Eagleton on Jeorge Orwell/ 伊格尔顿评乔治·奥威尔

Terry Eagleton/ Reach-Me-Down Romantic

George Orwell by Gordon Bowker · Little, Brown, 495 pp, £20.00

Orwell: The Life by D.J. Taylor · Chatto, 448 pp, £20.00

Orwell: Life and Times by Scott Lucas · Haus, 180 pp, £8.99

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Like any self-transformation, this one was imperfect. Orwell may have castigated Britain's class-ridden education system, but he put his adopted son down for Wellington and kept up his Etonian contacts to the end. Some Old Etonians have even claimed that they could identify him as one of their own from his writings, a hard case to credit unless Eton was stuffed with budding critics of saucy postcards and analysts of dirigiste economics. Like most of us, however, he loved Big Brother more than he admitted. He portrayed his prep school, run by a couple named Wilkes, as a brutal place, but D.J. Taylor thinks this is typical of his self-pitying image as the victimised outsider. (A sentence of Taylor's beginning 'Though presumably touched up by the Wilkeses' turns out to concern Orwell's letters home rather than his person.) One friend considered him conservative in everything but politics. This is not entirely paradoxical, since Orwell saw socialism as all about preserving traditional decencies. He knew a strange amount about ecclesiastical affairs, preferred Housman and Kipling to Yeats and Pound, and fretted about the quality of tea he would get in Spain. After resigning from the colonial service in Burma, where he had been in charge of 200,000 people at the age of 20, he described imperialism as 'that evil despotism'; but he also admired empire-builders for their practicality, and thought that a clip around the ear might do the natives no harm at all. In Burma he had used the left-wing Adelphi magazine for target practice.

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copyright © LRB Ltd, 1997-2007

Eagleton's Diatribe on American Academia/ 伊格尔顿抨击美国学术

这篇书评里，伊格尔顿骂人的厉害劲儿不弱于鲁迅先生。

Terry Eagleton/ The Estate Agent

The Trouble with Principle by Stanley Fish · Harvard, 328 pp, £15.50

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Like most of his compatriots, Fish is not the most cosmopolitan of creatures. The essays in The Trouble with Principle deal with racism, pornography, abortion, free speech, religion, sexual discrimination, in fact most of the stock-in-trade of enlightened US academia. This, on any estimate, is a pressing agenda; but it does not betray the slightest sense that there is anything else in the political universe worth discussing. With typical American parochialism and self-obsession, Fish's book is silent about famine, forced migration, revolutionary nationalism, military aggression, the depredations of capital, the inequities of world trade, the disintegration of whole communities. Yet these have been the consequences of the system of which the United States is the linchpin for many perched on the unmetaphysical outside of it. Being unable to leap out of your own cultural skin seems to mean in Fish's case having no grasp of how your country is helping to wreak havoc in that inscrutable place known as abroad. One has the indelible impression that Fish does not think a great deal of abroad, and would be quite happy to see it abolished. He is strenuously opposed to hate speech, but appears utterly ignorant of the structural conditions in his own backyard which give rise to such ethnic conflict. Indeed, he champions the social and economic order which helps to breed the effects he deplores. He is rightly concerned about anti-abortion fanatics, but not, as far as one can judge, about the military, ecological and economic threat which his country represents for so much of the world. For him as for many of his 'leftist' colleagues, a good deal of morality seems to come down to sex, just as it always has for the puritanical Right.

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To refer to Fish the Dean, however, is to reveal the fact that there are two Fishes, Little and Big. Little Fish is a sabre-rattling polemicist given to scandalously provocative pronouncements: truth is rhetoric, free speech is an illusion, unprincipled behaviour is best. Big Fish is the respectable academic who will instantly undercut the force of these utterances by insisting that they are descriptive rather than normative. Far from being radical recommendations, they simply describe what we do anyway without always knowing it, and 'theory', the Trumps of this world will be relieved to learn, thus has no effect whatsoever on practice. Anti-foundationalism is therefore unlikely to alienate the New York foundations, and Fish can buy his reputation as an iconoclast on the cheap.

Little Fish is in hot pursuit of a case which will succeed in alienating absolutely everyone; he is the cross-grained outsider who speaks up for minorities, and himself Jewish, comes from one such cultural margin. Big Fish, by contrast, has a consensual, good-boy disdain for rebels, whose behaviour is in his eyes just as convention-bound as those they lambast. It is fortunate for this schizoid character that there is a place where aggression and consensus go together. It is known as the US corporation, of which the campus is a microcosm. In academia, you can hammer your colleagues, safe in the knowledge that, since you all subscribe to the same professional rules, it doesn't really mean a thing.

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copyright © LRB Ltd, 1997-2007