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Terry Eagleton is one of academia's great conundrums: a Marxist moralist who cracks jokes, a high priest of literary theory's new obscurantism who writes prose as transparent as Orwell's. Matthew Arnold might not have agreed, but anyone unfamiliar with Eagleton's best-seller Literary Theory cannot call himself civilised.
His new book, the jocularly titled The Meaning of Life (OUP £10.99), isn't quite that canonical, but it's still one of this year's necessary reads.
The chapter-long analysis of the meaning of the word 'meaning' is an object lesson in the kind of close reading that intellectuals like Eagleton are ignorantly assumed to have done away with. But that doesn't mean he sides with those deconstructionist rebels who think it radical to declare everything indeterminate and meaningless. "If existence really were unintelligible,"
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he points out, "it would be impossible to pass moral judgements on it, such as the judgement that it is empty of significance."
So if life does have a meaning, what is it? Er, jazz. No, really.
For Eagleton, the casually creative give and take of playing in a jazz band is the perfect metaphor for a life lived as it should be - both through and for other people. "The free musical expression of each member act[s] as the basis for the free expression of others." There is no conflict between freedom and 'the good of the whole'.
Such reciprocal generosity, Eagleton argues, is a form of love and a microcosmic emblem of truly utopian politics. In other words, the meaning of life is to be found in the act of trying to make life less miserable for everybody else. Hardly new, of course, but that doesn't mean El Tel isn't on to something.
FIRST POSTED MARCH 8, 2007
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