'That dreadful Terry Eagleton'

August 6, 2003
Issue 

REVIEW BY RJURIK DAVIDSON

The Gatekeeper: A Memoir
By Terry Eagleton
Penguin, 2001
178 pages, $21.95 (pb)
Marxism and Literary Criticism
By Terry Eagleton
Rouledge, 2002 (originally 1976)
$23
Figures of Dissent
By Terry Eagleton
Verso, 2003
$46 (hb)

As a 10-year-old, Terry Eagleton was the "gatekeeper" at a convent of Carmelite nuns in Salford, in the north of England. The young Eagleton was on hand when young novices took the veil and shut themselves away from the world beneath the convent's roof, which was "more corrugated iron than gothic pinnacle".

So begins Eagleton's memoir, which tells the story of the son of impoverished Irish immigrants who became the Oxford professor and renowned Marxist critic who was once described by Prince Charles as "that dreadful Terry Eagleton".

The Carmelite nuns were subversive, he argues, because they recognised just how dire our situation really is. They were not the tough-minded types who "believe that this world is the best we can muster, some of whom are known as materialists and the rest as conservatives. Whatever they call themselves, the hard-nosed realists who claim that there is no need for another world have clearly not been reading the newspapers." Perhaps this explains Eagleton's conversion to Marxism.

Eagleton's childhood was one of illness and poverty. He suffered constant asthma; two of his siblings died at childbirth. His family was poor, yet "socially sophisticated enough to be conscious of their inferiority".

Eagleton was part of a generation of activist-intellectuals that came of age in the 1960s, which included Perry Anderson, Robin Blackburn, Sheila Rowbotham and Tariq Ali. For some time, Eagleton was a member of the Socialist Workers Party before leaving to become a member of the Socialist League.

He became famous as a Marxist literary critic. His 1976 Marxism and Literary Criticism is an excellent introduction to his talents as a populariser of radical ideas and the ideal place to begin for anybody interested in Marxist literary or cultural analysis. In this short work, Eagleton covers the basic historical debates within Marxism. He moves with great skill between the major revolutionary theorists, starting with Marx and Friedrich Engels and moving on to Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, George Lukacs, Emma Goldman, Theodor Adorno, Pierre Macherey, Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin.

Eagleton performed a similar job on the major academic strands of criticism in Literary Theory (1996), which launched him onto the world stage, reportedly selling close to 1 million copies and is used as the basic text in many English courses at universities.

The Illusions of Postmodernism (1996) one of the sharpest critiques of the trendy and simple version of this theory to be found in many a university caf‚, shows a powerful sense of irony. But his 1987 novel, Saints and Scholars, whose main protagonists are Ludwig Wittgenstein and Nicolai Bahktin (brother of Mikhail), is the best example of his impish sense of humour.

His latest book, Figures of Dissent, a compilation mainly of book reviews, gives brief assessments of trendy theorists such as Gayatri Spivak and Slavoj Zizek, as well as established greats like Lukacs and the poet WB Yeats. Even David Beckham gets a guernsey.

One of Eagleton's strong points is his talented use of humour. He has quipped — Oscar Wilde-style, about whom he has written a play — that the difference between the old and the young is that the young still believe in maturity.

Eagleton has remained, in all his works, an unrepentant Marxist revolutionary, and has come under criticism for claiming that "the sheer horror of cliche, if nothing else" stopped him from moving to the right. Here he uses his talent for the startling reversal: it is the Marxist who is usually thought the cliche.

Eagleton has a particular talent at making us see things from a new angle, to reconsider what have become routine forms of thinking. He argues, for example, that revolutionaries are not radical at all, but moderates and socialism is a conservative form:

"It is a sign of just how bad things are that even the modest proposal that everyone on the planet gets fresh water and enough to eat is fighting talk. One can imagine launching revolutions in the name of some exorbitant utopian ideal, but to disrupt people's lives in such a spectacular way simply so that everyone may be guaranteed a supply of fresh vegetables seems oddly bathetic. Only extremists could argue against it, just as only extremists could endorse a global capitalist system which in 1992 is said to have paid Michael Jordan more in advertising Nike shoes than it paid to the entire South-East Asian industry which produced them. Revolutionaries are those realist, moderate types who recognize that to put such things to right would require a thoroughgoing transformation. Anyone who imagines otherwise is an idle utopianist."

The Gatekeeper is a peculiarly impersonal book. We get no real idea of Eagleton the person, his journey through life or the characters around him. There are few mentions of his relationships with others — his romantic relationships get a line or two, as do his children — and there's barely a word about how he views his own struggles or about whether his life has been happy or satisfying.

Eagleton provides little insight into the turbulent 1960s and the part he played in them. This is a great shame. I was personally looking forward to Eagleton turning his intellect to address the fate of the English left, the struggles of the last few decades, his views on the future of the socialist movement, as well as offering anecdotes about the various characters he knew.

(For a closer look at the English left in the '60s and '70s, readers are better off getting hold of Rowbotham's Promise of a Dream or Ali's Street Fighting Years.)

While much of The Gatekeeper is spent considering his and others' ideas, Eagleton does offer brief glimpses of life within his socialist group and these few reflections are thought-provoking, occasionally hilarious and sometimes saddening. Even in the 1960s and '70s, the Trotskyist left in England, just as in Australia and elsewhere, was small and had only a modest impact. This isolation, no doubt, played its part in much of the internal dynamics of Eagleton's group and his portrayal of it is sometimes scathing. However, beneath his critique there is also compassion and respect.

One of the tragedies of the English left was its inability to marry its talented intellectuals to a socialist organisation or movement that, if not a mass organisation, had at least some significant impact on national politics. Many of the intellectuals were thus left to find their own way amongst the currents of history. Eagleton remains, thankfully, one who has kept his head while others have shown less intellectual fortitude.

From Green Left Weekly, August 6, 2003.
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