Literary Strategies

Terry Eagleton’s new book examines the ways in which literary theorists have asked how the concept of ‘literature’ may be defined, and evaluates the persuasiveness and usefulness of these attempts. With characteristic lucidity, Eagleton demonstrates the value that various literary theories have in pointing our understanding of particular texts and authors towards a wider conceptual grasp of imaginative literature. At the same time, as in some of his earlier work, he is quick to address what he sees as the universalising limitations of literary theory. He deeply admires the intelligence and rigour of the great theorists, but cannot submit himself to any single one of them. Eagleton’s Marxist interpretation of literature leads him to the conclusion that no form of literary theory is sufficiently alert to the historical specificity of its origins. Consequently, no theory can offer a complete conceptual framework for analysing literature. In this respect, Eagleton’s judgement is curiously close to Christopher Ricks’s criticisms of literary theory, though Eagleton finds its proceedings infinitely more stimulating and fruitful than ‘appreciative’ literary criticism, of which he is often reductively scornful. (He has admitted that his representations of non-theoretical literary criticism sometimes amount to travesties.)

In his earlier works The Illusions of Postmodernism (1996) and After Theory (2003), Eagleton attacked postmodernist thought for its rejection of universal categories. To Eagleton’s mind, postmodernist theory militates against socialist collective action in favour of an identity politics that privileges difference over continuity. He contends that this approach is admirable in raising our awareness of the marginal and excluded but limited in its ability to change the world. (In The Event of Literature, he adapts Marx’s famous criticism of philosophy in condemning postmodernist theory for its effort to interpret rather than to change the world.) Postmodernist thought, that is to say, is politically quietist in its refusal to countenance the possibility of fixed social groups. In this respect, postmodernism is as hostile as liberal individualism is to collective action for social change. Eagleton argues that a recognition of continuity and essential categories may be radical and, indeed, is vital to Marxist thought (he points out in this new book that Marx, like Plato and Aristotle, acknowledged the existence of universal categories). In The Illusions of Postmodernism, Eagleton advocated what he calls a ‘soft’ form of essentialism. It acknowledged categories and continuities (such as class and class struggle), but also recognised the dynamism and contingency of historical change. A similar approach is taken towards the concept of ‘literature’ in The Event of Literature. Eagleton argues that, although one cannot offer an overarching definition of literature, nevertheless, it is legitimate to assert that there are characteristics which are common to what we call ‘literature’ (he acknowledges his debt to Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘family resemblances’ for this formulation).

Eagleton begins by drawing a series of illuminating comparisons between the scholastic medieval disputes of realists and nominalists and modern-day internecine arguments about how literature should be interpreted. Realists believed that universal categories were in some sense real; nominalists held that abstract categories were posterior to particular entities, and merely offered us a way of perceiving them. Eagleton contends that the movement towards nominalist, empirical ways of understanding the world, whilst liberating human thought to investigate the particularity of individual things, represented ‘one long catastrophe’: ‘the arbitrarily absolute God of some late medieval thought becomes a model for the self-determining will of the modern epoch’ (p. 12). This modern will ‘threatens to crush the life out of things in the act of exerting dominion over them’; it is subject to desire rather than to reason; it reaches its ‘modernist terminus in the Nietzschean will-to-power, after which time, in the era of postmodern culture, the subject is really too depleted and decentred to will very much at all’ (p. 12). Eagleton’s objections to postmodernist theory are thus given a historical context. Postmodernism, for Eagleton, inherited nominalism’s subjugation of reason to desire and the will: ‘for the...