Against the Grain: Essays 1975-1985 (review)

140 the minnesota review demonstrates the turbulent and vital dilemma bequeathed to us by the class of '68. TIM WALTERS Notes 'George M. Wilson, Narration in Light: Studies in Cinematic Point of View (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. 191-207. 1In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), pp. 127-86. 'In Elements ofSelf-Criticism, trans Grahame Lock. (London: New Left Books, 1976), pp. 35-77. 'From "A Correspondence with Umberto Eco," boundary 2 12 (Fall 1983). See, for example , Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (New York: Viking, 1977). Against the Grain: Essays 1975-1985 by Terry Eagleton. London: Verso, 1986. 199 pp. $9.95 (paper). Whither is fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory and the dream? Terry Eagleton introduces this selection of his essays from 1975 to 1985 with a brief account of his intellectual development during the changing political conditions of the period. The radical political climate of the early seventies was "peculiarly conducive to theoretical debate" to which his Althusserian books and the earliest essays of this collection contributed; then, "as the 1970s ran their course, and the global crisis of capitalism generated a shift in political power in Britain and elsewhere to the far right," Eagleton turned from writing what he now sees as premature theoretical syntheses to defending and defining Marxism "in the light of the most suggestive, potentially progressive aspects of contemporary nonMarxist developments" and to recovering "in both style and theme a pleasure and playfulness which could not be grimly deferred until theory had done its work" (1-6). He is humorously self-deprecating about the "gradual abandonment of theoretical seriousness and intellectual responsibUity" (7) that this sequence of essays reveals, even as hejustifies himsdf, asserting that the theoretical questions he has abandoned are not resolvable now "at the level of theory" without the prior resolution of "certain real deadlocks and difficulties at the level ofpolitical history" (5). The evidence of the collection complicates this self-critical and self-serving narrative. For one thing, the first paragraph of its earliest essay introduces two of the three intellectual influences that preside over Eagleton's later turn away from "theoretical seriousness"— Benjamin and Brecht—along with the category of their materialist aesthetics that typifies much of his later work—the "author as producer" (9). At the very outset he recognizes this concept as "transitional" and "politically indeterminate" (9), but throughout the collection he both enacts and thematizes it. His essays (not to mention no fewer than five books written during the period of their composition) exemplify the productivity they celebrate in American academic critidsm and Raymond Williams (56-57), in Brecht and Empson (163), and in language itself (104, 156). The political indeterminacy of these loci of productivity is evident in Eagleton, and his praise for them typifies the " 'productive looseness' " (a phrase he draws from Christopher Norris) of his own "state of ideological conflict and division" (162). Bakhtin, the third presiding intellectual influence on Eagleton's "sinking" from theoretical seriousness, enters in the middle of the collection and of the period it represents to theorize that transitional and politically indeterminate "state of ideological conflict and division" Reviews 141 as a productive and vital condition. " 'Ideological life' " in this condition is lived for Bakhtin " 'on the boundary between its own context and another, alien context' " (115)—precisely where in review essay after review essay Eagleton lives the life of his Marxism. Both the Marxisms of others and the "writing of some non-Marxist critics" (7) overlap Eagleton's context and provoke his efforts to criticism and self-differentiation. In general the other Marxists—Althusser, Anderson, Jameson—prove insufficiently responsive to poststructuralism and feminism; the post-structuralists—Derrida via Michael Ryan, Lyotard, de Man via Lentricchia—prove insufficiently Marxist if not anti-Marxist, and Lentricchia, Wittgenstein and Empson prove unwitting but congenial fellow travellers. But several of Eagleton's responses go beyond defining routine alignments to produce a surprising complex of thoughts on style, pleasure, community and even nature and the philosopher-child that resonate with a strange similitude in dissimilitude for a reviewer who has long familiarized himself...