Pap and Pralines
Terry Eagleton, Hope Without Optimism
Yale University Press, 176pp, £18.99, ISBN 9780300217124
reviewed by Stuart Walton
One of the central dilemmas of late modern experience has been the question of how it may be possible to retain hope in the face of widespread catastrophe. To go on whistling in the dark after the mounting evidence of atrocity is the demeanour of the unhinged, but to surrender to nihilistic fatalism, in the sense of believing in nothing other than fate, only comforts catastrophe's perpetrators. If disillusioned consciousness refuses to be pacified with Pope's suggestion that hope springs eternal, neither is it likely to be placated by the evidence that, as the Russian proverb Nadezhda umirajet poslednej ('The hope dies last') has it, it too is as mortal as everything else.
'Hope,' wrote Theodor Adorno of the cheerless mise-en-scène in Beckett's Endgame, 'creeps out of a world in which it is no more conserved than pap and pralines.' In the eschatological vision of Clov, the bent-backed servant of a blind and immobile tyrant, there is a world where 'all would be silent and still and each thing in its last place, under the last dust,’ finally free of the torment of hoping, where hope only implies a reconciliation to what there is while the means of its redemption are unavailable. Clov's error, if one may speak of error in a universe constituted as one gigantic blooper, is to equate hope with reconciliation, one of the solecisms that Terry Eagleton is at pains to lay bare in this densely suggestive study.
As the title indicates, there is a world of divergence between hope and simple optimism. Optimism, by dint of its purblind assumption that all will be well if you only look at it the right way, falls short of being the virtue that official Panglossianism takes it to be, precisely because it is nothing but an axiom, whereas true hope recognises the shabby, tragic, denuded condition of the present for what it is, and defines itself against it. The last boy still clinging to the barrier during the 2014 pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, even while half-a-dozen of the state's functionaries turn their tear-gas on him, is not an optimist, but has nonetheless refused to the last extremity to surrender the virtue of radical hope.
There have to be reasons to hope, posits Eagleton, or hope isn't a virtue, but there is nothing ineluctable about the prospects for hope. If hope's outcome was assured, it wouldn't be hope, only mere expectation. Critically engaging the universal cliché, he writes that '[w]hereas the glass-half-full image reduces hope to pure subjectivity, the doctrine of progress reifies it to an objective reality'. If incurable yea-sayers are people who like to see the good in every calamity, thereby compounding the suffering of its victims as unreal, like Tweedledum mocking Alice's distress at her uncertain ontological status – 'I hope you don't suppose those are real tears?' – even more appalling are those cynics and misanthropes who retain an unshakeable conservative belief in human degeneracy, the kind of gallows phlegmatism that can shrug off war and genocide as though they were no more than the bad pennies that human history keeps turning up.
The book is eloquent not just on the relation between hope and despair, but on the purchase that hope retains on futurity, which is too often emphasised at the expense of its anchorage in the unredeemed past and the brittle present. '[T]he ideology of progress,' Eagleton affirms, 'imagines that redemption lies at the end of history rather than at the heart of it.' In this sense, hope is the obverse of nostalgia, positing the broken reed of its own all too perishable conviction that things might be better against the comforting support of nostalgia's ache over the passing of an age in which they indubitably were.
If hope continues to hope for what might be, however, it is not be confused with desire, which is always already frustrated until those occasional moments when fulfilment, in abolishing it, reveals it to have been chimerical. What one desires is generally all too plainly set forth, whereas the object of radical hope must perforce remain as tantalisingly indeterminate as the theological ban on images insisted, for fear that it degenerates into mere wishfulness. 'Hope divests all times to come of their false appearance as absolute futures,' Eagleton contends, in a caution against the blueprints of programmatic utopias. For all that, hope has to retain a grasp on something, otherwise it issues in the contentless messianism of the late Derrida, for whom, as Eagleton puts it in a Morrisseyesque formulation, hope is only 'a perpetual, open-ended anticipation of nothing in particular'.
No work on this theme can afford to ignore the hulking behemoth of Ernst Bloch's three-volume chef d'oeuvre The Principle of Hope, composed in American exile from European hopelessness, but the work receives a fairly rough ride, other than at the level of its Rabelaisian stylistic energy. If there is as much pugilistic Marxism in it as the times demanded, it emerges under an overarching atmosphere of rarefied mysticism, the booming voice in the dimly lit planetarium inviting spellbound spectators to wonder at the trackless cosmos in which, despite appearances, all will be well, since all is tending towards a fully reconciled outcome.
Eagleton's formidable powers as a literary theorist and Biblical exegete are brought to bear in a final chapter that finds the glimmer of redemption in classical tragedy as much as in orthodox theology. The fractional compensation of the tragic vision is its very discursiveness, its investment in the shaping consolations of language. If it isn't quite invariably true to say that where there's life, there's hope, language, from which a substantial proportion of life is constructed, is a more favourable bet. The flaming-tempered deity who rains down torments on Job still expects to be answered back, much as he was by Cain, if not by Abraham, but what happens when language is debased by cultural cliché and bureaucratic mendacity remains less clear. In such a climate, hope may be tempted to clap its hand over its mouth like the tortured Job, rather than join the prevailing prattle.
The theological reflections with which the book are threaded are sensitively articulated, other than where their author allows himself the luxury of blowing a sectarian raspberry at Protestantism, a self-indulgence of which he might almost have cured himself by now, and which does nothing whatever to solicit a receptive hearing from those who find theological reflection about as interesting as polenta. Eagleton's taste for faintly absurd analogies, often couched in the alliterative, and his commitment to the leaven of empiricist jokes, most of which come off, remain undimmed with the years. There is also in most of his later work a fastidious refusal of the universalising 'we' of bourgeois liberalism, an observance whose value is only reinforced by the occasional lapse.
A peroration on the inevitability of human cupidity even under transformed social conditions asserts that '[t]he fact that a good deal of our disreputable behaviour is generated by the regimes under which we live does not let us off the moral hook altogether. It was we, after all, who constructed those regimes in the first place.' To burden the immiserated populace of North Korea with the guilt of responsibility for the crimes of the Kim family's dynastic dictatorship is to presume too capacious a definition of 'we', a fatuous deferral to the kind of negative collectivity of which those cynics and misanthropes were convicted earlier in the book. Not everything in human affairs, for all that one such foul aspect of it may be distinctively human in its bestiality, is the fault of the whole of humanity. If it were, there would be no grounds for hope, which this fine book heroically estimates higher than both pap and pralines, and which will one day, it is to be hoped, since it has after all happened before, smash yet another depraved regime to bits.
'Hope,' wrote Theodor Adorno of the cheerless mise-en-scène in Beckett's Endgame, 'creeps out of a world in which it is no more conserved than pap and pralines.' In the eschatological vision of Clov, the bent-backed servant of a blind and immobile tyrant, there is a world where 'all would be silent and still and each thing in its last place, under the last dust,’ finally free of the torment of hoping, where hope only implies a reconciliation to what there is while the means of its redemption are unavailable. Clov's error, if one may speak of error in a universe constituted as one gigantic blooper, is to equate hope with reconciliation, one of the solecisms that Terry Eagleton is at pains to lay bare in this densely suggestive study.
As the title indicates, there is a world of divergence between hope and simple optimism. Optimism, by dint of its purblind assumption that all will be well if you only look at it the right way, falls short of being the virtue that official Panglossianism takes it to be, precisely because it is nothing but an axiom, whereas true hope recognises the shabby, tragic, denuded condition of the present for what it is, and defines itself against it. The last boy still clinging to the barrier during the 2014 pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, even while half-a-dozen of the state's functionaries turn their tear-gas on him, is not an optimist, but has nonetheless refused to the last extremity to surrender the virtue of radical hope.
There have to be reasons to hope, posits Eagleton, or hope isn't a virtue, but there is nothing ineluctable about the prospects for hope. If hope's outcome was assured, it wouldn't be hope, only mere expectation. Critically engaging the universal cliché, he writes that '[w]hereas the glass-half-full image reduces hope to pure subjectivity, the doctrine of progress reifies it to an objective reality'. If incurable yea-sayers are people who like to see the good in every calamity, thereby compounding the suffering of its victims as unreal, like Tweedledum mocking Alice's distress at her uncertain ontological status – 'I hope you don't suppose those are real tears?' – even more appalling are those cynics and misanthropes who retain an unshakeable conservative belief in human degeneracy, the kind of gallows phlegmatism that can shrug off war and genocide as though they were no more than the bad pennies that human history keeps turning up.
The book is eloquent not just on the relation between hope and despair, but on the purchase that hope retains on futurity, which is too often emphasised at the expense of its anchorage in the unredeemed past and the brittle present. '[T]he ideology of progress,' Eagleton affirms, 'imagines that redemption lies at the end of history rather than at the heart of it.' In this sense, hope is the obverse of nostalgia, positing the broken reed of its own all too perishable conviction that things might be better against the comforting support of nostalgia's ache over the passing of an age in which they indubitably were.
If hope continues to hope for what might be, however, it is not be confused with desire, which is always already frustrated until those occasional moments when fulfilment, in abolishing it, reveals it to have been chimerical. What one desires is generally all too plainly set forth, whereas the object of radical hope must perforce remain as tantalisingly indeterminate as the theological ban on images insisted, for fear that it degenerates into mere wishfulness. 'Hope divests all times to come of their false appearance as absolute futures,' Eagleton contends, in a caution against the blueprints of programmatic utopias. For all that, hope has to retain a grasp on something, otherwise it issues in the contentless messianism of the late Derrida, for whom, as Eagleton puts it in a Morrisseyesque formulation, hope is only 'a perpetual, open-ended anticipation of nothing in particular'.
No work on this theme can afford to ignore the hulking behemoth of Ernst Bloch's three-volume chef d'oeuvre The Principle of Hope, composed in American exile from European hopelessness, but the work receives a fairly rough ride, other than at the level of its Rabelaisian stylistic energy. If there is as much pugilistic Marxism in it as the times demanded, it emerges under an overarching atmosphere of rarefied mysticism, the booming voice in the dimly lit planetarium inviting spellbound spectators to wonder at the trackless cosmos in which, despite appearances, all will be well, since all is tending towards a fully reconciled outcome.
Eagleton's formidable powers as a literary theorist and Biblical exegete are brought to bear in a final chapter that finds the glimmer of redemption in classical tragedy as much as in orthodox theology. The fractional compensation of the tragic vision is its very discursiveness, its investment in the shaping consolations of language. If it isn't quite invariably true to say that where there's life, there's hope, language, from which a substantial proportion of life is constructed, is a more favourable bet. The flaming-tempered deity who rains down torments on Job still expects to be answered back, much as he was by Cain, if not by Abraham, but what happens when language is debased by cultural cliché and bureaucratic mendacity remains less clear. In such a climate, hope may be tempted to clap its hand over its mouth like the tortured Job, rather than join the prevailing prattle.
The theological reflections with which the book are threaded are sensitively articulated, other than where their author allows himself the luxury of blowing a sectarian raspberry at Protestantism, a self-indulgence of which he might almost have cured himself by now, and which does nothing whatever to solicit a receptive hearing from those who find theological reflection about as interesting as polenta. Eagleton's taste for faintly absurd analogies, often couched in the alliterative, and his commitment to the leaven of empiricist jokes, most of which come off, remain undimmed with the years. There is also in most of his later work a fastidious refusal of the universalising 'we' of bourgeois liberalism, an observance whose value is only reinforced by the occasional lapse.
A peroration on the inevitability of human cupidity even under transformed social conditions asserts that '[t]he fact that a good deal of our disreputable behaviour is generated by the regimes under which we live does not let us off the moral hook altogether. It was we, after all, who constructed those regimes in the first place.' To burden the immiserated populace of North Korea with the guilt of responsibility for the crimes of the Kim family's dynastic dictatorship is to presume too capacious a definition of 'we', a fatuous deferral to the kind of negative collectivity of which those cynics and misanthropes were convicted earlier in the book. Not everything in human affairs, for all that one such foul aspect of it may be distinctively human in its bestiality, is the fault of the whole of humanity. If it were, there would be no grounds for hope, which this fine book heroically estimates higher than both pap and pralines, and which will one day, it is to be hoped, since it has after all happened before, smash yet another depraved regime to bits.