Terry Eagleton: "Karl Marx once went out for a drink and ended up perched on a lamppost."

Barcelona"Believing in too many things can be bad for your health." "We can use the past to renew the present, not just to bury it." "Socialism is the culmination of democracy, not its negation." These three phrases are a tiny sample of the direct, revolutionary, and committed thinking of Terry Eagleton (Salford, 1943), one of the most influential university professors, literary critics, and essayists of the second half of the 20th century. Almost six decades after his debut with The New Left Church (Helicon, 1966) And after publishing around forty more books, the British author is no longer unpublished in Catalan thanks to Tigre de Paper, which has published Why Marx was right, translated by Lola Fígols Fornell. Published in English in 2011, the book prompted Eagleton's visit to Barcelona, ​​where he was one of the headliners at the Literal fair, held at the Fabra i Coats.

Last weekend, at the end of the conversation with the philosopher Xavier AntichWe heard him singing a traditional Irish song. Irish folk is one of your passions, isn't it?

— Yes. I must know practically the entire traditional Irish songbook. When I was a professor at Oxford University, we occasionally held Irish music sessions, where people would get together to sing and play songs. It was one of the few occasions where people from the city mixed with people from academia. We did this for over twenty years.

You had Irish ancestors.

— My four grandparents came from Ireland. They settled in Lancashire to work in the cotton mills, but during the Depression of the 1930s, they lost their jobs and ended up in Manchester. I grew up in England, although my Irish roots were always present. I've also lived in Northern Ireland for two decades. When people ask me if I'm English or Irish, I don't know how to answer. I haven't experienced identity in a conflicted way, unlike many others, who have been haunted by it like a curse.

In the book of The Goalkeeper. Memoirs (2002, Debate) explains his first contact with literature. It's a Dickensian story in every sense.

— My father barely read a single book in his entire life. And my mother too. We didn't have books at home, but somewhere I felt like books existed. classicsI had no idea what they could be. classics?Were there three million books? I asked my mother if she could enlighten me on the subject, and since she was as lost as I was, she took me to a bookstore in Manchester. My love of literature began there, in a modest secondhand bookshop.

How old was he?

— Eight or nine. When we asked for the classics, the bookseller showed us the shelf where the complete works of Charles DickensWhile he was talking to us, I made a decision: we had to buy them. Then the mother went as white as a sheet, because she didn't have enough money to pay for them.

And what happened?

— We paid an advance, and I paid off the debt with the allowance I received at home. I read all of Dickens's novels.

You were introduced to literature through one of the most popular authors of the 19th century. Did this influence your academic studies later on?

— Dickens entertains readers wonderfully, but he's also a great novelist. He published his novels before the Great Divide, which left behind, on the one hand, the cultural industry and, on the other, the exquisite modernism of authors like Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and so many others. I suppose it left a lasting impression on me that my first contact with literature was so enjoyable and fun.

He has dedicated books to the Brontë sisters (Myths of power, 1975) and the Clariza by Samuel Richardson (The rape of Clarissa, 1982). More recently, he has studied humor (Humor, 2019; Taurus) through figures such as Aristotle, Mikhail Bakhtin and Sigmund Freud.

— Freud dedicated a book to humor that has been criticized a lot, The joke and its relationship with the unconscious (1906), but I have a certain affection for it. It explores the mechanisms and dynamics of humor in a rather unique way. What makes us laugh? How is it that, in certain situations, humans react with laughter, and why don't other animals? My experience in university classrooms has shown me that a sense of humor is crucial when it comes to communicating with others.

Should we imagine him making the students laugh?

— I made them laugh as much as I could, yes. Humor is a good way to make students feel less intimidated. It conveys ideas very effectively. I recently finished writing a very thick book about death in which humor features heavily. Humor is the great antagonist of death. Whenever there is humor, it means that life is striving to move forward. That jokes were made even in the concentration camps is a revealing detail. The book about death may be the last I write...

I don't think so. He's probably got something else on his mind.

— I have a few because I really enjoy writing. I don't treat it as a job, but rather for pleasure. Writing is a way to compensate, displace, or replace other aspects of life... I, for example, had a rather poor childhood, emotionally, and this must have been important when it came to needing me.

In his memoirs he explained that, as a child, he had served as an altar boy in a convent of nuns.

— The nuns scared me for the rest of my life! [laughs]

But they also brought him closer to Christianity. He has reflected on the idea of God in books such as Reason, faith and revolution (2009) and has even publicly clashed with atheist biologist Richard Dawkins.

— Christianity is part of my cultural identity, whether I like it or not. And I've delved into books and debates a few times. I've done so with pleasure, without regret. When I was talking to you about nuns earlier, I was joking... Nuns have ended up reappearing in my life in an unexpected way.

How is this?

— A novice of that time read my memoirs when she was approaching eighty and contacted me. She had returned to Ireland and was living in another convent, located in a remote area. I went to see her a couple of times. We dined and sang together. I remember her fondly. She is now dead.

In a recent essay, Materialism (2017, Peninsula), writes that "unlike Marx, Nietzsche would not have been a great companion for a night out at the bar." Why?

— Nietzsche was a philosopher of great importance: he was so while he lived and remains so now. He has been one of the beacons of postmodernism, although he could not have foreseen it: he destroyed the idea of history, the human being... and proclaimed that God is dead. He was more radical than Marx, in many ways. We still live under his influence.

Also from Marx, although in the essay Why Marx was right write: "Marxists all over the world would be delighted if they were told that Marxism was over." He has dedicated books, articles and lectures to the author ofThe capital.

— I haven't been as interested in Marxism as I have in socialism. Marxism has to do with technical ideas related to the forces of production and class struggle. Socialism is just one way of being anti-capitalist.

In an advanced capitalist society like ours, you maintain an anti-capitalist spirit. Why?

— Yes. I argue this from the perspective of an intellectual. There are fewer and fewer intellectuals whose public profiles defend anti-capitalist positions, and this surely has to do with the vicissitudes the left has suffered in recent decades. What's happening in recent years is that neoliberalism is beginning to erode the principles of liberal democracy. We're seeing this, for example, in Donald Trump's America.

One of the words we have incorporated lately is illiberalism, a position that denies the principles of liberalism but which accesses government through formally democratic procedures.

— Democracy shouldn't be a system that seeks results, but rather a goal in itself. As Aristotle says, democracy is a virtue. Now we see it as a tool to achieve something. And this is a mistake. The problem with neoliberalism is that it is essentially anti-democratic.

You grew up in the second half of the 1940s, when democracy was being restored after World War II. How would you describe our present?

— We find ourselves at a time when defending the principles of democracy has become an act of radicalism. Fifty years ago, it wouldn't have been seen that way. Now, it's necessary to fight for quite basic rights. This means that democracy is truly in danger. Harvard University has stood up to Donald Trump [which recently announced a ban on visas for international students] shouldn't be seen as heroic, but it's all so wrong, it seems that way. What Trump is doing with Harvard is huge. The message he's sending is that if you're not American and one of his own, you're not welcome in the country. It's a decisive step toward fascist America.

In 2010 he published an article in The Guardian where he addressed "the death of universities" as a space for critical confrontation.

— It was a crucial moment. Universities have gone from being a place of criticism of the system to becoming part of it. Historically, they had been a problematic space, because they were simultaneously within and outside of society.

I asked you earlier about Nietzsche and bars. Why would Marx have been a good party companion?

— He once went out to bars and ended up perched on a lamppost. This happened in London, as far as I know. A policeman even arrested him, but he didn't end up in jail... Karl Marx could be very funny; he had an impressive zest for life. There's a quote by Goethe that Lenin quoted when referring to Marx: "Any theory is gray, but the tree of life will always be green." Behind Marx's great intellectual endeavor lies life.

I know it's a rather odious question to ask, and if you don't want to answer it, don't hesitate, but I'll ask you: what would you have talked about with Marx if you had met?

— Literature, no doubt. Marx had read a great deal; he was a voracious reader. In the 19th century, the only thing that surpassed him was probably Hegel. But Marx wasn't short. He wanted to finish writing. The capital to free himself from all that "economic rubbish," as he put it. His intention was to write an essay on one of his passions, Balzac. It's a shame he never got around to it.

FOUR BOOKS TO DISCOVER TERRY EAGLETON

Shortly after turning 60, the professor, critic, and essayist decided to look back at his origins. In addition to recalling his experience as an altar boy in a convent, his first literary epiphanies, and his academic adventures at Cambridge and Oxford, Eagleton also reflects on concepts such as family, love, friendship, and culture.

Precise and analytical as usual, and with an enviable sense of humor, Terry Eagleton confronts a widely circulated prejudice: that Marxism is finished. And he does so by refuting ten of the most common objections, including the excessive utopianism of the proposal, which leads to totalitarianism and reduces everything to economics.

With this 1983 essay, which was intended as an introductory manual to the history of literary theory—from Matthew Arnold to poststructuralism—and which, at the same time, became a fierce defense of the link between theory and politics, Eagleton also made a fortune among readers: more than 75 were sold in English alone.

One of the last essays published by the writer - in 2022, still unpublished in Catalan and Spanish - is Revolutionary Criticism, which explores the lives and contributions of five intellectuals who changed the way readers read. It begins with Nobel Prize winner TS Eliot and continues with Raymond Williams, one of Terry Eagleton's great mentors.