Lives in Writing

by David Lodge

  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.

  There is no explicit acknowledgement that in political and economic practice (e.g., in Russia and eastern Europe under communism) ‘socialism’ on the Marxist model proved inimical to people’s free development, and was decisively rejected by them when they had the opportunity, but Eagleton does concede that ‘it looks as though we simply have to argue with each other about what self-realization means; and it may be that the whole business is too complicated for us to arrive at a satisfactory solution’. At such times he sounds surprisingly like the pragmatists and liberal humanists from whom he usually dissociates himself. He criticises Marx for asserting that morality is just ideology: ‘“moral” means exploring the texture and quality of human behaviour as richly and sensitively as you can . . . This is morality as, say, the novelist Henry James understood it . . .’ (And, one might add, as critics like I.A. Richards and F.R. Leavis and Lionel Trilling understood it.) It is not a matter, Eagleton finds, on which Theory has had much that is useful to say. For Derrida, for instance, ‘ethics is a matter of absolute decisions – decisions which are vital and necessary, but also “impossible”, and which fall outside all given norms, forms of knowledge and modes of conceptualization’. Eagleton comments drily: ‘One can only hope that he is not on the jury when one’s case comes up in court.’

  The epigrams are sharper and smarter in this half of the book. E.g., ‘Politics belonged to the boardroom, and morality to the bedroom. This led to a lot of immoral boardrooms and politically oppressive bedrooms’ and ‘Military technology creates death but destroys the experience of it’. Eagleton is especially interesting on the subject of death, and rises to a fine pitch of prophetic eloquence when denouncing both postmodernism and late capitalism for trying to deny its inevitability:

  The body, that inconvenient reminder of mortality, is plucked, pierced, etched, pummelled, pumped up, shrunk and remoulded. Flesh is converted into sign, staving off the moment when it will subside into the sheer pornographic meaninglessness of a corpse. Dead bodies are indecent: they proclaim with embarrassing candour the secret of all matter, that it has no obvious relation to meaning. The moment of death is the moment when meaning haemorrhages from us . . . Capitalism too, for all its crass materialism, is secretly allergic to matter . . . For all its love affair with matter, in the shape of Tuscan villas and double brandies, capitalist society harbours a secret hatred of the stuff. It is a culture shot through with fantasy, idealist to its core, powered by a disembodied will which dreams of pounding Nature to pieces.

  ‘Death represents Nature’s final victory over culture,’ Eagleton declares, and thus also over Theory inasmuch as the latter asserts that everything is cultural.

  The work of academic critics is seldom interpreted with reference to their biographies, but Terry Eagleton’s critique of Theory owes much to his Roman Catholic background, vividly recalled in his highly entertaining memoir, The Gatekeeper. In Salford, the drab Lancashire industrial town where he grew up, there was, somewhat incongruously, an enclosed community of Carmelite nuns, to whom the young Eagleton acted as altar-server and ‘gatekeeper’ – passing them messages and objects via a turntable set into the convent wall, and ushering rare visitors into the forbidding parlour where they could communicate with the inmates through a grille. The nuns’ life of total self-denial was by any secular criteria absurd, but it was a Kierkegaardian kind of absurdity that witnessed to the fallen state of the world, a world perceived as so sinful that the best thing to do was to withdraw from it, pray for it, and wait to be released from it. The young Terry Eagleton was impressed, but as he grew up and shed the simple faith instilled in him as a child, he replaced the concept of sin with the concept of political and economic oppression, and looked for salvation in this world rather than the next. ‘One can move fairly freely . . . from Catholicism to Marxism without having to pass through liberalism,’ he explains in The Gatekeeper. But he never completely severed the connection with his Catholic roots, partly because of those radical English Dominicans, especially Herbert McCabe whose influence on After Theory he acknowledges as all-pervasive.

  McCabe (who died in 2001) was something of a maverick priest, even by the tolerant standards of the English Dominican province, and was once disciplined and sacked from the editorship of the order’s journal, New Blackfriars, for declaring in an editorial that the Church was ‘quite plainly corrupt’. (When reinstated years later he began his next editorial with the words, ‘As I was saying when I was so oddly interrupted . . .’) As a writer and preacher he tried to divest the Christian faith of ‘religion’, which had overlaid the essential message of the gospels – a message that had much in common with utopian socialism – with superstition, rules, and hierarchical authority. McCabe was adept at using modern biblical scholarship to defamiliarise the scriptures and surprise people into a perception of their radical nature, and traces of his teaching are visible in After Theory. By contrast with Derrida’s inscrutable and ineffable ethical imperatives, Eagleton says, ‘The New Testament’s view of ethics is distinctly irreligious . . . What salvation comes down to [in Matthew’s gospel] is the humdrum material business of feeding the hungry, clothing the naked and visiting the sick . . . The New Testament also adopts a fairly relaxed attitude to sex, and takes a notably dim view of the family.’ (This last observation presumably refers to Jesus’s friendly relations with fallen women, his exhortation to disciples to leave their families and follow him, and the snubbing of ‘his mother and his brothers’ in Luke 8.19–21.)

  When you read McCabe you realise it was from him that Terry Eagleton learned to discuss complex abstract issues in accessible language and through homely analogies. For instance, in an essay on evil, the Dominican asserts that badness is just a particular lack of goodness, which doesn’t mean it’s not real: ‘It would be absurd to say that holes in socks are unreal and illusory just because the hole isn’t made of anything and is purely an absence.’ McCabe maintained that ‘when we speak of God we do not know what we are talking about. We are simply using language from the familiar context in which we understand it . . . to point . . . into the mystery that surrounds and sustains the world.’ Presumably he believed in the reality of that ineffable ultimate transcendental signified, but Eagleton goes a step further, into what seems indistinguishable from atheism. ‘God is the reason why there is
anything at all rather than just nothing. But that is just another way of saying that there really isn’t any reason.’

  Nevertheless, the Christian counsels of perfection remain relevant for Eagleton even when deprived of their traditional metaphysical foundations. Since the only purpose of human life is to live as fully as possible, death will always seem arbitrary, but just because it is inevitable we must live in acceptance of it; and renouncing property, or being in principle willing to renounce it, as socialism in its purest form requires, is a way of preparing ourselves to give up bodily life.2 According to Eagleton, the greedy consumerism of contemporary Western society, driven by global capitalism and celebrated by postmodernism in the arts and the media, is in denial of this truth, and so is Theory, especially in America:

  The body is a wildly popular topic in US cultural studies – but this is the plastic, remouldable, socially constructed body, not the piece of matter that sickens and dies. Because death is the absolute failure to which we all eventually come, it has not been the most favoured of topics for discussion in the United States. The US distributors of the British film Four Weddings and a Funeral fought hard, if unsuccessfully, to change the title.