By James D. Hoff

Like many a good Brit, Terry Eagleton has a knack for conflating the comic and the serious. His criticism is full of bristling humor, taunting jabs, and acerbic one-liners that can make reading him feel like a night at the pub with a clever friend. As pleasing as such comic moments are, however, they can leave the reader suspicious that the author might just be more huckster than high theorist, more George Carlin than Jonathan Culler. Perhaps this is the point. For decades now Eagleton has deftly situated himself between theory and popular criticism, making a career for himself as a kind of literary critic for the masses, and this comic-ironic approach has allowed him to move among the world of literary theory without replicating its dour prose and smug sense of self-importance. Such an affable approach has in turn made him a relatively popular writer, as far as literary critics go, outstripping even the venerable and curmudgeonly Harold Bloom in terms of sheer output and notoriety. However, while Eagleton’s characteristic wit is difficult to resist and his charms hard to deny, one can’t help but wish for a little more substance-per-page from a critic of such broad mind and effortless erudition. Though his two most recent books—The Event of Literature and How to Read Literature, are lively texts, full of generous insight and deliciously sharp commentary—neither breaks much new ground and both are, in their own way, mere rearrangements of previous arguments dating back to his blockbuster Literary Theory: An Introduction, originally published in 1983. In this respect, reading these books is at once a familiar, intensely enjoyable, and yet also deeply frustrating experience.

Though Eagleton has written no less than a book a year for the last three decades—a remarkable, if ill-advised feat—not all of them have been about literature. In fact, for the past several years Eagleton has written on a wide range of extra-literary subjects, including ethics (Trouble with Strangers, 2008), religion (Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate, 2009), and politics (Why Marx Was Right, 2011). His two latest works, in contrast, mark a return to questions of literature and literary value. And in this sense they complement each other well, for while The Event of Literature is a largely theoretical text, concerned with offering a philosophical response to the nagging instability of literary categories, How to Read Literature is all practice, performing with virtuosic intensity the very process of close reading it seeks to revive. Taken together, then, they offer a soup-to-nuts account of the nature of the literary, from what makes a work a piece of literature, to what makes a passage of prose good, bad, or simply unreadable.

The most recent of these two new books, How to Read Literature, is a refreshing attempt to make a case for the continued importance of close, critical reading. For Eagleton, who has long championed various political, theoretical, and historical interpretive approaches to literature, such an embrace of the text might at first look like the beginning of a conservative shift. But Eagleton is as dedicated as ever to the pursuit of political ends through literary means, and he is quick to show how such assumptions miss the point. Any political or historical reading of literature, Eagleton insists, has to be grounded in attention to the nuances of language and literary convention. One cannot talk about the politics of a work of literature if one is oblivious to its form. Meaning, after all, is not only a matter of content, and the way a literary text means what it says is always as important, or more important, than what it says. In this way, close reading, rather than describing a hermetic practice abstracted from political or social concerns, is, in fact, a way of getting closer to such realities.

Through an introductory examination of several key literary concepts such as “character,” “narrative,” “interpretation,” and “value,” Eagleton describes both how and how not to read literature. To this end, the book is full of prescriptive advice: pay close attention to the opening lines of a literary text, don’t confuse characters with real people or plot with narrative, and please, whatever you do, don’t assume the author shares the values of his or her protagonist. Such elementary cautions are good advice and will be familiar to anyone who has taken or taught an introductory literature course or has had to sit through a trivial discussion of what a withholding dickhead Hamlet is and how abused poor Ophelia. But this advice is light fare at best, the stuff of freshman year seminars, and hardly sufficient for an entire study. To fill in the other approximately two hundred pages, Eagleton puts these ideas to work in a series of sometimes brilliant and sometimes remarkably pedestrian close readings that span the breadth of the new “canon” from Shakespeare the bard to Harry Potter the wizard.

Sadly, as brilliant as these observations can sometimes be, one has the sense that they are little more than literary scraps. And reading them is like eating a plate of cold leftovers. Indeed, one of the most frustrating aspects of How to Read Literature is precisely the unevenness of these generally arbitrary interpretations, which end as unexpectedly as they begin and frequently lead nowhere. An early analysis of E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, for instance, offers a thoughtful, if not entirely original, explanation of the novel’s opening lines. Looking closely at the syntactical nuances of the language employed by Forster’s narrator to describe the fictional city of Chanadrapore and the nearby Marabar Caves—where the novel’s most important rising action takes place—Eagleton shows how the “the very core of the book,” which is itself a kind of vacancy, “is distilled in its opening words.” This deeply insightful interpretation is followed by a quick reading of the three witches of Macbeth, which is then followed by a less than penetrating analysis of Genesis that itself does nothing to further the insights of the previous pages. Later chapters are equally erratic and uneven, ranging from pithy examinations of Joyce and Eliot, to a bizarre exegesis of “Baa baa black sheep” that seems designed only to exhibit its own folly, and an unbearably long and seemingly pointless summary of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations.

Sadly, this slapdash approach pervades the book, and though he offers some sage bits of wisdom, and some beautiful renderings of several classic texts, there is little here that is challenging or new. Indeed, How to Read Literature is one of those books that one reads to be comforted in one’s ideas, not to have them shaken up. In this way the book fails as both an introduction to literature and as a more nuanced argument for the value of close reading.

***

In contrast to the breezy accessibility of How to Read Literature, The Event of Literature is, by its own admission, a much more ambitious and difficult text. Not content to merely offer another perspective, The Event of Literature seeks out the literary equivalent of a theory of everything. By offering a comprehensive critique of continental theory and the philosophy of literature, it aims to provide an answer to that perennial question “what is literature?” Eagleton is keenly aware of the difficulty of the task he has set for himself and no sooner does he advance his intentions than he begins to retreat. Though he proposes to offer “a reasonable account of what literature…actually means,” his first act is to admit that such an endeavor is fraught with philosophical complications and near impossible without a radical reconsideration of its inherent instability.

To come to an actual understanding of the “essence” of literature, Eagleton argues, one must put aside all talk of essences and look instead at how notions of the literary both operate and unravel in practice. By first presenting a rough set of family resemblances, and then looking closely at how those resemblances too frequently fail to cohere, Eagleton pursues a kind of via negativa, repeatedly undermining the seemingly reasonable definitions he proposes until what he is left with is a record of literature’s own resilience in the face of such deconstructions. Unfortunately the product of this investigation is, to spoil the ending, not an original, more stable, or even more functional definition of literature, but merely a couple of hundred pages of speculative and theoretical insight, sometimes valuable, sometimes startlingly insightful, and sometimes merely self-evident.

Using Ludwig Wittgenstein’s polythetic theory of family resemblances as a starting point, Eagleton begins his investigation with a list of five commonly held characteristics of literary texts.

My own sense is that when people at the moment call a piece of writing literary, they generally have one of five things in mind, or some combination of them. They mean by “literary” a work which is fictional, or which yields significant insight into human experience as opposed to reporting empirical truths, or which uses language in a peculiarly heightened, figurative or self-conscious way, or which is not practical in the sense that shopping lists are, or which is highly valued as a piece of writing.

Just as Wittgenstein explained that any “family” is always composed of many overlapping and criss-crossing similarities, Eagleton argues that in order for a work to be considered literary it must have at least one, and usually more, of these five characteristics. However, no one characteristic is essential, so that a work that is morally significant but not highly valued, such as an experimental memoir by an unknown author, or one that uses figurative language for practical effect, such as a political speech, might still be considered literary even though neither one is fictional. Such a category, however, as Eagleton quickly explains, is only as stable as the definitions of its constituent characteristics, and what one means by fictional, figurative, esteemed, or non-pragmatic can be a highly contentious affair, especially among literary critics, for whom contested meanings are the stuff upon which careers are built.

And so Eagleton spends most of the rest of the book using, abusing, and otherwise mistreating (and frequently misreading, in a strictly Bloomian sense) a whole host of literary critics and philosophers in an effort to show that, though the category of literature may be fundamentally unstable, it is still functional. Even though literary critics may disagree about what makes a work fictional or whether there is a uniquely literary use of language, there still exists, in common practice, a rough and malleable definition. As Eagleton asserts early in the second chapter: “people do indeed have a sense of what they mean by literature and of how it differs from other social forms, and much of what I am doing here is simply trying to focus that sense more sharply.” Such a working theory, he argues, is much better than the supposedly airtight definitions offered by many philosophers of literature, and certainly better than the “anything-goes-ism” of critics like Stanley Fish, for whom Eagleton reserves only his choicest denunciations. However, while Eagleton successfully points out the many failures of previous thinkers, he offers little to nothing in their place except perhaps a deeper understanding of the ways in which different theoretical approaches both overlap and undermine one another.

Ironically, it is only when Eagleton explicitly turns his attention away from the characteristics of literary texts and towards the commonalities of literary criticism, that he discovers the real power and value of the work of art as “event.” Looking closely at the family resemblances between the many disparate and sometimes antagonistic methods of reading, he finds that they share a common understanding of the text as strategy and praxis. That is, various methods tend to view literature itself as an engagement with a reality that includes itself as well as the reader. For Eagleton the work is to be seen, then, not as a mere expression of subjective experience, or as a finished and self-contained system of symbols, but as an always active force operating within the bigger world of signs. As Eagleton makes clear such strategies are by and large exemplary of human practice more broadly. “Human beings,” after all, “do not go to work on a raw, inert environment but on one always-already ‘textualised,’ traced over with meaning like ancient palimpsests by countless previous or simultaneous human projects.” In this way works of art are always “an example of human praxis, and therefore of how to live well.”