CYBERTHEORY

I was reading that final paragraph of Terry Eagleton’s recent book, The Significance of Theory, while sitting in a train stalled at Nuneaton station. After I closed the book came the ritual of pondering. That provincial Midland town of Nuneaton, outside my window, was where the young Marian Evans grew up, on her way to becoming the exemplarily mature George Eliot, author of Middlemarch, the quintessential novel of Leavis’s great tradition, linchpin of EngLit courses for a generation. But she was also author of that major attempt at English intellectual political fiction, Daniel Deronda, selectively excised by the same F.R. Leavis, to be reconstituted and tamed as Gwendolen Harleth. As the train waited, I measured in memory the density of those great Victorian novels, their pace and length, the sense of journey embedded in their very structure, their linear narration and closure, their obvious relation to this very railway system which emerged with them and helped sustain

them. Once, long ago, back in the early 1960s, in The Long Revolution, Raymond Williams had analysed the 1840s sales figures for novels sold on W.H.Smith’s new railway kiosks as a way into explaining the ‘structure of feeling’ of a historical moment. I remembered the difficulty, and therefore the excitement, then, of advancing such analyses, entwining material history and critical analysis into a single argument, itself a step on the way to recognising the formal structuring of such fiction by its own modes of production, distribution and consumption. Familiar and now faded modes of theory. The cover of Terry Eagleton’s very first book, endearingly entitled The New Left Church, included a picture of a railway station. Inside was a laconic analysis of how modern railways symbolised both connection and alienation, as a prelude to close ‘practical criticism’ of the structure of feeling in then-contemporary poetry. Very New Left. Very early Marx.