Saints and Scholars (review)

208 the minnesota review attended _______," etc.); there are alarming numbers of dangling modifiers and ill-placed appositives (e.g., "a famous man by the time he was thirty, Farrell's three decades from the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s witnessed a reversal of fortune" [p. 261]; "TaU, thin, bespectacled , conservatively dressed, and a good speaker, Burnham, however, displayed little warmth in personal relations" [p. 178]). It is understandable that such stylistic flaws could appear in a book that attempts to compress so much information in so short a compass, but a juducious weeding out would have made for greater readability in an account that in other ways commands so much of our attention and respect. BARBARA FOLEY Saints and Scholars by Terry Eagleton. London: Verso, 1987. pp. 145. $14.95 (cloth). If, as Terry Eagleton says in the introduction to Against the Grain, his current project is to recover "in both style and theme a pleasure and playfulness which could not be grimly deferred until theory had done its work," he has done so here. Saints and Scholars, Eagleton's first work of fiction, is, if nothing else, playful in both style and theme. WhUe Saints andScholars may be somewhat difficult to classify — part "novel of ideas," part historical fiction, part philosophical dialogue — it is consistently amusing. Eagleton tries equally to raise laughs and pleasure in the play of language as to speculate on the nature and relationship of language and socio-historical reality. The "novel" is based on the rather whimsical question: what if Ludwig Wittgenstein, Nikolai Bakhtin (brother of the famed dialogist Mikhail), James Connolly, and Leopold Bloom were gathered in a remote viUage in the West of Ireland, 1916, to talk about language and politics? Such an eclectic assemblage of characters coming from widely diverse backgrounds lends itself readily to humor, and Eagleton rarely misses a chance to poke fun either at a character or at the institutions or ideologies that these characters represent. Wittgenstein and Bakhtin, in particular, are the targets of a good deal of comedy — the former hiding in terror from the Cambridge dons who want to spirit him back to an academic world he both loathes and needs; the latter a buffoonish, Rabelaisian figure, more concerned with food and wine than abstract, meaningless metaphysical speculation. Eagleton also plays self-reflexively with the nature of fiction. Leopold Bloom, for instance, fed up with the incessant babble of the others, who declare themselves and their language to be unreal, says "You might be a bleeding fiction... You look pretty much like one to me. I happen to be real. I think I'm about the only real person here. The only reason your lot talk about the dead so much is because you're all dead yourselves. Just a bunch of zombies talking about talking. Why don't we do something?" (135). The only character who in part escapes ridicule is James Connolly — it is perhaps difficult to make fun of a figure whose grim and dirty execution frames the narrative. Saints and Scholars is, however, more than one long joke; for all the playfulness, a good many serious issues are raised. What Eagleton does is to dramatize, after a fashion, the critical debate raised in his essay "Wittgenstein's Friends" (in Against the Grain), between metaphysical indeterminacy and hisorical materialist scientificity. Wittgenstein, whose theory of language establishes the basis of the debate, says that all discourse is ineluctably bound up with social activity; any knowledge comes not from metaphysical speculation, but from language in its rough, everyday use. According to the Wittgenstein of the novel, "Language hooked on to the world in many different ways, from a cheer to a curse. There was no secret essence to it all, just a Babel of differences" (42). The particular Babel where the novel takes place is Ireland, a land caught between two tongues, where language had long been used as an instrument of political oppression. Ireland (and the Irish), as depicted in the novel, is more than "the land of saints and scholars, martyrs and madmen"; it is, as Bakhtin, among others, notes, an absurdity, a fiction. The novel takes place shortly after the...