An Interview with Terry Eagleton

ALEXANDER BARKER AND ALEX NIVEN

Throughout a career spanning several decades, Terry Eagleton has been an

ineluctable part of British intellectual culture. Born and brought up in Salford,
Manchester to working-class Irish immigrant parents, Eagleton won a place to read
English literature at Cambridge, where he studied under Raymond Williams. As an
academic at Cambridge and later Oxford, he became known for his Marxist
readings of English literature, and for his advocacy of continental theory at a
relatively early juncture and throughout its ascendancy. His book Literary
Theory(1983) became the classic primer on the subject, and in the years since
Eagleton has continued to provide theoretical analyses of a host of subjects from
prosody to postmodernism in a critical voice that is by turns provocative,
accessible, and erudite. Eagletons recent book Why Marx Was Right seeks to
summarise and renovate Marxist principles in the context of the global financial
crisis and a climate of resurgent anti-capitalism.
So: why was Marx right?
Someone asked me that last night at a talk, and I mentioned Greece. Theres irony
in the fact that in the midst of the most affluent civilization history has witnessed
people are scavenging in rubbish baskets for food. Thats the kind of contradiction
I think Marx was talking about. I also stressed how much Marx admired the way
that capitalism had in a very short space of time accumulated such wealth
material, spiritual, culturalbut that it couldnt do that without the contradiction of
generating inequality at the same time; were seeing a stark instance of that in
Greece today. So thats the kind of thing Id point to to show the relevance of Marx.

Even within the anti-capitalist movement, Marx is not a majority presence. One has
to say that. Its partly because of the discrediting of Marxism by Stalinism, which
will take a long time for the Marxist left to recover from. But Im not myself madly
concerned about whether people stick the label Marxist onto themselves as long
as they take a critical stance towards the present situation. It doesnt matter what
they call themselves.
Do you think at this point in history Marxism, communism,
socialism, leftism are basically interchangeable? Would you insist on
sharp distinctions?
No, what Ive said in a sense suggests that theyre not, in that you can be a good
leftist and thinker of the anti-capitalist movement without being particularly
indebted to Marxism. I wouldnt lean too heavily on the need for Marx to be right,
though its true I suppose that Marxism has been the mainstream anti-capitalist
critique within the left. What strikes me is the dramatic way the situation has
changed since, say, the turn of the millennium. At the turn of the millennium,
history was supposedly over. Capitalism was in a peculiarly confident and arrogant
phase. And then, from the fall of the World Trade Center onwards, there has been
the so-called War against Terror, the enormous capitalist crisis, the Arab Spring,
societies like Greece teetering on the brink of radical change, a majority of
American youth saying they prefer socialism to capitalism. Nobody could have
predicted that ten years ago. So I think that whats brought Marxism or at least
socialism back on the agenda is of course the capitalist crisis. Its not because
people have suddenly started reading Marx or a new generation of leftists has
spontaneously emerged. Its that crisis always makes a system visible. It always
makes its limits visible. And systems dont normally like that, and therefore people
are able to cast a new critical eye on them.
You spoke of the fact that Marx didnt feel a revolution needed to be
violent. Do you feel that what is now going on in response to the crisis
and its aftermath is the beginning of a revolution in his sense?
I think it might be slightly rash to say so. I think I would want to wait and see.
Socialists have traditionally talked about pre-revolutionary situations. Im not sure
Id characterise it as that. Also, of course, Marx was against prediction, and what
predictions he produced were grotesquely mistaken. I would say that its always
rash to overestimate the fall of the power of the system. They have more tanks
than we do! On the other hand, capitalism like any other political system cant
really work without a certain degree of credibility. It doesnt need people to
congratulate it, but it does need them to be at least passively collusive with it. The
situation in Greece now is not like that. The situation in Greece now is I think raw
anger on the part of people who are by no means naturally radicals. And its not

out of the questionwe dont knowthat that mood could spread through Europe.
People in my view only go for a radical alternative when they think the present
system is bust beyond repair. As long as they think it will yield them some meagre
benefits, theyre likely to hang in there, because the perils and obscurities of
change are such as to daunt people. But if it turns out that the system cant yield
people that, because a whole nation grubbing in dustbins is not out of the
question, then theres no reason why people shouldnt consider an alternative.
You say somewhere, I think its in The Gatekeeper (2002), your
autobiography and memoir, that its of great consolation to you that
youve avoided the typical trajectory of going from being a youthful
radical to being an old Tory. But there has been a kind of a movement
towards dealing with big metaphysical themes in your recent work, I
think: tragedy, evil, religion, love, death. Have you been conscious of
that shift?
As far as avoiding the clich of angry young man to the dyspeptic old reactionary, I
guess a reason I havent done that is because, as I argue in the Marx book, the
reason why people stopped being leftists [in recent decades] was not necessarily
that they changed their views about the system, but that they found it too hard to
break. There was disenchantment with the alternative in the rampant years of
boom of Thatcher, of Reagan, of cowboy capitalism, of neoliberalism. There just
seemed no way that you could feasibly change it. Thats depressing in one sense
but encouraging in another. It wasnt that people threw in their hats with the
system because of how marvelous it was (apart from one of my most radical
Marxist students ever who became a stockbroker, because he became convinced
that capitalism was the best thing since Michelangelo). So that was the reason that
I hung in there, and many other people did.
I suppose one of the advantages of a left downturn, ironically, is that it gives you
time to think around politics, not to fetishise it. Politics isnt the be-all and end-all. I
never really believed that it was. But when the left is on the ascendancy, its hard
not to believe. So there are ironically gains from the situation at the moment that
you can then begin to lay in ideas or think around the topic, and I suppose thats
partly what Ive been doing. Not deserting politics but trying to add a depth to it,
and also, in doing so, breaking with the holy trinity of class, race, and gender. Vital
topics though they are, theyve become such tram-lines on which the cultural left
has been moving.
So do you think there might be potential in an alliance between religion
and left politics?

In a sense, you might almost say thats been the theme of my intellectual career.
Its not always obvious to me or to anybody else for that matter. But of course I
started, when I was at Cambridge, as a left-wing Catholic in the heady days of the
Vatican Council. And I suppose what you might call political Christianity has run
as a kind of subcurrent beneath my work. Its now come to the surface, and there
were times, particularly in what you might call my Althusserian phase, when it
wasnt so obvious.
Lots of people would see
Catholicism, for example

contradiction

between

Marxism

and

Well, Im not sure I would talk about myself as a Roman Catholic. I was brought up
in that culture, and it is a culture. Thats one of the attractive things about it. You
know, you meet a Catholic from Korea or somewhere, and you share an enormous
amount of things in common. Its like being a Jew, in that sense. I have no truck
with the Vatican and all that kind of stuff. But I suppose its a certain theological
mainstream that interests me, and the political implications of such. And of course
thats been coming much to the fore in the past few years. If you think of the
number of agnostic and very theistic leftists from Agamben and Zizek to Habermas
and Badiou, who have been raising theological themes, its very much part of the
zeitgeist.
How important is Ireland to you? Because obviously you grew up in
Manchester; is your interest in Irishness an exiles impulse?
I dont know actually. I wrote a lot about Ireland in the 1990s. I wrote a trilogy of
books on Irish history and culture and literature, and since then Ive intellectually
moved away from Ireland. I still live there; I just havent written much about it
since then. Except that Ive just written a long review for the London Review of
Books about a novel which involves Irishness, in which I remark that the Irish were
put on this earth for other people to feel romantic about. One thing I do value
about Ireland, which I also say in the review, is that our main export remains
culture, all the way from Bono to Riverdance to Heaney to Friel, and thats nice. I
rather appreciate that. But living in a small contentious island also has its
drawbacks, not least if youre a semi-outsider, like myself; you have to be careful
sometimes. I dont know. I suppose I always knew Ireland too well to feel romantic
about it.
And how about Englishness? Theres a lot of talk about that right now
Yes. In many ways I feel myself English. What I sometimes say to people who ask
me what I am, nationally, I usually say well it doesnt matter to me, and thats a
privilege. What you are ethnically, or nationally, matters if you are being

oppressed in it, if somebodys using that against you to make you feel unhappy
about it. Well thats not the case with me, so it doesnt really matter.
What are your views on the current state of academia? Youve seen it
evolve over a number of years.
Most people I know in academia want to get out. Which is a pretty new situation.
Ive never encountered that before. When I arrived in Oxbridge at the tender age
of 18, it was massively upper class and very patrician, and I had a very hard time
there. As a tutor in Oxford over the years, I saw all thatsuperficially at least
modulate. You know, Etonians with bones through their noses and Wykehamists
carefully dropping their vowels, distressing their jeans and their accents. But at
least in those years, the neo-managerial ethos hadnt exerted its clammy grip so
much over universities. [Neo-managerialism] is absolutely hideous. I mean, it has
effectively brought to an end hundreds of yearsat least a 200-year-old tradition
of the university as a centre of critique in a society where critique otherwise is
pretty hard to come by. That is a momentous and historic development, and Im
really rather glad, personally speaking, that it coincides with my exit. Everywhere I
go, from Peru to Australia, people are very unhappy in what perhaps were once,
you know, the best days of ones life.
How do you feel about current literary criticism? You were an episode in
the history of literary criticism yourself in a sort of transition phase from
Leavisism to the present day
Ive got a book coming out called something banal like How To Study Literature,
because I fear that literary criticism, at least as I knew it and was taught it, is
almost as dead on its feet as clog dancing. That is to say, all of the things that I
would have been taught at Cambridgeclose analysis of language, responsiveness
to literary form, a sense of moral seriousnessall of which could have negative
corollariesI just dont see that any more. Somewhere along the line that
sensitivity to language which I value enormously got lost. I didnt really know
about this because I had moved up in the echelons of academia and I wasnt close
enough to the undergraduate ground, as it were, to be aware of this. But when I
got to Manchester [Eagleton began teaching at the University of Manchester in
2001], I was appalled by the way that people could be very smart about the
context of a poem, but had no idea about how to talk about it as a poem. Whereas
even if one did that badly or indifferently, it was still something one automatically
did in my day. This book coming out next year is really an attempt to put literary
criticism as I see it back on the agenda. And to talk about questions of things like
value, whats good, whats bad, form, theme, language, imagery, and so on.

Thats not exactly an about-face, but certain people would have seen you
as one of the people responsible for a shift away from traditional literary
criticism toward the end of the last century. Its interesting. This alliance
between the old Cambridge tradition and late 20th-century political
criticism seems to parallel the new alliance between religion and leftism
you spoke of earlier. It seems that all of these things have been on the
back foot, and one way to combat that might be to ally them. So
someone like [Oxford Professor of Poetry] Geoffrey Hill would agree with
lots of what youre saying, but is an Anglican Tory.
Sure. Thats taking the rough with the smooth. One has to accept that some of
ones positions can be agreed with by ones enemies, that there is sometimes a
common ground.
But there seems to be a lot of common ground, perhaps, right now, in
terms of English.
Anybody, whatever their position, who supports some kind of a return to sensitivity
to language has my support in that. I can see your point that it might be ironic that
someone like myself who partly initiated high theory in this country should then be
bewailing the loss of the close reading tradition, but as I said before, I dont think
thats the case. I think that, almost uniformly across the board, the great theorists
were very close readers, from Hartmann to Jameson to Kristeva to Derrida, who
was for some people too close a reader. So I think that thats a false opposition
actually. I dont think thats the reason. I think the reason is much more to do with
the media, with postmodernism, with changes in general culture, the status of the
written word, and so on. But of course what one shares with someone like Hill
there is rather formal: an agreement for a certain procedural way of reading. But
then all the differences start. All the differences about the point of this, its place
within culture.
And what would you say is the place of literature? What is the value of
culture?
There have been attempts to make culture stand in for religion. Modernity is
littered with failed candidates, substitutes, surrogates for religion. Culture was
actually more successful than many of them. But it didnt work. In my view, no
symbolic system on earth has had religions power, pervasiveness, depth.
Whatever you think of religion I think thats just a fact. Not always a fact to be
celebrated by any means, but I think its a fact. Culture cant hold a candle to
religion. On the other hand, the fact that it cant do everything doesnt mean that
it should simply retire and sequester itself in some private and sacred space. Its
part, I suppose, of the materialist theory that culture is not where its at, in the

end, even though culture has become massively more important from 1900
onward in Western societies. But nevertheless it has an important role to play, and
that ideally is a role beyond simply, as it were, the private or academic activity of
writing literary criticism. I would like to see the critic once again become a partly
public intellectual. But you cant just legislate that into existence. It depends upon
culture as a whole, politics as a whole.
So what advice would you give to young critics?
Its not a good time to be in the universities. What someone once described to me
years ago (actually in South Africa of all places) as the Thatcherisation of the
universities carries on apace under different names. I only have an oblique
relationship to academia, as you know, now that Im semi-retired. But even when I
did, when I was thoroughly in the belly of the beast, I did try to hold the role of
public intellectual. That is very important. Not that everybody can be an Edward
Said or Habermas. But thats what we need, and even more deeply and rigorously
given the almost utter assimilation of academia into capitalism.
Do you think there are any positive ways of occupying that public role
outside of academia, and outside the market perhaps?
Nothing entirely is outside the market. And I dont think one should get too puristic
about that. One works with what one has, and one has to be realistic about that.
But the problem has been, at least through the end of the 19th century, perhaps,
post-Matthew Arnold, that increasingly the intellectuals moved into the
universities. You can almost chart that shift in late Victorian England. In one sense
that gave them a certain backing and buttressing and authority. They were no
longer freewheeling lone voices. But it also coincided with the slow demise of
important journals and forms where you could have a non-academic public
intellectual culture. I suppose I represent that now, but I didnt for most of my life: I
didnt when I was inside academia. One of the things that worries me is that in the
United States even radical academics are not particularly concerned about this.
They accept the academicisation of radical intellectual life very easily. Thats partly
because the whole of academia is much more self-consciously professional than it
is here, the home of the amateurs. But its a very worrying development. As Ive
said, too many times, I see the intellectual as the opposite of the academic in
many ways. Even if you can only launch that project from an academic position,
which is often the case, nevertheless it has to be in contention with the
complacency and the specialism and narcissism of so much academic work. But
realistically, again on a materialist analysis, the possibilities of that are not up to
the academic: theyre up to more general political developments.

Finally, what would you like to see happening next? In the world, in
Britain, in England, in Ireland, in academia.
In Ireland, of course, at the end of the month, theres a referendum on austerity
about to happen. Probably austerity will win out, but it wont (of course) in Greece.
And if it doesnt in Greece then there will be ripples throughout Europe, and I hope
that that will strengthen the anti-austerity movement immeasurably. I think that
theres a good chance that that will happen because Greece in that sense is the
canary in the coal-mine, and they cant take it, however proud [scare-quote
marks with fingers] a people they are. And nor will other people be able to take it if
that spreads out. I dont say that then people will man the revolutionary barricades
by any means. Although Greece might not be far from it, certainly not far from civil
war. But it will at least sharpen the political choices: it will put them on the table.
And not through any heroic efforts by the left, ironically, but through the logic of
capitalism itself, which has got itself, as Oliver Hardy said, in this fine mess. And
the less people are self-sacrificially prepared to get it out of it, the more the real
political options will, I think, become visible.
Alexander Barker is reading for a DPhil in Political Theory at Lincoln College,
Oxford. Alex Niven is reading for a DPhil in English Literature at St Johns College,
Oxford. They are both senior editors at the Oxonian Review.
http://www.oxonianreview.org/wp/an-interview-with-terry-eagleton/