Waray Literature and Kimball’s Critique of Contradictions in Eagleton’s Work

I

It was a sunny afternoon on May 6, 2026, when I made my way to the Leyte Samar Heritage Center at the University of the Philippines Tacloban. The Heritage Center is a two-story structure with smooth, bright white walls that stand out vividly against the blue sky. Its roof is covered in reddish-pink tiles or corrugated sheeting, and the main entrance features a striking gabled canopy supported by two light-colored pillars. Tall, arched windows with dark frames and louvered or grid-style panes run along the front and side walls, allowing light to filter in. Inside the building, I found Writing Literary History: Mode of Economic Production and Twentieth Century Waray Poetry by Jose Duke Bagulaya, in which he analyzes Waray literature using Terry Eagleton’s ideas.

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According to Roger Kimball, Marxist academics such as Eagleton embody a paradox. They preach revolution and the destruction of capitalism while holding secure, privileged positions within Western universities. Even as Communist regimes collapsed worldwide, exposing Marxism’s practical and predictive failures, these scholars remained unaffected, retreating into obscure theories, jargon, and radical movements like deconstruction to maintain their stance. This shift turned humanities departments into spaces of intellectual conformity hostile to Western traditions.

Eagleton, a leading British Marxist critic at Oxford, blends influences from socialist thought, practical criticism, and Catholicism, though his work grew increasingly abstract and political over time. Moving from literary analysis to “critical theory,” he began treating literature merely as a reflection of ideology rather than studying it for its own merit. At the core of his work is the Marxist idea that economic structures determine culture – an idea he softens with complex terminology but never abandons.

Eagleton uses the term ideology flexibly. Defined neutrally as how beliefs connect to power yet always deployed negatively to describe ruling-class manipulation. He claims Marxism alone stands outside ideology to offer objective truth, allowing him to interpret all art and literature, from “The Waste Land” to works by George Eliot or Henry James, as symptoms of bourgeois crisis or false consciousness, denying individual genius or intrinsic value.

Ultimately, Eagleton views art and literature only as tools for social change, rejecting the liberal idea that art enriches human understanding or possesses its own validity. His major work The Ideology of the Aesthetic frames aesthetics through this political lens, surveying the history of ideas to argue that concepts of beauty and taste are rooted in power structures. For Kimball, Eagleton represents a critic who cares little for literature itself, using it instead to advance a rigid, utopian political vision detached from reality.

Eagleton’s The Ideology of the Aesthetic surveys major thinkers from Baumgarten to postmodernism but offers predictable coverage and flawed analysis. Though extensively researched, it fails as an introduction to aesthetic theory because Eagleton consistently interprets philosophy through a rigid Marxist lens, distorting ideas (such as Baumgarten’s focus on sensory knowledge or Schopenhauer’s metaphysical pessimism) into narratives of class conflict and oppression. His writing often becomes obscure and forced, as seen in highly abstract, psychologized readings of figures like Kant.

Central to his argument is the claim that the aesthetic is inherently contradictory: it promises freedom yet functions as a tool of ruling-class ideology, as coercive as law though experienced as voluntary. The critique rejects this framework, noting that Eagleton defines “contradictions” only against his own political model, not objective reality. Kimball concluded that the book is judged confused and unilluminating regarding art, serving primarily as an illustration of ideological reasoning rather than rigorous analysis.

Short Biography

Fhen M. was an academic writer at Cebu-Seoul Software International from 2010 to 2011, penning numerous essays, including a literary critique of Voltaire’s Candide. Notably, the novel features a pivotal encounter between its protagonist and a creole character with a maimed slave from a Suriname sugarcane mill. As a philosopher, Voltaire was a vocal critic of slavery in his writings.