TERRY EAGLETON CRITICISM AND IDEOLOGY: "TOWARDS A SCIENCE OF THE TEXT" (SYNOPSIS BY ROBERT SCHMID)

Terry Eagleton’s stated intention in this essay is to analyze the relation between the literary text and both ideology and history.

He begins by using the analogy of a dramatic production for the relation between the literary text and ideology. "The literary text is not the ‘expression’ of social class. The text rather, is a certain production of ideology for which the analogy of a dramatic production is in some ways appropriate" (64).

Eagleton states that dramatic production "does not ‘express,’ ‘reflect,’ or ‘reproduce,’" the ext on which it is based, but rather it "produces" the text.(64) Eagleton makes the point that such a production is not mimetic, nor is it the production a concretization of the text. He dismisses the notion of binary oppositions between dramatic performance and text such as "rest/motion, soul/body, essence/existence" (65). He disagrees with the Cartesian and reflectionist models and points instead to the "materialist concept of productive labor as the definitive relation between text and production" (65).Eagleton states that such a conception would allow us to see nature of labor in the production. "The relation between text and production is the relation of labor: the theatrical instruments (staging, acting skills and so on ) transform the ‘raw materials of the text into a specific product, which cannot be mechanically extrapolated from an inspection of the text itself" (65). So to follow this analogy, we can say likewise, that ideology cannot be separated from the literary text. Eagleton alludes to langue and parole, when he uses the analogy of the relationship between normative grammar and speech to illustrate the relationship between text and production. Eagleton then takes the analogy of the dramatic performance to the next step. He points out that the dramatic performance is based on a text which itself is a production, creating a "production of a production" (67) and an "ideology of that ideology" (68). He states that drama deals with this issue in different ways, just as the text can express its relationship to its ideology in many ways. "And just as the dramatic production’s relation to its text reveals the text’s internal relations to its ‘world,’ so the literary text’s relation to ideology so constitutes that ideology as to reveal something of its relations to history"(69).

The next issue then is relation of the text to history.

Eagleton questions whether "ideology rather than history is the object of the text," and which elements of the "historically real" enter into the text. Eagleton proposes that ideology "produces and constructs the real," and that "the presence of th real is a presence constituted by its absences and vice versa"(69). Eagleton posits that the literary text cannot be imagined to be in a "direct, spontaneous" relation with history, but instead the two can be conceived of as being in a relation similar to the one in which language denotes objects rather than being a direct correlation with them. Eagleton states that even an historiographic text that concerns itself with history is in the end is fictive, because it takes as its object an ideological perception of history, thus creating "ideology to the second power" (70).

For this reason a fiction text can sometimes prove to be at least as valuable in studying history as historiographic texts, Eagleton uses Jane Austen as an example. "It is not as that Jane Austen’s fiction presents us merely with ideological delusion; on the contrary, it also offers us a version of contemporary history which is considerably more revealing than much historiography" (70). Eagleton states that the material real and the historical real enter into all texts at least in the "last instance"(72), however they enter not as unmediated real, but rather as ideology. The literary text’s creation of its own object seem to grant it a freedom, but Eagleton refutes this idea. "The text’s illusion of freedom is part of its very nature as an effect of the peculiarly overdetermined relation to historical reality"(72). Indeed, despite the fact that the literary text can be argued to be "self producing" it is in fact governed by a stringent set of rules that it attempts to mask in its production. Eagleton states that "the pseudo-real of the literary text is the product of the ideologically saturated demands of its modes of representation"(74).

Eagleton argues that the literary texts "dominance (or excess) of the signifying practice over the signified"(78) is due to the fact that it lacks a correlation to real history, it is instead based on "‘pre-textual’ ideology"(81). Some of these ideologies are to be found in "ordinary language" which Eagleton asserts is the site of production of ideology. A text’s relation to "ordinary language is crucial as it is indicative of it’s ideological character"(82). Again, Eagleton reminds us that the study of an ideological conception of another ideology; a study of "ideological production to the second power" (81). Eagleton points out that in such a production "the text reveals in peculiarly intense, compacted and coherent form the categories from which those representations are provided" (85).

In order to discern a text’s relation to ideology,(85) the reader must recognize how a text both attempts to naturalize these ideological categories, while at the same time presenting itself as "constructed artifice" (85). It is then necessary to examine both "nature of the ideology worked by the text and the aesthetic modes of that working" (85). Eagleton points out that these modes both "typically complex formations between whose elements multiple particular relations of homology and contradiction are possible"(86). Eagleton criticizes Atthusser for employing a reader response criticism of literary text, claiming that it leaves intact the "liberal humanist problematic"(85) by stating that it merely supplants the idea of discovering reality with the discovery of a text’s ideology. Eagleton proposes that the text is to be emphasized in the reader-text relationship. He states that "every text can be seen a ‘problem’ to which a ‘solution’ is to be found; and the process of the text is the process of problem solving"(87). These problems and solutions that the text poses are presented as diachronic, as pre-existing problems, but they are dealt with synchronically in the text. Since the text presents both the problem and ths possible solutions within itself, it can be said to be not only synchronic, but also self-determining. this self production creates a problematic in that "the text itself is the production rather that reflection, of an ideological ‘solution’"(89).

In its production the text reveals the holes in its ideology, through its silences, or its "not said"(89) components. Eagleton claims that the role of criticism is to analyze these silences, "in order to theorize it, to explain the ideological necessity of those ‘not saids’ which constitute the very principle of its identity" (91). Eagleton makes the connection, as did Macherey, between Marxist criticism and Freud’s work. Essentially, Eagleton proposes subjecting the text to something akin to psychoanalysis in order to determine its underlying ideology,(unconscious) which is represented in the text’s "ruptures" and "disorders"(91). Eagleton asserts that Freud’s "uppermost dream layer" can be equated to the readily apparent "readable text"(92). Eagleton reasserts Macherey’s view that "the text puts the ideology into contradiction, discloses the limits and absences which mark its relation to history and in doing so puts itself into question, producing a lack and disorder within itself"(95).

This complicated relation between ideology and text makes a scientific study of their structure difficult. Eagleton describes the nature of their relation as being " a ‘relationship of difference’ established by the text within ideology"(98). The structure of the text is complex, it can be said to be marked "not by symmetry but by rupture and decenterment"(98). Eagleton states that the "truth of a text is a practice of its relation to ideology and in terms of that to history"(98). Eagleton nicely summarizes his view of the relation between text and ideology, "Ideology presents itself to the text as a set of significations which are already articulated in certain form or series of forms, displaying certain general structural relations. Ideology also presents to the text a determinate series of specific modes and mechanisms of aesthetic production–an ideological determined set of possible modes of aesthetically producing ideological significations"(100).

In the critical analysis of this relation we can also see how the text "obliquely illuminates the relation of that ideology to real history"(101). Eagleton argues that literature is "the most revealing mode of experimental access to ideology that we possess"(101). He states that literature presents itself as a "midway between the distancing rigor of scientific knowledge and the livid but loose contingencies of the ‘lived’ itself"(101). He further distinguishes literature form science by noting that literature "appropriates the real as it is given in ideological forms, but does so in a way which produces an illusion of the spontaneously unmediated real" (101). Eagleton concludes by stating that "the function of criticism is to refuse the spontaneous presence of the work–to deny the ‘naturalness’ in order to make its real determinants appear"(101).