The Business of Theory (Page 3)

Figures of Dissent, which offers some two-score brief but vivid engagements with mostly modern or contemporary figures (Yeats, Lukacs, Spivak, Zizek), is by far the more worthwhile book. Essays on I.A. Richards and the Frankfurt School are models of historical explication; those on Wilde and Wittgenstein give us Eagleton paying homage to his intellectual heroes. For all his mordancy, he can display a generous heart, even if he displays it rather sparingly. Still, the more of these pieces one reads, the more exasperating, as well as exasperatingly predictable, Eagleton's method becomes. His unfailing strategy, as I suggested before, is to explain--that is, to explain away--a given thinker's ideas as a function of his or her historical situation. The same objection has long been made to Eagleton's literary criticism: that it treats works of art as symptoms of their societies' reigning ideologies, never as critiques of those ideologies in their own right.

For one thing, this approach is potentially exculpatory of even the most reactionary figures: How could they have done differently? For another, it fails to explain the differences between individuals from the same social situation. For a third, it's especially dangerous in the hands of a critic as ingenious as Eagleton: The problem isn't that he might fail to think up a way of explaining someone in terms of his or her historical background but that he'll never fail to do so, no matter how superficial that explanation turns out to be. Of Harold Bloom's theory of the anxiety of influence, which sees poets as engaged in Oedipal struggle with their forebears, Eagleton remarks that "these poetic warriors locked in virile combat were good old American entrepreneurs in literary clothing, Davy Crocketts and Donald Trumps of the spirit." This is, of course, ridiculous; far from being historically specific, Eagleton's analysis of the first-generation Jewish immigrant Bloom, who grew up speaking Yiddish in a working-class Bronx neighborhood, is laughably generic. It also dispenses with the specificities of individual development: Bloom was decisively shaped by Gnosticism and Freudian psychoanalysis, two traditions not exactly indigenous to the United States. In Eagleton's conception, if you can call it that, America is a social and ideological monolith of frontiersmen and tycoons. If this is the best he can come up with for Bloom, how am I to trust him with figures he's introducing me to for the first time?

It's funny, this approach, because After Theory actually criticizes the notion, advanced by "anti-theorists" like Stanley Fish and Richard Rorty, that one can never climb out of one's culture so as to be able to critique it. "Reflecting critically on our situation," Eagleton writes, "is part of our situation." But the only one capable of doing so, it seems, is Terry Eagleton. Or is he? Might we not apply Eagleton's methods to the man himself, reading his ideas as symptoms of his own historical myopia? Some of this is easy, and already amply acknowledged by Eagleton himself. It's no surprise that a working-class British intellectual who came of age in the early 1960s should have become a Marxist; the real stroke of rebelliousness would have been if he hadn't. Nor is it all that surprising that a product of Catholic schools should have retained an attachment to Catholic moral concepts and images (like martyrdom, which seems to exert a strong fascination for him as an idea, if not as a life choice). Eagleton is the kind of renegade Catholic intellectual who's rejected every last bit of dogma but still somehow feels that the church really does have all the answers.

But we can go further. One of the hallmarks of Eagleton's thought is his anti-Americanism. Snide, jokey comments about American crassness and philistinism dot his writing--like Harpo tooting his horn, he seems to throw them in whenever he feels the need to get a laugh--but the current runs deeper than that. Though very few of cultural theory's seminal thinkers were American, Eagleton's analysis of contemporary cultural studies carries the unmistakable implication that the whole sorry business is an outgrowth of American narcissism. Postcolonialism, he suggests in Figures of Dissent, turns out to be "a kind of 'exported' version of the United States' own grievous ethnic problems," another instance of the United States "defining the rest of the world in terms of itself." This will be news to all those postcolonialists in New Delhi or Cape Town (or Ulster, for heaven's sake) dealing with grievous ethnic problems that have much less to do with American hegemony than with the criminal legacies of older imperial powers like Great Britain. With rioting skinheads still fresh in the memory of London's Asian communities (and Muslim minorities on the boil throughout Europe), it's really something to hear an Englishman lecture the United States about ethnic tensions. By all means, let's have some criticism of the United States from beyond our borders--we sure as hell need it--but let it be intelligent, informed criticism. Anyone who thinks of Davy Crockett and Donald Trump as the paradigms of all things American, who blithely claims that pro wrestling is our most popular TV sport and who caricatures the current Administration as "semi-illiterate" (a grievous underestimation of people like Wolfowitz and Rice) only plays into the hands of the xenophobic, unilateralist right.

So where is this knee-jerkerie coming from? Let's remember that Eagleton spent his young adulthood clawing his way to the top of the British intellectual establishment, only to discover once he got there that it had been supplanted, just as surely as the British economic establishment had been some decades earlier, by an American one. There's nothing like the rage of an old elite against a new one. Even in England, Oxbridge stopped being the place to be a long time before Eagleton jumped ship, the last provincial kid to notice that the magic world he'd once dreamed of had fallen into ruins. No wonder he's bitter.

But then, I'm an American, and I would say these things (or maybe it's just that I'm better able to notice them). And in any case, I'm probably being overingenious. After all, is it that hard to explain what Eagleton's up to? The prolificness, the self-plagiarism, the snappy, highly consumable prose and, of course, the sales figures: Eagleton wishes for capitalism's demise, but as long as it's here, he plans to do as well as he can out of it. Someone who owns three homes shouldn't be preaching self-sacrifice, and someone whose careerism at Oxbridge was legendary shouldn't be telling interviewers of his longstanding regret at having turned down a job at the Open University. But then, Eagleton is a past master at having it both ways. After Theory contains some important and timely ideas about the imaginative failures of the left, the moral shape of a just society and much else--it's just too bad they come from so dubious a source. But if the book sells as well as the one its title so deceptively evokes, at least he'll be able to buy himself another few houses.

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