The Gatekeeper': A Hymn to Intellectual Thought August 11, 2002 By JENNY TURNER
One morning, when Terry Eagleton is a boy, he makes a hole with his spoon in his bowl of porridge. He expects a telling off for it -- ''It was not a household in which one did anything without a point, unless prayer is to be included in that category'' -- and is tentatively delighted when the telling off doesn't come. Instead, his mother encourages him to make the hole bigger, then takes the milk and pours it in. To Terry's lifelong disappointment. ''The hole was just a convenient way of pouring milk on my porridge. The playful turned out to be pragmatic after all. There had been no Proustian epiphany. My porridge was not my madeleine.'' Eagleton was born in 1943 in Salford, the famous ''dirty old town'' by Manchester in the industrial northwest of England, into a family of poor Irish Catholics. His family he remembers as ''cowed, daunted''; both his brothers died as infants, and he himself suffered from chronic asthma. Young Terry went on to get into secondary school, then Cambridge, where he took high honors in English, and thence became a top professor and prolific author, the closest thing the Brits have to a crowd-pulling academic star. But this memoir is not an ''Angela's Ashes''-type wallow in blarney-oiled tales of poverty, nor does it sing the stereotyped, triumphalist old ballad of the scholarship boy. It's cleverer, more witty and also very much more preachy. It's an apologia pro vita sua from one of Britain's most unapologetic old New Left thinkers. And it's a hymn to the enduring power and pleasure of intellectual thought. Among scholars, Eagleton is known for being preternaturally quick and productive, and as an enthusiastic, possibly compulsive, communicator. Marxism is his thing, as a philosophy and as a critical method. In his best work, and especially in his classic ''Literary Theory: An Introduction'' (1983), still an efficient and entertaining primer to structuralism and poststructuralism, Freudianism and post-Freudianism and so on, he has a way of grabbing difficult abstract concepts by the throat, as it were, forcing them to explain themselves in vivid concrete images. There are jokes, some of them Wildean (Eagleton is a great Wilde fan), some of them sophomoric. There's an irascible, attractive hothead radicalism, and an overall sense of bounding warmth. Eagleton brings all these qualities to ''The Gatekeeper,'' at the same time that the historical materialist in him is using the memoir form, as he might put it, to explore the conditions of their very existence. In other words, ''The Gatekeeper'' represents Eagleton attempting to explain in his own way why he is the way he is; and if that sounds a little paradoxical, well, that's just how autobiography works. Eagleton himself calls ''The Gatekeeper'' an ''anti-autobiography,'' and quickly the reader will come to see what he means. Instead of the usual bildungsroman sense of a life as a single arc, Eagleton does his as interlinked short hops. There are seven chapters, called ''Lifers,'' ''Catholics,'' ''Thinkers,'' ''Politicos,'' ''Losers,'' ''Dons'' and ''Aristos.'' Within this structure, Eagleton's gregarious banter develops a series of oppositions, the fundamental arguments that have come to shape his life: radicalism versus liberalism; the honest misery of home versus the flyblown ease of Cambridge; the aesthetically opposite approaches to life he encapsulates as ''the battle between the good and the fine'': ''The good are aware that they must sacrifice such superfluous beauties as wit and style to a greater cause. . . . The fine, for their part, know that despite their magnificence they are unreliable in a crisis.'' Therefore, ''it is the good who will enter the kingdom, but the fine who make life worth living in the meanwhile.'' The book's other organizing drama is eschatological. As a boy of 10, Eagleton was gatekeeper at the local Carmelite convent, negotiating the revolving doors, hatches, secret compartments and cupboards accessible from both sides that the order used to keep itself completely separate from the world. When a novice, a young woman of 19 or 20, was ready, young Terence it was who escorted her weeping parents from the convent parlor, never to see their daughter in this life again. ''These women . . . acknowledged in their own eccentric way the wretchedness of human history, which they would no doubt have called the sinfulness of the world.'' As Eagleton tells it, it was in the Carmelites that he first encountered the radical's sense that the world can change, and does change, and indeed must change, because it is intolerable as it is. Young Terry took this discovery with him to Cambridge, into the left Catholic movement of the 1960's. Then, as his faith left him, he took it into left-wing politics, into his teaching and his books. Many, many times as I was reading, I found myself gasping out loud at Eagleton's acuity and aptness of expression. The early Wittgenstein -- like Wilde, an Eagleton hero -- is ''homesick for the pure ice of philosophical precision, for those countless gleaming metaphysical acres stretching silently to the horizon.'' On Brecht and his famous alienation effect: ''If Brecht had directed 'Waiting for Godot,' he would have hung a large sign at the back of the stage reading 'He's not going to come, you know.' '' Much of the book is very, very funny, with the extra hilarity that comes with a feeling of release from old taboos. ''As usual with the industrial working class,'' Eagleton writes of family get-togethers, ''the talk was of the body, though not in the style of a California graduate seminar. Our elders rambled on endlessly about hemorrhoids and catarrh, prolapse and lumbago, cataracts and rheumatoid arthritis. We were the walking wounded of the Industrial Revolution, a Dad's army of adenoidal midgets. In common with most of the north-of-England working class, we were a good few inches below average height, like a herd of extras from 'The Wizard of Oz.' '' But as you can see, the book also contains enormous sadness, and whether accidentally or deliberately, Eagleton allows this sadness to hobble him. Again and again, beautiful passages are spoiled by hasty, repetitive construction and an unchecked fondness for childish one-liners. For example, Eagleton has a strange, undignified weakness for wombat jokes: ''I could no more build a sewing machine than could a wombat,'' he says irrelevantly at one point, and ''the mating habits of wombats'' are mentioned, equally unnecessarily, later on. There's a gerbil simile, a hamster simile and a fruit bat simile, and an instance of the never-funny-in-the-first-place Rimbaud/Rambo quibble, now surely long past its sell-by date. In a reflective moment, Eagleton writes about how he thinks his own immense productivity probably has to do with ''the uncertain literacy'' of his family background, a continuing sense of unease that he is actually paid for reading and writing books. Do the wombats and gerbils represent for Eagleton another continuity with his origins? Do they allow him to think he is keeping faith with his parents, refusing to indulge his desire and ability to make a text that as well as being clever and spirited and useful might also be aesthetically fine? Eagleton is halfway through his entrance exam at Cambridge when his tutor, the pseudonymous Dr. Greenway, tells him his father has died. Terry goes home for the funeral but is accepted anyway, then spends the next three years ''sick at heart . . . as though I had murdered to get in.'' As an undergraduate, he argues constantly with Greenway about the meaning and value of tragedy. For Greenway, it's a noble art form, ''on a level with 'chivalry' or 'sauteed oysters.' '' For Terry, tragedy is real, and terrible, and to do with ''pain . . . class, sacrifice, trauma'' and the point at which all of these converge. Among its other goodies, this hilarious, devastating little book contains what seem to be preliminary sketches for a new theory of tragedy, in which the memory of Eagleton's father takes an honored place by Lear and Oedipus and ''the broken body of an executed political criminal,'' i.e., Christ. This theory of tragedy, it seems, will form the basis of Eagleton's next book. Last year, Eagleton left the Oxford chair he had held since 1992 for a new chair of cultural theory at Manchester, just across the canal from where he was born. We can, I think, look forward to Eagleton on tragedy, a noble art form, but one in which this fine and funny left-winger will find himself at home. Jenny Turner is a member of the editorial board of The London Review of Books. www.nytimes.com/2002/08/11/books/review/11TURNERT.html?ex=1030094083&ei=1 &en=f386e5c84dd5f731 Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company ________________________________________________________________ GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO! Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less! Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/web/. _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
