Up and Running

After Wedding Fun, here is a review of Eagleton's new book.

After Theory
by Terry Eagleton
225pp, Allen Lane, £18.99

Being at once a leader and a rebel is a good trick. Mrs Thatcher managed it brilliantly, speaking as if she were a dissident in the government of which she was in fact head. The ordinary fudges of political life took place despite her. Terry Eagleton has always done something similar, a soi-disant intellectual outsider who was once the country's "top" literary professor. When he was Warton professor of English at Oxford he styled himself "a barbarian inside the citadel". (Now he is professor of cultural theory at Manchester University, the self-image is a little less defensive.) Travel the campuses of Britain, however, and you will find that for many he is the orthodoxy. His Literary Theory: An Introduction , a punchy synopsis of other writers' ideas first published 20 years ago, must be the best-selling work of lit crit ever.

Characteristically, this book for students of literature argued that there was no such thing as literature and that literary criticism was but a conservative political ideology: "Departments of literature in higher education are part of the ideological apparatus of the modern capitalist state." The arrival of literary theory from France was broadly welcome, for it crushed with its rigour the effete mutterings of bourgeois humanism. Yet while he was theory's ambassador, he always managed to signal his own distance from it. Literary Theory ended with what became his signature declaration of the hidden significance of politics in intellectual life (hidden from most theory buffs, too).

Now here he is again, calling us away from the herd. In a prefatory note he declares that his new book "argues against what I take to be a current orthdoxy". Other early theory enthusiasts have, in effect, recanted. Eagleton leaves no room for the admission of his own involvement in error or folly. Theory has gone astray, but not because it has encouraged academic obscurantism and grim reductiveness. It is because it has not been political enough. So, as a "radical", Eagleton is necessarily out of step with even the intellectual fashions for which he once seemed cheerleader. "It is not pleasant to be out of line," he says, contentedly.

He senses that the campus campaign against traditional lit crit has been won. Nowadays "quietly-spoken, middle-class students huddle diligently in libraries, at work on sensationalist subjects like vampirism and eye-gouging, cyborgs and porno movies". Hooray! But no, the postmodernism that has made deviancy the norm has disengaged us from political conflicts. There is no hypocritical respectability to rail or rebel against. He rather misses the "old-fashioned bourgeois values" that underpinned "liberal humanist" approaches to reading and teaching. At least the battle lines were clear.

He is caught between two attitudes to the academic business. On the one hand, he rather wants to laugh at all those earnest undergraduates (and lecturers) attaching the same arguments about sexual transgression to whatever they are studying. Here he speaks in a voice familiar from his literary journalism, a wry commentator on academic habits. "Students once wrote uncritical, reverential essays on Flaubert, but all that has been transformed. Nowadays they write uncritical, reverential essays on Friends." He is jokey, roguish, strictly jaundiced. He is still in love with the supposedly comic similes and illustrations that were such an odd part of his style in his memoir The Gatekeeper.

He is always good for a laugh at the habits of academics, and there are plenty of side-swipes here at crusty dons. Indeed, he still depends a good deal on his convenient fiction of what "traditional" critics are like. They study flower-imagery in Tennyson or emote about Keats. "The belle-lettristic gentlemen who ran the critical show some decades ago" are his adored opponents. "Conservative critics" turn up frequently as a type, always spouting simple-minded pieties. You wonder if he has ever met an intelligent antagonist.

At an imagined distance from the currents of intellectual fashion, he effortlessly encapsulates decades and sums up intellectual movements with the droll wisdom of hindsight. Yet, for all his reflections on academic self-delusion, never has there been a critic so rooted in academic habits. He credits academia as the source of intellectual progress and preserver of values. He flatters his students with being subversive idealists, who study arts subjects because they are "morally conscientious". He believes that "the grey-bearded guardians of the state" have always been "rattled" by those who study only for the delight of it.

For there is also Marxist Terry, who sees the duty of intellectuals to be revealing the depredations of capitalism. In this voice he speaks solemnly of the shortcomings of "cultural theory". We inhabit "a social order which urgently needs repair" and we are told that "theory must be harnessed to practical political ends". Yet it is not quite clear what he thinks is to be done. How is the study of culture to effect the revolutionary changes he dimly sketches? He talks about "fashioning a world in which the hungry could be fed", but takes it for granted that this is not something that would ever concern those professionally involved in politics or commerce. He is superciliously dismissive of all politicians. He likes to use the word "democratic" about what he likes, "the whole idea of cultural theory is a democratic one", and so on. Yet his only word for the state in which we live is "capitalist".

This will sound like the Terry of old, yet the truth is that he is tiring of the revolutionary rhetoric. In the latter part of this book, he starts deviating from stern Marxism. He has been reading Aristotle, bits of the Bible and the philosopher Alastair MacIntyre. He wrangles with those who deny that there is any such thing as human nature. He begins audaciously to bruit the notions that there is an objective reality and that morality is not just ideology. You can imagine the news spreading through the seminar rooms. He ends up musing amiably about what is wrong with fundamentalism and why thinking about our mortality is salutary. The old rogue begins to sound quite human.

· John Mullan is senior lecturer in English at University College London.