograph, published in 1967, when Continental structuralism was little more than a rumour in English universities, was a conventional Marxist reading of Shakespeare’s plays. In subsequent books like
Criticism and Ideology
and
Marxism and Literary Criticism
, both published in 1976, a time when structuralism was mutating into post-structuralism on the Continent, he engaged earnestly with the theoretical revision of Marxism being carried out by the French writers Louis Althusser and Pierre Macherey. Eagleton’s leftist political principles made him suspicious of the formalist bias of structuralism, and more receptive to some aspects of post-structuralist Theory than to others – to post-colonial and feminist criticism rather than deconstruction, for instance. But his agile intelligence, eloquence and wit enabled him to grasp and expound the essential ideas of all of them in an accessible and even entertaining way. His
Literary Theory: An introduction
(1983) was a polemical as well as descriptive work, which proposed the replacement of literary studies by cultural studies, and came down heavily in its last chapter in favour of ‘Political Criticism’, but it covered the whole waterfront of Theory. It was seized and devoured with relief and gratitude by several generations of students, and is reported to have sold 800,000 copies world-wide – an astonishing figure and impressive testimony to Eagleton’s global fame.

The title
After Theory
, therefore, inevitably provokes the question: is Terry Eagleton the latest of the stars of Theory to lose faith in it? The answer is: yes and no, or rather no and yes.
After Theory
is a kind of dialogue between Eagleton the Practitioner and Defender of Theory and Eagleton the Conscience and Accuser of Theory, or, one might say, between Terry the stand-up comedian and Terry the lay preacher. One of the difficulties of grappling with the book is that it is constantly using one voice to qualify the arguments of the other, but from about halfway onwards the second, more serious and critical voice dominates. On page one the author declares: ‘Those to whom the title of this book suggests that “theory” is now over, and that we can all relievedly return to an age of pre-theoretical innocence, are in for a disappointment’ – but so are those who hoped for a panegyric to the age of Theory.

It must be said that the quality of the writing is very uneven. Eagleton’s racy, relaxed and humorous style of exposition is usually a refreshing change from the tortuous solemnity more typical of Theory, but in the first half of this book it sometimes seems merely slapdash. There are sentences that should never have got past the first draft on his computer screen, let alone into print, like: ‘Much of the world as we know it, despite its solid, well-upholstered appearance, is of recent vintage.’ (In the next sentence this upholstered vintage is thrown up by tidal waves.) There is a plethora of facetiously hyperbolic simile. This was always a favourite Eagleton trope, but it is in danger of becoming a distracting verbal tic, as, for instance, when postmodernism is criticised for attacking a bourgeois culture that is already on the wane: ‘this is rather like firing off irascible letters to the press about the horse-riding Huns or marauding Carthaginians who have taken over the Home Counties.’ It is not. The frequent use of
in any case
,
anyway
,
even so
, sometimes twice in the same paragraph, is another annoying stylistic feature. These words and phrases allow Eagleton to wriggle out of an apparent contradiction between two propositions by asserting something else at a higher level of generality. Thus in the first few pages he says, ‘in a historic advance sexuality is now firmly established within academic life as one of the keystones of human culture’; then he says that most of this work is trivial and self-indulgent, and then: ‘Even so, the advent of sexuality and popular culture as kosher subjects of study has put paid to one powerful myth . . . the puritan dogma that seriousness is one thing and pleasure another.’ Perhaps this is dialectical thinking, but it often seems more like having it both ways.

He begins by locating the origins of Theory in the 1960s and that decade’s heady ferment of liberation politics, youthful revolt and intellectual adventurousness. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive . . . For a brief period it seemed possible that iconoclastic cultural criticism, avant-garde art and revolutionary politics might march confidently into the future arm in arm. But by the end of the 1970s the dream had faded, and in the greedy anti-ideological 1980s the left had to face the fact of its defeat. Eagleton observes astutely: ‘As often happens, ideas had a last, brilliant efflorescence when the conditions which produced them were already disappearing. Cultural theory was cut loose from its moment of origin, yet tried in its way to keep that moment warm. Like war, it became the continuation of politics by other means.’ That comment explains the ambivalence towards Theory which runs through the whole book. On the one hand Eagleton admires it for continuing to question the accepted ‘order of things’; on the other he cannot forgive it for turning away from radical political action, which it regarded as ‘fatally compromised by the emptiness of desire, the impossibility of truth, the fragility of the subject, the lie of progress, the pervasiveness of power’. Much of the blame for this
trahison des clercs
is attributed to the climate of postmodernism, which denies the validity of universals and first principles, and encourages a kind of hedonistic pick-’n’-mix browsing in the cultural shopping mall of ideas and experiences, depriving even ostensibly progressive projects, like post-colonial studies, of practical effect and moral purpose.

In a chapter called ‘Losses and Gains’ Eagleton attempts a kind of audit of Theory. He begins by taking a swing at the wilfully obscure and mystifying style of much of its literature, citing just one, unattributed sentence, evidently taken from some crazed deconstructionist intent on out-Derridaing Derrida:

The in-choate in-fans ab-original para-subject cannot be theorized as functionally
completely
frozen in a world where teleology is schematised into geo-graphy.

It’s a pity that Eagleton did not choose some longer, less extreme and more contextualised example of post-structuralist critical discourse – heaven knows there are plenty to choose from – analysing its rhetorical perversity and attempting to explain how and why this style of exposition became fashionable. His comment on this example is disappointingly weak:

There is something particularly scandalous about
radical
cultural theory being so wilfully obscure . . . because the whole idea of cultural theory at root is a democratic one. In the bad old days, it was assumed that culture was something you needed to have in your blood, like malaria or red corpuscles. Countless generations of breeding went into the ways a gentleman could instantly distinguish a sprightly metaphor from a shopsoiled one. Culture was not something you could acquire, any more than you could acquire a second pair of eyebrows or learn to have an erection.

Reading this, one wonders exactly what bad old days Terry Eagleton is alluding to, only to discover incredulously that they went right up to the era of the Beatles:

Theory, which we have seen was born somewhere in the dense, democratic jungle of the 1960s, thought otherwise. All you needed in order to join in the game was to learn certain ways of talking, not to have a couple of thoroughbreds tethered outside the door.

This is an absurd misrepresentation of the real history of literary criticism and literary education in the modern era. The teaching of vernacular literature in schools, colleges and universities was begun in the late nineteenth century and expanded in the twentieth precisely as a way of opening up ‘culture’ to all. And over the same period literary criticism evolved more and more sophisticated and illuminating ‘ways of talking’ about it. In England and America this project was furthered by what came to be called the New Criticism, extending roughly from the 1920s to the 1950s (or, say, I.A. Richards to W.K. Wimsatt) which contained a good deal of literary theory, even though it was not as systematic as the structuralist poetics and narratology developed over the same time-scale in Moscow, St Petersburg, Prague and in due course Paris. These two critical traditions remained curiously ignorant of each other until the 1960s. As Frank Kermode explained in his memoir
Not Entitled
, he and like-minded Anglo-American critics (among whom I would count myself) gave a warm welcome at first to European structuralism because they thought it might bring a new energy and rigour to a common pursuit.

Terry Eagleton knows all this of course, so why he should pretend otherwise is baffling. In the process the really important issue of the obfuscatory style of much Theory gets lost, or brushed aside. To demonstrate that it is not incompatible with the sensitive reading of literary texts he provides a little commentary on the opening sentence of a short story by Evelyn Waugh. This is perceptive enough but could have been done by any competent critic completely ignorant of the theory (i.e. Theory) which is the ostensible subject of his book. ‘That theory is incapable of close reading is one of its opponents’ most recurrent gripes,’ he says. Is it? I would have said that a more common gripe against Theory is that its exponents are manically obsessive close readers whose interpretative ingenuity is unrestrained by traditional criteria of verifiability and plausibility. However, it is equally perverse to credit ‘cultural theory’ with demolishing the assumption ‘that there is a single correct way to interpret a work of art’. ‘Ambiguity’ was a key term in the New Criticism, and William Empson’s
Seven Types of Ambiguity
one of its seminal texts.

The chapter continues in this style, pitting caricatured ‘conservative critics’ against idealised ‘cultural theorists’ (I particularly cherish the phrase ‘theory, in its unassuming way . . .’) to reach the conclusion that ‘most of the objections to theory are either false or fairly trifling’. At precisely this point, just about halfway through the book, when the informed reader may feel inclined to hurl it across the room in exasperation, Eagleton performs a stunning argumentative somersault:

A far more devastating criticism of it can be launched. Cultural theory as we have it promises to grapple with some fundamental problems, but on the whole fails to deliver. It has been shamefaced about morality and metaphysics, embarrassed about love, biology, religion and revolution, largely silent about evil, reticent about death and suffering, dogmatic about essences, universals and foundations, and superficial about truth, objectivity and disinterestedness.

The rest of
After Theory
is an elaboration of this formidable indictment and an exposition of its philosophical basis.

First, Eagleton defends the idea that there is such a thing as ‘absolute truth’, using a homespun style of ordinary language philosophy. ‘It simply means that if a statement is true, then the opposite of it can’t be true at the same time, or true from some other point of view . . . it does not make sense to say there is a tiger in the bathroom from my point of view but not from yours.’ Fair enough, but the next example is not so straightforward: ‘“Racism is an evil” is not the same kind of proposition as “I always find the smell of fresh newsprint blissful.” It is more like the statement “There is a tiger in the bathroom.”’ More like, perhaps, but not the same. What constitutes racism is always open to interpretation and debate, whereas what constitutes a tiger is not. Deconstructionists will not feel seriously threatened by the argument so far.

Eagleton then moves on to ‘the question of human well-being’, which he seeks to define by a synthesis of Aristotle (whose
Ethics
he has obviously been studying carefully), Judeo-Christian moral teaching, and Marxism:

Aristotle thought that there was a particular way of living which allowed us . . . to be at our best for the kind of creatures we are. This was the life conducted according to the virtues. The Judeo-Christian tradition considers that it is the life of charity or love. What this means . . . is that we become the occasion for each other’s self-realization. It is only through being the means of your self-fulfilment that I can attain my own . . . The political form of this ethic is known as socialism, for which, as Marx comments, the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.