Terry Eagleton, The Event of Literature (Yale)
Having progressed from seats at Oxford and Cambridge Universities, and through Manchester, Terry Eagleton now updates his thoughts on literary theory from the summit of the academic world, the English department at Lancaster.
Who would have thought that theory would ever become 'unfashionable' but the opening paragraphs here suggest that it has finally gone the way of so many ephemeral academic subjects for discussion that have come and gone in an ever accelerating need for novelty, edge and topicality, an unseemly hastening that necessarily makes each successive burning issue the more rapidly outdated.
It seems undue to regard such passing fancies as post-colonial studies, sexuality, ethnicity and cultural studies more 'radical', or, for that matter, semiotics, post-structuralism, Marxism or psychoanalysis, compared to the 'conservative opponents of theory' but if they have had their day then I'm sure their obsolescence was in-built.
While for the most part maintaining an acute awareness of the flaws in any given practice or thinking, Eagleton equally brings with him vestigial remnants of his soi-disant radical past. There is a lameness in his insistence of using the pronoun 'she', rather than the presumably discredited 'he', to denote such non-gender specific figures as 'the author' or 'the reader' when the usage of the singular 'they/their' is perfectly serviceable. And for one so forensically accurate in dismantling the terminology of others, it is surprising to find him refer to 'literary types' as if they were a species, as identifiable perhaps as a term used by John McCririck in the past, the 'each-way shrewdy'.
In the opening chapter that differentiates between Realists and Nominalists, I find that I am probably among the latter, along with Derrida and Foucault and other 'literary types', who are more commonly liberals than conservatives. Although only 35 pages earlier it had seemed I might be irredeemibly conservative if I wasn't a fully-paid up adherent of theory.
But, as a fairly literary type of philosopher himself, Eagleton makes his way through some labyrinthine arguments, clarifying with well-chosen illustrations and his trademark 'sardonic travesties',
without some measure of implicit meaning, no piece of writing could function at all. The sign 'Exit' tacitly requests us to take it as a description rather than an imperative otherwise theatres and department stores would be permanently empty.
Philosophy at its best is the highest form of humour and Eagleton is rarely more than a paragraph away from his next droll observation. The problem with the question, 'What is Literature', though, is that although it appears to be the same sort of question as 'what is a giraffe', it can't be answered in the same way. A giraffe has giraffe DNA, and can be identified with some confidence at a glance in any case, but literature is a man-made thing, has meant different things at different times and can still mean somewhat different things to different people. But if it weren't so then the finest minds in the country wouldn't be able to exercise themselves on such arcane questions and instead might have to address more pressing concerns like economic crises, wars and social problems that are generally left to the spivs and charlatans elected to do so.
Calling something 'literature' has often conferred approbation on it, something that Eagleton is well aware of but has difficulty getting away from. Having not accepted his definition of 'poem' in How to Read a Poem, I'm not keen to take his word on literature either. I know that there are such things as bad poems. I know that poetry is a part of literature. And so I believe that there can be bad literature. So many of our assumptions are only 200 years old, taken from the vast influence of Romanticism, and we haven't recovered from them yet.
But Eagleton does a great job in setting out the complex relationship between fiction and the real world, between what a literary work is and how it might be apprehended. We have the concept of sacraments that are things that 'fulfil their ends simply by virtue of the actions they involve', and praxis, a practice whose ends are internal to it, both of which seem useful in arriving at an idea of what a literary work is.
The work of art ...is an example of human praxis, and therefore of how to live well.
And so might this book be, which is, in itself, a literary work of a sort. In places it demonstrates how philosophy, with its sense of its own absurdity temporarily absent, can be little more than a chore, but it is the process involved as much as the answer, if any, arrived at that provide its meaning and justification. Philosophy investigates itself as much as it investigates anything else. We may not be much the wiser at the end of it but, if not, we feel as if we understand a little better why not.