What a temptation it is to say that the incendiary Marxist critic Terry
Eagleton is undergoing some late-life epiphany by publishing an introduction
to the Gospels. In fact, he is re-engaging with an influence that was with
him as a boy in a seriously poor Irish family in Salford.
At the age of 64, he is spending the final years of his academic career back
in Manchester after three decades teaching in Oxford, so the temptation
shifts to describing his progress as circular. This is to be resisted as
strongly as the first, for both are too pat to be hung on such a
long-standing public enemy of cliché.
God appears to find him biddable but, as some have complained of Eagleton, is
having trouble making Himself fully understood.
“I guess I am still searching,” Eagleton says. The possibility of this
astringent leftwinger having something other than a secular faith should not
entirely surprise his readers. In the 1960s he was a member of the radical
Roman Catholic group Slant and wrote a book called Towards A New Left
Theology. Two months ago, in the London Review of Books, he castigated
Britain's most prominent atheist, Richard Dawkins, author of The God
Delusion, for his alleged ignorance of that discipline.
“Imagine someone holding forth on biology,” he wrote, “whose only knowledge of
the subject is The Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what
it feels like to read Dawkins on theology.”
Of course Marxism, Eagleton's most sustaining belief system, is often
portrayed as a religion, with its texts, prophets, vision and martyrs.
“Yes,” he says, “and I certainly don't think it's odd that Christianity and
Marxism should go together in my career, or indeed in anybody's career. They
are both concerned with emancipation, and in the narrative of each the poor
play a central role. Something I am very drawn to [in both] is that their
assessment of the present state of humanity is very glum, whether that is
because of original sin or the class society.
“At the same time there is a feasible capacity for transformation. They see
things as being much more stark and realistic than most forms of progressive
liberalism. They are both tragic but, in contrast to a merely fashionable
postmodern pessimism, both believe in the possibility of change.” It is
largely because of this shared ground that he has maintained that you can
proceed from Catholicism to Marxism without the bridge of liberalism.
Does he still hold this position? “I do. I believe that is true. It certainly
is for me. I wasn't brought up with any understanding of liberal,
individualist, middle-class culture. Coming from an Irish Catholic,
working-class home such ideas were fairly alien. I had to learn them,
whereas others got them spontaneously.”
The John Edward Taylor Professor of Cultural Theory can be found, with
difficulty, in a building full of contradictory corridors away from the main
university site. Even inside, hardly anyone seems to have heard of this
grand old man of literary theory. They repeat “Eagleton” with the bemusement
of locals who don't know the village you are after.
The seclusion suits him. He left Oxford partly because he resented being, as
he sees it, forced into administrative roles. The weight of teaching is much
lighter than it was at Wadham College. His office is unadorned and doggedly
low-tech, almost indistinguishable from the sort of premises that were
evoked by David Lodge or Malcolm Bradbury when they were the coming young
novelists.
Because of his assaults on Dawkins — and Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens,
of which more soon — it is a surprise to find him quite so genial and ruddy.
For years he had a reputation for being beery and flirtatious, but you would
now have to call him avuncular were he not such an unstoppable father in his
own right — two children from a previous marriage, now in their thirties,
and three more — aged 10, 2 and six months — with his wife Willa Murphy, an
American academic.
Why did he choose to write an introduction to the Gospels? “Basically because
I was asked to do it. They [the publisher, Verso] were running a series on
revolutionaries, and would I do Jesus, knowing I had some background. So I
said OK. They were bringing out one on Trotsky, and I said I think my man
has the edge over him, as Trotsky didn't rise from the dead.”
Meaning that Jesus did? Or at least that Eagleton believes he did? He does not
give so much an answer as a fairly broad, all-purpose kind of laugh that may
be as much agnostic as evasive. The Christ of his 30-page essay is nothing
if not revolutionary, and more profoundly so, Eagleton suggests, than any
other historical figure.
“In his Crucifixion and descent into Hell,” he writes, “Jesus in StPaul's view
is ‘made sin,' identifying with the scum and refuse of the earth, enduring a
solidarity with suffering, evil and despair in order to transfigure it
through his Resurrection. Like the classical tragic protagonist, he succeeds
only through failure.”
Reading him in this vein, it is hard to know whether you are in the company of
an unreconstructed, literalist Catholic or a literary scholar responding to
the power of metaphor. What was Christ up to? “Well,” Eagleton replies, “in
a way which is far more radical than the secular Left, he's saying it's all
over; even as you look at it, it's out of date, passing away. Something new,
something unimaginable is striking into this place.”
And what did he (Christ — or Eagleton for that matter) have in mind here?
“Well. He called it the Kingdom of God. But a lot of ink has been spilt over
what that means.”
Not some posthumous glory for this flesh and blood of ours? “No. I don't know.
He's talking a traditonal kind of Judaic talk. It's the realm of justice,
the realm where tragedy will be wiped away, the realm of fellowship. Though
what that means...”
He tails off in a way that makes his fabled powers of exegesis look either
frustratingly fallible or reassuringly human.
Apart from Dawkins, whom he accuses of conjuring a satanic and easy-to-pillory
God, another writer to have felt the lash of his disdain is Martin Amis. In
a new edition this year to his classic, Ideology: An Introduction, he
accused the novelist, who teaches creative writing at the same university,
of sounding like a British National Party thug by advocating the
strip-searching of travellers who look as if they come from the Middle East.
Since the War on Terror, he argues, there has been a revival of old-fashioned
liberal rationalism. “Not just Amis, but Hitchens as well. There is an
element of panic and even hysteria in the way that people are waving their
rational credentials.
“What Amis is really talking about is a war between barbarism and
civilisation. This is an old theme. It takes different forms, and now it's
taking this one. If by civilisation you mean a West that's at present
killing hundreds and thousands of innocent people in Iraq, then the smugness
of that is extraordinary.”
While Eagleton may well prove the truth of the saying, “Once a Catholic,
always a Catholic,” in his case you might equally substitute the word
Marxist. He considers himself as committed as ever.
“In some ways perhaps even more so. Some of what Marx was predicting in The
Communist Manifesto has come about. What he said about increasing
globalisation, rising inequalities and battles over scarce resources; those
bits are true, and in a world where capitalism is more powerful than ever,
it seems right that it should be subjected to a proper critique.”
Look closely at Eagleton's career and the surprise of him addressing the
Gospels is no surprise at all, just the next part of a story that is
consistent for its seeming incongruities.
A poor Salford Irish boy becomes a star in the Oxford firmament. While part of
that establishment he draws odium from all sides for being a token Red.
He calls himself “Doctor” while his academic peers adopt the affected modesty
of “Mister”. He is a literary critic but breaks the convention of the
calling by writing a bestseller on theory. He tackles the great English
canon but elevates marginal characters to a higher significance than their
“betters.” He applauds Das Kapital but trades in the opium of the people.
Paradoxes come as standard.
He asks: “Was Jesus, then, a revolutionary?” and decides that the answer “is
not that Jesus was more or less a revolutionary, but that he was both more
and less.” Surely this can't be an instance of an author visiting his own
narrative on his subject?
Terry Eagleton Presents Jesus Christ The Gospels
Verso, £7.99; 160pp
TERRY EAGLETON: A LIFE IN BOOKS
1966 The New Left Church
Debut publication linked to the ideas of Slant, a Cambridge journal published
by a group of left-wing Roman Catholics.
1976 Criticism and Ideology, Marxism and Literary Criticism
Applying Marxist theory to literary criticism, these books raised his academic
profile.
1983 Literary Theory: An Introduction
An international bestseller and perhaps his best-known book.
1985 Saints and Scholars
His only novel; a fictional account of Wittgenstein in Ireland. He also
co-wrote Derek Jarman's 1993 film about the philosoper.
1996 Heathcliff and the Great Hunger
A study of the linked history and literature of Ireland, from where his family
came.
2001 The Gatekeeper
From Catholic altar boy to Marxist critic; Eagleton's memoirs.
2007 The Meaning of Life
It's happiness and “living life in a certain way”, according to this book of
philosophical essays.
