Terry Eagleton: Quotations

Monographs & Essays
Saint Oscar (1989), ‘I object to this trial on the grounds that no Irishman can receive a fair hearing in an English court because the Irish are figments of the English imagination. I am not really here; I am just one of your racial fantasies. You cannot manacle a fantasy. I do not believe in your morality and I do not believe in your truth. I have my own truth and morality which I call art. I am not on trial here because I am a pervert but because I am an artist, which in your book comes to much the same thing. You hold that a man is a man and a woman is a woman. I hold that nothing is ever purely itself, and that the point where it becomes so is known as death. I therefore demand to be defended by metaphysicians rather than by lawyers, and that my jury should be composed of my peers - namely, poets, perverts, vagrants and geniuses.’ (Quoted in Seamus Heaney, ‘Speranza in Reading: On “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”’, in The Redress of Poetry, Oxford 1995, pp.86-87.) Note also the opening chorus song: ‘From Portora to prison is quite a long way […]’.

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Nationalism: Irony and Commitment [Field Day Pamphlet Series, ‘Nationalism, colonialism and Literature’, No. 13] (Derry 1988): ‘Our grudge against the ruling order is not only that it has oppressed us in our social, sexual or racial identities, but that it has therefore forced us to lavishing an extraordinary amount of attention on these things, which are not in the long [7] run all that important’ those of us who happen to be British, yet who object to what has been done historically to other peoples in our name, would far prefer a situation in which we could take being British for granted and think about something more interesting for a change.’ (pp.7-8.) ‘[T]he metaphysics of nationalism speaks of the entry into full self-realisation of a unitary subject known as the people. As with all such philosophies of the subject from Hegel to the present, this monadic subject must somehow curiously pre-exist its own process of materialisation - must be equipped , even now, with certain highly determinate needs and desires, on the model of the autonomous human personality. […] The model […] is an express/blockage one, of a familiar Romantic kind … it is just that one ironic effect of such repression is to render us radically uncertain of what our needs really are. The very repressive conditions which make it necessary for the subject to express itself freely also tend to render it partially opaque to itself.’ (p.9.) ‘This is the kernel of bourgeois Enlightenment: the abstract universal right of all to be free, the shared essence or identity of all human subjects to [10] be autonomous […] the telos of the entire process is not, as the Enlightenment believed, universal truth, right and identity, but concrete particularity.’ (p.10-11.) ‘Modernism is at once, contradictorily, an exhilarating estrangement from the powerfully distancing perspectives of exile, monopoly capitalism, and an expression of the rootless conditions of an international monopoly capitalism, whose abstractly universalists forms are mimed by modernisms’s own progressively abstract techniques.’ (p.14.) ‘I have suggested that the aesthetics as a totalisation of particular and universal is in general absent in Ireland; but then what else, you might claim, is Ulysses? […] The aesthetics of Ulysses are in this sense pretty standard Hegelian stuff, and among other things fit compensation for the pain of exile.’ (p.14.)

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Nationalism: Irony and Commitment (1988) - cont.: ‘If Ulysses “resolves” contradictions, however, the sweated Flaubertian labour with which this is accomplished points to the effective impossibility of the whole project. […] The novel celebrates and undermines the Irish national formation at a stroke, deploying the full battery of cosmopolitan modernist techniques to recreate it while suggesting with its every breadth how easily it could have done the same for Bradford or the Bronx. Something of the same ambiguity haunts Finnegans Wake … The Wake’s anarchic differencing is possible only on the basis of a secret homogenising of reality, a prior equalising of all items which then enables them to enter into the most shockingly idiosyncratic permutations.’ […] Joyce, then, poses the problem of totalisation, rather than providing us with any very adequate solution.’ (p.15). ‘[A]re the Irish oppressed as Irish? In one sense, surely not: it was never of much interest to British imperialism whether the Irish were Irish or Eskimo, white or black, whether they worshipped tree gods or the Trinity. It is not their ethnic peculiarity but their territory and labor power that have entranced the British. The Irish are simply denizens [12] of a convenient neighboring island; as long as they are other than the British they do not […] require certain specific innate characteristics to be ruled over […] In another sense, however, it is clearly abstract caviling [sic] to maintain that the Irish people has not been oppressed as Irish. However fundamentally indifferent colonialism may be to the nature of the peoples it does down, the fact remains that a particular people is in effect done down as such. And it is this fact that the truth of nationalism illuminates. (Nationalism, &c., US Edn. 1990, p.29-30; quoted in ‘Joyce and the Tradition of Anti-Colonial Revolution’, Working Papers Ser., Washington State Univ. 1999, pp.12-13.)

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‘Nationalism, Irony and Commitment’ (in Seamus Deane, ed., Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature, Minnesota UP 1990): ‘This bankrupt Irish Arnoldianism is particularly ironic when one siders that the title of Arnold’s own major work, Culture and An, might well have been rewritten as Britain and Ireland. The humanist notion of Culture was constituted, among other thing[s to] marginalize such peoples as the Irish, so that it is particularly intriguing to find this sectarian gesture being rehearsed by a few of the Irish themselves.’ (p.33; quoted in Vincent Cheng, Joyce, Race and Empire, Cambridge UP 1995, p.311 [ftns.].) [Cont.]

‘Nationalism, Irony and Commitment’ (1990) -cont.: ‘If colonialism tends to deprive those it subjugates not only of their land, language, and culture but of their very history […] then it is arguable that the mythological image of Ireland […] is itself a markedly historical phenomenon. A people robbed of their sense of agency and autonomy, unable to decipher the social institutions around them as expressions of their own life-practice, may tend quite reasonably to read their collective experience through the deterministic optic of mythology, with its sense of human life as shaped by the mighty forces of some process quite hidden to consciousness. Myth is in this sense less some regrettable, primitive irrationalism than a kind of historical truth.’ (p.31; Cheng, op. cit., pp.311-12.) [Cont.]

‘Nationalism, Irony and Commitment’ (1990) -cont.: ‘Ironically, then, a politics of difference or specificity is in the first place in the cause of samenes and universal identity - the right of a group victimised in its particularity to be on equal terms with others as far as their self-determination is concerned. […] In a further dialectical twist, however, this truth itself must be left behind as soon as seized; for the only point of enjoying such universal abstract equality is to discover and live one’s own particular difference. The telos of the entire process is not, as the Enlightenment believed, universal truth, right and identity, but concrete particularity.’ (p.30; Cheng, op. cit., p.315.)

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‘Aesthetics and Politics in Edmund Burke’, in Irish Literature and Culture, ed. Michael Kenneally [CAIS Conf., Marianopolis 1988] Irish Literary Studies No. 35] (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1992), pp.25-34: ‘The only problem is where all this imitating ends: social life for Burke would appear a kind of infinite chain of representations of representations, without ground or origin. If we do as others do, who do the same, then all of these copies would seem to lack a transcendental original, and society is shattered to a wilderness of mirrors. / This ceaseless mutual mirroring has about it something of the stasis of the Lacanian imaginary, and if taken too literally would spell the death of difference and history.’ (p.28.) regards the sublime as ‘a phallic “swelling” arising from our confrontation with danger […] a suitably defused, aestheticised version of the values of the ancien regime. It is as though those traditionalist patrician virtues of daring, reverence, free-booting ambition must be at once cancelled and preserved within middle-class life […] to avoid emasculation, they must still be fostered within it in the displaced form of aesthetic experience. The sublime is an imaginary compensation for all the uproarious old upper-calss violence, tragedy repeated as comedy.’ (p.29). [Cont.]

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‘Aesthetics and Politics in Edmund Burke’ (1992) - cont.: quotes Burke, ‘We submit to what we admire, but we love what submits to us; in one case we are forced, in the other flattered, into compliance.’ (‘Philosophical Enquiry’, in Works, 1906, Vol. 1, p.161), and comments: The distinction between the beautiful and the sublime, then, is that [29] between woman and man; but it is also the difference between what Louis Althusser has called the ideological and the repressive state apparatuses.’ (pp.29-30.) ‘We shall see, however, that Burke is not so much an aesthete as an aestheticiser [of power], which makes a significant difference.’ (p.41.) ‘What the aesthetic in Burke sets its face most firmly against is the notion of natural rights […]. All of this strange homespun psycho-physiology is a kind of politics, willing to credit no theoretical notion which cannot somehow be traced to the muscular structure of the eye or the texture of the fingerpads.’ (p.32.) ‘The true danger of revolutionaries is that as fanatical anti-aestheticians they offer to reduce hegemony to maked power […] angered by this iconoclasm, Burke speaks up instead for what Gramsci will later term “hegemony”’ (p.32.) [Cont.]

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‘Aesthetics and Politics in Edmund Burke’ (1992) - cont.: ‘The law is male, but hegemony is a woman; this transvestite law, which decks itself out in female drapery, is in danger of having its phallus exposed. Power is ceasing to be aestheticised.’ (p.33.) ‘The politic victory of the aesthetic in Burke is more than a local one. Indeed one might claim that from Burke and the later Coleridge and onward throughout the nineteenth century, the aesthetic as a category is in effect captured by the political right.’ (p.34.) ‘But when Walter Benjamin instructed us that since the fascists had aestheticised politics, we must politicise aesthetics, he did not, presumably, mean tha twe must replace the aesthetic with the political. Instead, we must find our own ways to reinterpret the classical tradtion of the aesthetic, which as I hve tried to show begins life as a kind of primitive proto-materialism.’ (p.34.)

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‘Form and Ideology in the Anglo-Irish Novel’, in Literary Relations: Ireland, Egypt and the Far East, ed. Mary Massoud (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1996), pp.135-46: ‘That a major literary realism never flourished in Ireland is in one sense unsurprising. For culture demands a material base; and there was little of that in one of Europe’s poorest countries’ (p.135.) ‘It is as though Carleton, like Griffin and the Banims before him, is unable to organise his plot in accordance with some deep historical logic, as Georg Lukacs would claim for the great European realists from Stendhal to Tolstoy. The Irish novel from Sterne to O’Brien is typically recursive and diffuse, launching one random narrative only to abort it, for some equally gratuitous tale, ringing pedantically ingenious variations on the same meagre clutch of plot elements. Anglo-Irish literature begins with one of the world’s greatest anti-novels, and achieves its apotheosis in a couple of others. […] If realism is the home of stability, it is equally the locus of totality. (p.136.) ‘Another check to Irish realism, paradoxically enough, is a certain excess of reality. The stark exigencies of history often enough disrupt the artifice of literary realism, as passionate polemic or outraged commentary burst through the protocols of the imagination, refusing to be naturalised in the classical realist mould.’ (p.137.) ‘There is a species of Irish fiction - the wildly popular Knocknagow comes to mind - which strives to sanitise reality for the ends of edification, since to depict the people in their true degraded state might only confirm their oppressors’ stereotypes of them […] Writing is torn between an abrasive realism which in indicting the colonial[,] risks demeaning the people, and one which in fostering the national self-esteem gives false comfort to their rulers.’ (p.137.) […; cont.]

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‘Form and Ideology in the Anglo-Irish Novel’ (1996) - cont.: ‘Protestant Gothic, one might claim, is the political unconscious of Irish society, the place where its fears and fantasies most luridly emerge. Ireland is violent, criminal, priest-ridden, autocratic full of mouldering ruins and religious fanaticism, and thus a society ripe for Gothic treatment. And if the form is on the whole of Protestant origin, it is because nothing lends itself better to the genre than the decaying gentry in their crumbling mansions isolated and sinisterly eccentric, haunted by the sins and spectres of the past, awash with ghosts and revenants of various kinds. For Gothic is the nightmare of the besieged and reviled - most notably of women, but in this case of an ethnic minority marooned within a largely hostile people. Sheridan Le Fanu portrays Daniel O’Connell as a Gothic monstrosity, a kind of Dracula of Derrynane; and James Clarence Mangan, with his blanched face and eccentric dress, was a type of the Undead, a kind of walking Gothic fantasy all in himself. It is not hard to read Melmoth in Charles Maturin’s magnificent novel as a type of the Anglo-Irish gentry, haunted by a primordial crime perpetrated in the seventeenth century which refuses to lie quite in its grave but which stalks the centuries in search of expiation. The Faustian pacts Melmoth seeks to establish with the dispossessed are all about Irish class politics - about the ghastly bonds of hatred and affection between exploiter and exploited. In a bizarre paradox, the oppressor has put himself morally beyond the pale, and so has a kind of grotesque affinity to those he persecutes.’ [Cont.]

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‘Form and Ideology in the Anglo-Irish Novel’ (1996) - cont.: ‘Gothic, that most extravagant of literary forms, is also secretly one of the most materialist. If it is full of hapless victims left to rot in remote asylums, you can be sure that this is because somebody is trying to get his hands on their money. The Irish name for this materialist Gothic is Sheridan Le Fanu, where money is usually to be found lying at the root of metaphysics, as in the disputed will or murderous struggle over inheritance. For Gothic is the form in which the dead take command of the living, a fiction of transmitted curses and aboriginal trespasses, all of which can be decoded as the deadweight of inherited property moulding the present of an Ascendancy now entering its dotage. The power of capital, which sucks blood from the living, is the most vampiric phenomenon of all. Le Fanu is thus fascinated by states which are ambivalently dead and alive, where real and unreal undecidably mingle, as the world of the Ascendancy itself is always part fantasy and part reality, and his work lays bare the guilt and paranoia of a social class on the wane, not least in that cockpit of feuds and loathings known to polite company as the family. There is indeed an unspeakable horror at the heart of things, but it turns out to have the drearily familiar names of fraud, coercion, exploitation. [p.146; see seq. under Bram Stoker; and note that the same essay appears in Bullán: An Irish Studies Review, Spring 1994, pp.17-26; see further extracts on Bram Stoker’s Dracula, under Stoker RX.] Also, ‘Joyce’s writing is the non-Irish speaking Irish writer’s way of being unintelligible to the British. By subverting the very forms of their language, he struck a blow for all his gagged and humiliated fellow country people.’ (‘Form and Ideology in the Anglo-Irish Novel’, in Búllan I, 1994, p.24.)

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‘The Ideology of Irish Studies’, in Bullán: An Irish Studies Journal, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Spring 1997), pp.5-14: ‘study of Irish history has become ensnared with potent mythologies from which it needs to be cut loose […] liberal humanism, postmodern pluralism, Eurocentrism, Anglophilia, multinational cosmopolitanism, ideologies of progressivism, modernisation, and the like […] ‘ [5]; Deconstructing Irish nationalism is fairly fashionable in some circles these days and with any luck will get you a job; deconstructing liberal humanism […] will probably not […] [5]; some of my best fiends are middle-class liberals [5] more hopelessly mystified than unionism or nationalism ever were […] [6]; committed to the values of justice, freedom, tolerance, and the like […] [but] actually seem to believe that all of this could be achieved without the most shattering transformation of the existing world system. [6]; The provincialism of supposed cosmopolitanism is truly staggering. [6]; Ireland on the whole lacks a liberal humanist heritage, with the result that what liberalism it now breeds tends to overreact against an illiberal society and betray its own liberal tenets in the act of doing so […] very unBloomsburyish [6]; difference between revisionists and their critics […] about class [6]; it has all been unspeakably dreadful so far and most people in history, let’s face it, would probably have been far better off not being born […] this glaringly obvious truth [7]; on the whole the working class movement’s view of things is truer than that of its antagonists, Schopenhauer more realistic than Hegel [7]; ideology of modernism […] Blairism, Ballsbridge or the smarter parts of Belfast [7]; […] grossly reductive binary opposition between atavistic traditionalism and a liberal, pluralist, enlightened world order on the other. [7]; Atavistic traditionalism is usually a hideous enough affair [viz., Oxford, 7]; Local atavisms and predatory transnationalism are sides of the same coin; the answer to whether the world is getting more regional or more global is surely a resounding yes. [8].

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‘The Ideology of Irish Studies’ (1997), cont.: Modernisation in Ireland today means a host of precious things like pluralism, feminism, tolerance, civic rights, secularisation, flexible notions of sovereignty; it can also mean being shamefaced and sarcastic about your historical culture - that cultural specificity which all good postmodernists are supposed to celebrate, except perhaps in the case of Irish postmodernists - so as to leap, suitably streamlined and amnesiac, into the heart of a European order characterised by racism, structural unemployment, urban barbarism, military campaigns against the third world and the abandonment of the Irish small farmers and working-class to a brutally neoliberal polity. As far as celebrating specific cultures goes, this is acceptable when what’s at stake is gay, rather that G.A.A. Tradition in the Irish Republic means an oppressive church, a stifling patriarchy, Gaelic chauvinism, dancing statues of the Virgin and the commission for building new roads going to whatever crony of the Minister happens to be most strapped for cash. It also means a respect for one’s cultural particularity, a refusal to surrender without a struggle to late-capitalist homogenising, a suspicion of the success ethic, and a respect for a church without which millions of Irishmen and women would never have been nursed, educated and cared for. How utterly non-pluralist to imagine that one could simply choose here! Why are the liberal pluralists so zealously one-sided about these matters? [8]; Liberal middle-class Irish historians tend not to know much about postmodernism, being devotees of Lyons rather than Lyotard; but it would help if they did, since they might then realise that they are to some extent part of it. [9]; Postmodern anti-essentialism (a mistaken philosophical fashion, in my view, but that’s also another story [cf. similar phrasing in Brendan Bradshaw’s comments: ‘another story’, under Bradshaw, Ricorso supra]), also fits rather well with revisionism, if somewhat inconsistently so. [9]

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‘The Ideology of Irish Studies’ (1997), cont.: Culturalism is another place where a specific postmodernism schema, and a certain revisionist or liberal middle-class reading of Ireland, conveniently intersect. […] Indeed if part of the theoretical struggle of our time has been to shift the very notion of culture from its narrow aesthetics to its wider (anthropological) meaning, two meanings of the word dislocated by modernity, then Ireland seems a splendidly appropriate mediation here. [11]; To put it another way: Ireland can be made to signify both cultural affirmation and political failure, spiritual centrality and political marginality, and this particular blend consorts excellently with the preoccupations of a postmodernist era, in which culture has been foregrounded partly as a displacement of political deadlocks we just can’t resolve. This displacement has been an age-old strategy in Ireland itself […; 12]; One of the universal political problems which Ireland incarnates is simply this. There is almost nothing more politically valuable than tolerance, pluralism, mutual understanding. […] For there is indeed something even more important than tolerance, and this is justice […] Justice is essential so that tolerance and plurality can thrive, but the struggle for it often undermines them. There seems to me absolutely no intellectual resolution to this dilemma. You just have to try it with the ball. [13]; Some time ago, I published a somewhat abrasive critique of the historian R. F. Foster, which contained, alongside a good many barbs, a fair amount of what seemed to me rather lavish praise for his work, entirely sincerely intended. Those who leapt to Foster’s defence in print dealt with the somewhat inconvenient fact that I had praised as well as criticised his work by the ingenious device of suppressing this fact altogether. So much for pluralism. There was, I allow, one lonely exception to this censorship. One commentator, seizing on my admiring comments on Foster’s elegant prose style, remarked that since elegance was not a quality associated with the Irish, I was really insinuating that Foster wasn’t truly Irish. When paranoia goes that far down, it is unlikely that it will be laid to rest by the liberal-rationalist view that if they don’t agree with you, you just have to say it again rather more persuasively. [14; End.]

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Heathcliff and the Great Hunger (1997): ‘We have learnt from Mikhail Bahktin to view the novel as an inherently dialogical form, a conflict of conversation between different codes, languages, genres; but the Irish nineteenth century novel is dialogical in a rather more precise sense of the term. For what we are listening to when we read it is one side of a fraught conversation with the British reading public, the other side of which can only be inferred or reconstructed from the words on the page. Like Irish political rhetoric, which knew that it would be reported and reacted to on the mainland and crafted itself accordingly, Irish fiction constantly overhears itself in the ears of its British interlocutors, editing and adjusting its discourse to those ends, holding the prejudices of its implicit addressee steadily in mind and constituting itself, at least in part, on the basis of that putative response.’ (p.201; quoted in Jacqueline Belanger, ‘Educating the Reading Public: British Critical Reception of Maria Edgeworth’s Early Irish Writing’, in Irish University Review, Autumn/Winter 1998, pp.240-55; p.241-42 [available at JSTOR online].)

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The Truth about the Irish (New Island Press 1999, 181pp.): ‘One sixth of Ireland consists of bogland, a higher proportion than any other European country except Finland. Most of the bogs are concentrated in the midlands and the west. For the visit, a bog is just a bog; a wild, harsh, damp, dismal stretch of ground which it’s best to drive through as quickly as possible before it starts to chase after you’. (p.30.) ‘If bogs have haunted the Irish imagination, it may be partly because they reveal the past as still present. with a bog and its buried contents, the past is no longer behind you, but palpably beneath your feet. A secret history is stacked just a few feet below the modern world in which your standing. This, in fact, has been one way in which the history-plagued Irish have sometimes conceived of their past - not as a set of events over and done with, but as something still alive and present […] (p.31.) Objects preserved in bogs are caught in a kind of living death, and this sense of death as part of life has been a theme of traditional Irish culture [viz., Finnegans Wake, the ghost story, &c.]. […] The country is full of ruins and spectres, of a past which won’t lie down, of those who perished in war or famine refusing to be laid decently to rest and returning to lay siege to the living (see DRACULA). Over the past few decades in Northern Ireland, religious conflicts which date from the seventeenth century have been slogging it out in the streets. What seems to have been [32] buried safely out of sight is thrust suddenly to the surface like a corpse rearing up from bog.’

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After Theory (London: Allen Lane 2003): ‘In fact, reality has no views about anything. Moral values, like everything else, are a matter of random, free-floating cultural traditions. / There is no need to be alarmed about this, however, since human culture is not really free-floating. Which is not to say that it is firmly anchored either. That would be just the flipside of the same misleading metaphor. Only something which was capable of being anchored could be described as having floated cloose. We would not call a cup “floating loose" just because it wasn’t clamped to the table with bands of steel. Culture only seems free-floating because we once thought we were rivetted in something solid, like God or Nature or Reason. But that was an illusion. It is not that it was once true but now is not, but that it was false all along. We are like someone crossing a high bridge and suddenly seized by panic on realising that there is a thousand-foot drop below them. It is as though the ground beneath their feet is no longer solid. In fact it is. / This is one difference between modernism and postmodernism. Modernism, or so it imagined, was old enough to remember a time when there were firm foundations to human existence, and was still reeling from the shock of their being kicked rudely away. That is one reason why so much modernism is of a tragic temper. The drama of Samuel Beckett, for example, has no faith whatsoever in redemption, but presents a world which still looks [57] as though it were in dire need of it. It refuses to turn its gaze from the intolerableness of things, even if there is no transcendent consolation at hand. After a while, however, you can ease the strain of this by portraying a world in which there is indeed no salvation, but on the other hand nothing to be saved. This it the post-tragic realism of postmodernism. Postmodernism is too young to remember a time when there was (so it was rumoured) truth, identity and reality, and so feels no dizzying abyss beneath its feet. It is used to treading clear air, and has no sense of giddiness. In a reverse of the phantom limb syndrome, there seems to be something missing but there is not. We are simply the prisoners of a deceptive metaphor here, imagining as we do that the world has to stand on something in the way that we stand on the world. It is not that the pure ice beneath our feet has yielded to rough ground; the ground was rough all along. We are like toddlers who still insist that they need their comforters, and need to be dragged kicking and screaming to the recognition that they do not. To relinquish our metaphysical comforters would be to make the momentous discovery that doing so has changed absolutely nothing. If only we could accept this we would be thoroughly post-metaphysical, and hence free. As Nietszche admonished us, however, we have killed God but hidden the body, insisting as we do on behaving as though he is still alive. Postmodernism exhorts us to recognise that we will lose nothing by the crumbling of the foundations except our chains. We can now do what we want, without carting around a lot of cumbersome metaphysical baggage in order to justify it. Having checked in our baggage, we have freed our hands.’ (pp.57-58.)

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After Theory (2003) - cont. ‘Cultural theory is in the habit of posing what one might call [87] meta-questions. Instead of asking, “Is this poem valuable?”, it asks “What do we mean by calling a poem good or bad?” Instead of asking whether a novel has an implausible plot, it asks itself what a novel is anyway. Instead of asking whether the clarinet concerto is slightly too cloying to be entirely persuasive, it inquires about the material conditions which you need to produce concertos in the first place, and how these help to shape the work itself. Critics discuss symbols, whereas theorists ask by what mysterious process one thing can come to stand for another? Critics talk about the character of Coriolanus, while theorists ask how it comes about that a pattern of words on a page can appear to be a person. / None of these meta-questions need replace straightforward critical questions. You can ask both kinds of question together. But theory, in its unassuming way, is unsettled by the way in which conventional art criticism seems to take too much briskly for granted. It moves too fast and self-assuredly, refusing to push questions far back enough. It has the air of appearing to know all kinds of things that we are actually unsure about. In this sense, theory is less dogmatic than conventional criticism, more agnostic and open-minded. It wants to take fewer preconceptions casually for granted, and to scrutinise our spontaneous assumptions as far as it can. Inquiry, of course, has to begin somewhere. In principle, it is possible to push the question back ad infinitum. But received ways of talking about culture are rather too precipitous in what they take as read. / From this viewpoint, non-theorists look remarkably lacking in curiosity.’ (pp.87-88.)

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After Theory (2006) - cont. ‘Most of the objections to theory are either false or fairly trifling. A far more devastating criticism of it can be launched. Cultural theory as we have it promises to grapple with some fundamental problems, but on the whole fails to deliver. It has been shamefaced about morality and metaphysics, embarrassed about love, biology, religion and revolution, largely absent about evil, reticent about death and suffering, dogmatic about essences, universals and foundations, and superficial about truth, [101] objectivity and disinterestedness. This, on any estimate, is rather a large slice of human existence to fall down on. It is also, as we have suggested before, rather an awkward moment in history to find oneself with little or nothing to say about such fundamental questions. Let us see if we can begin to remedy these deficiencies by addressing these issues in a different light.’ (pp.101-02; end chap.; see also extracts in Wikipedia [online].

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After Theory (2006) - various sentences: ‘Cultural ideas change with the world they reflect upon. If they insist, as they do, on the need to see things in their historical context, then this must also apply themselves. Even the most rarified theories have a root in historical reality.’ (p.23.) ‘Cultural theory was among other things the continuation of modernism by other means.’ (p.64.)

Why Marx Was Right (2011): ‘Resources would be allocated by negotiations between producers, consumers, environmentalists and other relevant parties, in networks of workplace, neighbourhood and consumer counscils [...] At every state, public debate over alternative economic plans and policies would be essential [...] Prices would be determined not centrally, but by production units on the basis of input from consumers, users, interest groups and so on.’ (Quoted in Frank Barry, book review, in The Irish Times, 2 July 2011, Weekend Review, p.12.)

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Reviews
Staging the Famine’, Terry Eagleton writes about the inherent difficulties of portraying in art works events as cataclysmic as the Great Famine’, Irish Reporter, 19 (3rd Quarter 1995), pp.12-13; the same issued contains an appreciative review of Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, Studies in Irish Culture, written by Sean Ryder (p.30).

‘Imperfect Strangers’, review of Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodernity and its Discontents (Oxford: Policy 1997), 221pp., in Times Literary Supplement (23 May 1997): ‘Bauman strives implausibly to reserve individual freedom for the postmodern epoch, ignoring the fact that modernity was individualist too and fudging the distinction between liberal and postmodern versions of personal liberty.’ (p.22.)

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Arthur Mathews: review of Well-Remembered Days, in The Irish Times (3 March 2001) [as supra], with additional remarks: ‘A truly modern nation would be one which felt able to recall its history without either tearful sentimentalism or glib derision.’ Further, ‘One of the more insidious crimes of the Irish Catholic church has been to deprive the nation of the kind of intellectually challenging, politically relevant version of the Christian doctrine which it would cost you something to reject. Instead, an autocratic Church has allowed its rebels to buy their atheism on the cheap, a feat which might be less easy in the jungles of Guatemala.’ Finally, ‘Modernism, which the pious Eneas detests, means sweat shops and shattered communities as well as enlightened values, pollution and migration alongside Thai cuisine. […] Only when the bubble bursts and the Tiger sickens might it start to dawn on them [the Irish] that Temple Bar is no more a solution to the riddle of history than the Tubbercurry Legion of Mary.’ [End].

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‘Pedants and Partisans’, in The Guardian (22 Feb. 2003): ‘There are two things desirable for fighting fundamentalists. The first is not to be one yourself. The US government’s war on the movement is somewhat compromised by the fact that it is run by scripture-spouting fanatics for whom the sanctity of human life ends at the moment of birth. This is rather like using the British National party to run ex-Nazis to earth, or hiring Henry Kissinger to investigate mass murder, as George Bush recently did by nominating him to inquire into the background to September 11. Fundamentalists of the Texan stripe are not best placed to hunt down the Taliban variety. / The second desirable thing is to know what fundamentalism is. The answer to this is less obvious than it might seem. Fundamentalism doesn’t just mean people with fundamental beliefs, since that covers everyone. Being a person means being constituted by certain basic convictions, even if they are largely unconscious. What you are, in the end, is what you cannot walk away from. These convictions do not need to be burning or eye-catching or even true; they just have to go all the way down, like believing that Caracas is in Venezuela or that torturing babies is wrong. They are the kind of beliefs that choose us more than we choose them. Sceptics who doubt you can know anything for sure have at least one fundamental conviction. “Fundamental” doesn’t necessarily mean “worth dying for”. You may be passionately convinced that the quality of life in San Francisco is superior to that in Strabane, but reluctant to go to the gallows for it. […] Fundamentalists are really necrophiliacs, in love with a dead letter. The letter of the sacred text must be rigidly embalmed if it is to imbue life with the certitude and finality of death. Matthew’s gospel, in a moment of carelessness, presents Jesus as riding into Jerusalem on both a colt and an ass - in which case, for the fundamentalist, the Son of God must indeed have had one leg thrown over each. [… &c.]’ [From Guardian online.]

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Thinking, America?: Review of Curtis White, The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don’t Think For Themselves, in The Irish Times (20 March 2004), includes remarks: ‘Everyone is an acolyte of the imagination, just as everyone is a champion of world peace, which is what makes both notions so resoundingly vacuous. Anything on which we all spontaneously agree is bound to be mildly suspect, not least when almost every enlightened idea in history was resisted tooth and claw at the time by a scandalised majority. / In fact, the imagination is by no means as innocent a concept as Romantics such as Curtis White seem to suppose. It became fashionable from the mid-18th century onwards, when it began to seem the only way of gaining access to the inner lives of others. Since men and women were now defined as solitary creatures whose experience was private to themselves, a faculty was needed which would allow them to melt sympathetically into each other’s minds; and the imagination stepped obediently into the breach. Without such intuitive fellow-feeling, society would fall apart, and the bankers and landowners along with it. / The imagination, then, rose to power partly to compensate for the privatisation of human experience in a middle-class world. It was a magnificent solution to an entirely false problem. It also helped in its surreptitious way to legitimate the inequalities of that world. If you were too poor or hard-worked to explore the markets of Marrakesh, you could always explore them vicariously through the power of the imagination, and so be reconciled to your situation. Before long, we were being told that possessing something in the imagination was even richer than possessing it in reality. Ill-starred wretches get to lunch at the Ivy and sail down the Nile, while the really fortunate ones among us stay at home and experience all this in imaginary terms.’

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“Conquering England: Ireland in Victorian London” [exhibition at National Portrait Gallery], reviewed in Times Literary Supplement (1 April 2005), ending: ‘[…] Fintan Cullen and R. F. Foster, the curators of “Conquering England”, have constructed an exhibition as notable for its mix of genres as for its individual items. There is sculpture by the great Dublin artist John Henry Foley, historic playbills and theatre programmes, an early draft of The Importance of Being Earnest and a profusion of other treasures. As with most Irish cultural matters, there is a political agenda of sorts behind the exhibition. Part of its purpose is to counterbalance Irish nationalism’s insistence on the antagonism between Britain and Ireland , shifting the focus instead to the two nations’ mutual admiration, collaboration and entwined destinies. It is a view of the past which, like most such views, is moulded by the politics of the present- As such it represents a salutary revision of the case that the British saw the Irish only as apes and anarchists. The image of the Irishman typified here in Alfred Bryan’s lovable rogue lithograph of the popular stage character Conn the Shaughraun was never the whole story. The stereotype of Irishness in Britain was always more complex: in the eighteenth century, for example, notions of Irish sentiment and conviviality played a vital role in the English literary cult of sensibility. When the English Whigs were in need of a world-class rhetorician to promote their cause, it was to the Dubliner Edmund Burke that they turned. / Yet, though not all Irish emigrants to Britain were working-class, as Foster points out, the cast majority of them were: and the plaudits bestowed on a Maclise or a Shaw scarcely serve to redeem the racism and exploitation endured by their less fortunate compatriots. What proved decisive in the end, as usual in Britain, was social standing rather than national origin. “Conquering” England, in the sense of taking over its theatre and journalism, was hardly a fair return for having its army in your own country. Even so, this spectacle of Irish cultural wealth reminds us valuably of John Bull’s other island - of those Irish who ran a monopoloy of parliamentary reporting in London: whose influence was pervasive thorughout the provincial press of the whole island; whose drama entranced the West End, and whose art decorated the House of Lords.’ (For full text, see RICORSO Library, “Criticism / Reviews”, infra.)

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Redemption Falls, by Joseph O’Connor, reviewed in The Guardian (Sat., 5 May 2007): ‘“It is my freedom from English convention,” James Joyce wrote to his brother, “which lies at the source of my talent.” The Irish novel was never hamstrung by the need for shapely plots and well-rounded characters. Instead, like postcolonial literatures today, it was a place for experiment and innovation. Estranged from the metropolitan culture, Irish writers made it up as they went along, cobbling together bits and pieces of other people’s traditions to compensate for the fact that they lacked a canonical literary heritage of their own. From Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, bending the rules of realism is as Irish as emigration. Almost a century ago, Ireland was the only region of the United Kingdom to produce a native modernist art. Its fascination with verbal play and extravagance, which runs as far back as the early middle ages, sat well with the modernist adventure. So did its sense of history as dark and fragmented. […]’ (For full text see RICORSO Library, “Criticism / Reviews”, [infra.)

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Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso 1991; rep. 2007) - Introduction to the 2007 edition: ‘The point is not that Osama Bin Laden should be ceremonially escorted into the palace of Westminster. It is rather that civilizations which fail to recognize the violence at their own core – fail to acknowledge that there is that at the heart of human culture which is profoundly antithetical to it – are likely to suffer hubris, overreach themselves in the pursuit of their enemies, and bring themselves to nothing. For the Freud of Civilization and its Discontents, violence must be harnessed by civilization to the task of its own creation; yet there is always something excessive and anarchic about this fickle power, which Freud names as Thanatos or the death drive; and this excess can be turned against civility itself. What makes for human culture also threatens to mar it. The urge for order is potentially lethal. The very forces that are intended to subdue chaos are secretly in love with it. There is a paranoid rage for order as well as a non-pathological one. The paranoid kind is a grotesque caricature of our natural desire for peace and security, one which spreads havoc around it. This is what we learn from ancient Greek wisdom; not just from modern-day liberals. It is not a matter of being cavalier about one’s own security, or of indulging sentimental liberal illusions about one’s enemies. It is a question of a secret complicity between order and chaos, civilization and violence, as the very drive to safeguard the realm can kindle an insensate fury which threatens to scupper it. / Those who sunder such a complicity in the case of tragedy are the powerful insiders [xii] who, confronted with the alien and dispossessed, are able to acknowledge this thing of darkness as their own. The theological name for this self-recognition is repentance. It is when the sovereign discerns a terrifying image of himself in those who are cast out or trodden down that the possibility of redemption begins to glimmer. It is on this note that Sophocles’ Theban trilogy ends, as Theseus, the king, takes an enormous risk and welcomes the blind, polluted Oedipus into the city. In ancient mythology, the monster on the threshold usually turns out in some way or another to be a frightful version of oneself. This is not to suggest in some bout of liberal self-laceration that we should come to recognize our own image in those who burn innocent children to death, or in bigots who blow up trains packed with commuters. But it does involve accepting that the West’s own hands are hardly clean when it comes to the injustices that drive men and women to these moral obscenities, and that to say so is no more to collude with such actions than to enumerate the causes of Nazism is to endorse it.’ (p.xii-xiii.) Note: the 2007 Introduction begins with an assault on Martin Amis which takes in the reactionary attitudes of his father Kingsley Amis. The Introduction is signed T.E. / Dublin 2006.)

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Miscellaneous remarks
Ireland and England: ‘[Ireland and England were] at once too near and too far, akin and estaranged, both inside and outside each other’s cognitive range.’ (‘Changing the Question’, in Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, London 1995, p.128; here pp.210-11); further, ‘[the British] treated Ireland at once differently and not differently enough - The Irish were different enough to require a special civl sevice and apparatus of repressin, to be asked to foot the bill for the Famine, and to enjoy a peculiar franchise qualification. But they were alike enough to have MPs at Westminster in the first place, a privilege enjoyed by no other British colony, to contribute to the national debt, and to share with the imperial nation an exchequer,armed forces, postal services, and free-trade area.’ (p.131; both here, pp.210-11.)

Totality where?: ‘There is no overarching totality, rationality or fixed centre to human life, no metalanguage which can capture its endless variety.’ (Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction, Blackwell 1996, p.210; cited Mariana Avelas, MA Dip. Essay, UUC, 1997.)

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Act of Union?: ‘There can be no union without distinct identity, otherwise what exactly is being unified? Identity is at once the distinct precondition of unity, and its potential disruption; without a degree of identity there is nothing to amalgate, and with too much identity no possibility of accord. It is hard to locate the delicate point of equipoise between the two - the point where you are at once enough something else, and yet not so grossly self-identical as to resist all reciprocity. To unite with another implies a persistence as well as a transformation of your previous identity, since it is you who have united; whereas a mere act of assimilation, as of the Irish parliament to the British in 1801, is in one sense no unity at all, since one of the terms in question has simply been abolished […]. Ireland and Britain were united in the sense that the latter confiscated the former’s parliament, and so rather as a fish can be said to be amalgated with a diner through the act of eating. In the words of a seventeenth-century Munster planter, the British were to ‘incorporate [the Irish] into ourselves, and so by a oneness take away the foundation of difference and fear altogether.’ (Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, pp.129-30; cited by Matthew Campbell, ‘Gerard Manley Hopkins and Ireland: “at a thírd /Remove”’, in Bullán: An Irish Studies Journal, Vol. 3, No. 1, Spring 1997, pp.50-51.)

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History & Allegory: ‘The present, then, is a kind of allegory, which properly interpreted lays bare the historical forces at its heart. How far one should pursue this project, however, is another question. There is no way of unlocking an intricately historical present without confronting the contentions of the past; yet to do so may be to fall prey to the nightmare of history, and so prove counterproductive. The ancient quarrels which hold the key to the present, and so to a reinvigorated future, may end up by overwhelming both. History is both ruin and redemption; and it was her awareness of the former that inspired Morgan to abandon the original historical setting of O’Donnel and transport the action to the present day. […] (‘The Anglo-Irish Novel’, in Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, London: Verso 1995, p.183.)

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Literary theorists: ‘If literary theorists are, for the most part, second-hand philosophers, this is not entirely their own fault’. ‘One risk of musciling in on philosophy is the alrming possibiility that a real philosoper mighe weigh in on your arguments, rather as you might seek to impress someone at a party with your smattering of knowledge about the Dead Sea scrolls, only to discover later that he is a new testament scholar’. ‘On thing in which [her] knowledge instructs her is just how old0-hat most post-modernism is. Moral relativism, the arbitrary sigh, the world as “constructed” rather than as given given, the mediated nature of knowledge, the self as processual rather than stable: all of these doctrines of course are at least as old as Plato, and no doubt as Adam. “Anti-realism”, as Devaney caustically puts it, is as much of a foundational principle in western philosophy as realism is”. This is bad news for those credulous souls who believe that all this avant-garde speculation started with Saussure or Jacques Derrida, before whom all philosophy was a dreary mixture of naïve [for native] realism and autocratic rationalism’. ‘Postmodernism is a game in which one solemnly sets up a grotesque travesty of one’s opponent’s view, and then proceeds self-righteously to bowl it over. It is because postmodernists have uncritically accepted a hopelessly simplistic, reductive picture of classical Western logic, so Devaney argues, that they consider themselves subversive. It is revolution bought on the cheap […] one fears that there is too much spiritual and material capital now invested in the postmodernist industry for its executive directors to be able to afford to listen.’ (Review of M. J. Devaney, “Since at Least Plato [ …] ” and Other Postmodernist Myths (London: Macmillan 1997, in Times Literary Supplement, Jan. 1998, p.8).

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Ireland & modernity: ‘As a whole [Ireland] has not leapt at a bound from tradition to modernity. Instead, it presented an exemplary case of what Marxism has dubbed combined and uneven development.” (Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture, London: Verso 1995, p.274; quoted in Gregory Castle, Modernism and the Celtic Revival, Cambridge UP 2001, p.1.) Further: ‘The existence of an artistic ancien régime, often in societies still under the sway of an aristocracy; the impact upon this traditional culture of breath-takingly new technologies; and the imaginative closeness of social revolution. Modernism springs from the estranging impact of modernizing forces on a still deeply traditionalist order, in a politically unstable context which opens up social hope as well as spiritual anxiety. Traditional culture provides modernism with an adversary, but also lends it some of the terms in which to inflect itself.’ (Ibid., p.297; quoted in Gregory Castle, op. cit., 2001, p.172; with comments, as infra.)

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‘Writer’s Book Choice, Times Literary Supplement (1 December 2000): Terry Eagleton chooses John Banville, Eclipse (Picador), ‘one of his usual unpleasant, socially antagonistic protagonists, more adept at discriminating between tints of cloud than at conducting human relationships. […] stylish, slyly self-conscious prose is more a way of fending off feeling than expressing it. But this splendidly crafted, dreamily slow-moving novel […] culminates unpredictably in a powerful emotional trauma, and in doing so confirms its author’s reputation as one of the maestros of modern English prose.’ Includes comparisons with Nabokov and Iris Murdoch.

Notions of truth: ‘[Postmodernism can be defined as] a style of thought which is suspicious of classical notions of truth, reason, identity and objectivity, of the idea of universal progress or emancipation of single frameworks, grand narartives or ultimate grounds of explanations’ (Eagleton, 1996, p.vii; quoted by Ana Moya, IASIL 1999; Barcelona).

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‘Tradition is the practice of ceaselessly excavating, safeguarding, violating, discarding and reinscribing the past […] history is not a fair copy, but a palimpsest, whose deleted layers must be thrust to light.’ (Eagleton [no source]; quoted as epigraph to Theresa O’Connor, ed., The Comic Tradition in Irish Women Writers, Florida UP 1996.)

Critic rebuked: Terry Eagleton, letter in Times Literary Supplement (30 June 2000), addresses ‘Kevin Barry’s intemperate review of Scholars and Rebels in Nineteenth-Century Ireland [TLS June 2] which sees the book as an unqualified plea for Gaelic Catholic nationalism and rebuts this view, listing the writers and class praised and satirised in it and ending, perhaps ‘Professor Barry was sent the wrong book’.

Heathcliff: ‘You can take Heathcliff out of the Heights, but you can’t take the Heights out of Heathcliff.’ (Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, London: Verso 1997, p.47.)

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Matthew Arnold: ‘Sweetness and Light for All: Matthew Arnold and the search for a common moral ground to replace religion’, contrib. to “Refreshing Giants”, [ser.; No. III], 21, Times Literary Supplement Jan. 2000, pp.14-15): ‘[…] As a self-confessed Philistine or bourgeois, he was a merciless satirist of his own class; he was also a champion of Celticism who was stoutly opposed to Irish Home Rule. He writes at the point where the literary must yield ground to sociological enquiry, if high culture is to survive; yet his sociological writing is incurably that of a literary amateur, with an eye to rhetorical effect and a habit of staking complex social cases on tone, style and spurious symmetries. As an advocate of the free play of mind, he trades in social stereotypes; as an opponent of abstract dogma, he is full of airy generalities. If he sometimes seemed to believe that poetry could save the world, he was nonetheless distinctly sceptical of the academic study of English.’ Further, ‘Yet Arnold’s typically English preoccupation with the moral has one enormous strength. His writing plays a vital role in shifting the whole meaning of morality in English discourse away from duties and prohibitions, and back to a more traditional sense of morality as an inquiry into the equality of a whole way of life. It is this re-inflection of the moral which Henry James will later elaborate so finely.’ See also a letter from Nicholas Murray in TLS, 28 Jan. 2000, calling Eagleton’s article a ‘reluctantly wrought concession that Matthew Arnold exhibited “a divinatory intelligence” […] a step in the right direction for “the modern Left”; goes on to say that ’to dismiss Arnold’s criticism as “smugly Olympian” shows a remarkable unawareness of the tone an dpredure of contemporary “theoretical approaches” in academic literary criticism […&c.]’ Note: In the following issue (4 Feb. 2000), a wag writes in the person of Arnold expressing his delight at the ‘diverting burlesque’ in which ‘one Mr Eagleton’ attributes to him views ‘almost exactly the contrary of those I have laboured for many years to put before the public.’ Facetious flights in the letter include the conjecture that Eagleton is an acronym for a cenacle of Gelehrte in Gottingen or Tubingen, or that the author is one of the enragés of Salford striving to adopt the identity of a Fenian agitator, or finally a professorial don at Oxford. Patrick Jackson, a third correspondent, corrects the supposition that Arnold showed any interest in elementary education or contributed to the thinking behind the 1870 Education Act of his br.-in-law W. E. Foster.

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Blairite Britain: ‘The broken lives of Blairite Britain’, review of A Stranger’s Eye by Fergal Keane, in The Irish Times (27 May 2000), Weekend: ‘The poor as objects of sympathy or sensationalism have been a recurrent literary topic in England, all the way from Victorian forays into darkest London to George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier. E.M. Forster, with typical liberal self-doubt, refused to write of them in his fiction at all, delegating the task instead to poets and statisticians. But whereas Orwell never shows us a politically conscious worker, Keane writes of the struggle against a shipyard closure and the quiet heroism of social activists. These down-at-heel men and women are subjects as well as objects, aware of the squalor of their surroundings, some pathetically striving to cultivate a spot of decency in degrading conditions. Indeed, so far is Keane from a fashionable pessimism that he ends his survey on a curiously upbeat note: poverty in Britain will be beaten, he thinks, though it may take 20 or 30 years. / There is dolefully little to justify this faith. If Keane’s lack of political nous is a gain when it comes to toughly objective reportage, it is a hindrance when it comes to prognostication. Thirty years is about as likely to see off poverty in the UK as it is to witness the end of adultery. Inequalities in Britain and elsewhere are steadily deepening, as the function of a global economic system which no increase in crêches or care for drug addicts can significantly dent. The men and women Keane writes of with such splendidly unsentimental compassion are the wreckage of a world system which is in the process of mutating from one form to another, slimming down, shifting ground, shaking out, speeding up. The blunt truth is that the future does not need them, and treats them increasingly as fifth-columnists to be controlled. As capitalism draws its wagons into an ever tighter circle, the army of the dumped and discarded is likely to swell. Policing, not participation, is their lot. The next few decades are far more likely to witness a bunkered, beleaguered minority increasingly paranoid about its privileges, and increasingly prepared to defend them with force, than they are to see the end of deprivation. […] This starry-eyedness, however, is one of the few Blairite moments in an otherwise resolutely un-New-Labourish study.’

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Binary law: ‘Ideologies like to draw rigid boundaries between what is acceptable and what is not, between self and non-self, truth and falsity, sense and nonsense, reason and madness, central and marginal, surface and depth. such metaphysical thinking […] cannot be simply eluded: we cannot catapult ourselves beyond this binary habit of thought into an ultra-metaphysical realm. But by a certain way of operating upon texsts - whether “literary” or “philosophical” - we may begin to unravel these oppositions a little, demonstrate how one term of an antithesis secretly inheres within the other.’ (Literary Theory: An Introduction, Blackwell 1996, p.113; quoted in Stephanie Bachorz, ‘Postcolonial Theory and Ireland: Revising Postcolonialism’, Aaron Kelly & Alan Gillis, eds., Critical Ireland: New Essays in Literature and Culture, Four Courts Press 2001, p.11.)

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“Clubbing”: On watching the EU enlargement ceremony in Phoenix Park”: ‘See art and commerce in cahoots / As Dublin honeys up the suits, / Ringmaster to the rich man’s club / While refugees sink, in a tub / Clear water now between the two, / Reflecting a B52. / As Freude thunders from the choir / That damned barbed wire gets higher and higher. / The thieves of Baghdad have a pal / Whose song and dance is capital. / Fulsome, gladhanding, loath to blame, / This phoenix is more ash than flame. / The red-eyed scavengers take fright / And scuttle stateless into night. / Beneath the watchtowers young men roam, / Lost, unhappy, not at home.’ Terry Eagleton (In The Irish Times, Weekend, 22 May 2004.) Note: the poem is apparently in response to Seamus Heaney’s “Beacon at Bealtaine”, delivered at the EU enlargement ceremony in Phoenix Park, Dublin (see The Irish Times, 3 May 2004.)

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“Culture is worth fighting for”, Guardian Weekly (30 May 2008): ‘[…] Ever since the early 19th century, culture or civilisation has been the opposite of barbarism. Behind this opposition lay a narrative: first you had barbarism, then civilisation was dredged out of its depths. Radical thinkers, by contrast, have always seen barbarism and civilisation as synchronous. For every cathedral, a pit of bones; for every work of art, the mass labour that granted the artist the means to create. Civilisation needs to be wrested from nature by violence, but the violence lives on in the coercion used to protect civilisation - a coercion known among other things as the political state. / These days the conflict between civilisation and barbarism has taken an ominous turn. We face a conflict between civilisation and culture, which used to be on the same side. Civilisation means rational reflection, material well-being, individual autonomy and ironic self-doubt; culture means a form of life that is collective, passionate, spontaneous, unreflective and arational [sic]. It is no surprise, then, to find that we have civilisation whereas they have culture. Culture is the new barbarism. / The problem is that civilisation needs culture even if it feels superior to it. Its own political authority will not operate unless it can bed itself down in a specific way of life. Men and women do not easily submit to a power that does not weave itself into the texture of their daily existence - one reason why culture remains so politically vital. Civilisation cannot get on with culture, and it cannot get on without it. […; &c.]’ (See full text, infra.)

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Michael Groden has written parenthetically: ‘Terry Eagleton has quipped that the ttest of any theory is how well it would work with Finnegans Wake; he could just as easily have said this about Ulysses.’ (See Groden, ‘The Complex Simplicity of Ulysses’, in James Joyce, ed. Sean Latham, IAP 2010, p.111, citing 1872 Edn., p.107, citing Literary Theory: An Introduction, 2nd Edn., 1996, p.71.)

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