Literature is informative. Where there is competition or selection pressure it is likely to obey the law of increasing functional information- i.e. specific functional forms will burgeon while mere ornamentation or euphuism will decline. Sadly, we don't know what the future fitness landscape will look like and thus any theory of literature is unlikely to be able to predict which current trend will persist and which fad or fashion will disappear.
It should also be borne in mind that Literary theory is older than literature in the sense that those who produced and consumed literature already had some theory about what the thing was, how the thing should be done, and what should be done with it.
What are the essential elements of such a theory?
1) It needs a theory of the author. Is she supposed to be an aspect of God's omniscience? Is she a prophet or oracle or clairvoyant granted limited telepathic and other powers for a particular purpose? Or is she an artist working within the conventions of an established genre who, it may be, is able to better express what has oft been said?
The author may choose a persona- e.g. that of an animal or a slave or a foreigner- for a particular purpose- e.g. to highlight 'inhuman' practices or for some political or religious purpose. One might say that the authorial function reflects, or itself helps to determine, the 'theory of mind' prevalent in a culture.
I suppose, for literature of a philosophical type, the author herself may espouse a philosophical theory of authorship. But will the author's theory of authorship be received in an univocal manner?
This brings us to
2) a theory of reception or readership. Should we 'receive' a text on the basis of the authority of the author? Should we reject works written by those considered 'deviant'? Or should we say 'Literature is an Art. Art exists for its own sake.' ? But what is Art? We know what we like, but the Devil whispers in our ear, 'is it art?'
Kipling's 'Conundrum of the Workshops' expresses in popular form a journeyman concern with 'theory' which had begun materially altering outcomes in English literature from its inception. On the one hand, an imitation of a classical work, or one which had gained wide currency elsewhere, was deemed 'literary'. It was seen as a way to raise up the vernacular. On the other hand, popular works of a picaresque kind which incorporated material found in oral folk-culture, too, could acquire a certain cachet. Indeed, authors might juxtapose or intermingle classical and folk themes to their mutual advantage.
3) in periods when religious or political ideologies gained salience, there was a third aspect to the theory of literature. It was tempting to say that works which advanced a particular agenda, or which mirrored its concerns, was proper literature. Anything else was meretricious trash. Critics and Academics might consider it vital to choose a side and praise authors holding their own views while attacking works produced by those in the other camp. Sadly, a totalizing ideology must acknowledge economic forces. Literature is itself a 'scarce' commodity at least in the sense that there is an opportunity cost to reading this rather than that. Literary theory, too, must pay its way or else degenerate into a Ponzi scheme adversely selective of imbecility.
Terry Eagleton. a Leftist Professor of English Literature, is 20 years older than me. I was 20 when I read his Introduction to Literary Theory- and being a fool- thought there might be something in it. What was certain was that Eagleton's English was excellent. His book was a bestseller and is still worth reading- if only for the quality of its prose. However, it was already 20 years behind the time. It was the ideology of Thatcher & Reagan that prevailed before being supplanted by that of Donald Trump and Nigel Farage. Oddly literary theory, allying with 'Grievance Studies' & wokeness, weakened Eagleton's own side in the 'culture wars'. There was no Revolution. There was only a slow-motion Counter-Revolution though this may not have been apparent to Ivy League Professors till Trump began attacking their employers.
Consider the following excerpt from Eagleton's preface-
The economist J. M. Keynes
already in bad odour with Thatcher & Reagan
once remarked that those economists who disliked theory, or claimed to get along better without it, were simply in the grip of an older theory.
Keynes was wrong. Economists can 'economise' on the use of scarce resources simply by finding empirical regularities- e.g. estimating elasticities of supply or demand- and finding ways to change them. Implicitly, you may say, they have a 'Structural Causal Model'. But a Model isn't necessarily a theory and a theory may have no model.
By contrast, even if you have the 'right' theory, if you are wrong on empirical trends, you may cause a great deal of harm. Keynes believed America was becoming a net food importer (i.e. food was highly income elastic and so countries which currently were net exporter would cease being so) and thus Germany- lacking colonies- would starve unless it captured land to its East. In other words, Keynes unwittingly endorsed the German General Staff's maximal program. He was also wrong about reparations (this is called the 'transfer problem'). Bertil Ohlin had actually run the numbers. A country may be better off if it gives money away because this lowers its real exchange rate thus permitting it to export more and thus gain economies of scope and scale. We may say Hecksher-Ohlin was a theoretical improvement precisely because it was empirically founded. Theory, in econ, came to mean- 'better mathematical representation'- nothing more nothing less. Better math just means more accurate predictions or policy advise. Eagleton was behind the times. It is a mistake to talk about Econ if what you studied was Eng Lit.
What Keynes meant by his remark was that economists who resisted his ideas were in thrall to 'Say's law' (i.e. the notion that all markets clear and 'supply creates its own demand'). However, he himself was more of a 'practical man of business' than a theorist. Thus, it was people like Sir John Hicks who made 'Keynesianism' teachable. Indeed, when I finally came to read Keynes's 'General Theory' after a couple of years at the LSE, I was astonished by his stupidity and ignorance of what was supposed to be his own theory.
This is also true of literary students and critics. There are some who complain that literary theory is impossibly esoteric - who suspect it as an arcane, elitist enclave somewhat akin to nuclear physics.
No. We get that nuclear physics is useful. We hold no such view about 'literary theory'. Still, Umberto Eco, a Semiotician, wrote a crackerjack murder-mystery called 'Name of the Rose'. It was possible that clever people who went to Cambridge and 'read' Eng Lit, might discover new ways to tell exciting tales with a twist in the tail. By and large, we were disappointed. Smart people could write in an innovative way regardless of whether or not they had been to University. Douglas Adams, it is true, had read Eng Lit at Cambridge, but his influences seemed to be Monty Python & Pink Floyd. Elon Musk considers him a great philosopher.
J.K Rowling, now seen as a doughty warrior against Wokeness, read Modern languages and did write wonderful novels. But, to my best knowledge, she wasn't influenced by literary theory. By contrast, Creative Writing programs- which the US had had from before the Great War- did produce best selling authors. But that was their purpose. This had nothing to do with 'literary theory'
It is true that a 'literary education' does not exactly encourage analytical thought;
it may do. Plenty of lawyers and legislators and civil servants had studied 'Literae humaniores'. Analytical and descriptive skills enabled them to succeed. This helped raise total factor productivity.
but literary theory is in fact no more difficult than many theoretical enquiries,
is it useful? No. It is a waste of time.
and a good deal easier than some.
Back in the Seventies, I recall reading quite an entertaining novel by Gore Vidal. He referenced some arcane French texts and avant garde literary theories so I thought it was possible that this new academic discipline might contribute to, if not better literature, then new and innovative ways of telling gripping stories of an old fashioned enough sort.
Eagleton begins his book by mentioning the Russian Formalists. Sadly, it was Russian literature of the long Nineteenth Century- Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Doestoevsky & Chekhov which was good. After that, the thing declined.
By contrast, in America 'creative writing' began to be taught at Harvard from about 1885. Literature could be pursued in the same manner as Medicine or the Law. Every aspect of the writer's craft received attention. Soon there were separate courses for Journalism, Theatre writing, Non-Fiction (e.g. popular science), Advertising, etc. College educated Americans like T.S Eliot & Ezra Pound helped shake England out of Georgian complacency. But, the Anglo-Saxon predilection was for the work itself, not the theory behind it.
Perhaps literature is definable not according to whether it is fictional or 'imaginative', but because it uses language in peculiar ways.
Literature isn't definable. It is a Tarskian primitive.
On this theory, literature is a kind of writing which, in the words of the Russian critic Roman Jakobson, represents an 'organized violence committed on ordinary speech'.
Nonsense! Bad literature- e.g. my shitty poems- may be described in that way. Good literature brings out the music and the pathos even of ordinary speech- or the pregnant silences that punctuate it.
Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language,
or ornamental or ceremonious or vatic or Scriptural language.
deviates systematically from everyday speech. If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur 'Thou still unravished bride of quietness,' then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary.
Not me. I think I am in the presence of a rapist. I run away.
I know this because the texture, rhythm and resonance of your words are in excess of their abstractable meaning - or, as the linguists might more technically put it, there is a disproportion between the signifiers and the signifieds.
The guy is quoting Keats. Why? Perhaps he is a secret agent. He will hand over atomic secrets to the person who responds correctly by saying 'The Rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain'.
Your language draws attention to itself, flaunts its material being, as statements like 'Don't you know the drivers are on strike?' do not.
A literary work may use very understated language. Yet it may affect us deeply.
This, in effect, was the definition of the 'literary' advanced by the Russian formalists, who included in their ranks Viktor Shklovsky, Roman Jakobson, Osip Brik, Yury Tynyanov, Boris Eichenbaum and Boris Tomashevsky. The Formalists emerged in Russia in the years before the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, and flourished throughout the 1920s, until they were effectively silenced by Stalinism.
Because they were useless. Stalin wanted the newly literate to have nice books to read. He intervened to protect Pasternak & Bulgakov.
A militant, polemical group of critics, they rejected the quasi-mystical symbolist doctrines which had influenced literary criticism before them, and in a practical, scientific spirit shifted attention to the material reality of the literary text itself.
Take God out of Russian literature and there is precious little left.
Criticism should dissociate art from mystery and concern itself with how literary texts actually worked: literature was not pseudo-religion or psychology or sociology but a particular organization of language. It had its own specific laws, structures and devices, which were to be studied in themselves rather than reduced to something else.
Stalin's philosophy of language was actually quite helpful- more particularly for writers in regional vernaculars. By saying that language, as part of the superstructure, was relatively autonomous from the sub-structure, Stalin was saying it was okay to use 'feudal' genres. This dovetailed with his doctrine of Nationality and was the reason somebody like Karunanidhi- writing in Tamil- would be justified in naming his son 'Stalin'. That young man (he looks young compared to me!) is now Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu.
The literary work was neither a vehicle for ideas, a reflection of social reality nor the incarnation of some transcendental truth: it was a material fact, whose functioning could be analysed rather as one could examine a machine.
There is some point to examining a machine. You can reverse engineer it. No doubt, writers have examined the works of their precursors in a similar manner. I suppose there were long periods when literary works tended to be imitative or otherwise derivative of classical models. The 'modernist' movement (more particularly in Asia) was about breaking with tradition and using, as far as possible, the idiomatic spoken language of the majority. This in turn facilitated and reinforced the spread of 'mother tongue' literacy which was very helpful in raising 'general purpose productivity'.
It was made of words, not of objects or feelings, and it was a mistake to see it as the expression of an author's mind. Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, Osip Brik once airily remarked, would have been written even if Pushkin had not lived.
This is the mathematical notion of canonicity. Sooner or later everybody of sufficient intelligence would arrive at the same theorem and proof of that theorem. Sadly, Literature is a co-evolved phenomenon and 'naturality' is far to seek. Still, one might say that 'literary theory' of this stupid type was part and parcel of 'vulgar' Marxist determinism.
Formalism was essentially the application of linguistics to the study of literature;
essentially, it failed. The thing was useless.
and because the linguistics in question were of a formal kind, concerned with the structures of language rather than with what one might actually say,
maybe this was helpful for computer languages and 'machine translation' etc. But, that has nothing to do with what people find it pleasing to read.
the Formalists passed over the analysis of literary 'content' (where one might always be tempted into psychology or sociology) for the study of literary form. Far from seeing form as the expression of content, they stood the relationship on its head: content was merely the 'motivation' of form, an occasion or convenience for a particular kind of formal exercise.
The 'vulgar' Marxist did indeed condemn entire genres as being forms of literature characteristic of feudalism or 'bourgeois idealism' or 'Left Adventurism' or 'Right Deviationism' etc.
Don Quixote is not 'about' the character of that name: the character is just a device for holding together different kinds of narrative technique.
Just as the Earth is merely a device for holding together geology and biology and meteorology.
Animal Farm for the Formalists would not be an allegory of Stalinism; on the contrary, Stalinism would simply provide a useful opportunity for the construction of an allegory.
Interestingly, Stalin's own philosophy of language militated against Orwellian notions of language- e.g. 'Newspeak' or the artificial production of 'pulp fiction' for the masses.
It was this perverse insistence which won for the Formalists their derogatory name from their antagonists; and though they did not deny that art had a relation to social reality - indeed some of them were closely associated with the Bolsheviks - they provocatively claimed that this relation was not the critic's business.
Their true business was mental masturbation.
The Formalists started out by seeing the literary work as a more or less arbitrary assemblage of 'devices', and only later came to see these devices as interrelated elements or 'functions' within a total textual system.
In other words, they were as stupid as shit. Still, they may have thought they were being 'scientific' and thus just as good, in their own way, as Einstein.
'Devices' included sound, imagery, rhythm, syntax, metre, rhyme, narrative techniques, in fact the whole stock of formal literary elements; and what all of these elements had in common was their 'estranging' or 'defamiliarizing' effect.
This was a period when the natural Sciences seemed to be embracing ideas far removed from 'common sense' intuition. The Social Order too was being turned on its head. People did feel 'estranged'. The world was becoming unfathomable. Eagleton points out that anything at all could be seen as estranging. But, the fact is, there are only specific historic epochs or milieus where people feel 'estranged' as the world around them ceases to be familiar.
Eagleton ponders
the secret... of why Lamb, Macaulay and Mill are literature
I wasn't aware that the works of John Stuart Mill were considered part of literature. Apparently, he was considered to have a good prose style. The problem was that his notions of logic and probability were behind the times. Bertrand Russell tells us he turned from Mill to Milton when it came to writing 'A Free Man's worship'. Personally, I detect a whiff of Pater. However, it was Karl Pearson, Galton, Jevons, Edgeworth and so forth who rendered Mill obsolete. At a later point, it was Thomas Bayes- an eighteenth century clergyman- who gained salience.
but not, generally speaking, Bentham, Marx and Darwin.
I suppose, one might read Lamb or Macaulay for pleasure. The same thing could be said of TE Lawrence, Churchill & Bertrand Russell. The last two won the Nobel prize for literature.
Perhaps the simple answer is that the first three are examples of 'fine writing', whereas the last three are not. This answer has the disadvantage of being largely untrue, at least in my judgement, but it has the advantage of suggesting that by and large people term 'literature' writing which they think is good.
We may speak of a clerical class devoted to 'ars dictaminis'. They may settle upon a literary 'canon'- i.e. a set of 'exemplary' texts worthy of emulation. The rising generation may not share a taste for fustian of this sort. They may welcome a more virile or 'modern' style of writing. But such writing might itself become canonical and, attracting imitators, begin to smell of the lamp.
An obvious objection to this is that if it were entirely true there would be no such thing as 'bad literature'. I may consider Lamb and Macaulay overrated, but that does not necessarily mean that I stop regarding them as literature. You may consider Raymond Chandler 'good of his kind', but not exactly literature. On the other hand, if Macaulay were a really bad writer - if he had no grasp at all of grammar and seemed interested in nothing but white mice - then people might well not call his work literature at all, even bad literature.
I don't suppose it would have been published if that were the case. I suppose one can say something like 'literature is that which has been considered to have literary merit'. The trouble is a bad writer may have a gripping story to tell while a very good writer may be writing on a subject which bores us to tears.
Value-judgements would certainly seem to have a lot to do with what is judged literature and what isn't - not necessarily in the sense that writing has to be 'fine' to be literary, but that it has to be of the kind that is judged fine: it may be an inferior example of a generally valued mode. Nobody would bother to say that a bus ticket was an example of inferior literature, but someone might well say that the poetry of Ernest Dowson was.
At least one of his poems is immortal.
The term 'fine writing', or belles lettres, is in this sense ambiguous: it denotes a sort of writing which is generally highly regarded, while not necessarily committing you to the opinion that a particular specimen of it is 'good'.
A fair point. Much of what was considered 'literature' even a few decades ago, now strikes us as trash. On the other hand, a particular text- e.g. Bram Stoker's 'Dracula'- might rise in public esteem. Indeed, one might consider it 'post-modern' avant la lettre. Marx had gassed on about Capital as 'dead labour' feeding vampire fashion on the proletariat. Van Helsing understands that the feudal Count is nothing but a criminal- of the sort Sherlock Holmes hunts down- and that a stake can be driven through the heart of what is, after all, a minor and easily rectifiable nuisance. Thus, a Liberal Society can deal easily enough with 'unconscionable contracts' and other methods of 'rent extraction'. This is a matter of 'Law & Econ', not literary or some other sort of paranoid theory.
The first professorship of English literature & rhetoric was established in Edinburgh in 1762. Attempts were made to start a magazine- the Edinburgh Review- which came to fruition from 1802 onward. It promoted Whig (Liberal) ideas and was favourable to the Romantic movement. It certainly had great influence. Scottish writers and intellectuals did much to shape the thinking of the Victorians.
By the closing years of the nineteenth century, new ideologies- e.g. the Socialism of Shaw & Wells or the Anglo-Catholic Radicalism of 'Chesterbelloc'- and 'experimental' writing (e.g. that of Joyce) influenced by French or Scandinavian writers, were challenging received notions of what literature should look like or what purpose it should serve.
Russia, which had produced great writers, was economically and politically backward but, after the 1917 revolutions, it might also be a sort of 'tabula rasa' where a wholly new type of Society might come into existence. Thus, for Eagleton, literary theory begins with the Russian 'Formalists'-
who included in their ranks Viktor Shklovsky, Roman Jakobson, Osip Brik, Yury Tynyanov, Boris Eichenbaum and Boris Tomashevsky. The Formalists emerged in Russia in the years before the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, and flourished throughout the 1920s, until they were effectively silenced by Stalinism. A militant, polemical group of critics, they rejected the quasi-mystical symbolist doctrines which had influenced literary criticism before them,
such things represented 'bourgeois idealism'. The theorist had an obligation to denounce 'reactionary' elements in the intelligentsia. Sadly, this meant throwing away the baby along with the bath-water.
and in a practical, scientific spirit shifted attention to the material reality of the literary text itself.
a book is just a book whether it's author is Lenin or the Holy Spirit.
Criticism should dissociate art from mystery and concern itself with how literary texts actually worked:
Though it was the Cheka which was doing the heavy lifting in the new Soviet State.
literature was not pseudo-religion or psychology or sociology but a particular organization of language. It had its own specific laws, structures and devices, which were to be studied in themselves rather than reduced to something else.
This was the vulgar, deterministic, aspect of Marxism.
The literary work was neither a vehicle for ideas, a reflection of social reality nor the incarnation of some transcendental truth: it was a material fact, whose functioning could be analysed rather as one could examine a machine.
The new regime was willing to subsidize writers & artists. They needed to pretend they weren't just engaged in propaganda. They were actually the equivalent of engineers or chemists.
Good writers could emigrate and do well in exile- more particularly if they switched languages. Bad writers had to engage in a trivial type of 'office politics'. Sadly, Stalin was happy to purge 'Old Bolsheviks' and 'right deviationists' and 'left adventurists' and so forth.
It was made of words, not of objects or feelings, and it was a mistake to see it as the expression of an author's mind.
The ideal was to be a mindless drudge employed by the State
Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, Osip Brik once airily remarked, would have been written even if Pushkin had not lived.
A convenient doctrine. Killing good writers won't cause a contraction in the supply of good writing. Books will write themselves.
Formalism was essentially the application of linguistics to the study of literature; and because the linguistics in question were of a formal kind, concerned with the structures of language rather than with what one might actually say, the Formalists passed over the analysis of literary 'content' (where one might always be tempted into psychology or sociology) for the study of literary form.
The same point might be made about 'Formalists'. Kill them. Formalism will produce itself. There is no need to waste food on useless intellectuals.
Far from seeing form as the expression of content, they stood the relationship on its head: content was merely the 'motivation' of form, an occasion or convenience for a particular kind of formal exercise.
This isn't too different from Croce's doctrine. In other words, the thing was still 'bourgeois' and 'idealist'.
Don Quixote is not 'about' the character of that name: the character is just a device for holding together different kinds of narrative technique. Animal Farm for the Formalists would not be an allegory of Stalinism; on the contrary, Stalinism would simply provide a useful opportunity for the construction of an allegory. It was this perverse insistence which won for the Formalists their derogatory name from their antagonists; and though they did not deny that art had a relation to social reality - indeed some of them were closely associated with the Bolsheviks - they provocatively claimed that this relation was not the critic's business.
As Stalin strengthened his hold on the party, even mathematicians or biologists could get 'purged' for the sin of bourgeois idealism. Stalin was aware that 'internal exile' (i.e. immersion in abstract research) would be attractive to many. Fortunately, everybody was happy to denounce everybody else and thus 'internal exile' could very quickly turn into a one way trip to the Gulag.
The Formalists started out by seeing the literary work as a more or less arbitrary assemblage of 'devices', and only later came to see these devices as interrelated elements or 'functions' within a total textual system. 'Devices' included sound, imagery, rhythm, syntax, metre, rhyme, narrative techniques, in fact the whole stock of formal literary elements;
This is like Indian aesthetic theory. But, as Tagore pointed out (in connection with 'Kadambari') it militated for unreadability.
and what all of these elements had in common was their 'estranging' or 'defamiliarizing' effect.
or being as boring as fuck.
...In the routines of everyday speech, our perceptions of and responses to reality become stale, blunted, or, as the Formalists would say, 'automatized'.
Only if everybody sticks to talking about the weather- not the fact that your wife is fucking the postman.
Literature, by forcing us into a dramatic awareness of language, refreshes these habitual responses and renders objects more 'perceptible'.
Only if you take the trouble to read it.
By having to grapple with language in a more strenuous, self-conscious way than usual, the world which that language contains is vividly renewed. The poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins
appeals to Anglo-Catholics or those with a marked spiritual bent. One may not understand the theology behind it, but we get that the dude was big on religion.
might provide a particularly graphic example of this. Literary discourse estranges or alienates ordinary speech, but in doing so, paradoxically, brings us into a fuller, more intimate possession of experience.
Nonsense! What we apprehend is something vague and vicarious. Still, it may chime with something in our inner lives. After reading Hopkins, a guy might decide to switch from Chartered Accountancy to running a second-hand bookshop or migrating to Australia to marry a kangaroo.
Most of the time we breathe in air without being conscious of it: like language, it is the very medium in which we move. But if the air is suddenly thickened or infected we
either adjust or run the fuck away.
are forced to attend to our breathing with new vigilance, and the effect of this may be a heightened experience of our bodily life.
especially if we run away to Australia and find our new bride is a kangaroo.
We read a scribbled note from a friend without paying much attention to its narrative structure; but if a story breaks off and begins again, switches constantly from one narrative level to another and delays its climax to keep us in suspense, we become freshly conscious of how it is constructed at the same time as our engagement with it may be intensified.
Or we get bored and have a wank. Literature has to compete with other leisure activities.
The story, as the Formalists would argue, uses 'impeding' or 'retarding' devices to hold our attention; and in literary language, these devices are 'laid bare'. It was this which moved Viktor Shklovsky to remark mischievously of Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, a novel which impedes its own story-line so much that it hardly gets off the ground, that it was 'the most typical novel in world literature'.
It really wasn't. Still, it was remarkably frank and does have some good bits.
Eagleton only mentions the Formalists to reject their point of view. After all, Eagleton was a Marxist- albeit of an English, 'Analytical', sort.
Another problem with the 'estrangement' case is that there is no kind of writing which cannot, given sufficient ingenuity, be read as estranging. Consider a prosaic, quite unambiguous statement like the one sometimes seen in the London Underground system: 'Dogs must be carried on the escalator.' This is not perhaps quite as unambiguous as it seems at first sight: does it mean that you must carry a dog on the escalator?
No. Had Frank Ramsey lived, he would have taken a Pragmatic turn and killed of 'Analytical' philosophy of this jejune sort.
Are you likely to be banned from the escalator unless you can find some stray mongrel to clutch in your arms on the way up? Many apparently straightforward notices contain such ambiguities: 'Refuse to be put in this basket,' for instance, or the British road-sign 'Way Out' as read by a Californian. But even leaving such troubling ambiguities aside, it is surely obvious that the underground notice could be read as literature. One could let oneself be arrested by the abrupt, minatory staccato of the first ponderous monosyllables; find one's mind drifting, by the time it had reached the rich allusiveness of'carried', to suggestive resonances of helping lame dogs through life; and perhaps even detect in the very lilt and inflection of the word 'escalator' a miming of the rolling, up-and-down motion of the thing itself. This may wellibe a fruitless sort of pursuit, but it is not significantly more fruitless than claiming to hear the cut and thrust of the rapiers in some poetic description of a duel, and it at least has the advantage of suggesting that 'literature' may be at least as much a question of what people do to writing as of what writing does to them.
Eagleton wrote well. This was unpardonable in a Professor of Literature. It is obvious that the catachresis of the future which is anterior to its own scotimisation by the catachresis of the peristalsis of the sodomized Subaltern in Singur is imbricated in the catachresis of that thing Spivak mentioned in her next book.
When the poet tells us that his love is like a red rose, we know by the very fact that he puts this statement in metre that we are not supposed to ask whether he actually had a lover who for some bizarre reason seemed to him to resemble a rose. He is telling us something about women and love in general. Literature, then, we might say, is 'non-pragmatic' discourse:
yet many a lover has quoted this line of Burns when parting from his beloved. He will come back to her even if all the seas run dry and he has to walk ten thousand miles.
unlike biology textbooks and notes to the milkman it serves no immediate practical purpose, but is to be taken as referring to a general state of affairs.
Burns's poetry serves a practical purpose. Many a bonny bairn was born thanks to a judicious quotation from the Scottish poet.
Sometimes, though not always, it may employ peculiar language as though to make this fact obvious - to signal that what is at stake is a way of talking about a woman, rather than any particular real-life woman. This focusing on the way of talking, rather than on the reality of what is talked about, is sometimes taken to indicate that we mean by literature a kind of self-referential language, a language which talks about itself.
Burns doesn't do that. His poems are a spontaneous 'sphota' or explosion of meaning. I imagine that it is Scotland itself which was the red rose for which its exiles- earning a living under alien skies- pined for and pinned their hopes on returning to.
Eagleton, though appearing a common sense 'positivist', wishes to lead the empirically minded English reader, by gentle steps, to an ideological perspective.
The largely concealed structure of values which informs and underlies our factual statements is part of what is meant by 'ideology'.
The word 'concealed' suggests deliberation- perhaps even a conspiracy. It would be truer to say that 'the structure of values' is taken for granted though, in ordinary conversation, we often do make our values explicit.
By 'ideology' I mean, roughly, the ways in which what we say and believe connects with the power-structure and power-relations of the society we live in.
I suppose we do talk differently if appearing before a Judge or Tribunal of some sort. The same may be true when we converse with our boss or an important client. But, speaking generally, this is independent of our 'ideology'. Few British Marxists went around greeting each other as 'Comrade'.
It follows from such a rough definition of ideology that not all of our underlying judgements and categories can usefully be said to be ideological. It is deeply ingrained in us to imagine ourselves moving forwards into the future (at least one other society sees itself as moving backwards into it),
which one?
but though this way of seeing may connect significantly with the power-structure of our society, it need not always and everywhere do so. I do not mean by 'ideology' simply the deeply entrenched, often unconscious beliefs which people hold; I mean more particularly those modes of feeling, valuing, perceiving and believing which have some kind of relation to the maintenance and reproduction of social power.
The fact that a lot of people like chocolate makes Cadbury brothers rich. I believe they used their wealth for philanthropy and to promote the Pacifist ideals of their Quaker faith. But does eating sweets really 'maintain or reproduce' social power?
The fact that such beliefs are by no means merely private quirks may be illustrated by a literary example. In his famous study Practical Criticism (1929), the Cambridge critic I. A. Richards sought to demonstrate just how whimsical and subjective literary value-judgements could actually be by giving his undergraduates
these were kids who had swotted hard and written what was expected of them so as to get into University. Some might themselves become teachers or College Professors. It was important that they internalize the prejudices of their masters so as to rise in that line of work.
a set of poems, withholding from them the titles and authors' names, and asking them to evaluate them. The resulting judgements, notoriously, were highly variable: time-honoured poets were marked down and obscure authors celebrated.
This points to a deficiency in the way Eng Lit was taught. Those who train themselves to write by imitating great writers of the past are more likely to be able to identify their lesser works.
To my mind, however, much the most interesting aspect of this project, and one apparently quite invisible to Richards himself, is just how tight a consensus of unconscious valuations underlies these particular differences of opinion.
This isn't interesting at all. Everyone was aware of the deficiencies of School curriculums and the incentive students had to echo conventional wisdom rather than rely upon their own critical faculties.
Reading Richards' undergraduates' accounts of literary works, one is struck by the habits of perception and interpretation which they spontaneously share - what they expect literature to be, what assumptions they bring to a poem and what fulfilments they anticipate they will derive from it.
Swotting for exams will do that to you. It is a mistake to read English at University.
None of this is really surprising: for all the participants in this experiment were, presumably, young, white, upper- or upper-middle-class, privately educated English people of the 1920s, and how they responded to a poem depended on a good deal more than purely 'literary' factors.
Indeed. I suppose England was a far more 'deferential' and strait-laced Society at that time. Two years before Eagleton's book came out Colin MacCabe- who had studied at the ENS in Paris- was denied tenure because he was a 'Structuralist'. Apparently, this was some particular evil- i.e. Continental- type of Marxism. Students exposed to such foreign filth might become addicted to masturbation rather than good old fashioned sodomy.
Their critical responses were deeply entwined with their broader prejudices and beliefs. This is not a matter of blame: there is no critical response which is not so entwined, and thus no such thing as a 'pure' literary critical judgement or interpretation. If anybody is to be blamed it is I. A. Richards himself, who as a young, white, upper-middle-class male Cambridge don
Parents paid a lot of money to send their kids to Cambridge in order that they receive instruction from erudite people of the ruling class. By contrast, few were willing to send them to a Nigerian brothel so as to imbibe the mores of poor, lower class, prostitutes.
was unable to objectify a context of interests which he himself largely shared, and was thus unable to recognize fully that local, 'subjective' differences of evaluation work within a particular, socially structured way of perceiving the world.
I think he understood that upper class Englishmen saw the world differently from Nigerian prostitutes.
If it will not do to see literature as an 'objective', descriptive category,
No harm in doing so. For any given purpose the 'intension' can be given a good enough 'extension'. We might say a book which wins a prestigious prize is 'Literature' even if we don't like it whereas books which sell very well, which we enjoy, are considered entertainment rather than 'art'.
neither will it do to say that literature is just what people whimsically choose to call literature. For there is nothing at all whimsical about such kinds of value-judgement: they have their roots in deeper structures of belief which are as apparently unshakeable as the Empire State building.
Not really. Literature doesn't greatly matter. The 'deeper structures of belief' are likely to be Darwinian- i.e. they have survival value.
What we have uncovered so far, then, is not only that literature does not exist in the sense that insects do,
Yet, it does exist in the same way that bee-hives or ant-hills exist.
and that the value-judgements by which it is constituted
It isn't constituted by value-judgments though, no doubt, some may value particular works which others don't like at all.
are historically variable, but that these value-judgements themselves have a close relation to social ideologies.
No. Hitler liked King Kong & Tarzan. Stalin enjoyed Westerns. Ideology has little to do with what people like though, no doubt, they may pretend to like politically correct boring shite.
They refer in the end not simply to private taste, but to the assumptions by which certain social groups exercise and maintain power over others.
This is nonsense. The powerful have long used circuses or other escapist fare to keep the masses entertained. But, such entertainment is 'recreation'. It helps maintain productivity.
If this seems a far-fetched assertion, a matter of private prejudice, we may test it out by an account of the rise of 'literature' in England.
This was linked to an expanding market. Political parties found that hiring good writers could increase their power and influence.
In eighteenth-century England, the concept of literature was not confined as it sometimes is today to 'creative' or 'imaginative' writing. It meant the whole body of valued writing in society: philosophy, history, essays and letters as well as poems.
This has always been the case. Bertrand Russell & Winston Churchill won the Nobel prize for literature.
What made a text 'literary' was not whether it was fictional
this has never mattered.
— the eighteenth century was in grave doubt about whether the new upstart form of the novel was literature at all — but whether it conformed to certain standards of 'polite letters'.
Thus, Bunyan's Pilgrim Progress- whose greatness was acknowledged by Swift and Johnson- was not part of 'polite letters'. A gentleman knew some Latin and a little Greek. The blacksmith or tenant farmer did not. Still, English could acquire an Augustan polish and precision which a rising middle class could relish. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, Professors like Hutcheson were starting to lecture in English rather than Latin. In the battle between the 'ancients' and the 'moderns', the tide was shifting towards the moderns.
The criteria of what counted as literature, in other words, were frankly ideological:
Sociological. The Earl of Rochester was part of literature. Bunyan, a tinker by profession, wasn't.
writing which embodied the values and 'tastes' of a particular social class qualified as literature,
Rochester's tastes were rather outré, but he was a belted Earl. The fact is, we sometimes enjoy reading works which embody values very different from our own.
whereas a street ballad, a popular romance and perhaps even the drama did not. At this historical point, then, the 'value-ladenness' of the concept of literature was reasonably self-evident.
The opposite was the case. 'Values' didn't matter. The question was whether the author was a Classicist or, better yet, belonged to the upper class.
Still, if you were doing an A level in Eng Lit, you would have been well advised to parrot Eagleton's views.
In the eighteenth century, however, literature did more than 'embody' certain social values: it was a vital instrument for their deeper entrenchment and wider dissemination.
That was a function of rapid economic growth as England made itself the Mistress of the Seas.
Eighteenth-century England had emerged, battered
Not really. What England went through was nothing compared to what Germany experienced during the wars of religion.
but intact, from a bloody civil war in the previous century which had set the social classes at each other's throats;
Nonsense! It was more a case of brother against brother.
and in the drive to reconsolidate a shaken social order,
The 'Glorious Revolution' had undergirded it. Party politics had replaced the sword of the Cavalier and the musket of the Roundhead.
the neo-classical notions of Reason, Nature, order and propriety, epitomized in art, were key concepts.
As supposed to notions of Craziness and masturbating in the streets.
With the need to incorporate the increasingly powerful but spiritually rather raw
they became less intensely theological.
middle classes into unity with the ruling aristocracy,
The country squire was more important particularly when the Tories were in power. The Whig aristocracy did have a stable of writers- Addison, Dennis, Thickell- and it is fair to say, they set the tone in the early eighteenth century.
to diffuse polite social manners, habits of 'correct' taste and common cultural standards, literature gained a new importance.
Because affluence was rising. Circulating libraries began to appear from about 1725. Literacy amongst men was about 58 percent by 1720. The figure for women was about half that.
It included a whole set of ideological institutions: periodicals, coffee houses, social and aesthetic treatises, sermons, classical translations, guidebooks to manners and morals. Literature was not a matter of 'felt experience', 'personal response' or 'imaginative uniqueness':
In France, it would become so. Literature did have a much bigger ideological and political role in that country precisely because, politically, it was much behind England.
such terms, indissociable for us today from the whole idea of the 'literary',
i.e. Collidge educated chumps gassing on about their childhoods
would not have counted for much with Henry Fielding.
Nor with Stephen King or Robert Ludlum.
It was, in fact, only with what we now call the 'Romantic period' that our own definitions of literature began to develop.
I suppose we borrowed it from the Germans. Young Britishers could make their fortunes in distant parts of the world while young Germans had to spend a lot of time in University after which they might get a job as a tutor to the son of a wealthy merchant. They would then fall in love with his daughter who, however, would marry for money. The German would then write a long introspective novel or 'bildungsroman' or something of that sort.
The modern sense of the word 'literature' only really gets under way in the nineteenth century,
it was being taught in Scotland from the 1760s.
Literature in this sense of the word is an historically recent phenomenon: it was invented sometime around the turn of the eighteenth century, and would have been thought extremely strange by Chaucer or even Pope.
Pope earned good money from his works. Literature had become a paying profession by the end of the seventeenth century.
What happened first was a narrowing of the category of literature to so-called 'creative' or 'imaginative' work. The final decades of the eighteenth century witness a new division and demarcation of discourses, a radical reorganizing of what we might call the 'discursive formation' of English society. 'Poetry' comes to mean a good deal more than verse: by the time of Shelley's Defence of Poetry (1821), it signifies a concept of human creativity which is radically at odds with the utilitarian ideology of early industrial capitalist England.
The Utilitarian ideology gained ascendency in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.
Of course a distinction between 'factual' and 'imaginative' writing had long been recognized: the word 'poetry' or 'poesy' had traditionally singled out fiction, and Philip Sidney had entered an eloquent plea for it in his Apology for Poetry. But by the time of the Romantic period, literature was becoming virtually synonymous with the 'imaginative': to write about what did not exist was somehow more soul-stirring and valuable than to pen an account of Birmingham or the circulation of the blood.
What was even better was to do careful research so as to add verisimilitude. That way the reader feels he is getting more value for his money.
The word 'imaginative' contains an ambiguity suggestive of this attitude: it has a resonance of the descriptive term 'imaginary', meaning 'literally untrue', but is also of course an evaluative term, meaning 'visionary' or 'inventive'. Since we ourselves are post-Romantics, in the sense of being products of that epoch rather than confidently posterior to it, it is hard for us to grasp just what a curious historically particular idea this is.
Nonsense! Shakespeare is plenty imaginative. Still, if you are a Professor of a useless subject, I suppose you have to pretend that farting, as we understand it today, was invented in 1932 by Heidegger. This caused Hitler to come to power.
It would certainly have seemed so to most of the English writers whose 'imaginative vision' we now reverently elevate above the merely 'prosaic' discourse of those who can find nothing more dramatic to write about than the Black Death or the Warsaw ghetto. Indeed it is in the Romantic period that the descriptive term 'prosaic' begins to acquire its negative sense of prosy, dull, uninspiring.
Apparently, this happened around 1812. Jane Austen uses the word 'prosy' in 1814.
If what does not exist is felt to be more attractive than what does, if poetry or the imagination is privileged over prose or 'hard fact', then it is a reasonable assumption that this says something significant about the kinds of society in which the Romantics lived.
It was an exciting period. Enlightenment might be 'evolutionary'. This was a revolutionary age. How would it end? Would it end? The extension of the franchise did give a new importance to what was being read. Elite paideia felt under threat from a rising tide of meretricious literature designed to appeal to the base passions of the masses. This attitude survived into the Twentieth century in writers like Beerbohm & Waugh who considered the Board school a danger to the Social order. Perhaps Eagleton himself, in youth, had experienced prejudice against those who went to Grammar rather than Public school. Thankfully, Mrs. Thatcher killed off that aspect of the English class system.
Eagleton identifies Romanticism with Revolution and socially progressive forces. This was certainly a popular view on the English Left. However, there was a backward looking, rather reactionary, aspect to Romanticism. It distrusted the new economic forces which were shaking up Society and displacing the landed aristocracy.
The historical period in question is one of revolution: in America and France the old colonialist or feudalist regimes are overthrown by middle class insurrection,
Why? Money. The middle class wanted to get rich. They might then marry into the aristocracy. But even the nobility preferred the security of Consols or Debentures to court intrigue and the chance to gain an office of profit from the Crown.
while England achieves its point of economic 'take-off', arguably on the back of the enormous profits it has reaped from the eighteenth-century slave trade and its imperial control of the seas, to become the world's first industrial capitalist nation.
This is nonsense. Industrialization was about raising general purpose and total factor productivity in the home islands. The Barbary Coast had big slave markets. It didn't industrialize.
But the visionary hopes and dynamic energies released by these revolutions,
It takes a lot of energy to overthrow the existing government. What happens after that is a release of productive forces.
energies with which Romantic writing is alive,
This is pure magical thinking. There is nice nice energy and writers I like have it. But there is also nasty nasty energy which writers I don't like possess in abundance.
enter into potentially tragic contradiction with the harsh realities of the new bourgeois regimes.
Nice nice Energy thought bourgeois regime would give it sweeties. Sadly, the bourgeoisie are very nasty. They sodomized Romanticism and made fun of its puny genitals. Romanticism cried and cried.
In England, a crassly philistine Utilitarianism is rapidly becoming the dominant ideology of the industrial middle class,
Nonsense! They tended to be Evangelical. Renting a pew costs money. It may get you into Heaven but it yields no utility here and now.
fetishizing fact,
as opposed to what? Sending facts to bed without any supper till they turn into a nice flying unicorn?
reducing human relations to market exchanges
Did you know the Bourgeois baby charges money for cuddles?
and dismissing art as unprofitable ornamentation.
Ornamentation adds value. People think you spent more than you actually did. Sadly, functionalism tends to triumph because what matters is utility- i.e. spending less money while getting more benefit.
The callous disciplines of early industrial capitalism uproot whole communities,
i.e. people who weren't content to stay put and starve to death
convert human life into wage-slavery,
Eagleton received a salary not a wage. Thus, he wasn't a slave- unlike the toiling masses whom Mrs. Thatcher had somehow fooled into voting Tory.
enforce an alienating labour-process on the newly formed working class and understand nothing which cannot be transformed into a commodity on the open market.
That's why they didn't understand that they needed to wipe their bums after taking a dump. Since they couldn't sell their faeces on open markets, they didn't bother with it at all.
As the working class responds with militant protest to this oppression, and as troubling memories of revolution across the Channel still haunt their rulers, the English state reacts
by expanding 'outdoor relief' (Speenhamland system) and other palliative measures. But the Napoleonic wars had been very expensive. Was the accumulated debt manageable? Strangely, it turned out to be a blessing rather than a curse. Consols represent a risk-less asset and thus permit portfolio diversification and more robust or anti-fragile financial markets.
with a brutal political repressiveness which converts England, during part of the Romantic period, into what is in effect a police state.
There was no national police force. It is a different matter that troops might be used to crush popular demonstrations.
In the face of such forces, the privilege accorded by the Romantics to the 'creative imagination'
which scientists and mathematicians need more than anyone. But entrepreneurs and engineers too need to imagine how things could be.
can be seen as considerably more than idle escapism.
But neglecting actual politics so as to devote yourself to increasingly paranoid polemics is itself a type of escapism. Eagleton viewed the Eighties, which most people remember as quite a good period for English literature, as 'a pivotal decade where the structure of sensibility changed, leading to a decline in the political importance of culture. He argued that culture was increasingly seen as a product rather than a site for political impact.' I think, rising affluence and improving life-chances meant that more and more people felt they enjoyed a wider culture and more cosmopolitan civilization than their parents had been able to afford. I think the great pop-stars of the Sixties contributed to this. English insularity was giving way to an appreciation of what other countries and cultures had achieved. Moreover, if you owned your own house and also owned shares traded on the Stock Exchange, how were you inferior to the upper class? True, the had more money- but this was merely a difference of quantity not quality.
On the contrary, 'literature' now appears as one of the few enclaves in which the creative values expunged from the face of English society by industrial capitalism can be celebrated and affirmed.
There speaks the voice of paranoia. Literary theory is the tin-foil hat we all must wear. Otherwise, we will be brainwashed into voting Tory.
'Imaginative creation' can be offered as an image of non-alienated labour;
There is no such thing as alienated labour. There may be 'rent extraction' but the solution is to raise elasticity of supply. This just means raising general purpose productivity.
the intuitive, transcendental scope of the poetic mind can provide a living criticism of those rationalist or empiricist ideologies enslaved to 'fact'.
So can Voodoo. Put on your tin-foil hat and stick pins in a wax doll of Mrs. Thatcher.
The literary work itself comes to be seen as a mysterious organic unity,
A guy writes a book. He is a biological organism and what he has written has the unity he endowed it with. What is 'mysterious' about this?
in contrast to the fragmented individualism of the capitalist marketplace:
which is where books are sold.
it is 'spontaneous' rather than rationally calculated, creative rather than mechanical.
Sadly, the reverse is more often the case. Literature hasn't seen any great innovations. The STEM subjects have. Creativity is scarce. The most creative invent new things. Stupid people are welcome to tell stories.
The word 'poetry', then, no longer refers simply to a technical mode of writing: it has deep social, political and philosophical implications,
No. It doesn't matter very much. People read less and less of it from decade to decade.
and at the sound of it the ruling class might quite literally reach for its gun.
Not in a Capitalist Democracy. The market for the thing is small and it has not great political influence.
Literature has become a whole alternative ideology, and the 'imagination' itself, as with Blake and Shelley, becomes a political force.
Which achieves nothing. Economics matters. That's what provided the impetus for the Great Reform Bill, the abolition of the Corn Law, the inauguration of Free Trade, etc. etc. This is the orthodox Marxist view.
Its task is to transform society in the name of those energies and values which art embodies.
If so, it failed everywhere and at all times. I suppose, if Eagleton taught embroidery, he would say the task of the embroiderer is to overthrow Capitalism and establish a Soviet State.
Most of the major Romantic poets were themselves political activists,
unless they lived long enough to reverse their views
perceiving continuity rather than conflict between their literary and social commitments. Yet we can already begin to detect within this literary radicalism another, and to us more familiar, emphasis: a stress upon the sovereignty and autonomy of the imagination,
and the super-powers Voodoo can endow you with
its splendid remoteness from the merely prosaic matters of feeding one's children or struggling for political justice.
Even more splendid is the remoteness of the padded cell.
If the 'transcendental' nature of the imagination offered a challenge to an anaemic rationalism, it could also offer the writer a comfortingly absolute alternative to history itself.
Opium worked better.
Indeed such a detachment from history reflected the Romantic writer's actual situation. Art was becoming a commodity like anything else,
Previously, it had been a pussy cat. Not any old tabby. It was a very special pussy cat with Voodoo super-powers.
and the Romantic artist little more than a minor commodity producer; for all his rhetorical claim to be 'representative' of humankind, to speak with the voice of the people and utter eternal verities, he existed more and more on the margins of a society which was not inclined to pay high wages to prophets.
Which is why they might have to settle for a Professorship.
The finely passionate idealism of the Romantics, then, was also idealist in a more philosophical sense of the word. Deprived of any proper place within the social movements which might actually have transformed industrial capitalism into a just society,
There were no such 'social movements'. Justice, as David Hume observed, is merely a matter of utility. The trade-off facing rapidly urbanizing and industralizing Societies is between higher wages and lower Investment in the short run and lower standards of living fore everybody in the medium to long-term. One safety valve Britain possessed was emigration. Geographic mobility often went hand in hand with occupational and social mobility.
the writer was increasingly driven back into the solitariness of his own creative mind. The vision of a just society was often enough inverted into an impotent nostalgia for the old 'organic' England which had passed away. It was not until the time of William Morris, who in the late nineteenth century harnessed this Romantic humanism to the cause of the working-class movement, that the gap between poetic vision and political practice was significantly narrowed.
By then the upper working class had got the vote. But they might vote Tory. A further expansion of the suffrage was needed. It wasn't till after the Great War that Labour became a serious contender for power. As for 'Romantic humanism', the thing was all very well, but it was King Coal which paid the bills for the leaders of the proletariat.
It is no accident that the period we are discussing sees the rise of modern 'aesthetics', or the philosophy of art. It is mainly from this era, in the work of Kant, Hegel, Schiller, Coleridge and others, that we inherit our contemporary ideas of the 'symbol' and 'aesthetic experience', of 'aesthetic harmony' and the unique nature of the artefact.
Eagleton is speaking of himself. Most of his countrymen inherited nothing from German pedants. In any case, Tesauro & Bellori had developed an aesthetic theory by the mid seventeenth century. Bellori was a direct influence on Wincklemann. My memory is that Dryden introduced his ideas into England.
Previously men and women had written poems, staged plays or painted pictures for a variety of purposes, while others had read, watched or viewed them in a variety of ways. Now these concrete, historically variable practices were being subsumed into some special, mysterious faculty known as the 'aesthetic', and a new breed of aestheticians sought to lay bare its inmost structures.
For the most part, they repeated old ideas. Aesthetics simply isn't a high IQ field.
It was not that such questions had not been raised before, but now they began to assume a new significance.
Only to people of no significance whatsoever.
The assumption that there was an unchanging object known as 'art', or an isolatable experience called 'beauty' or the 'aesthetic', was largely
true. There are ancient Greek statues which we recognize as 'art' and as 'beautiful'.
a product of the very alienation of art from social life which we have already touched on.
If you have to teach nonsense to undergraduates, I guess you soon become as alienated as fuck.
If literature had ceased to have any obvious function
It wasn't obvious to Eagleton that the function of a book is to be read- unless it is boring as shit.
— if the writer was no longer a traditional figure in the pay of the court, the church or an aristocratic patron - then it was possible to turn this fact to literature's advantage.
Good writers turned it to their own financial advantage. J.K Rowling isn't exactly short of a bob or two.
The whole point of 'creative' writing was that it was gloriously useless, an 'end in itself loftily removed from any sordid social purpose.
This may be true of my novels. Since they are boring and stupid, they serve no social purpose. Rowling's books are entertaining.
Having lost his patron, the writer discovered a substitute in the poetic.
Which is like losing your job and discovering a substitute in crystal meth.
It is, in fact, somewhat improbable that the Iliad was art to the ancient Greeks in the same sense that a cathedral was an artefact for the Middle Ages or Andy Warhol's work is art for us;
If it hadn't been art it wouldn't have been preserved. People don't knock down cathedrals nor do the wipe their bums on pictures which can be sold for millions of dollars.
but the effect of aesthetics was to suppress these historical differences.
No. Its effect was to bore the pants off those exposed to it. I like looking at beautiful women. I don't like listening to a senile savant gas on about the philosophy of pulchritude.
Art was extricated from the material practices, social relations and ideological meanings in which it is always caught up, and raised to the status of a solitary fetish.
masturbating while wearing Mummy's high heels.
At the centre of aesthetic theory at the turn of the eighteenth century is the semi-mystical doctrine of the symbol.
Baumgarten published Aesthetica in 1750. Is there some objective way of distinguishing good from bad taste?
For Romanticism, indeed, the symbol becomes the panacea for all problems. Within it, a whole set of conflicts which were felt to be insoluble in ordinary life — between subject and object, the universal and the particular, the sensuous and the conceptual, material and spiritual, order and spontaneity — could be magically resolved.
Because that's how magic works except it doesn't at all.
It is not surprising that such conflicts were sorely felt in this period. Objects in a society which could see them as no more than commodities appeared lifeless and inert, divorced from the human subjects who produced or used them.
When Eagleton drove his car, half the folk at the car-factory were in the back-seat.
The concrete and the universal seemed to have drifted apart: an aridly rationalist philosophy ignored the sensuous qualities of particular things, while a short-sighted empiricism (the 'official' philosophy of the English middle class, then as now)
Why sneer at the English middle class? It is decent enough even if not all its members have a PhD in Gramscian Grammatology.
was unable to peer beyond particular bits and pieces of the world to any total picture which they might compose.
e.g. the totally stupid picture painted by Karl Marx.
The dynamic, spontaneous energies of social progress were to be fostered, but curbed of their potentially anarchic force by a restraining social order.
Social order was very mean. It also restrained energetic and spontaneous jizzing by wankers. Why must the Bourgeoisie be such kill-joys?
The symbol fused together
loose
motion and stillness, turbulent content and organic form, mind and world.
We get it. Crazy losers went in for this sort of shite. But politics is about gaining power and money. If all you can do is talk paranoid bollocks, you'd better just settle for a teaching gig.
If one were asked to provide a single explanation for the growth of English studies in the later nineteenth century, one could do worse than reply: 'the failure of religion'.
Nonsense! More people studied English because there was a vast expansion in jobs teaching English. Why? More and more jobs required a School Certificate. From 1876, competitive exams were introduced for the lower branch of the Civil Service. This meant having to write essays on 'Was Hamlet really mad or only pretending?'.
Religion had high income elasticity of demand for most British people during the Nineteenth century. There were tangible benefits from being known as a devout Church-goer or pew renter.
By the mid-Victorian period, this traditionally reliable, immensely powerful ideological form was in deep trouble.
It had been in greater trouble at the time of the French Revolution.
It was no longer winning the hearts and minds of the masses,
There is some evidence that church attendance peaked around 1880. It appears that, whatever was happening to hearts and minds, wallets were not being opened to the same extent.
and under the twin impacts of scientific discovery and social change its previous unquestioned dominance was in danger of evaporating. This was particularly worrying for the Victorian ruling class, because religion is for all kinds of reasons an extremely effective form of ideological control.
Anti-Clericalism can be a very attractive ideology. One might say that the early Victorian period did witness some uneasiness regarding the spread of literacy. Might it contribute to Chartism? However, by the second half of the century, the evident advantage of a literate workforce outweighed other considerations. Moreover, it was becoming obvious that one could rely on migrants to supply unskilled labour.
Like all successful ideologies, it works
by creating incentives and penalties- e.g. jobs for the boys or beatings for rivals.
much less by explicit concepts or formulated doctrines than by image, symbol, habit, ritual and mythology.
Mrs Thatcher was ideological. But she prevailed by putting more money in the pockets of voters. Labour was stuck with a Prices and Incomes Policy resented by 'Dagenham Man'.
It is affective and experiential, entwining itself with the deepest unconscious roots of the human subject;
sadly money is more important than 'unconscious roots'.
and any social ideology which is unable to engage with such deepseated a-rational fears and needs, as T. S. Eliot knew,
T.S Eliot wasn't a poet. He was chief propagandist for Mussolini.
is unlikely to survive very long. Religion, moreover, is capable of operating at every social level: if there is a doctrinal inflection of it for the intellectual elite, there is also a pietistic brand of it for the masses. It provides an excellent social 'cement', encompassing pious peasant, enlightened middle-class liberal and theological intellectual in a single organization.
Eagleton was born Catholic. In England there was a time when it was viewed as a sinister religion. It was believed that people would vote as their priest instructed them to. Even in France and Spain, anti-clericalism was as powerful, or more so, than the Church.
Its ideological power lies in its capacity to 'materialize' beliefs as practices: religion is the sharing of the chalice and the blessing of the harvest, not just abstract argument about consubstantiation or hyperdulia.
But neither ritual nor dogma affect one's economic interests and ideology is closely linked to economic outcomes. One would scarcely expect the Catholic mill owner to vote for the same candidate as the Catholic Trade Unionist.
Its ultimate truths, like those mediated by the literary symbol, are conveniently closed to rational demonstration, and thus absolute in their claims.
Regarding the life to come. In this life, economics predominates.
Finally religion, at least in its Victorian forms, is a pacifying influence, fostering meekness, self-sacrifice and the contemplative inner life.
Or Abolitionism and concern for the poor- the so called 'Social Gospel'.
It is no wonder that the Victorian ruling class looked on the threatened dissolution of this ideological discourse with something less than equanimity. Fortunately, however, another, remarkably similar discourse lay to hand: English literature
If only the Tzar had insisted his subjects get an A level in Eng Lit, his descendants would still rule Russia.
. George Gordon, early Professor of English Literature at Oxford, commented in his inaugural lecture
in 1922. I suppose he was worried that the Labour party would turn Bolshevik and chop off the head of the King Emperor.
that 'England is sick, and . . . English literature must save it. The Churches (as I understand) having failed, and social remedies being slow, English literature has now a triple function: still, I suppose, to delight and instruct us, but also, and above all, to save our souls and heal the State.' Gordon's words were
silly. But then his subject was silly.
spoken in our own century, but they find a resonance everywhere in Victorian England.
No. Victorian England thought itself the cat's whiskers. 900,000 soldiers died in the Great War. Only 21,000 died in the Crimean War- the Victorian period's worst war.
It is a striking thought that had it not been for this dramatic crisis in mid-nineteenth-century ideology,
there was no crisis. The country just kept getting safer and richer
we might not today have such a plentiful supply of Jane Austen casebooks and bluffer's guides to Pound.
More schools meant the need for more graduates able to teach Eng Lit or Chemistry or whatever. Blame Forster's 1870 Education Act and the slogan 'we must educate our masters' (i.e. the newly enfranchised need to be educated enough to make sensible voting choices).
As religion progressively ceases to provide the social 'cement', affective values and basic mythologies by which a socially turbulent class-society can be welded together, 'English' is constructed as a subject to carry this ideological burden from the Victorian period onwards.
One might say journalism and the circulating library welded the country together. But, both were overtaken in the Twentieth Century by Radio, TV and the Cinema.
The key figure here is Matthew Arnold,
who spent 35 years as a State inspector of schools. He changed nothing. His brother, on the other hand introduced 'halkabandi' to the Punjab. That's what caused Tariq Ali.
always preternaturally sensitive to the needs of his social class,
his profession
and engagingly candid about being so. The urgent social need, as Arnold recognizes, is to 'Hellenize' or cultivate the philistine middle class,
through sodomy? No. He was above that sort of thing.
who have proved unable to underpin their political and economic power with a suitably rich and subtle ideology.
involving sodomy? That's what the ancient Greeks got up to- right?
This can be done by transfusing into them something of the traditional style of the aristocracy, who as Arnold shrewdly perceives are ceasing to be the dominant class in England, but who have something of the ideological wherewithal to lend a hand to their middle-class masters.
There was a great expansion of 'Public' school education modelled on his father's Rugby College. By the end of the century, about 60 new Public schools had been added to the nine ancient foundations.
State established schools, by linking the middle class
the working class. The middle class made something of a fetish out of fee-paying schools even if the majority of them fitted their sons only for commercial employment. Waugh's Apthorpe (from the 'Sword of Honour' trilogy) went to a passable Prep school but not a respectable Public school. Thus, he is the predestined 'pharmakos' (sacrificial victim) of 'Men at arms'. It is ironic that Guy Crouchback- a Catholic aristocrat, descended from Crusaders- only manages to kill one person ( in the chapter 'Apthorpe Immolatus') in the course of his war against the Twentieth Century.
to 'the best culture of their nation', will confer on them 'a greatness and a noble spirit, which the tone of these classes is not of itself at present adequate to impart'.
Like his Dad, Matt was in the education racket. He wrote-
It is of itself a serious calamity for a nation that its tone of feeling and grandeur of spirit should be lowered or dulled. But the calamity appears far more serious still when we consider that the middle classes, remaining as they are now, with their narrow, harsh, unintelligent, and unattractive spirit and culture, will almost certainly fail to mould or assimilate the masses below them, whose sympathies are at the present moment actually wider and more liberal than theirs.
What was actually happening was decreased mobility within the manufacturing classes. An expanded market meant more economies of scope and scale and thus higher barriers to entry. It was no longer the case that a man might rise from being a labourer to becoming an iron-master. There were exceptions to this rule, Marshallian industrial districts gave scope for enterprising people to specialize in a component and supply the whole industry. At the same time, there was an increase the proportion of migrants in the industrial proletariat. This, by itself, became a barrier to Tardean mimetic effects spreading within an industry.
Arnold wasn't a Sociologist or an Economist. He was the son of a headmaster who knew little of life. He may be forgiven for having talked bollocks because, after all, he wrote one or two excellent poems.
They arrive, these masses, eager to
earn enough to feed themselves and maybe have enough left over for the rent.
enter into possession of the world, to gain a more vivid sense of their own life and activity. In this their irrepressible development, their natural educators and initiators are those immediately above them, the middle classes. If these classes cannot win their sympathy or give them their direction, society is in danger of falling into anarchy.
That danger had passed. Why? General Napier showed the 'physical force' Chartists his canons. He had physical force. They didn't.
Arnold was writing at a time when about one tenth of the working population lived in the homes, as domestic servants, of the top tenth of the population. It was usual, in retail establishments, for the workers to sleep in their place of business. What worried the upper class was the increasing size of the industrial proletariat working in big factories. Their supervisors could scarcely engage with them in the manner of a medieval Guild master. By contrast, it was believed, that agricultural laborers felt attached to the Squire. The Vicar might be his cousin- advowsons tended to be kept in the family- and though there might be a Dissenting Chapel in the parish, attendance there would be restricted to those whose livelihoods were independent of the displeasure of their betters.
Arnold is refreshingly unhypocritical: there is no feeble pretence that the education of the working class is to be conducted chiefly for their own benefit,
There is no need to pretend that instruction in Reading, Writing & 'Rithmetic raises productivity and life-chances. Arnold didn't need to spell out the bleeding obvious.
or that his concern with their spiritual condition is, in one of his own most cherished terms, in the least 'disinterested'.
The question of State supported universal Education was fatally imbricated with sectarian strife. It wasn't till about 1905 that Dissenters accepted Local Authority support for Anglican or Catholic schools. Arnold was 'disinterested' in that he kept talking about ancient Greece rather than Rome's Scarlet Woman.
In the even more disarmingly candid words of a twentieth-century proponent of this view: 'Deny to working-class children any common share in the immaterial, and presently they will grow into the men who demand with menaces a communism of the material.'
Heaven may be immaterial. All may have a share in it.
If the masses are not thrown a few novels, they may react by throwing up a few barricades.
If you teach embroidery or Yoga, you may claim that if the masses are denied instruction in crochet or pranayama, they will go mad, bite their own heads off and subject the Environment to slut shaming.
Literature was in several ways a suitable candidate for this ideological enterprise.
No. Countries with very different ideologies nevertheless had similar schemes of mother tongue instruction for a rising proportion of the common people. Education is economic. Try to make it ideological and there is a bigger backlash. Eagleton himself went to a very good Catholic school.
It must be said, English literature- e.g. Shakespeare's History plays- are great at inculcating patriotism. I suppose that is why the Grievance Studies mob used literary theory to try to destroy its hold on us. Sadly, they failed. Did you know Shakespeare had a white penis which he did not use for wholly homosexual purposes? Cancel the cunt!
As a liberal, 'humanizing' pursuit, it could provide a potent antidote to political bigotry and ideological extremism.
Arnold may have believed that. Eagleton couldn't possibly do so. Surely, he knew of the Hitler Youth?
Since literature, as we know, deals in universal human values rather than in such historical trivia as civil wars, the oppression of women or the dispossession of the English peasantry,
or the fact that Shakespeare wasn't black and didn't have a vagina
it could serve to place in cosmic perspective the petty demands of working people for decent living conditions
which they can only get if they become more productive. It isn't the case that the King can give everybody a magical money tree.
or greater control over their own lives,
see above.
and might even with luck come to render them oblivious of such issues in their high-minded contemplation of eternal truths and beauties.
As opposed to screaming their tits about about how its totes unfair that Shakespeare had a white penis and had sex with women.
English, as a Victorian handbook for English teachers put it, helps to 'promote sympathy and fellow feeling among all classes';
Eagleton is against any such thing. Why have the proles not slit the throats of people like himself? All is the fault of 'the rise of English'. Had Shakespeare been a Tamil Lesbian, the English would have killed off toffs like Eagleton long ago.
another Victorian writer speaks of literature as opening a 'serene and luminous region of truth where all may meet and expatiate in common', above 'the smoke and stir, the din and turmoil of man's lower life of care and business and debate'.
Why is that bastard saying literature is nice? Even if it is nice, what he should be saying is 'rape and decapitate every fucking toff you meet. Incidentally, teechur is a toff. So is the Doctor and the Post Office clerk. Just kill anybody wot talks fancy or who can read & rite gud.'
Literature would rehearse the masses in the habits of pluralistic thought and feeling, persuading them to acknowledge that more than one viewpoint than theirs existed - namely, that of their masters.
Masters- even School Masters- don't want their throats slit. How very unreasonable of them!
It would communicate to them the moral riches of bourgeois civilization, impress upon them a reverence for middle-class achievements, and, since reading is an essentially solitary, contemplative activity, curb in them any disruptive tendency to collective political action.
e.g raping and decapitating the fucking toffs wot work at the Post Office.
It would give them a pride in their national language and literature:
they should be ashamed of both.
if scanty education and extensive hours of labour prevented them personally from producing a literary masterpiece, they could take pleasure in the thought that others of their own kind - English people - had done so.
Not till every Englishman slits his own throat out of shame for having been born English, will Eagleton be satisfied.
The people, according to a study of English literature written in 1891, 'need political culture, instruction, that is to say, in what pertains to their relation to the State, to their duties as citizens; and they need also to be impressed sentimentally by having the presentation in legend and history of heroic and patriotic examples brought vividly and attractively before them'.
The same thing was being said in Tamil and German and Japanese. What is truly sinister is that kids were being taught Arithmetic. Did you know that Capitalists keep 'accounts'? This involves adding and subtracting and calculating percentages. How shockingly evil!
All of this, moreover, could be achieved without the cost and labour of teaching them the Classics:
which were taught through English to English people.
English literature was written in their own language, and so was conveniently available to them.
This is a very deep insight. English is available to English people. Eagleton's very expensive education wasn't entirely wasted on him.
Like religion, literature works primarily by emotion and experience,
this is also true of cooking and dancing and being a fucking human being
and so was admirably well-fitted to carry through the ideological task which religion left off.
Eagleton didn't get that if you want a particular task done- e.g. getting the sink fixed- you need to hire a guy who is good at that task- e.g. a plumber. It is no use entrusting the task to the Church or the Politburo of Henry Pollitt's wing of the Communist party.
Religion either performs a religious task- instilling faith in paying customers that they will go to the Good Place- or it gets disintermediated. It withers on the vine even if it pretends it is actually really good at Social Work or Philanthropy or saying boo to Neo-Liberalism.
Indeed by our own time literature has become effectively identical with the opposite of analytical thought and conceptual enquiry:
Nonsense! There was an explosion of 'sci-fi' and Sociological novels of the HG Wells type. Bertrand Russel himself received the Nobel Prize for literature when Eagleton was a small boy. The British space program started in 1952. There was a plethora of books for boys about British spaceships on voyages to Venus or Neptune. The writing style was 'analytical' and 'conceptual'.
whereas scientists, philosophers and political theorists are saddled with these drably discursive pursuits, students of literature occupy the more prized territory of feeling and experience.
That's why boys didn't study Eng Lit. They took Engineering or, it that was too hard, settled for Chartered Accountancy.
Whose experience, and what kinds of feeling, is a different question. Literature from Arnold onwards is the enemy of 'ideological dogma', an attitude which might have come as a surprise to Dante, Milton and Pope;
they would have been more surprised by the fucking steam engine. Dante had a conception of literae humaniores and understood well enough that the ideological strife of his own age was harmful to his country. The same could be said of Milton & Pope. Even if you have to pick sides, you may deplore the quarrel.
the truth or falsity of beliefs such as that blacks are inferior to whites is less important than what it feels like to experience them.
No. It is more important. If blacks have tiny brains then it might not be a good idea to entrust yourself to a Black Surgeon. On the other hand, if there are no gender or colour based differences in intelligence, you only harm yourself if you refuse medical help from the best surgeon and end up dying under the knife of a cretin of the right colour or gender.
Arnold himself had beliefs, of course, though like everybody else he regarded his own beliefs as reasoned positions rather than ideological dogmas. Even so, it was not the business of literature to communicate such beliefs directly — to argue openly, for example, that private property is the bulwark of liberty. Instead, literature should convey timeless truths, thus distracting the masses from their immediate commitments, nurturing in them a spirit of tolerance and generosity, and so ensuring the survival of private property.
The masses won't read boring books. They were willing to read Samuel Smiles or stirring narratives of working class people who rose in Commerce.
Just as Arnold attempted in Literature and Dogma and God and the Bible to dissolve away the embarrassingly doctrinal bits of Christianity into poetically suggestive sonorities, so the pill of middle-class ideology was to be sweetened by the sugar of literature.
It was shit, not sugar. What entertains us is what we relish, not that which bores the pants of us.
There was another sense in which the 'experiential' nature of literature was ideologically convenient.
The Bourgeoisie was trying to brainwash the proletariat into thinking there was a biological difference in gender. The reality was that all working class people had at least one penis and one vagina. By forcing proles to read Jane Austen, they were obliged to choose either one or the other. J.K Rowling is part of a Capitalist conspiracy to keep down the non-binary masses. Sappho, fuck her, was the first TERF.
For 'experience' is not only the homeland of ideology,
nope. For Marxists it might be the homeland of 'false consciousness'.
the place where it takes root most effectively; it is also in its literary form a kind of vicarious self-fulfilment.
Like masturbation? I suppose so. It's a way to kill time.
If you do not have the money and leisure to visit the Far East, except perhaps as a soldier in the pay of British imperialism,
in the pay of their King. The British Army and Navy kept the country safe from invaders or insurrectionists. That was a good thing, for English people, of all classes.
then you can always 'experience' it at second hand by reading Conrad or Kipling.
Only in the sense that you can experience being a wolf or a bear of a Maltese polo pony.
Indeed according to some literary theories this is even more real than strolling round Bangkok. The actually impoverished experience of the mass of people,
i.e. guys who went in for plumbing rather than Eng Lit
an impoverishment bred by their social conditions, can be supplemented by literature: instead of working to change such conditions (which Arnold, to his credit, did more thoroughly than almost any of those who sought to inherit his mantle), you can vicariously fulfil someone's desire for a fuller life by handing them Pride and Prejudice.
Even better, you can hand your Professor a copy of 'Postman Pat' and suggest that if he perseveres he may one day be able to read it all by himself.
It is significant, then, that 'English' as an academic subject was first institutionalized
when a Professor of English was appointed at UCL in 1828?
not in the Universities, but in the Mechanics' Institutes,
which focused on technical subjects like chemistry
working men's colleges and extension lecturing circuits."
This happened at about the same time and for exactly the same reason that Eng Lit had begun to be studied- first a Scottish Universities in the second half of the Eighteenth Century, and then at private Academies, Girls Schools, and finally the new non-Anglican Colleges.
English was literally the poor man's Classics
for the talented, it was the royal road to riches.
- a way of providing a cheapish 'liberal' education for those beyond the charmed circles of public school and Oxbridge.
In other words, almost everybody.
From the outset, in the work of 'English' pioneers like F. D. Maurice and Charles Kingsley, the emphasis was on solidarity between the social classes,
oddly, this is also the message of Christianity
the cultivation of 'larger sympathies', the instillation of national pride and the transmission of 'moral' values.
Why were Schools not teaching kids how to rape and murder? It was because the Bourgeoisie wanted kids to be productive. Fuck you Bourgeoisie! Fuck you very much!
This last concern — still the distinctive hallmark of literary studies in England,
I suppose Eagleton means the cult of F.R Leavis. Tom Sharpe had satirized it in 'the Great Pursuit' published in 1977. Thankfully, we live in a more enlightened age. Literary studies in England now focus on screaming your tits off because Shakespeare had a dick. Moreover, it was a white dick! That's totes triggering for me.
and a frequent source of bemusement to intellectuals from other cultures - was an essential part of the ideological project;
Enid Starkie thought Baudelaire would have turned out fine if he had been sent to a good Public School. Back then it was believed that playing cricket made you immune to the siren song of sodomy. This was funny but Starkie had a point. The French Army wouldn't have been so shit at fighting if its schools had substituted team sports for suppositories.
indeed the rise of 'English' is more or less concomitant with an historic shift in the very meaning of the term 'moral', of which Arnold, Henry James and F. R. Leavis are the major critical exponents.
No. Arnold and James were latecomers observing an already well established moral and intellectual climate. Arnold's brother, an educational reformer in Punjab, is still remembered for separating religious from other instruction- i.e. Hindu students would no longer be obliged to study the Bible or Quran. This was by no means an advantage though, no doubt, it increased attendance.
Morality is no longer to be grasped as a formulated code or explicit ethical system: it is rather a sensitive preoccupation with the whole quality of life itself, with the oblique, nuanced particulars of human experience.
In other words, it has deep roots in indigenous spirituality. You can find it in Julia of Norwich & Richard Rolle & William Langland.
Somewhat rephrased, this can be taken as meaning that the old religious ideologies have lost their force,
that force has been reinvented or otherwise renewed in every generation in this green and pleasant land. On the other hand, it is deeply distressing to me that Lord Jesus Christ had a penis. The Roman Imperial State was remis in not providing compulsory gender reassignment surgery, free at the point of delivery, to all dudes not obviously benders.
and that a more subtle communication of moral values, one which works by 'dramatic enactment' rather than rebarbative abstraction, is thus in order.
Shakespeare is generally considered to have been rather good at 'dramatic enactment'. Rebarbative abstraction condemns him for his adamant refusal to chop off his own bollocks.
Since such values are nowhere more vividly dramatized than
in daily life.
in literature,
Nope. Dramatic enactment of kissing is better than reading about the thing.
brought home to 'felt experience'
Sex is really really nice- unless the other party keeps saying 'is it in yet?'. Scratch that. It's still great no matter what the other party says.
with all the unquestionable reality of a blow on the head, literature becomes more than just a handmaiden of moral ideology: it is moral ideology for the modern age, as the work of F. R. Leavis was most graphically to evince.
You only had to bother with that cunt if you chose to study worthless shit at Uni. Thatcher studied Chemistry and got a job in industry. Then she qualified as a barrister. She read a bit of Hayek and Von Mises and so forth. That was an ideology. By its lights, people were entitled to the fruits of their own labour. The Council may own your house, but your labour paid for the Council. You should have the right to own your own house rather than pay rent for the rest of your days.
The truth is Eagleton rose in class terms by becoming a don. But, because he studied English- the softest of soft subjects- he became, intellectually speaking, an eunuch.
The rise of English in England ran parallel to the gradual, grudging admission of women to the institutions of higher education; and since English was an untaxing sort of affair, concerned with the finer feelings rather than with the more virile topics of bona fide academic 'disciplines', it seemed a convenient sort of non-subject to palm off on the ladies, who were in any case excluded from science and the professions.
Not Thatcher- industrial chemist turned Barrister turned Prime Minister. English was liberated from the Old Maids in the English Dept. Eagleton, sadly, didn't get the memo.
In the early 1920s it was desperately unclear why English was worth studying at all;
you could get a job teaching it.
by the early 1930s it had become a question of why it was worth wasting your time on anything else.
No. By then it was clear that Mathematics was the language of Nature, Commerce, Government, War- everything that mattered.
English was not only a subject worth studying, but the supremely civilizing pursuit,
Teaching, as Lamb pointed out long ago, is a demoralizing profession. As pedants age they become wholly unfit for polite society.
the spiritual essence of the social formation.
There was an economic 'sub-structure'. There were no spirits or ghosts or goblins.
Far from constituting some amateur or impressionistic enterprise, English was an arena in which
boring cunts bored the pants of each other.
the most fundamental questions of human existence - what it meant to be a person, to engage in significant relationship with others, to live from the vital centre of the most essential values
none of which can be done if you devote your life to boring shite.
- were thrown into vivid relief and made the object of the most intensive scrutiny. Scrutiny was the title of the critical journal launched in 1932 by the Leavises,
at its peak, in the Fifties, it had a circulation of 1500. Meanwhile, American Universities had nurtured generations of writers and journalists. Decade after decade, there was no shortage of Great American Novels. Nothing comparable was being attempted in England. What would be the point? Even a Tolkien would be dismissed as a children's author.
which has yet to be surpassed
why surpass stupid shit?
in its tenacious devotion to the moral centrality of English studies, their crucial relevance to the quality of social life as a whole.
Fuck the Great Depression. Ignore the fucking Blitz. What is crucially relevant to English social life is the fact that Leavis has a hard on for D.H fucking Lawrence.
Whatever the 'failure' or 'success' of Scrutiny, however, one might argue the toss between the antiLeavisian prejudice of the literary establishment and the waspishness of the Scrutiny movement itself, the fact remains that English students in England today are 'Leavisites' whether they know it or not, irremediably altered by that historic intervention.
No. They found Leavis boring and Tom Sharpe's takedown of his cult screamingly funny. I think they liked Borges and Marquez and Canetti and thought that maybe Rushdie & Co. might be on to something.
There is no more need to be a card-carrying Leavisite today than there is to be a card-carrying Copernican: that current has entered the bloodstream of English studies in England as Copernicus reshaped our astronomical beliefs, has become a form of spontaneous critical wisdom as deep-seated as our conviction that the earth moves round the sun. That the 'Leavis debate' is effectively dead is perhaps the major sign of Scrutiny's victory.
That was the debate with C.P. Snow at the end of the Nineteen Fifties. Harold Wilson's election and the reform of Civil Service recruitment signalled the victory of Science & Technocracy over shrill screams of moral superiority emanating from the English Department. By the time Eagleton's book came out, many young people- including students of English- had memorized paragraphs from Douglas Adams's 'Hitchiker's Guide'. Why? It was sciencey. It was American. It was modern- in a word, Thatcherite. Adams became a spokesperson for Apple computers and ended up moving to California.
What the Leavises saw was that if the Sir Arthur Quiller Couches were allowed to win out,
Professors would be chosen on the basis of their literary and cultural attainment, not their shrillness or their stupidity.
literary criticism would be shunted into an historical siding of no more inherent significance than the question of whether one preferred potatoes to tomatoes.
It would be about finding out which type of potato or tomato tastes best in a given dish.
In the face of such whimsical 'taste',
some writing really is better than other writing just as a particular type of tomato tastes better in a salad. There's money to be made from 'taste'. It isn't whimsical at all.
they stressed the centrality of rigorous critical analysis, a disciplined attention to the 'words on the page'.
because that's how reading works.
They urged this not simply for technical or aesthetic reasons, but because it had the closest relevance to the spiritual crisis of modern civilization.
There was no such thing. Also, it wasn't really true that all the young men were turning into homosexuals because the beer they serve nowadays is full of chemicals.
Literature was important not only in itself, but because it encapsulated creative energies which were everywhere on the defensive in modern 'commercial' society.
Fuck off! The Cinema & Radio & then TV, were plenty creative. Gassing on about D.H Lawrence wasn't at all.
In literature, and perhaps in literature alone, a vital feel for the creative uses of language was still manifest, in contrast to the philistine devaluing of language and traditional culture blatantly apparent in 'mass society'.
Mass society is totes gay. It's because the Government is putting something in the water. The other day I tried on my wife's dress. Personally, I blame Stanley Baldwin. That boy aint right.
The quality of a society's language was the most telling index of the quality of its personal and social life:
It was wholly irrelevant. Life can turn to shit, Society can disintegrate completely, yet people will still talk in the same manner that they did before. Oscar Wilde didn't start talking like Bill Sykes in Reading Gaol.
a society which had ceased to value literature was one lethally closed to the impulses which had created and sustained the best of human civilization.
Which is why it is cool to commit genocide on pre-literate societies.
In the civilized manners of eighteenth-century England, or in the 'natural', 'organic' agrarian society of the seventeenth century, one could discern
the desire to fuck off to America and to kill the indigenous people and take over their land.
a form of living sensibility without which modern industrial society would atrophy and die.
But you couldn't have gotten 'modern industrial society' if that 'organic sensibility' hadn't slit its own fucking throat.
To be a certain kind of English student in Cambridge in the late 1920s and 1930s was to be
either a boring cunt or a boring Communist cunt. If you were studying Math or Physics, this was not necessarily the case.
caught up in this buoyant, polemical onslaught against the most trivializing features of industrial capitalism.
as opposed to the genocidal features of Stalinist industrialisation.
It was rewarding to know that being an English student was not only valuable but the most important way of life one could imagine
nobody thought that. Still if you were too stupid to be a lawyer and too smelly to be a stock-broker, you might as well become a Don teaching worthless shite.
- that one was contributing in one's own modest way to rolling back twentieth-century society in the direction of the 'organic' community of seventeenth-century England, that one moved at the most progressive tip of civilization itself.
Because progress means going back to the seventeenth century and spending your time digging for turnips in between laying snares for coneys.
Those who came up to Cambridge humbly expecting to read a few poems and novels were quickly demystified: English was not just one discipline among many but the most central subject of all, immeasurably superior to law, science, politics, philosophy or history.
How fucking naive were these cunts? What Leavis should have done was to persuade them to rent out their rears and hand all the money they made in this way to 'Queenie'- a good name for the keeper of a male brothel.
These subjects, Scrutiny grudgingly conceded, had their place; but it was a place to be assessed by the touchstone of literature, which was less an academic subject than a spiritual exploration coterminous with the fate of civilization itself. With breathtaking boldness, Scrutiny redrew the map of English literature in ways from which criticism has never quite recovered.
Criticism never recovered from being totes wrong about Keats. As for teaching English literature, how could it survive Eagleton's stricture?-
Spending your English lessons alerting schoolchildren to the manipulativeness of advertisements or the linguistic poverty of the popular press is an important task,
as is potty-training. Let the English Dept. combine these two tasks for the more diverse elements of our scholastic intake.
and certainly more important than getting them to memorize The Charge of the Light Brigade
Did you know Tennyson was White? Also he had a penis. That's just wrong.
A literary artist- like TS Eliot- may hold bizarre views. In Eliot's case, it didn't stop him encouraging and even publishing authors with different ideologies from his own. Leavis & Co. don't appear to have contributed anything to literary creativity. Tolkien, on the other hand, did not merely delight his readers, he inspired other talented people.
Is Eagleton right about 'the rise of English' having to do with replacing Religion with some other 'opium of the masses' such that Capitalism could continue to exploit the workers and peasants of England?
No. The expansion of school education meant increased demand for specialist teachers. STEM subjects developed rapidly in scope and content. Non-STEM subjects didn't. Any literate person over the age of 14 can learn as much literature or history or sociology or economics as they wish without studying the subject in a classroom. Perhaps the Left hoped that the mindless expansion of non-STEM higher education would create a crisis of 'elite overproduction'. People with higher degrees in useless shit would rebel against the system. Sadly, this isn't what happened. The graduate student came to be seen as a gormless skiver just one step above a hobo. They reacted by taking a page out of the Thatcherite playbook and finding new ways to market themselves. Then came the computer & internet revolution. Productivity was no longer, necessarily, related to a position within the hierarchy of a giant corporation. A new tribe of billionaires were rising up. On the left there was George Soros who idolized Popper. On the right there is Peter Theil who seems to have a thing for Rene Girard. This is Keynes's nightmare of ideological power being wielded from beyond the grave by silly pedants who wrote modish nonsense. Perhaps a stock market crash will shake out the lunatics. But what replaces them may be pure, distilled, evil. In that context, Eagleton's ilk don't seem so bad.
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