In the Company of Confreres

Terry Eagleton

On Modern British Fiction edited by Zachary Leader
Oxford, 328 pp, £14.99, October 2002, ISBN 0 19 924932 6

During the half-century since 1950, Lindsay Duguid writes in an essay in this collection, ‘the lady novelist turned into the woman writer,’ the historical novel became respectable once again, crime fiction became respectable for the first time, and the English novel was reborn as the British novel. Indian novelists revealed a ‘fondness for identical twins’, while angels, giants, babies and women who pass as men grew curiously fashionable. ‘In 1999, three British novels and one American novel featured a heroine in a coma.’ Stuffed with literary graduates, publishers’ offices are increasingly coming up with paradoxical comparisons for dustjackets: ‘Brighton Rock written by Charlotte Brontë’; ‘the Camus of the backpacking generation’.

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Vol. 24 No. 24 · 12 December 2002 » Terry Eagleton » In the Company of Confreres (print version)
Pages 31-32 | 3000 words

Letters

From James Wood

In his sprightly review of a book of critical essays, On Modern British Fiction, Terry Eagleton commends one contributor's essay for dealing in 'complex ideas, which was never quite criticism's strongest point' (LRB, 12 December 2002). When people like Eagleton write slightingly about 'criticism' or 'English literature', they hardly ever mean 'criticism and literature as it has been written by writers', and almost always mean 'English literary studies in universities, from about 1910 to 1950' – from 'Q' to Leavis. Thus Eagleton's own slight is as parochial and anti-intellectual as his target, for no one could seriously argue that criticism, in the largest sense – seen as a branch of aesthetics, or as the grandchild of philology and Biblical higher criticism – has not dealt in 'complex ideas'. Walter Benjamin writes in The Origin of German Tragic Drama that 'it is characteristic of philosophical writing that it must continually confront the question of representation,' and if, by these lights, philosophy is often a kind of criticism, dealing with mimesis, then by the same token criticism is often a kind of philosophy. (And literature is often both.) Above all, criticism is a form of literary thinking, historically undertaken not by academics or by theorists, of course, but by writers, and if its ideas do not seem 'complex', then it is our idea of complexity which is being challenged.

'Criticism' is a word large enough to accommodate not only the Biographia Literaria (complex enough that Coleridge is barely comprehensible at times) and Contre Sainte-Beuve and Woolf's essays, but also Heine's Religion and Philosophy in Germany, and Schiller's essay on naive and sentimental poetry, and Lev Shestov's philosophical writing on Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, and Thomas Mann's Schiller-influenced criticism, and the work of Renato Poggioli and Erich Heller, and Edmond Jabès's epigrams and fragments, and so on. Readers can provide their own additions, and if they are like me they read this stuff pretty much as they read other genres of literature. (Benjamin again, from One-Way Street: 'Criticism must speak the language of artists.') Of writers still alive, even Eagleton would find it hard to deny that the essays of J.M. Coetzee, Czeslaw Milosz and Milan Kundera are criticism, or that they deal in 'complex ideas'. But Eagleton, one of the most widely read theorists alive, knows all this, so what does he mean? I suspect that he not only wants to reserve theory (along with philosophy and aesthetics) as the proper domain of real thought, but that he also means to suggest, with a wink and a nod, that literature itself does not really deal in 'complex ideas' either. For if criticism, that parasitical, absorptive and co-dependent discipline, has little to do with ideas, then what of its even softer, more vulnerable host?

James Wood
Washington DC