John Higgins
It’s embarrassing to introduce an academic superstar to a small audience in a large hall. “There may be just my theory of literature class here,” I murmured, as we hurried towards the lecture, adding silently, “all 10 of them!” Could the unfashionable topic, “Marxism at the Millennium”, draw in the crowds on this swelteringly hot afternoon in Cape Town, perhaps the last perfect day for the beach?
I needn’t have worried: the hall was packed to capacity. But then, this was Terry Eagleton speaking. Though you won’t quite find his books at airport kiosks, you will find them at every university bookshop in the world.
He is that rare thing: the author of academic best-sellers. Literary Theory: An Introduction alone has sold something like a million copies, in 20 or so different languages.
Aside from hard work and an unusually acute intellect, the main reason for this extraordinary success is sheer style. Eagleton writes with the kind of wit more usually found in a thriller than a university set-work: less like philosopher Jurgen Habermas than fiction writer Carl Hiassen, more Raymond Chandler than cultural theorist Raymond Williams.
“I like popularising, writing for a large audience,” he says, and adds, with a quick grin, “Some of the interesting responses to literary theory actually came from people who had never seen the inside of a university – intelligent general readers who wanted to know what’s going on.”
Against the grain of much recent work in contemporary theory, which seems at times to address only an in-group of academics, Eagleton argues that “socialist intellectuals have a duty to reach the general public, or at least to be intelligible to it”.
Indeed, he suggests, we need to recognise some distinctions between genuine intellectuals and academics. “If you wanted to explain to someone what an intellectual is, you could do worse than to say that an intellectual is the opposite of an academic in at least two senses. Academics tend to be pinned down within a specialist area, while genuine intellectuals tend to transgress the boundaries between given discourses and disciplines.
“Secondly, and relatedly, intellectuals have some sense of the bearing of ideas on society as a whole, something which academics (at least in my own university!) tend to lack. Some academics are intellectuals, but not all; and many non-academic people are also intellectuals.”
Eagleton’s commitment to clarity is allied with a rare dialectical skill, one that insists on seeing both sides of every question, and then seeing both sides differently. Eagleton still regards himself as a socialist, one whodraws on some but not all of traditional Marxist theory. Also, his Marxism is subtly inflected by what he chooses to use of the work of other thinkers.
While willing to accept the “paradox of the materialist as cultural critic” – the recognition that cultural criticism is “eminently dispensable and not, politically, where it’s at” – he is also quick to insist that “the idea of culture as the icing on the cake” (beloved of so many university administrators and policymakers) “is the crassest piece of bourgeois philistinism”.
“There’s something rather suspect,” he continues, “about supposedly radical governments who find themselves reproducing that kind of case. There’s a big difference between permitting the humanities to do their own thing, and hoping that some social good may come of it, and forcing them to submit to the logic of technocracy. That strikes at their very core, and is extremely dangerous.
“You can end up with a grim parody of the humanities. If you look at the intellectuals who’ve been most formative in our period – Williams, Noam Chomsky, Pierre Bourdieu and Julia Kristeva, Habermas and Edward Said, among others – all of them were working to keep open a general intellectual space.”
And, he concludes, “in a period of political downturn like our own, the need to keep open the space for critique becomes more radical than it was. If humanities departments can try to resist what I would call, in my own context, Thatcherisation, or instrumentalisation, and keep open that rather precarious space of critique, then they will be doing a power of good.”
After a lecture series at the University of Cape Town, Eagleton gave one talk at Wits University. It’s a chilling irony that while Wits was eager to host the superstar, they closed down their own space for literary theory – their outstanding department of comparative literature – last year. A grim paradox in South Africa’s intellectual life, and testimony to the need to keep thinking through Marxism as the millennium approaches.
John Higgins is the editor of Pretexts, which celebrates its 10th anniversary this year, and the author of Raymond Williams: Literature, Marxism and Cultural Materialism (Routledge), which was launched this week