ANTONY EASTHOPE 73

Science, ideology, literary criticism For Terry Eagleton marxism is scientific; for Bernard Bergonzi it is only another ideology. How may such competing claims be arbitrated, and briefly even granted the licence to cut corners? Well, briefly then, we may begin by recognising that a science is not simply given. It is made within his- tory, as was astronomyin the seventeeth century, both by strugglingagainst pre-scientific elements (the Ptolemaic system) and by constructing its own 'better paradigm' as necessary model for understanding and explanation. There is as yet no science of literature, for if there were we'd all know it. Literary analysis in the tradition of historical materialism aims away from mysteries and towards systematic knowledge. It can claim to be in transition towards scientificity if it offers a convincing critique of pre-scientific ideas (ideology) and also provides its own model as a necessary form of expla- nation. Bernard Bergonzi's position, that of established 'literary criticism' (cited hereafter without sceptical single quotes), is founded on the notion of the absolute identity of the individual (what Bergonzi calls 'the kind of per- son I am'). This assumption is needed to support the argument at three points: to define 'human nature' (people as self-consitituted entities 'influ- enced' but not determined by 'innumerable factors'); to describe the 'essence' of the literary text which changes yet remains the same on the analogy of 'the mysterious ways in which human beings grow'; and to underwrite in conclusion the 'fact of individual death' as a form of absolute corresponding to the equally transcendent individual life.

The absolute individual is a recent discovery. It is well known that it did not exist in the ancient world, nor in any developed form in the middle ages. Identification of the individual with self-consciousness either in its Car- tesian ('I think therefore I am') or Lockeian form ('I experience therefore I am') emerges only at the Renaissance in significant conjunction with a new class (the bourgeoisie) and a new sense of private property. If on one side historical materialism shows the individual to be a position assigned in the process of economic and social forces, from the other psychoanalysis has demonstrated the self-present ego as effect of an internal dynamic: the kind of person I think I am depends by intimate necessity on the kind of person I cannot think I am.

This privileging of the individual as absolute identity has an essential function in the structure of literary criticism. It yields firstly a method, that familiar scenario in which the eternal Subject and the eternal Object con- front each other with supposedly unmediated directness: I 'experience' the text. So criticism is able to proceed on the basis of tacit consent (notoriously,

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‘This is so, isn’t it?) in innocence of any theoreticalexplicitness which would make visible the historical relations binding text and reader. (And so also the typical style of criticism- an urbane and ironic grasp of the supposedly unproblematic everyday.) Secondly, this concept of the individual helps literary criticism towards some explanation of the origin of literature. What- ever the local niceties of the discussion, The Author is thus foregrounded as source for the text ontologically removed from the social and historical ’background’. Thirdly, the same identity, now equated with ‘human nature’, provides grounds in which the reader receives the text. And finally, it makes plausible a corresponding autonomy of the text, that old old story of the work ‘in itself‘. Thus conceived, individuality may function as ’source, and end, and test of Art’ in a closed circle which marxists, with their passion for difficult new words, like to refer to as ‘overdetermined’.

But there is always one point at which the circle breaks, at which literary criticism is forced to look beyond itself, and where systematic knowledge may be able to develop only across conceptual grounds prepared by his- torical materialism. This point is the relation of the text to history. Bergonzi alleges that Eagleton identifies the text with its reading, its history; in order to state this relation himself he is forced to appeal to mystery, to the change- ably unchanging human ‘essence’. In fact Eagleton rather scrupulously elaborates the (marxist) principle of relative autonomy by which ‘the “same” text may inhabit contradictory systems’ and Homer survives but not as the ‘same‘ Homer. If it is only historical materialism that enables us to think the relative autonomy of the text without falling into idealism or relativism then literary study can only advance into science by moving into this field. Graham Hough in his essay in Contemporary Criticism writes that:

. . . the autonomy of literature is relative . . . Criticism should be able to give some intelligible account of the relation of literature to the social order. There is a methodology for this, and as far as I know there is only one. To think on this subject at all requires some application of Marxism . . .

The conclusion has more force coming not from a ‘dogmatic’ position but from a writer far from marxist in his sympathies.