by David Lodge
There is a vein of anti-American sentiment running through After Theory which has long been characteristic of the British far left and was inflamed by the war in Iraq. It is not the first book to suggest that Theory has had its day or lost its way, but perhaps the first of its kind to be written in the shadow of 9/11 and the alarming global upheaval that followed, thus lending the argument an apocalyptic tone at times. ‘The End of History was complacently promulgated from a United States which looks increasingly in danger of ending it for real,’ Eagleton observes, alluding to the title of a much publicised book by Francis Fukuyama published in 1992; and he concludes: ‘With the launch of a new global narrative of capitalism, along with the so-called war on terror, it may well be that the style of thinking known as postmodernism is now approaching an end.’ Since the United States is of pivotal importance in global politics, and the academic institutions of the United States have been particularly hospitable to Theory and postmodernism, a causal connection is implied between these phenomena. But the United States is pivotal because it won the cold war, and became an unopposed military superpower which unluckily fell into the control of an arrogant and reckless administration under George W. Bush. This can hardly be blamed on Theory, or postmodernism.
The other main factor in the current global crisis, the rise of religious fundamentalism, especially but not exclusively of the Islamic persuasion, is certainly within Theory’s field of competence, but Eagleton claims that its scepticism about general principles has prevented it from saying anything very constructive on the subject. He argues that the objection to religious fundamentalists is not that they have principles, but that they have the wrong ones; that they base their principles on the foundation of a text or texts, ‘which is the worst possible stuff for the purpose’; and that they ‘are ready to destroy the whole of creation for the purity of an idea’. Human beings, he says, must learn to ‘live ironically. To accept the unfoundedness of our own existence is among other things to live in the shadow of death . . . To accept death would be to live more abundantly.’ Unfortunately fundamentalists are not very appreciative of irony, and are apt to apply that last dictum to life in the next world rather than this. Terry Eagleton has no real answer to the threat which that paradoxical figure, the suicide bomber, at once martyr and murderer, presents to civilised society. (But then, who has?)
After Theory is an ambitious and thought-provoking book as well as an exasperating one, but it overestimates the importance of Theory and its influence outside the academy, while avoiding a proper analysis of its history inside. Theory has, after all, been an almost exclusively academic pursuit, driven by professional as well as intellectual motivations. In a period when the university job-market became increasingly competitive it provided an array of impressive metalanguages with which academics in the humanities could win their spurs and demonstrate their professional mastery. But to anyone outside the arena – ‘the educated general reader’, for instance – the excruciating effort of construing this jargon-heavy discourse far exceeded the illumination likely to be gleaned from it, so they stopped reading it, and non-specialist media stopped reviewing it, which was bad both for academia and culture in general. Some of Theory’s achievements are genuine and permanent additions to knowledge, or intellectual self-knowledge. Eagleton is quite right to assert that we can never go back to a state of pre-Theory innocence, believing in the transparency of language or the ideological neutrality of interpretation. At its best, as a method of critical reading (in Roland Barthes’s S/Z, say), Theory performed at a second remove what literature does to life – defamiliarising the object of its attention, and making us see it and enjoy it afresh. But like all fashions it was bound to have a limited life of novelty and vitality, and we are now living through its decadence without any clear indication of what will supersede it. ‘Theory’ has, in short, become boringly predictable to many people who were once enthused by it, and that After Theory is most interesting when its focus is furthest from its nominal subject is evidence that Terry Eagleton has become bored by it too.
Postscript
In 2003, when After Theory was published, Terry Eagleton was John Edward Taylor Professor of Cultural Theory at Manchester University, having left Oxford two years earlier. In 2008 he departed from Manchester to become Distinguished Professor of English Literature at the University of Lancaster and has since held a number of visiting professorships in universities in Ireland, America and other parts of the world. He continued to publish prolifically in this period – some dozen books up till 2012, with more announced for publication. (He wrote amusingly about the Trollopian scale of his output in The Gatekeeper, ‘Whereas other academics worry about not being productive enough, my embarrassment has always been the opposite. Instead of finding myself unable to write books, I find myself unable to stop, to the point where some people have wondered if I am actually a committee.’)
In retrospect it is clear that After Theory marked not only Terry Eagleton’s disillusionment with Theory, but also an interesting new turn in his own work. This may explain why the writing in the first half of that book was so far below his usual standard: he wanted to make his valediction to Theory as positive as possible to avoid giving encouragement to conservative cultural critics, but his heart wasn’t in the task. None of the titles he published in the next ten years contains the word ‘theory’ except for a 25th-anniversary edition of Literary Theory issued by the University of Minnesota Press, while several others reflect the urge evident in the second half of After Theory, to discuss big cultural and philosophical issues in a religious perspective and theological language. His output in the last decade includes Holy Terror (2005), The Meaning of Life (2007), Trouble with Strangers: A Study of Ethics (2008), Reason, Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (2009), and On Evil (2010). ‘Why are the most unlikely people, including myself, suddenly talking about God?’ he asked, in the fourth of those books. ‘Who would have expected theology to rear its head once more in the technocratic twenty-first century . . . Why is it that my local bookshop has suddenly sprouted a section labelled “Atheism”?’ The answer to the last question was, of course, the publication of several books attacking religious belief from the point of view of atheistic materialism, especially two bestsellers, The God Delusion (2006) by the biologist and popular science writer Richard Dawkins, and God is Not Great (2007) by the American-based British journalist and author Christopher Hitchens. But those and similar books were themselves a response to the rise of militant Islamic fundamentalism, unforgettably manifested in the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York in September 2001, and its hostile counterpart, Christian fundamentalism (especially of the American variety), both of which were seen by liberal intellectuals as serious threats to the values of secular Western society.
Eagleton plunged into this arena of debate. In Holy Terror (2005) he tackled the subject of terrorism, tracing the phenomenon back through its first political manifestation in the French Revolution to its roots in ancient religion – the idea of martyrdom, the figure of the scapegoat, the Dionysian revolt against reason – drawing on literary texts from Euripides’ The Bacchae to Conrad’s The Secret Agent, ‘the first suicide-bomber novel of English Literature’. He distinguishes neatly between the two aspects of that paradoxical figure. The martyr’s death ‘signifies a hope for the future, bearing witness to a truth and justice beyond the present. But whereas the martyr is prepared to stake his life on this, the suicide bomber is prepared to stake your life on it.’ This makes it a genuinely evil act according to Eagleton’s ethics. Unfortunately, ‘the more Western society reacts to terrorist assault with answerable illegality, the more it depletes the very spiritual and political resources which it takes itself to be protecting . . . we . . . see . . . a similar inversion of victory and defeat in the case of the terrorists’. It’s a plausible but depressing analysis, though the book as a whole is a stimulating tour de force.
In October 2006 Eagleton published a long revi
ew of The God Delusion in the London Review of Books which famously began: ‘Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the British Book of Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.’ Much of the review, which provoked a long-running correspondence in the LRB, was incorporated later in Reason, Faith and Revolution, where he also took on Christopher Hitchens, referring occasionally to the two authors under the compound name of ‘Ditchens’. Eagleton is a witty and acute polemicist, and scored some effective points against the dogmatic atheism of his antagonists, but the coherence of his own argument is debatable, especially when expounded at book-length. He claims to be defending ‘faith’, not ‘belief’, against atheism.
Faith, Ditchens seems not to register, is not primarily a belief that something or someone exists, but a commitment and allegiance – faith which might make a difference to the frightful situation you find yourself in, as is the case, say, with faith in feminism or anti-colonialism. Christian faith, as I understand it, is not primarily a matter of signing on for the proposition that there exists a Supreme Being, but the kind of commitment made manifest by a human being at the end of his tether, foundering in darkness, pain and bewilderment, who nevertheless remains faithful to the promise of a transformative love.
There’s a loophole in that ‘primarily’ which allows for a more credal kind of faith, but few practising Christians, and very few Catholics, I suspect, would define their faith in these starkly existentialist terms. It seems more like the Protestant concept of ‘conversion’, transposed into a secular and politicised key. It evidently serves Terry Eagleton well as something to live by, but it provides a very fragile platform from which to argue against the opponents of religion. While jeering sarcastically at the theological and biblical illiteracy of Ditchens, he frequently expresses complete agreement with their criticisms of Christian beliefs and practices, and becomes almost fulsomely admiring at times (e.g.: ‘Dawkins . . . has done a magnificent job over the years of speaking out against that particular strain of psychopathology known as fundamentalism’). He makes it clear that he has no faith in the institutional Roman Catholic Church, in either its officially promulgated doctrines or its governance, though he respects individual members. Herbert McCabe remains a source of inspiration, and Eagleton frequently invokes his summary of the meaning of the crucifixion, ‘If you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you.’
The Christian faith holds that those who are able to look on the crucifixion and live, to accept that the truth of human history is a tortured body, might just have a chance of new life – but only by virtue of an unimaginable transformation in our currently dire condition. This is known as the resurrection . . .
Shortly after expounding this idiosyncratic version of Christian faith Eagleton surprisingly concedes: ‘It may well be that all this is no more plausible than the tooth fairy. Most reasoning people these days will see excellent grounds to reject it. But critics of the richest, most enduring form of popular culture in human history have a moral obligation to confront that case at its most persuasive.’ Persuasive or not, as put by Eagleton it represents a very small fraction of the spectrum of Christian belief, and seems more appropriately described as the faith of a ‘tragic humanist’, which is how Eagleton defines himself at the end of Reason, Faith and Revolution. There is a paradox here: one of the weaknesses of Dawkins’s position is that he doesn’t seem to acknowledge that his contentment with a universe that is ultimately purposeless and indifferent to human beings is fairly easy to achieve when you are privileged to live a comfortable and fulfilling life. Terry Eagleton does well to remind him and others of his persuasion that the lives of a large proportion of the human race are made chronically wretched by poverty, ill-health and violent oppression (and, one might add, just bad luck). For many of them religion is often the only thing that makes life meaningful and worth living, by its promise of a better life to come for those who deserve it. Materialistic atheism takes away that hope, which is rooted in a deep human desire for justice, but ‘tragic humanism’ – religion from which the supernatural has been stripped away – seems to do the same.
In The Meaning of Life: A very short introduction, Eagleton presented a more genial response to the enigmas of our existence. Its very title, on the cover of a little book measuring 11 cm x 17 cm and containing only a hundred pages, raises a smile, and the author shows he is well aware of its presumptuousness, while nevertheless managing to cover an enormous amount of philosophical ground in a lucid, pithy and entertaining way, with deftly chosen illustrations from world literature. It is a brilliant feat, which perhaps only Terry Eagleton could have pulled off. He is ‘widely regarded as the United Kingdom’s most influential living literary critic’, according to Wikipedia, which cites four published sources to support this claim. He is probably the most well-known, and perhaps the most widely read – but is he the most influential? If there is a school of Eagletonian critics, I am not aware of it, and it is difficult to imagine that there could be. The man writes so much on such various topics, and changes the focus of his attention so often, that it would be impossible to derive a systematic critical method from his writings. His métier is to excite, provoke and stimulate our interest in literature and ideas by the breadth of his reading, the acuteness of his intelligence, and the energy of his prose. The style is the man, or rather the critic, and could not be imitated without turning into pastiche or parody. It is comparable to the style of a first-class journalist – and I mean that as a compliment – applied to information of great intellectual complexity and breadth of historical reference such as is usually encountered only in works of specialist scholarship, making it accessible, comprehensible, and entertaining as well as instructive.
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1 Terry Eagleton, After Theory (London: Allen Lane, and New York: Basic Books, 2003).
2 A hostile reviewer of After Theory, William Deresiewicz, complained that ‘someone who owns three homes shouldn’t be preaching self-sacrifice’ (The Nation, 16 February 2004). Paul Vallely, however, pointed out later that there were practical reasons for this multiple ownership: one home is in Coleraine where Eagleton’s wife teaches, another one is in Lancashire where Eagleton teaches, and their main home is halfway between the two in Dublin (‘Terry Eagleton: Class Warrior’, Independent, 13 October 2007).
FRANK REMEMBERED – BY A KERMODIAN
THE NAME OF Frank Kermode first impinged on my consciousness in 1954, when I was a second-year undergraduate reading English at University College London. In our Shakespeare course we had lectures from Winifred Nowottny, who in due course would be a colleague of Frank’s when he occupied the Lord Northcliffe chair at UCL. Sadly, Winifred became increasingly eccentric and obsessive towards the end of her life, but in the early 1950s she was a charismatic teacher who gave the impression that she was sharing with us her own latest thoughts and discoveries about English literature, and we hung on her every word. Winifred read Frank’s New Arden edition of The Tempest when it first came out and was greatly excited by its introduction, the gist of which – the way, for instance, Shakespeare poetically explored contemporary concerns with the discovery and colonisation of the New World – she expounded with the book open in her hand. This, we inferred, was the cutting edge of modern literary scholarship – and we were not misled.
In 1960 I was appointed Assistant Lecturer in the English Department of Birmingham University, and in the Easter vacation of 1961 I attended what was then called the University Teachers of English Annual Conference, held that year in Cambridge. Among the principal speakers, along with W.K. Wimsatt and John Holloway, was Frank Kermode, then occupying his first professorial chair at Manchester. At this same conference I met Bernard Bergonzi, whom Frank had appointed to an assistant lectureship at Manchester. He had recently read my first novel, The Picturegoers, and recognised the location of the story as that of his own corner of south-east London, so we became, and hav
e remained, good friends. It was probably through Bernard that I was introduced to Frank at that conference, and was privileged to sit in someone’s bedroom drinking whisky with him and his companions late one night. I was, as most people were, charmed by his affable manners and quick wit, but I regret to say that the only specific topic of his conversation that I recall concerned the performance of his new Mini on the drive down from Manchester. The Mini was then, however, a novel and trendy vehicle, and seemed an appropriate possession for a cutting-edge scholar.
My subsequent acquaintance with Frank was for several years maintained principally through meetings at other conferences and similar academic occasions, but it eventually became a valued personal friendship. In the meantime he became for me, as for many others, an inspirational literary critic through his books, articles and reviews. I still remember the grateful wonder with which I read The Sense of an Ending (1967), a book of modest length but breathtaking scope. For me it was a seminal work which had the effect of extending my critical interest in the novel from a preoccupation with verbal style (exemplified in my first book of criticism, Language of Fiction) to an engagement with broader questions of narrative structure – for example, peripeteia, the technical term for a sudden reversal of circumstances and expectations in a plot, which Kermode compared to the constantly revised predictions of the end of the world in the history of Christianity.