Book: After Theory
Author: Terry Eagleton
Price: (Allen Lane, ?18.99)
Arguments pro and contra the radical cultural theories that emerged from the post-1968 generation of academics have recurred with grim circularity for the last 25 years. As long ago as 1978, the socialist historian EP Thompson published The Poverty of Theory, skewering the fatalistic doctrines of the Stalinist sage, Louis Althusser. Even then, sharper observers had grasped that the gospel according to Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan et al threatened to congeal into a system of institutional power and patronage just as rigid as anything it sought to dethrone-as, in short order, it duly did. In Britain, many guardians of high theory paradoxically took charge of the market-led "massification" of undergraduate education demanded by the high Thatcherism of the 1980s. In their joint contempt for traditional authority and their fetishism of consumer-or reader-choice, these twin movements flourished together, then faded together.
Yet the quarrels over theory will not lie down. Here, once again, comes the indefatigably sprightly Terry Eagleton, this time leaping into action to denounce many of the notions that his earlier books did so much to spread. In After Theory, Eagleton has finally noticed how enervating is the "rather stifling orthodoxy" of postmodernist and relativist thought. Better late than never, I suppose.
While Eagleton has always shouted his heresies, Frank Kermode has whispered his doubts. In a magisterial selection of his literary-critical essays from the past 45 years, Kermode reveals a calmer, cannier attitude to academic fashion. But the disparity in volume does not make Eagleton more subversive, or Kermode more conservative. Showily, and wittily, Eagleton yearns for a species of salvation or transcendence from cultural theories, and makes a song and dance of his dismay when they fail to deliver. Kermode, in contrast, modestly seeks some extra utensils for his capacious toolbox as a reader of literature and an explicator of the way that it makes, or refuses to make, sense. Read back to back, these books offer an illuminating contrast between two styles of university-based English intellectual as they encounter the alien glamour of continental thought.
Eagleton plays the preacher, Kermode the artisan. One is an enthusiast and rebel; the other, a deep-dyed pragmatist. And still, after decades of bitter wrangling over the status of the literary canon, each will try to clinch a point with a nod to King Lear or Coriolanus. When, in the now obligatory 9/11 peroration, Eagleton closes his book with some surprisingly straight-faced reflections on the exorbitant "evil" of fundamentalist terrorism, it is of course to Iago that he turns. To the English academic mind, Saussure may briefly bloom and wither, but Shakespeare is forever.
Although After Theory reverts to canonical texts at its moments of passion or stress, it scorns mere lit crit-even of a theoretical kind. Rather, two decades beyond his bestselling primer, Literary Theory, Eagleton presents us with a breezy 100-page overview of the fate of the class of '68. In this perspective, the modernist rigours and subversive stratagems of structuralism and poststructuralism yielded to the anything-goes zaniness of consumer-culture postmodernism, in which students write reverential essays on Friends instead of Flaubert. By the 1980s, "radical combat had given way to radical chic."
Cue Eagleton's brisk balance sheet of high theory's profits and losses. This is marked by a breathtaking neglect of the actual history of English-language criticism. Eagleton knows this territory intimately, but for a proper account of what he knows you have to turn to books such as his essay collection, Figures of Dissent. Multiple interpretations, analytical rigour, historical contexts, attention to popular culture, questions of literary language and aesthetic form: you could find such dishes on the critical menu long before the likes of Barthes and Foucault opened their bistros on campus. However, if you wish to pretend to newcomers that "belle-lettristic gentlemen... ran the critical show" before the soixante-huitards rolled up, better not mention figures such as William Empson, Marshall McLuhan, IA Richards or Northrop Frye. Here, quite bafflingly, Eagleton doesn't. (Kermode-who actually does history rather than just proclaim its value-supplies two immensely useful surveys of 20th-century Anglo-American criticism in his pieces on the "Cambridge Connection" and "Literary Criticism: old and new styles.")
After Eagleton's verdict on post-1960s thinkers, he abruptly switches tone and tack. He mounts his pulpit to demand that satiated theory buffs return to the strenuous path of moral philosophy and social commitment. Farewell, Althusser (yet again), welcome back, Aristotle. Concepts such as human nature, absolute truth and objective knowledge bounce back into the frame. "Trying to be objective is an arduous, fatiguing business, which in the end only the virtuous can attain," writes Eagleton, sounding these days more like Baden-Powell than Barthes.
After Theory's sternly uplifting second half rests heavily on the moral philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre, the neo-Aristotelian author of After Virtue. Its value lies in a sort of rehab course for readers debauched by too much relativism. Stop playing in the postmodernist sandpit, exhorts Eagleton, and grapple with the enduring human stuff of biology and mortality, "morality and metaphysics," "religion and revolution." Welcome words-except that most grown-up thinkers about culture and society never dipped a toe into that sandpit in the first place. For all its cosmopolitan cachet, post-1968 cultural theory has proved a parochial business. Evolutionary biologists or social historians yearn to speak to civilians. Literary theorists, as Eagleton notes, too often prefer the cosiness of tribal argot.
Not surprisingly, much of the former audience for Parisian or American master theorists now seeks wide-angle stimulation from ambitious science writers who have never been shy of painting the big intellectual picture. None of these registers as more than a faint blip on the Eagleton radar. In passing, however, Eagleton-whose revolutionary socialism can often taste like the icing on an essentially Catholic cake-does tick off Richard Dawkins for being an atheist.
He doesn't much care for atheists, any more than he likes liberals or capitalists. Besides Marx and Aristotle, the theorists who pick up the best notices here include St Paul, St Augustine and the author of the Book of Isaiah. Eagleton's socialism, like his Catholicism (or at least Catholic-mindedness), figures as a glowing horizon whose distance from the here and now only lends enchantment to the view. In one of many cherishable one-liners, he points out that for the snobby Parisian avant-garde journal Tel Quel to swap Stalinism for Maoism was "rather like finding an alternative to heroin in crack cocaine." The ardent, humanistic Marx of the 1844 Manuscripts remains his touchstone. But, since he spends so much energy upbraiding idealists who cover up the mess of history, should he not say a little more about the crimes and catastrophes of socialism in power? Not his, or the junior Marx's, fault, of course. Still, the preening gesture politics on show in After Theory (which at one point slides from the Nazi death camps to the World Bank in successive sentences) confirms the impression of a writer sure of a captive student audience, rather than one willing to treat sceptical lay readers as equals who need persuasion rather than mere patter.
Eagleton can be insufferably glib. Fence- sitting liberals, for instance, have an "industrial chaplain view of reality" in refusing to take sides. Spooling out the soundbites, he comes over as the PG Wodehouse of theoretical criticism, as well as its Michael Moore: "Some dolphins can distinguish the sentence 'Take the surfboard to the frisbee' from 'Take the frisbee to the surfboard,' an operation which even some world leaders might find difficulty with."
Like his idol, Oscar Wilde, Eagleton prefers snappy aphorism to sequential argument, and the jaunty comic mode of After Theory helps to mask its underlying disillusion. Time and again, cultural theory has broken its promises, not only to interpret the world but also to change and even save it. Essentially theological in his sensibility, Eagleton rather movingly exposes a hunger for wholeness. When he pays tribute to the "ritual and moral code" of traditional faith, which could "enlist countless millions of men and women in the business of ultimate value," he sounds more like Chesterton than Wilde.
So whoever persuaded him, or any other academic theorist, that a set of premises and procedures taken from the margins of continental philosophy could hasten a project of private and collective liberation? It was, to adopt the Eagleton idiom for a moment, a bit like trying to ride a bicycle across the channel.
Frank Kermode, on the other hand, always kept his wheels on solid ground. Much of Pieces of My Mind consists of fairly technical essays on questions of interpretation as applied to a standard canon of literary and biblical texts (Conrad, Hawthorne, Wallace Stevens, St Mark's gospel). Among them he reprints those superb general essays on critical history (with sharp words for "the onslaught of undisciplined interdisciplinarity" as the old order breaks down), and exemplary long reviews of current authors: McEwan, Amis, DeLillo, Paulin. Always precise, seldom pedantic, Kermode also knows when to slip into the Eagletonian style of epigrammatic snap, crackle and pop. I have long relished a typical, and masterly, distinction between his and Barthes's conception of the classic work of literature: "What Barthes calls 'modern' is very close to what I am calling 'classic,' and what he calls 'classic' is very close to what I call 'dead.'"
In one important respect, Kermode comes across as more of a fearless free thinker than Eagleton. Interpreting literature or the criticism of literature, he never expects to find totality. Kermode is the virtuoso of the loose end, the wrong turning, the red herring: all the many ways in which incomplete narratives in books (and experience) muddy our waters. He attends to secrets, silences and mysteries, but apprehends that-despite the "public demand for narrative statements that can be agreed with... for problems rationally soluble"-no perfect reading will ever bring them into the light of common day.
So we continue to see the "enigmas and puzzles" of literature and life through a glass, darkly. Kermode embraces this fallen and cloudy world of thinking, writing and reading, turning a wry gaze on doomed attempts "to hammer our lives and thoughts into a unity." Eagleton also deprecates the "desire for purity" and advocates creative, "ironic" flux and change against the death-dealing certainties of the fundamentalist. Yet he persists all the same in a kind of intellectual utopianism which demands that the creative word should match the created world. Even "after" the twilight of the theoretical idols, Eagleton still thirsts at his book's end for redemption in the form of a cultural theory "equal in depth and scope to the situation it confronts."
What, however, if that situation involves indecipherable ambiguity? A trademark Kermode essay entitled "The Man in the Macintosh" (from his book The Genesis of Secrecy) examines the mysterious "lanky looking galoot" who walks across the scene of the Hades chapter in James Joyce's Ulysses. He turns up again later in the novel, first munching dry bread and then drinking Bovril. Critics have identified the man in the mac as everything from Death to Joyce himself. For Kermode, this celebrated optional extra serves as the type of a narrative knot that no amount of interpretation can untie. He remains the lanky looking galoot who scuppers all our designs. Before theory, and after it, the man in the macintosh will always stop us making sense.
