Lives in Writing (16 page)

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.

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.

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.