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On the other hand, I think you would be madly triumphalist – I don’t know anybody on the left who holds this
view that what we’re seeing is a massive resurgence of the left. The problem is not that, it’s really that a crisis is
always an opportunity for the left, but the forces that produced this particular crisis of the system were also the
forces that rolled the left back in the years before. The result of that is that when the crisis finally arrived the
left was on the back foot, and it was the same system that had done these two things. One obviously doesn’t
want to have any kind of victorious feeling here at all, but it’s useful to have a reminder that issues that we’ve
been plugging on about are suddenly back on the agenda and visible, whatever happens about them.
CB: Do you think that’s reflected in the literary production of the past, say five years? Do you think we’re getting
literary texts that are interrogating rather than accepting those narratives?
TE: Possibly. Yeah… maybe. Although it seems to me that literature in this country at least is in the stranglehold
of a kind of metropolitan literati (at least if you’re thinking of someone like Amis who’s a very typical example
of that) whose reactions to the world trade centre event and Islamic radicalism are really quite disgraceful, and
I had a rather famous spat with him as you may know. He’s never apologized for the disgraceful remarks he
made about ordinary Muslims – saying they should be hounded and harassed – he’s never apologized for that,
he said it was made in the spur of the moment, fair enough it was, but he should apologize. I think that the
reaction of the, as it were, official literary world has been pretty poor. The official literary world is no more
enamoured of the far left than it is of the far right, and therefore it’s always rather boringly predictable in its
responses to these things. So if I think of the Ian McEwans and the David Lodges of this world I’m not
particularly cheered. I also wrote a piece a few years ago in the Guardian I think, saying how striking it was that
so little theatre had actually engaged with some of these issues.
RH: I wonder if what we’re seeing more of is voices from minorities speaking about these issues, rather than the
established literary tradition?
TE: Yes, I think so. I think that’s probably more the case.
CB: I wonder as well if it’s to do with the way literary production can now happen. For example there’s the fact
that people can now self publish through new media in ways that can bypass the literary establishment – and
perhaps that means those voices are more diffuse.
TE: Yes, technology changes. Don’t forget you’re talking to someone who’s never used the internet [laughs]. But
at the same time technologically it’s changed, but ideologically it may remain within the same ambit. The two
things don’t necessarily go together.
RH: What do you think criticism’s role is, if any, in responding to social and economic events?
TE: Well, criticism is all part of the crisis really isn’t it? First of all, taking criticism in a rather wider sense than
simply literary criticism, but instead as critique, we’re living at a momentous point in the development of the
West where a long tradition of universities as centres of critique is almost coming to an end, and that is a
dramatic event. A cataclysmic event. I was in South Korea not long ago and I was being shown around what was
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