The Age of Eagleton

Terry Eagleton's recent attack on Martin Amis stirred up something of a storm:

In the new introduction to the 2007 edition of his classic book, Ideology: An Introduction, Eagleton launches an impassioned attack on the views of "Amis and his ilk" who argue that the West needs to clamp down on Islam.

Eagleton also attacks Amis's father Kingsley as "a racist, anti-Semitic boor, a drink-sodden, self-hating reviler of women, gays and liberals". He adds that he believes that "Amis fils has clearly learnt more from him than how to turn a shapely phrase".

The spur for Eagleton's criticism is Amis's assertion that, as the Islamic population swells, "the Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order". On 10 September 2006, the day before the fifth anniversary of the bombing of the World Trade Centre in New York, Amis published a controversial essay entitled "The Age of Horrorism", in which he argued that fundamentalists had won the battle between Islam and Islamism.

Amis has suggested "strip-searching people who look like they're from the Middle East or from Pakistan", preventing Muslims from travelling, and further down the road, deportation. "Not the ramblings of a British National Party thug," writes Eagleton, "but the reflections of Martin Amis, leading luminary of the English metropolitan literary world."

Terry's now back on the attack in - where else? - the Guardian's CiF:

In an essay entitled The Age of Horrorism published last month, the novelist Martin Amis advocated a deliberate programme of harassing the Muslim community in Britain. "The Muslim community," he wrote, "will have to suffer until it gets its house in order. What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation - further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they're from the Middle East or from Pakistan ... Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children..."

Amis was not recommending these tactics for criminals or suspects only. He was proposing them as punitive measures against all Muslims, guilty or innocent. The idea was that by hounding and humiliating them as a whole, they would return home and teach their children to be obedient to the White Man's law. There seems something mildly defective about this logic.

The problem with all this, as commenters on Eagleton's piece have pointed out, is that Amis wrote no such thing. The Age of Horrorism can be read here, and no mention is made of these alarming proposals to harrass the Muslim community. In fact the quotations come, not from an essay but from an interview Amis did with journalist Ginny Dougary. Here's the full context:

This is the central question Amis keeps coming back to in his writing: an extended and moving review of the film United 93; a short story, published in The New Yorker, The Last Days of Mohammad Atta (we talk about the haunting photograph of the 9/11 leader, with his hard black eyes “full of murder… as though he couldn’t contain it a second longer”); a new 12,000-word essay tackling the terrorists head-on. This last response is likely to be extremely hardline, inflamingly so, if Amis’s message to me is anything to go by.

“What can we do to raise the price of them doing this? There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.’ What sort of suff­­er­­­ing? Not letting them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan… Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children. They hate us for letting our children have sex and take drugs – well, they’ve got to stop their children killing people. It’s a huge dereliction on their part. I suppose they justify it on the grounds that they have suffered from state terrorism in the past, but I don’t think that’s wholly irrational. It’s their own past they’re pissed off about; their great decline. It’s also masculinity, isn’t it?”

Whether Dougary accurately reported Amis's words I don't know, but it's clear from this - and from all we know about him from other contexts as well - that he's in no way advocating this "curtailing of freedoms" as a policy he believes we should follow. He's talking about "a definite urge", a temptation. Certainly he could have been clearer (or Dougary could have edited better?). It's clumsily phrased. But this isn't what Eagleton claims it is, a serious proposal from Amis, and it certainly isn't part of an essay.

So Eagleton is plain wrong, and his attacks on Kingsley Amis in this context - guilt by association, in the classic Stalinist style - are particularly nasty. I don't suppose we'll be getting an apology though. Truth is after all, as Terry would surely agree, merely a function of ideology.

Update: see George S.

Comments

[dearieme]

Astonishing, Mick: commie proves untruthful.

[Dr.Dawg]

Come on. He got the reference wrong, but the quotation absolutely right. And Amis is not even being particularly subtle or sly in his phrasing.

"What can we do to raise the price of them doing this?" he begins, and then comes his list of collective punishments. Does he say, "Well, that's extreme, of course, and we shouldn't give in to our emotions; here's what we should do instead?"

No, he does not. That's what he puts on the table, and he doesn't take it off. So, in the final analysis, he got his source wrong. Big whoop. Amis said what he said Amis said--that's the main point.

[Dom]

Actually, when I read the interview just now, I assumed the phrase "Well, that's extreme, of course, and we shouldn't give in to our emotions" was pretty much understood. Why didn't he actually say it? Well, it's an interview, and he is allowed to ramble and sometimes things get left out.

Notice he says "There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it?" This implies, to me at least, that he is speaking of base emotions. He admits to it, but knows better than to follow it.

[DaninVan]

Dr. D; for a guy (you) who takes such relish in throwing peoples words back at them, as well as denying suggestions of your own utterings, this is rather suspect logic (on your part).

[PooterGeek]

http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/philip_hensher/article3041082.ece

[Dr.Dawg]

PG:

So Philip Hensher conceded that Eagleton was right about the anti-Semitism.

DV:

I have no idea what you're talking about. But Amis was quoted correctly by Eagleton, and I'm afraid res ipsa loquitur. Pretty hard to rationalize his comments, although I'm sure you'll try. Indeed, the extra context provided by our host here makes my point. Amis is obviously advocating precisely the measures that he's, er, advocating.

[DaninVan]

Do you even read your own stuff, Dr.D? Look at what you wrote in answer to the well researched piece by P. Hensher. A mere suggestion on his part, becomes total absolution on your part, for Eagleton's piece.

This from the linked interview:
"“And now, for instance, it’s very important to me that my daughters are fully Jewish by Jewish law, which is matrimonial. So I’m pleased they’d be the first to be summoned.” That’s rather a peculiar thought, isn’t it? “It is, but let’s not mess about – that’s what they are. So there’d be no shilly shallying there. Especially since what we’re living through now, among other things, is a huge recrudescence of anti-semitism. And, with my two daughters, it makes me feel great solidarity with them.”

Yup, that there's some kinda anti-semitism!

[Dr.Dawg]

I read Hensher, to whom I was pointed by PooterGeek:

"There is plenty of evidence to suggest that he was somewhat anti-Semitic."

That's more than "mere suggestion," but the parsing some of you people do could turn anything into anything else. As, for example, Amis' list of collective punishments, spun from the notion of an "urge" that he suggests everyone shares, is now being wished away by those who are embarrassed by it.

[Mick H]

Eh? It's Kingsley about whom Hensher suggests there was evidence of his anti-Semitism, not Martin. And if you can't see the difference between making a proposal and acknowledging an urge, there's really not much point in any further discussion.

[Dr.Dawg]

Sheesh. Will you guys get your Ames (pl.) straight, please?

Yes, MH, I know it was Kingsley that Hensher was writing about. It was Kingsley that, by extension, got into the discussion because Eagleton segued from Martin to Kingsley, attacking the latter for, inter alia, anti-Semitism. I read Hensher, and noted that Eagleton seemed to be right about one aspect of Kingsley's character, at least. DV jumped in to tell us that "a mere suggestion" is how we are supposed to translate "plenty of evidence."

But back to The Quotation from Amis fils. It's a lengthy quotation going on and on about the various humiliations he wanted to visit upon innocent British Muslims. In the haste to give Eagleton a kicking because he's a Marxist, you're all giving Amis (Martin) an undeserved pass. What was the point of saying those things, if he didn't believe them?