Running out of Soil

Terry Eagleton

From the Shadow of Dracula: A Life of Bram Stoker by Paul Murray

Ireland has less of a tradition of literary realism than England, though for an English critic to say so may require a degree of diplomacy. It may sound like saying that Ireland is deficient in realism in the same way that a nation might be deficient in hospitality or human rights. This is because realism is one of those terms which can be both normative and descriptive, like ‘nature’ or ‘culture’. It can mean, neutrally, the kind of art which aims for verisimilitude, or it can mean one which succeeds in penetrating to the truth of how things are. Realism can refer to the representational mode of an art form, or to its cognitive effect. Paul Murray quotes me in this book as claiming that the Irish literary tradition is one of ‘largely non-realistic works’, whereas what I actually wrote was ‘non-realist’. ‘Realistic’ is a value term, whereas ‘realist’ is not, or not necessarily.

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Terry Eagleton is John Edward Taylor Professor of English Literature at Manchester. His books include Literary Theory, After Theory and, most recently, The Meaning of Life.