birmingham university in the mid-1960s. We were interviewing young scholars for a lectureship in English literature. One of them had produced a clever, theoretical, "left-wing" book on Shakespeare. As the last candidate left, the committee settled down to choosing. The dean, a mischievous character who knew what was in play, at once said from the chair: "Well, not much doubt there. Eagleton is head and shoulders above the rest." I agreed. The department head, a distinguished Shakespearean scholar, could barely contain himself. "I will in no circumstances have that man in my department." As was the way in those days, the head of department prevailed. So much for theory.
Terry Eagleton has, of course, fulfilled his promise and gone on to be the Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at Oxford and one of our foremost literary theoreticians. But this book is something of a surprise in that, behind the usual play of theory, it is very personal: a coming to terms with some of his earlier beliefs and with more recent movements (including post-modernism); an assessment of the limits of some things to which he has formerly adhered and a reassessment of some he had earlier rejected. As usual, it is not an easy read; on the whole it repays the effort.
Here is an example of prose that calls for some deciphering: "Marx is as hostile to the abstraction of universality as he is to the divorce of the abstract citizen from the concrete individual, or of the abstraction of exchange-value from the sensuous specificity of use-value." One can grasp the meaning after no more than two readings, but it surely could be put in a manner which required only one reading; in two sentences, say.
Sometimes obvious points dress themselves up as aphorisms: "An assault on the institution of monarchy need not imply that the Queen herself is a depraved wretch." In this fondness for clinching epigrams, Eagleton recalls one of his teachers, Raymond Williams. The neatness can be deceptive. One of Williams's most frequently quoted obiter dicta runs: "There are in fact no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses." That cheers the democratic soul; but it is only a half-truth. In one sense there are indeed no masses; we are all different and many of us may not be deceived into becoming parts of masses. But thousands of people spend their time persuading us to become parts of masses: in buying this, believing that, following this fashion. And it works. In this sense there certainly are masses, increasing masses; and we would do well to face the fact.
One is relieved when Eagleton becomes less elliptical. We may then arrive suddenly at a clear-but still quirky-upland: "Taken together, works of 'high culture' are offered as evidence of the timeless unity of the human spirit, of the superiority of the imagination to the actual; of the inferiority of ideas to feelings; of the truth that the individual stands at the centre of the universe; of the relative unimportance of public as against inter-personal life, or of the practical as against the contemplative, and other such modern prejudices."
If an intellectual has a mind which runs naturally to theory, so be it. But if they write about the character of a culture and society, that writer has special problems. Eagleton understands that society is full of "thisness," things, unpredictabilities. But I am not yet sure that he recognises it sufficiently. And I am sure that many of his admirers recognise it less than he does. Many of the younger academic writers on culture-and-society have spent more time reading theory than going around looking at their subjects. There is a missing connection.
In the often tense effort to define culture in a way which embraces group-identity ("organic") and what Eagleton calls "civility" he comes closer to Matthew Arnold than seemed likely a few years ago. Civility, to Arnold and Eagleton, is a process of individual maturing, embracing everything from political commitment to "the best that has been thought and said."
He refers often to colonialism and its mainly dire effects. I do not underestimate its influences; but I think he leans too much on them. After many years working with colleagues from southeast Asia, and after many visits there, I have been impressed by the depth and power of some non-European cultures. Impressed for good and ill. An elderly Indonesian I know is sharply critical of the way the west has become money-mad and atomised. He lives mainly on rice dishes and in our terms is very poor, but he claims, rather sententiously, that he is richer than most in the west today; he is blest by family and his communal culture. Colonialism had been a bad patch, but from his long perspective it was just an interlude.
Then, the obverse. Indonesian colleagues spoke guardedly, even in Europe, about the brutality and corruption of the Suharto regime; to do more was to risk prison. I recall, in the Yogyakarta district in the 1970s, being in a large crowd in a stadium to hear Suharto. When his armed en-tourage swept in a great ululation arose from the crowd: "Papa Presidente! Papa Presidente!" It was appalling, chilling, childish, frightening. This really was community as identity. But how could such uneducated people-trapped in the limiting aspects of their communal culture-and how could such a society, be helped towards a more self-defining life? Or should we conclude that their culturally closed, communal lives offer more that is good than is restricting? Hearing that enormous cry, firmly conditioned by authority, I began to reassess the complex relations between the east and the west even more.
On an international level, the argument found its focus throughout the 1960s and 1970s in the department of culture at Unesco headquarters in Paris, where I was assistant director-general. What a polysyllabic dog's breakfast that was. The secretariat included people of more than 100 nationalities. It was out of the question to suggest value-distinctions between some aspects of different cultures. After agonising arguments the department produced the fiat: "All cultures are equal." By what criteria? Were cultures which practised enforced female circumcision justified in that? By western standards, certainly not. But all cultures had been pronounced equal by Unesco, so western standards were not relevant.
I remember talking about the European legacy to that quietly measured Holocaust survivor, Simone Veil. One of her judgments was particularly memorable: "Europe is the conscience of the world. The best and the worst happened here." The worst, we are aware of; the good, we tend to be more nervous about acknowledging. Among finer achievements we can, without hubris, count the idea of individual rights and individual dues, rooted in the individual conscience, and moving out to the acceptance of communal rights and dues (and so to the political life). And all of this not so much as a statement of abstract principles, but as expressed in philosophy, literature and the other high arts. I know of no other culture which has better brought together this complex, differentiated sense of what it is to be fully human.
Of course we overuse the word "culture"
nowadays. We speak of "canteen culture," "yob culture," "pop culture" and dozens of others. One simple distinction would be to say that we immerse ourselves in one or more adjectival cultures; but we may grow towards culture as civility. The celebrated reception for "The Arts" at No 10 in the early days of the present government, which included the latest pop group but virtually no "literary" writers, was an instance of the failure to distinguish between adjectival cultures and culture as civility.
As to the failings of modern society, it is easy to agree in general with Eagleton. The sense of a three-tiered social division remains, but with its emotional energy transferred into maintaining different kinds of status, (professional, financial, celebrity) rather than of class by birth. On the other hand, the clear values based on class have given way to a weightless relativism. At three different universities last year, I was challenged on my right to say that George Eliot was a better novelist than Jeffrey Archer. Universities are increasingly assumed, inside and outside, to be institutions which serve the status quo; rather than standing for something beyond present assumptions; bearing witness.
Eagleton recognises that the old debate about high, low and middle-brows has run into the sand. He illustrates this in his criticism of TS Eliot's dichotomy in Notes Towards the Definition of Culture; the cultivated on top, the rest somehow looked after by them. Sixty-five years ago, I began a sixth-form essay: "Thomas Hardy was a truly cultured man." I was trying, jejunely, to rescue Hardy from both the condescension of the cultivated highbrows and from those who recognise "culture" only as group or ethnic identity.
Somewhere in the middle are those who are not and never will be highbrows. They can still have empathy, good sense, tolerance-wisdom learned on the pulses. Most discussions about height-of-brow and "creating a common culture" do not acknowledge such people sufficiently. This is where the hermetic quality of the response to Eagleton's work is a problem, too. What he has to say is not easily available even to "the common reader," the non-professional serious student of ideas. Nor is there much concern about this. The department of education and employment is concerned to do little more than prepare pupils to serve our "post-modern" machines, and become uncritical consumers of contemporary mass culture; it lacks democratic imagination. The academic world goes round and round, either taking the outside world as it is, or turned in upon itself as it plays with new, abstract, often untethered notions. This is our version of the treason of the clerks. More people-including readers of Eagleton-should try to speak to today's Jude the Obscures. There are more than we assume.
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