Lives in Writing by David Lodge

Author:David Lodge [Lodge, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2017-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

He begins by locating the origins of Theory in the 1960s and that decade’s heady ferment of liberation politics, youthful revolt and intellectual adventurousness. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive . . . For a brief period it seemed possible that iconoclastic cultural criticism, avant-garde art and revolutionary politics might march confidently into the future arm in arm. But by the end of the 1970s the dream had faded, and in the greedy anti-ideological 1980s the left had to face the fact of its defeat. Eagleton observes astutely: ‘As often happens, ideas had a last, brilliant efflorescence when the conditions which produced them were already disappearing. Cultural theory was cut loose from its moment of origin, yet tried in its way to keep that moment warm. Like war, it became the continuation of politics by other means.’ That comment explains the ambivalence towards Theory which runs through the whole book. On the one hand Eagleton admires it for continuing to question the accepted ‘order of things’; on the other he cannot forgive it for turning away from radical political action, which it regarded as ‘fatally compromised by the emptiness of desire, the impossibility of truth, the fragility of the subject, the lie of progress, the pervasiveness of power’. Much of the blame for this trahison des clercs is attributed to the climate of postmodernism, which denies the validity of universals and first principles, and encourages a kind of hedonistic pick-’n’-mix browsing in the cultural shopping mall of ideas and experiences, depriving even ostensibly progressive projects, like post-colonial studies, of practical effect and moral purpose.

In a chapter called ‘Losses and Gains’ Eagleton attempts a kind of audit of Theory. He begins by taking a swing at the wilfully obscure and mystifying style of much of its literature, citing just one, unattributed sentence, evidently taken from some crazed deconstructionist intent on out-Derridaing Derrida:

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