Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 10 Number 1, April 2009
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Smith, James. Terry Eagleton. Cambridge: Polity, 2008. 186 pages. ISBN: 9780745636108 (Paperback) £ 15.99. ISBN: 9780745636092 (Hardback) £50.00.
Reviewed by
Indiana University Southeast
Arguably, one of the most prominent Marxist critics today is Terry Eagleton, although difficult to pin down as he continues to develop his thinking into new social and intellectual engagements. Among literary critics he may be the best known for his examination of the interrelations between ideology and literary form, but as James Smith shows, Eagleton’s influence reaches well beyond literature departments and even the academy.
Smith not only highlights major shifts in Eagleton’s development as a critic, but also places him firmly in the larger context of European intellectual history in the 20th century. Eagleton emerges as a model of the modern public intellectual, tirelessly repositioning himself in the changing historical and cultural contexts. Smith offers a lucid, well-documented analysis of Eagleton’s theoretical evolution, providing his readers with a consequential chronology and just enough information about major intellectual influences to help them understand the significance of each of the 30 books and the oeuvre at large. For instance, in the first chapter, which lays out Eagleton’s early involvement with radical Catholicism, Smith avoids getting sidetracked in a detailed theological critique, but keeps his focus on the critic’s intellectual commute between the progressive wing of the Catholic Church and the New Left to document Eagleton’s increasing interest in critical theory. In his exemplary method, Smith highlights major shifts in Eagleton’s thinking as markers of larger trends in his work, such as the examination of ideas through seemingly irreconcilable perspectives, a tendency already apparent in Eagleton’s early attempt to theorize common ground between socialist and Christian thought.
Smith discusses each book as a tributary to Eagleton’s broad intellectual scope and the unique model of his criticism which never treats literature as a separate object, but instead “as a mode of access into a wider society.” Following Smith’s overview work by work through the decades, one gains remarkable insight into Eagleton’s thought process and, at the same time, into the larger context of (mostly) European progressive thinking. Thus the early The Body as Language (1970) serves Smith as a marker for Eagleton’s increasing identification with more secular areas of theory which corresponds to crucial stages of 20th-century Marxist theory and the emergence of his particular style, also known as “Eagletonism.”
Smith’s method of presenting every new turn in Eagleton’s thought as an effect of intellectual influences from Atlhusser to Goldman could easily turn Eagleton into a passive object of historical forces. But as a differentiating and circumspect writer who pays as much attention to his subject as to the larger context, Smith renders a nuanced account of Eagleton’s involved intellectual struggles from which he emerges as a negotiator and catalyst of intellectual history.
Obviously not all of Eagleton’s intellectual moves meet with Smith’s approval, nor are they acceptable to today’s readers. Thus he criticizes the limitations of Eagleton’s attempt at “scientific” literary interpretation in the 1970s because of its fixed terminology which could not account for the multiple layers of discourse in culture and literature. But Smith—as does Eagleton—recognizes it as a necessary step to overcome the mechanical formulations of “vulgar” Marxist criticism to arrive at a more sophisticated critical approach. Thus Smith, although not taken by the conventional style and form Criticism and Ideology (1976), praises it as “one of the most sophisticated Marxist considerations of the relationship between the production of literary texts to the wider ideological and historical circumstances”—a question that he claims New Historicism has evaded.
Eagleton’s constant struggle with the most problematic areas of Marxist theory always led him to new critical directions. Using the “critical historical” work from the 1980s that followed the unpublished play, Brecht and Company (1979), Smith traces how Eagleton came to his “radical critical pluralism” and his growing concern with the important question to what extent cultural production can serve as an effective political tool. At the center of this phase in Eagleton’s writing, Smith places Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), arguably the “single most important book.” Radically challenging and immensely readable, Literary Theory, according to Smith, best reveals the theoretical ambivalence running “as a counter-current in Eagleton’s career.”
Such ambivalence can also be found in Eagleton’s clever attack on Deconstructionism. In The Rape of Clarissa ((1982), for instance, he performs a brilliant deconstructive reading of the novel which in the end, “deconstructs its own deconstruction” thus pointing to the political reality such criticism must finally confront. But Eagleton’s “cheerful raids” of a range of post-structural and feminist approaches ruffled some intellectual feathers, here documented in his scuffle with the eminent feminist critic in Elaine Showalter who accused Eagleton of a “politics of appropriation,” a reproach he could not allay completely.
With the establishment of postmodernism as the dominant model of intellectual and cultural expression, Eagleton saw himself in a position from which he sought to revitalize the possibilities for a radical critical practice. A crucial work in this phase is The Ideology of Aesthetics (1990), in which he discusses the dialectical function of the aesthetic as coercive and emancipatory at the same time. Well aware of the impossibility to address this monumental work in its entirety, Smith again relies on his competent method to highlight Eagleton’s dialectical engagement with contemporary culture, here evident in his exposure of the conservatism in postmodern theory underneath its apparent subversive impulse. In The Illusions of Postmodernism (1996) Eagleton continues his intellectual battles with postmodern theories, trying to assert the relevance of Marxian categories, such as ideology, and to recover a progressive politics that can overcome the postmodern privileging of fragmentation and its “political complicity with capitalism.” Smith here rightly deplores Eagleton’s sacrifice of the philosophical ground of argument for “polemical immediacy” and questions his curious omission of a substantial body of Marxist work that did attempt to theorize a link between postmodernism and wider material conditions. Even though Smith agrees with other critics that Eagleton unfairly blurs poststructuralism and postmodernism “into one indistinguishable intellectual category,” he acknowledges that his polemics may not have been meant as a comprehensive argument, but rather a polemical pamphlet to expose postmodernism’s pervasive cultural effects. Smith sees Eagleton take a different turn in his critical attack on of the postmodern Left in the next decade, introduced by The Idea of Culture (2000). In what appears to be a return full circle to the social humanism propagated in his earliest publications, Eagleton here employs Williams’s 1960s concept of a “common culture” to overcome the perceived ills of postmodernism and identity politics and to create a path for more political solidarity.
Smith here interrupts his chronology for an excursion into Eagleton’s creative writing projects in the 1980s and 1990s (novels, drama and a film script) to prepare the reader for the concluding chapter. In these creative works Eagleton addressed not only an expanded public arena but also foregrounded questions of Irish history. Eagleton’s turn to Irish nationalism prompted his critics to debate whether these seemingly peripheral issues were irreconcilable with his Marxist position. But Smith argues that Eagleton was using Irish history as a test case for the critical claims of cultural history, precisely because Ireland presents one of the most acute sites of political tension resulting from British imperialism. Again, Smith finds the key to understanding Eagleton’s shift in interest by looking into his past, here by citing from his essay, “Nationalism: Irony and Commitment” (published in 1988), in which Eagleton claims that nationalism, by canceling individual life, embodies another form of alienation which must be worked through in the interest of real liberation. In what Smith calls the “Irish trilogy,” Eagleton addresses Irish nationalism in several discursive modes to dramatize the tensions between the demands of a nationalist and a socialist revolution, both at the heart of Irish history. To the reader the function of this chapter is not entirely clear from the beginning, but a short concluding paragraph resolves the puzzle: Smith suggests that the works addressed in this chapter perform most coherently Eagleton’s idea of a new form of critical literary study, an idea that one could see emerge from his criticisms in the 1980s.
The final chapter of the book, aptly named “Full Circle,” addresses Eagleton’s apparent return to the metaphysical or theological approaches of his early years. However, as Smith demonstrates in his intertextual reading of Eagleton’s works, the recent turn to metaphysical discourses should not be seen as a substitute for political concerns, but rather as a possible venue for expanding the scope of radical cultural criticism. Smith is not entirely comfortable with the degree of ambivalence in Eagleton’s most recent writings, ranging from the reinstatement of the tragic in the modern age in Sweet Violence (2003) to the alleged demise of critical theory in After Theory (2003) to a provocative debate of the public’s historical amnesia concerning terrorism in Holy Terror ( 2005) to his latest re-engagement with practical criticism in How to Read a Poem 2007).
Smith’s discussion of How to Read a Poem reminds us to take the concept of “full circle” (which he borrows from Eagleton himself) with a grain of salt and yet as a running trope in this survey of Eagleton’s career. Eagleton seems to return to his roots in practical criticism, namely, the New Critical credo of close reading, however, not as an escape from political and social considerations, but as an awareness that enables us to understand the political function of such texts. Smith argues that this book—similar to others from this period—repositions Eagleton as an oppositional critic, but now standing in opposition to the movements he helped instigate. This seeming paradox in Eagleton’s career, we are told, is not actually a traditionalist repositioning. On the contrary, as Smith convincingly shows, Eagleton’s unresolved ambivalences towards contemporary culture and his recent infusion of socialist critical discourse with theological and New Critical idiom acutely show his “continued ability to intervene politically at sites of critical tension,” thus making him a prominent public intellectual who reaches audiences beyond any “readily defined political spectrum.”
Smith has found an effective approach in presenting to his readers the vast oeuvre of a major theorist in such a way that they get immediate access to each book without losing any of the complexity and depth of Eagleton’s argument. The author’s decision to avoid any attempt at giving an exhaustive picture but rather to highlight key elements in the context of their development, works to his and the reader’s advantage. By placing lesser known or unpublished works alongside Eagleton’s more prominent ones, Smith provides a concise, differentiated, and yet well-rounded intellectual portrayal of one of the leading literary critics and theorists of our time.