Lives in Writing (17 page)

Eagleton plunged into this arena of debate. In
Holy Terror
(2005) he tackled the subject of terrorism, tracing the phenomenon back through its first political manifestation in the French Revolution to its roots in ancient religion – the idea of martyrdom, the figure of the scapegoat, the Dionysian revolt against reason – drawing on literary texts from Euripides’
The Bacchae
to Conrad’s
The Secret Agent
, ‘the first suicide-bomber novel of English Literature’. He distinguishes neatly between the two aspects of that paradoxical figure. The martyr’s death ‘signifies a hope for the future, bearing witness to a truth and justice beyond the present. But whereas the martyr is prepared to stake his life on this, the suicide bomber is prepared to stake
your
life on it.’ This makes it a genuinely evil act according to Eagleton’s ethics. Unfortunately, ‘the more Western society reacts to terrorist assault with answerable illegality, the more it depletes the very spiritual and political resources which it takes itself to be protecting . . . we . . . see . . . a similar inversion of victory and defeat in the case of the terrorists’. It’s a plausible but depressing analysis, though the book as a whole is a stimulating tour de force.

In October 2006 Eagleton published a long review of
The God Delusion
in the
London Review of Books
which famously began: ‘Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the
British Book of Birds
, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.’ Much of the review, which provoked a long-running correspondence in the
LRB
, was incorporated later in
Reason, Faith and Revolution
, where he also took on Christopher Hitchens, referring occasionally to the two authors under the compound name of ‘Ditchens’. Eagleton is a witty and acute polemicist, and scored some effective points against the dogmatic atheism of his antagonists, but the coherence of his own argument is debatable, especially when expounded at book-length. He claims to be defending ‘faith’, not ‘belief’, against atheism.

Faith, Ditchens seems not to register, is not primarily a belief that something or someone exists, but a commitment and allegiance – faith which might make a difference to the frightful situation you find yourself in, as is the case, say, with faith in feminism or anti-colonialism. Christian faith, as I understand it, is not primarily a matter of signing on for the proposition that there exists a Supreme Being, but the kind of commitment made manifest by a human being at the end of his tether, foundering in darkness, pain and bewilderment, who nevertheless remains faithful to the promise of a transformative love.

There’s a loophole in that ‘primarily’ which allows for a more credal kind of faith, but few practising Christians, and very few Catholics, I suspect, would define their faith in these starkly existentialist terms. It seems more like the Protestant concept of ‘conversion’, transposed into a secular and politicised key. It evidently serves Terry Eagleton well as something to live by, but it provides a very fragile platform from which to argue against the opponents of religion. While jeering sarcastically at the theological and biblical illiteracy of Ditchens, he frequently expresses complete agreement with their criticisms of Christian beliefs and practices, and becomes almost fulsomely admiring at times (e.g.: ‘Dawkins . . . has done a magnificent job over the years of speaking out against that particular strain of psychopathology known as fundamentalism’). He makes it clear that he has no faith in the institutional Roman Catholic Church, in either its officially promulgated doctrines or its governance, though he respects individual members. Herbert McCabe remains a source of inspiration, and Eagleton frequently invokes his summary of the meaning of the crucifixion, ‘If you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you.’

The Christian faith holds that those who are able to look on the crucifixion and live, to accept that the truth of human history is a tortured body, might just have a chance of new life – but only by virtue of an unimaginable transformation in our currently dire condition. This is known as the resurrection . . .

Shortly after expounding this idiosyncratic version of Christian faith Eagleton surprisingly concedes: ‘It may well be that all this is no more plausible than the tooth fairy. Most reasoning people these days will see excellent grounds to reject it. But critics of the richest, most enduring form of popular culture in human history have a moral obligation to confront that case at its most persuasive.’ Persuasive or not, as put by Eagleton it represents a very small fraction of the spectrum of Christian belief, and seems more appropriately described as the faith of a ‘tragic humanist’, which is how Eagleton defines himself at the end of
Reason, Faith and Revolution.
There is a paradox here: one of the weaknesses of Dawkins’s position is that he doesn’t seem to acknowledge that his contentment with a universe that is ultimately purposeless and indifferent to human beings is fairly easy to achieve when you are privileged to live a comfortable and fulfilling life. Terry Eagleton does well to remind him and others of his persuasion that the lives of a large proportion of the human race are made chronically wretched by poverty, ill-health and violent oppression (and, one might add, just bad luck). For many of them religion is often the only thing that makes life meaningful and worth living, by its promise of a better life to come for those who deserve it. Materialistic atheism takes away that hope, which is rooted in a deep human desire for justice, but ‘tragic humanism’ – religion from which the supernatural has been stripped away – seems to do the same.

In
The Meaning of Life: A very short introduction
, Eagleton presented a more genial response to the enigmas of our existence. Its very title, on the cover of a little book measuring 11 cm x 17 cm and containing only a hundred pages, raises a smile, and the author shows he is well aware of its presumptuousness, while nevertheless managing to cover an enormous amount of philosophical ground in a lucid, pithy and entertaining way, with deftly chosen illustrations from world literature. It is a brilliant feat, which perhaps only Terry Eagleton could have pulled off. He is ‘widely regarded as the United Kingdom’s most influential living literary critic’, according to Wikipedia, which cites four published sources to support this claim. He is probably the most well-known, and perhaps the most widely read – but is he the most influential? If there is a school of Eagletonian critics, I am not aware of it, and it is difficult to imagine that there could be. The man writes so much on such various topics, and changes the focus of his attention so often, that it would be impossible to derive a systematic critical method from his writings. His
métier
is to excite, provoke and stimulate our interest in literature and ideas by the breadth of his reading, the acuteness of his intelligence, and the energy of his prose. The style is the man, or rather the critic, and could not be imitated without turning into pastiche or parody. It is comparable to the style of a first-class journalist – and I mean that as a compliment – applied to information of great intellectual complexity and breadth of historical reference such as is usually encountered only in works of specialist scholarship, making it accessible, comprehensible, and entertaining as well as instructive.

1
Terry Eagleton,
After Theory
(London: Allen Lane, and New York: Basic Books, 2003).

2
A hostile reviewer of
After Theory,
William Deresiewicz, complained that ‘someone who owns three homes shouldn’t be preaching self-sacrifice’ (
The Nation
, 16 February 2004). Paul Vallely, however, pointed out later that there were practical reasons for this multiple ownership: one home is in Coleraine where Eagleton’s wife teaches, another one is in Lancashire where Eagleton teaches, and their main home is halfway between the two in Dublin (‘Terry Eagleton: Class Warrior’,
Independent
, 13 October 2007).

THE NAME OF
Frank Kermode first impinged on my consciousness in 1954, when I was a second-year undergraduate reading English at University College London. In our Shakespeare course we had lectures from Winifred Nowottny, who in due course would be a colleague of Frank’s when he occupied the Lord Northcliffe chair at UCL. Sadly, Winifred became increasingly eccentric and obsessive towards the end of her life, but in the early 1950s she was a charismatic teacher who gave the impression that she was sharing with us her own latest thoughts and discoveries about English literature, and we hung on her every word. Winifred read Frank’s New Arden edition of
The Tempest
when it first came out and was greatly excited by its introduction, the gist of which – the way, for instance, Shakespeare poetically explored contemporary concerns with the discovery and colonisation of the New World – she expounded with the book open in her hand. This, we inferred, was the cutting edge of modern literary scholarship – and we were not misled.

In 1960 I was appointed Assistant Lecturer in the English Department of Birmingham University, and in the Easter vacation of 1961 I attended what was then called the University Teachers of English Annual Conference, held that year in Cambridge. Among the principal speakers, along with W.K. Wimsatt and John Holloway, was Frank Kermode, then occupying his first professorial chair at Manchester. At this same conference I met Bernard Bergonzi, whom Frank had appointed to an assistant lectureship at Manchester. He had recently read my first novel,
The Picturegoers
, and recognised the location of the story as that of his own corner of south-east London, so we became, and have remained, good friends. It was probably through Bernard that I was introduced to Frank at that conference, and was privileged to sit in someone’s bedroom drinking whisky with him and his companions late one night. I was, as most people were, charmed by his affable manners and quick wit, but I regret to say that the only specific topic of his conversation that I recall concerned the performance of his new Mini on the drive down from Manchester. The Mini was then, however, a novel and trendy vehicle, and seemed an appropriate possession for a cutting-edge scholar.

My subsequent acquaintance with Frank was for several years maintained principally through meetings at other conferences and similar academic occasions, but it eventually became a valued personal friendship. In the meantime he became for me, as for many others, an inspirational literary critic through his books, articles and reviews. I still remember the grateful wonder with which I read
The Sense of an Ending
(1967), a book of modest length but breathtaking scope. For me it was a seminal work which had the effect of extending my critical interest in the novel from a preoccupation with verbal style (exemplified in my first book of criticism,
Language of Fiction
) to an engagement with broader questions of narrative structure – for example, peripeteia, the technical term for a sudden reversal of circumstances and expectations in a plot, which Kermode compared to the constantly revised predictions of the end of the world in the history of Christianity.

Peripeteia, which has been called the equivalent, in narrative, of irony in rhetoric, is present in every story of the least structural sophistication. Now peripeteia depends on our confidence of the end; it is a disconfirmation followed by a consonance; the interest of having our expectations falsified is obviously related to our wish to reach the discovery or recognition by an unexpected and instructive route . . . So that in assimilating the peripeteia we are enacting that readjustment of expectation in regard to an end which is so notable a feature of naive apocalyptic. And . . . we are . . . reenacting the familiar dialogue between credulity and scepticism. The more daring the peripeteia, the more we may feel that the work respects our sense of reality.

The point may seem obvious enough today, but to me in 1967 it seemed like a revelation, the elegant lucidity of the exposition making it all the more persuasive.
The Sense of an Ending
was full of such illuminations. It made me receptive to the new structuralist narratology which was to come out of Europe, and especially France, in the next decade, and which Frank himself did much to interpret and disseminate in his writings (in a more reader-friendly style than that of the Parisian
savants
) and through a famous graduate seminar, hospitable to visitors, which he ran at UCL in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The concept of ‘apocalypse’, the prophetic revelation of an end, which runs like a thread through
The Sense of an Ending
proved a useful key to the understanding of much modern literature, notably D.H. Lawrence (whom Frank radically and convincingly reinterpreted), and also of postmodernism. His essay ‘Objects, Jokes and Art’ which first appeared in
Encounter
in its heyday (1966) is a brilliant, witty and elegant analysis of aleatory art, literature and music, such as Duchamp’s ‘ready-made’ sculptures, William Burroughs’s
Nova Express
, composed of cut-up fragments of printed texts, and John Cage’s silent piano piece 4’ 33”, which focuses the auditors’ attention on random sounds in the environment for the prescribed number of minutes and seconds. I selected this essay as the last item in my Reader,
20
th Century Literary Criticism
(1972), and it was pleasing to conclude an anthology of nearly 700 pages with Frank’s final sentence: ‘In the end what Simone Weil called “decreation” (easy to confuse with destruction) is the true modernist process in respect of form and the past. Or if it is not we really shall destroy ourselves at some farcical apocalypse.’