Nobody could accuse Terry Eagleton of lacking a policy. Years ago, asked why he wrote about literature, he replied in my hearing, ‘To help bring about the arrival of socialism.’ Nothing in Sweet Violence suggests that he has changed that agenda. Early in the piece he claims that ‘It is capitalism which is anarchic, extravagant, out of hand, and socialism which is temperate, earth-bound and realistic.’ The reader has been given notice.
Trenchancy though is not Eagleton’s only mode. He writes, for instance, ‘In many of its aspects, religion today represents one of the most odious forms of political reaction on the planet, a blight on human freedom and a buttress of the rich and powerful. But there are also theological ideas which can be politically illuminating, and this book is among other things an exploration of them.’ For reasons which do not matter here, I came to the book with no high expectations; in the event, though, I think that Eagleton has gone about his grave task very well.
That task consists in a rethinking of the character of tragedy. The first chapter, ‘A Theory in Ruins’, consists of a critical overview of the ways in which, in older and in modern times, tragedy has been conceived. Eagleton has always been good at surveying fields, usually with an eye to the cockle as well as the wheat, and so it goes here: it is a Good Thing, for example, to be Raymond Williams or Walter Benjamin, and a Bad Thing to be Dorothea Krook or George Steiner. The Eagleton who elsewhere makes clear how thoroughly he loathes the Catholicism of his childhood can still write, betimes, in the spirit of a medieval scholastic theologian, determined to make clear just who are the enemies and who the friends.
By contrast, though, with some of those predecessors, he has a genuinely vivacious mind, which can be generously inventive even when it is being mordant. Eagleton usually writes as though he is fired as much by what he is reading as by his prior notions about it, which is a rarer thing than it sounds. For instance, when he says that ... the world of Samuel Beckett, in which things appear at once enigmatic and baldly self-identical, seems less a place which once had a meaning which has now haemorrhaged away than one which calls that whole rather peculiar way of looking into the question.