Brief but interesting article by Terry Eagleton on Postmodernism and 'meta-narratives'. Terry is a long-standing critic of certain trends in postmodern thought/ postmodern sensibility. See his excellent essay 'Capitalism, Modernism, and Postmodernism' (partly summarised here).
'Postmodernism, wedded as it is to the particular, would be reluctant to accept that there are propositions which are true of all times and places, yet which are not simply vacuous or trivial. The statement ‘In all times and places, most men and women have led lives of fairly futile labour, usually for the profit of a few’ seems one such utterance. ‘Women have always suffered oppression’ is another. To narrativise these propositions is to help de-familiarise them — to recover something of our naive astonishment at what we had taken for granted. There is a sense in which we can forget or deny what is most common exactly because it is so common, as in Roland Barthes’s celebrated example of those names of countries which march across the map in such huge capitals that they are effectively invisible. Grand narratives are in this sense a bit like transcendental conditions, so much the very framework of our perception that it is hard to stare at them straight.'
As I'm quoting Eagleton, I found rather amusing this opening paragraph or so of his review of a book on George Orwell:
He was the son of a servant of the Crown from a well-heeled South of England background, who shone at prep school but proved something of an academic flop later on. A passionate left-wing polemicist, he nonetheless retained more than a few traces of his public-school breeding, including a plummy accent and a horde of posh friends. He combined cultural Englishness with political cosmopolitanism, and detested political personality cults while sedulously cultivating a public image of himself. From a vantage-point of relative security, he made the odd foray into the lives of the blighted and dispossessed, partly to keep his political nose to the ground and partly because such trips furnished him with precious journalistic copy. Coruscatingly intelligent though not in the strict sense an intellectual, he had the ornery, bloody-minded streak of the independent leftist and idiosyncratic Englishman, as adept at ruffling the feathers of his fellow socialists as at outraging the opposition. As he grew older, this cussedness became more pronounced, until his hatred of benighted autocratic states led him in the eyes of many to betray his left-wing views altogether.
Such, no doubt, is how Christopher Hitchens will be remembered
P.S. I'm currently away from my computer. Back home Friday.