NYT
April 22, 2007
Questions for Terry Eagleton
The Believer
Interview By DEBORAH SOLOMON
Q: As a professor of cultural theory at the University of Manchester in England, you reach some surprisingly sentimental conclusions in your new book, “The Meaning of Life.” Tell us, What does life mean? Perhaps the two strongest candidates for the answer to the question are happiness and love. But one of the terrible things about the word “happiness” is that it is so utterly feeble. It evokes the idea of people cavorting around with manic grins on their faces.
Is there a word you prefer to “happiness”? Aristotle, of course, uses a term which is better translated as “well-being.” The term I like is “fulfillment.”
And where do you advise us to look for fulfillment? There’s a famous phrase from Karl Marx, in which he says that he wants a society in which the full development of each is the condition of the full development of all. What would it be like to find our fulfillment through each other rather than against each other?
In the book, you define love in egalitarian terms as well. But that doesn’t ring very true. What if someone falls in love with, for instance, a voice heard on the phone? You can talk about having affection or love for all kinds of things. You can love your handbag or bedroom slippers. That isn’t the full model of love, where each realizes himself or herself through the other doing the same.
Does love for a pet dog constitute true love, by your definition? No. Because it’s a biologically different species, it doesn’t realize itself, doesn’t flower into its own being, through that.
Do you find that having children adds meaning to life? I find that for a left-winger like me, the problem is that either your children out-left you or they become fascists.
Unlike most left-wingers, you have been a champion of religion. I did attack Richard Dawkins’s book on God because I think he is theologically illiterate. I value my Catholic background very much. It taught me not to be afraid of rigorous thought, for one thing.
Where do you think all these neo-atheists like Dawkins are coming from? I suppose it is a reaction to various ugly types of fundamentalism. I’m entirely with Dawkins in condemning redneck fascists from Texas to the Taliban. But the trouble with Dawkins is that he thinks that’s what religion is.
You are generally described as England’s best-known literary critic. Where does that leave Clive James, whose essay collection, “Cultural Amnesia,” was just published amid great fanfare in New York? I don’t really think he is a literary critic, although he is very clever.
Do you disapprove of the way he treats high culture and pop culture with equal seriousness? Not at all. My chair is in cultural studies. But that’s not the same as running off on chat shows.
What’s interesting is that neither you nor he seems to write much about actual books. I think what’s happened is that the literary critic has turned increasingly into a cultural critic because there are so many crises in our culture.
Have you read anything good lately? I don’t actually read other peoples’ books. If I want to read a book, I write one myself. I have written more than 40 books.
How scandalous. Someone should stop you. I have tried to stop writing. In fact, I am looking for a “contrascriptive” — a tablet you can take that stops you from writing. There’s this organization called Writers Anonymous. They try to get you down from a full-length volume to a poem.
Very funny. Do you plan to go on book tour in the U.S.? No. As I get older, I find my visits to the States get shorter because I can’t take the general culture very much. I know I am back in the States because at the hotel breakfasts they are all talking about money.
Prince Charles once called you “that dreadful Terry Eagleton.” What about you is so offensive to him? I think just existing is probably enough.
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