Criticism: In the story 'Kingdom, Order, Species', from his recently published collection On the Nature of Human Romantic Interaction, Karl Iagnemma describes the peculiar case of J. Poole, author of Woody Plants of North America.
The narrator of the story is obsessed with why its brilliant author mysteriously gave up forestry after publishing it. Tracking him down in deepest Michigan, she asks him why. But Poole has not quit forestry. He has done something much more subversive and shocking: he has quit academe.
"Your presence here today illustrates something tragic," he tells her. "Academics think that universities contain an entire world."
If there is one word that conjures up the kind of academic who equates the university with the world, rightly or wrongly, it is "theory". Up to speed on James Joyce's post- colonial hybridity but ignorant of obscure subjects like his Catholicism, interpreting Derrida's Marxist "turn" without so much as a reference to actual class politics, the central casting theorist is a Teflon person, a purveyor of non-stick knowledge. Anyone who has ever read a cultural studies paperback will know the drill: the garbled, second-hand philosophy, the bogus radicalism, the tin-can prose. Yes, a book about how theory has failed literary criticism must have a serious point. But hang on a minute: this is Terry Eagleton we're talking about, the celebrated author of Literary Theory: An Introduction.
What's going on here? Needless to say, After Theory is not about the failure of theory or a disenchanted "God that failed" book. Eagleton is not angry with theory, he's just a little disappointed, that's all. If theory has let him down it's because it has become institutionalised, one more symptom of the sickness for which it was meant to have been the cure. Eagleton wants to be the Father Arnall of theory, dragging it off for a spiritual retreat and putting the fear of God back into it with a good old hellfire sermon about globalisation and the pointlessness of writing PhDs about Friends.
One well-established feature of Eagleton's style strongly in evidence here is his addiction to slick conjunctions of things that may or may not have anything in common, as when he tells us of the 19th-century fin de siècle: "You could be enthralled by symbolism and syndicalism at the same time. Dope and diabolism were quite as plentiful as feminism." (A dash of alliteration doesn't go amiss either.)
He also has a bizarre attachment to insulting animal comparisons (insulting to the animals, that is). In his memoir, The Gatekeeper, a doltish Cambridge academic "had no more ideas in his head than a hamster" and 1950s Salford boys had a life experience "as limited and repetitive as a fruitbat's". At times After Theory is practically crying out for the Pet Rescue helpline number. Here it is on toads: "Toads do not win medals for being toads. You can have a good toad, but not a virtuous one." On stoats: "Like village idiots and neighbourhood police officers, they are essentially local beings."
And on the reluctance of non-theorists to think about the nature of prose fiction: "It would be like caring for an animal for years without having a clue whether it was a badger, a rabbit or a deformed mongoose." A deformed mongoose? When Elizabeth Bishop praised a new poem of Marianne Moore's that for once did not have any animals in it, Moore's mother replied: "Yes. I am so glad that Marianne has decided to give the inhabitants of the zoo . . . a rest." Eagleton too should give his menagerie a well-earned break.
What is dispiriting about these stylistic tics is how little they contribute to the argument, which is familiar but cogent, taking in such Eagleton greatest hits as: liberals have a limited world-view; absolute truth still matters; postmodern relativism is the real dogma of our times; oh, and liberals have a limited world-view, or did I mention that one already? These I take to be entirely unexceptionable statements, not worth anyone getting worked up about. But Eagleton is much given to shadow-boxing with an assumed antagonist still deeply entrenched in the works of Quiller-Couch and outraged by the mere mention of words like "structuralism" or "ideology". This becomes tiring, even as we find ourselves taking Eagleton's side. For undeniably, if there is one thing worse than a theory bore it is an anti-theory bore, high-mindedly allergic to French charlatans but prepared to spout any amount of blather in defence of the sacred Western Canon (the name Harold Bloom springs to mind). Sometimes the words "tradition" and "canon" are far more decadent than any amount of Jacques Derrida.
If we are now "after theory" there is no going back to a world "before theory", as if such a thing were possible. When we read R.P. Blackmur and Kenneth Burke today it should be because they were fine critics, not because they make us feel good about our inability to read anything written by an academic since 1968. Nobody likes a reactionary and, to paraphrase the Gore Vidal joke about red-baiting never destroying anyone in Hollywood who was worth saving, the critics who cry loudest about theory spoiling the party for them are all too often those whose critical parties were least worth attending anyway. If one of the outstanding European intellectuals today, Slavoj Zizek, is a fully signed-up Leninist Lacanian who does theory the way Keith Richards does guitar riffs, it's our loss, not his, if we allow ourselves to be scared off. So two cheers for theory groupies everywhere for reminding us of that, if nothing else.
One final thought occurs to me. Eagleton's argument may be all very well in practice. But does it work in theory?
David Wheatley is a poet and critic
After Theory. By Terry Eagleton, Allen Lane, 225pp. £18.99