A malfunction of my website forced to retrieve the folder where I keep the .pdf of the interview with Terry Eagleton which I did for the literary magazine Quimera, back in 2003. To my delight, the whole transcript of the original English version was still there (we published just a selection, in Spanish). After a quick revision, it is now available from my website (in the section http://gent.uab.cat/saramartinalegre/content/other-publications). Journalists must be used to keeping full records of their most interesting conversations but I’m just an amateur interviewer, and this is for me the rarest of documents. I hope you enjoy it as much as I have enjoyed rediscovering how amazingly generous Prof. Eagleton was to me (as I assume he must be to everyone). Incidentally: the interview took place in a hotel in downtown Barcelona because Prof. Eagleton’s talk at my university was cancelled due to one of our many students’ protests. He was delighted that this was the reason for the cancellation!

This post completes, in a sense, an improvised trilogy on the matter of how theory and literary criticism fused around the 1990s. I mention in the interview that the most recent edition at the time of the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (Leitch et al., eds., 2001) excludes Erich Auerbach, I.A. Richards, F.R. Leavis or Lionel Trilling, but includes Homi Bhabha, Helène Cixous, Stuart Hall and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and this helps to date with precision when the new model was fully institutionalised. Eagleton comments that “some of those critics who are today fashionably excluded were actually far more radical than some of the fashionably included”. The third edition (2018), though, appears to be far more comprehensive, with 157 authors, 48 of whom contribute texts written in the 21st century (the book is 2848 pages long!). The liberal classics I missed in 2001 are back in and, of course, Eagleton is present. The youngest critic included in this hefty volume is Ian Bogost (b. 1976) with a piece called “The Rhetoric of Videogames”. Please, note that the Norton does not carry the word ‘literary’ in its title.

Terry Eagleton made an extraordinary contribution to the establishment of theory within literary criticism with his handbook Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), which has gone to countless editions and has sold close to 750000 copies –not really to common readers but to students in need of a reliable guide. This is just one volume in Eagleton’s astonishing oeuvre, which runs to forty volumes so far (including a novel and memoirs). In the interview he tells me that he finds “writing criticism enormously creative, fulfilling” and that “I’m one of those strange people who are probably for good or bad just called ‘writer’ in the sense that what I write is far less important to me than the fact of writing. I happen to have ended up writing about culture and tragedy, but I might have ended up writing about something else”. This confirms my view that academic writing can indeed be seen as a genre, though Eagleton is privileged in having a voice of his own that expresses itself with complete freedom. He thanks feminism for “showing me a new style of approaching some subjects” but also mentions the Irish working-class background of his family (in England) as a major influence. “Perhaps almost unconsciously”, Eagleton says, “I’ve plugged into that tradition in my own writing” albeit he did so only as a fully established scholar. “[W]hen you’re younger and you are establishing yourself you have to play by the rules of the game and I look back on some of my early radical works and I’m shocked by how conventional they’re in their methods, or their tones, or their styles”.

Eagleton (b. 1943), grew up in Salford, in Greater Manchester. He graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge, but wrote his doctoral dissertation at Jesus College, under Raymond Williams’ supervision. Later, he moved to Oxford, where his career developed for the following three decades (1969-2001) until he accepted the John Edward Taylor chair of Cultural Theory at the University of Manchester. The label ‘Cultural Theory’ was, he told me, of his own devising. When I met him, Prof. Eagleton was combining his Manchester chair with a position in the other Trinity College, in Dublin. He is now Distinguished Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University, apparently with no thoughts of retiring. Do recall that Eagleton comes from a working-class family. He is a wonderful case of a person pulling themselves up the bootstraps of boots that don’t even exist (at least, he had access to grants which would hardly be the case in other nations).

When he was a student at Cambridge, he reminisces, “everybody around me was an aristocrat. They were all about seven foot tall –I was quite small a student– because they had generations of good food and good breeding. They looked distinctly different from ordinary people, they spoke differently”. Oxbridge students later became “anonymously middle-class” though working-class students are still too few. His own job consisted of creating “a space in which these different people could come together”. In his view, “most conservative institutions create their own internal opposition, and there has to be someone there to organise it and that’s what I really tried to do” in an atmosphere that was in fact “incredible receptive” to new syllabi and topics. “The place I left was very different from the place I joined. But that wasn’t just because of me”, he concludes. Inevitably, Eagleton also absorbed the patrician culture surrounding him and, as you can read in the interview, he writes predominantly about canonical texts. We need not assume, he declares “that if everybody takes to writing their master’s thesis on The Simpsons it’s going to be more revolutionary than writing about Jane Austen”. The revolution that interests him is, rather, the “very subversive effect” that canonical texts may have; this is the method he followed at Oxford.

It’s quite funny for me to see that the questions I asked Prof. Eagleton about close reading, literary criticism, and theory in 2003 are exactly the same questions worrying me seventeen years later. I was then a recently tenured lecturer (2002), with already an experience of teaching for twelve years at UAB and it might seem that since 1991 much should have changed. I see, however, that basically I caught the beginning of an academic wave still swelling and far from breaking point, hence the recurrence of the same worries. I should have disliked Eagleton’s work, as he was one of the main defenders of the introduction of theory in the English classroom but he was also Raymond Williams’ disciple and, as such, he had a very British awareness of the relative values of culture, which is often missing in American criticism. This feels, to my mind, more straitlaced, puritanical, and humourless. I’m comfortable reading Eagleton but uncomfortable reading other theorists and there must be a cultural explanation for that.

What is then the function of theory, according to Prof. Eagleton? For him, the rise of theory between 1965 and the 1980 responds to students’ demands: “They don’t want to be taught the novel by teachers who never even stopped to ask themselves what a novel is (…)”. Theory pushes “questions a stage back: it doesn’t just say ‘is this a good poem?’, it asks ‘what do we mean by a good poem?’; it doesn’t just say ‘is this a moving tragedy?’, it asks ‘what is it to be tragic?’. It’s not replacing criticism, it’s asking questions that go one level deeper”. Close reading without that kind of question is valueless, but “any theory which can’t read the text closely is not for me a very valid theory”, Eagleton points out. He also worries about the commodification of theory, mostly an effect of ultra-competitive US academia, and declares his wariness of post-structuralism, presenting himself insistently as a Marxist. In fact, I called the interview “We Are All Marxist” because for Eagleton “Marxism as a theory is part of the modern mentality as much as Darwin or Freud or Nietzsche” and “we’re all Marxist now in the sense that Marx was the first to say ‘look, there is this object called capitalism, it has its peculiar ways of working; we must look at it as an object of study.’ You don’t simply throw that aside overnight. It’s part of our very deep way of thinking in the West”.

Marx, in short, was among the first cultural theorists and Eagleton approaches theory in the same spirit: as an object of study, not as a preacher, a fanatic or, even worse, an intellectual in love of abstraction. Marxism, Prof. Eagleton clarifies, is not about using Marx for literary criticism but “raising questions about the place of culture, the cultural practices in our kind of society” from a left-wing position, naturally committed to socialism. He praises Marx for using “dialectical thinking” to “embrace the riches of the great liberal, middle-class tradition” in his project to transform them into a culture open to all. For Eagleton “one of the great loses of post-modern theory, if that’s what it is, has been the loss of that dialectical habit of mind” which consists of “seeing a relation between the opposites” and how Modernity is both liberating and enslaving. “One reason I’m a Marxist still is I don’t hear anybody else say these things again”: there is no “third position”, no debate, no dialogue. I couldn’t agree more.

The problem is, I think I need not stress this, that the word Marxist carries many unwanted connotations. It is tainted both by the excesses of the Communist regimes –though I wonder why Vietnam is never discussed in the media; is it because it is a successful Communist nation?– and the excesses of the pro-Communist European intelligentsia of the 1960s and 1970s, all those upper-middle-class kids playing revolutionary and understanding nothing about working-class life. I don’t know whether Eagleton still identifies as a Marxist but if he does he must be one of the last great intellectuals using that label. Marx is being forgotten partly because the issues I have mentioned and also because the USA’s triumph in the Cold War. Add to this heady mix the rise of Communist China as the next world leader (if the current coronavirus crisis does not devastate its economy), and you can see how odd it is to call yourself a Marxist in the Western world. I know that I am indeed a Marxist, without having ever read Marx in depth, because what Eagleton implies is that if you come from a working-class family your awareness of class issues makes you necessarily a Marxist. You may become eventually right-wing but that is another form of class awareness, if you get my drift. So, yes, in a sense we are all Marxists, as we are the children of Darwin, Freud or Nietzsche –and of Mary Wollstonecraft and all the feminists.

I’ll end by vindicating, as Prof. Eagleton does in the interview, the need for a renewal of dialectal thinking because this must spring from conversation, one of the greatest victims of our current self-absorbed, narcissistic academic system. I thank the stars that allowed me to share conversation with one of the greatest minds of our time one morning in April, back in 2003. Enjoy not only the record of that rich conversation but all the enriching conversations you may have in your life.

I publish a post once a week (follow @SaraMartinUAB). Comments are very welcome! Download the yearly volumes from: http://ddd.uab.cat/record/116328. My web: http://gent.uab.cat/saramartinalegre/