Terry Eagleton - Critical Revolutionaries: Five Critics Who Changed the Way We Read

CRITICAL REVOLUTIONARIES

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For Tony Pinkney

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

The conviction underlying this book is that a vital tradition of literary criticism is in danger of being neglected. This is so to some extent even in academia, as well as in the wider literary world. If not many students of literature today are likely to be familiar with the work of, say, I.A. Richards or Raymond Williams, the same may well be true of some of their teachers. Yet the five critics discussed in this book rank among the most original and influential of modern times, which is why I have chosen them.

They also represent a specific intellectual formation, one of the most remarkable in twentieth-century Britain. All but one of them taught at the University of Cambridge. The exception is T.S. Eliot, yet Eliot had close connections with Cambridge, not least through his friend I.A. Richards, and as an informal consultant was a powerful influence on the shaping of English studies there. These men were part of what has been hailed as a critical revolution, one that transformed the academic study of literature and lent it a fresh centrality in Britain and beyond. Ironically, however, what one might call Cambridge English was never the orthodox creed of the Cambridge English Faculty. On the contrary, it was always a marginal, minority affair, though its combativeness and evangelical sense of mission lent it at times a presence disproportionate to its size. Despite this, the careers of Richards, Empson, Leavis and Williams were made possible in part by a radical reform of the Cambridge English course as far back as 1917, sidelining Anglo-Saxon and philology for a course of study that was overwhelmingly modern, critical and literary (rather than linguistic) in orientation.

The new Cambridge course was entitled English Literature, Life and Thought the last two terms a couple of absurdly large abstractions, yet indicative of the fact that literature was to be studied in its social and intellectual context. There was also a cosmopolitan dimension to the course: the Tragedy paper in the final examinations encompassed such dramatists as Sophocles and Racine as well as Shakespeare, while the English Moralists paper included such honorary Englishmen as Plato, St Paul and Augustine, along with a host of other non-indigenous thinkers.

That the critical revolution should have its source in Cambridge, a university with a strong scientific pedigree and a record of openness to innovation, was not entirely accidental. There were other factors at work as well. Like British society in general, the culture of the university had been deeply shaken by the First World War, which seemed to herald a break with the past and the onset of a new era. There were ex-servicemen among the student body, while middle-class students on state or university scholarships were making their presence felt in an institution which had traditionally been dominated by the private schools and the upper classes. Only one of the critics portrayed in this book, William Empson, enjoyed such a privileged upbringing, as the son of a Yorkshire squire and a former pupil of Winchester College. The genteel amateurism of an older generation of upper-class literary scholars was under challenge from a new, rigorously analytical approach to literary works, of which I.A. Richardss method of practical criticism was exemplary. This involved taking anonymous passages of prose or poetry, submitting them to tenaciously detailed scrutiny and passing judgement on their quality. Value was no longer simply a matter of taste; instead, it had to be vigorously argued for. There was a paper devoted to this practice in the final English exams, which included what was known as dating, or assigning an approximate date to a set of anonymous literary passages. Students today might be surprised to learn that dating several times in quick succession was once compulsory for Cambridge English students.

Traditional literary scholarship had been largely insulated from society at large, whereas younger critics like Richards, F.R. Leavis and his partner Q.D. Leavis, who stemmed from less sheltered backgrounds, were more alive to the general culture, as well as more troubled by the place of literary studies within it. Leavis, the son of a shopkeeper, had lived through the trauma of the First World War. In a period of social and political turbulence in the wake of that conflict, English could either take the pressure of social change or consign itself to irrelevance. Opening it up also involved setting it in the context of other academic disciplines, which some of these pioneers knew at first hand. Richards came over to English from Mental and Moral Sciences, F.R. Leavis from History and William Empson from Mathematics. Q.D. Leavis took a keen interest in psychology and anthropology. Eliot wrote his doctoral thesis on philosophy, not literature. Several decades later, Raymond Williams was to move from literary criticism to cultural studies, a subject which he helped to invent.

The early years of the reformed English Faculty coincided with the heyday of literary modernism, and something of the boldness and bravura of that experiment was part of its ethos. The Cambridge of Richards and Leavis, for example, was also that of Malcolm Lowry, whose novel Under the Volcano is a late masterpiece of English modernism. The fact that world-class literature was being produced in English at the time seemed to conspire with the Facultys focus on the present day, while the august figure of T.S. Eliot acted as a link between modernism and criticism. The two currents had a number of other features in common: both were tough-minded, impersonal, quick to detect sham emotion, conceptually ambitious and sensitively attuned to language. They also shared a certain elitism, as we shall see later in the case of criticism. Modernism was the product of a historical crisis, and so was the new critical work being undertaken at Cambridge. At its centre was the belief that the close reading of literary texts was a profoundly moral activity which cut to the heart of modern civilisation. To define and evaluate qualities of language was to define and evaluate the quality of a whole way of life. As I.A. Richards put it, A decline in our sensitiveness and discrimination with words must be followed One could take this remark as the motto of Cambridge English. To focus attentively on the words on the page may sound like an attempt to exclude larger concerns, but larger concerns are already implicit in it.

There is a problem with this argument. To what extent is verbal capability bound up with moral sensitivity? If the two are really as interwoven as Richards seems to suggest, does this imply that men and women who lack linguistic dexterity are insensitive and imperceptive in their everyday dealings? Are only the eloquent able to feel courage and compassion? Obviously not. It is not true that those who can produce coruscating commentaries on Rudyard Kipling or Angela Carter are invariably more subtle and discerning in daily life than the mass of humanity. In fact, the opposite has sometimes been claimed that those who are deeply versed in the humanities may be displacing forms of feeling and attention which might more usefully be deployed in everyday affairs. Education sometimes cohabits with such barbarity, such cynicism, that you are filled with disgust, remarks the narrator of Fyodor Dostoevskys