The Desire For Wholeness-An Analysis Of Cultural Clashes From The Perspective Of Eagleton's Dialectical Unity

The academic circles are active in yielding rich inspirations on the perspectives we should take when encountering the depressing clashes between First World metropolitan or hegemonic cultures and Third World dominated or peripheral cultures in the postcolonial climate. This paper is intended to make a preliminary study of the complex dialectical unity by taking British deconstructionist Marxist Terry Eagleton's ideological approach to analyze literary texts as a typical example, in the hope of accelerating a fully developed totalistic perspective to preserve and disseminate the essence of the peripheralized literature rather than to sacrifice the latter's unique dignity and identity to cater to the hegemonic expectations.This dissertation consists of five chapters.Chapter One,"Introduction", concentrates on the archetype of wholeness and the correlating image of circle, organicism as the incarnation of this collective unconscious and the influence of organicism on later critical schools. This chapter falls into four sections. Section One is a brief introduction to the archetypal image—circle or sphere—a symbol of wholeness or unity, originating in the well-known circular image and symbolic diagram of mandala particularly found in Tantric Hinduism and Tibetan Buddhism and signifying sweet harmony, perfect order and desire for spiritual unity and integration. It aims at showing that the circle-archetype or the archetype of wholeness as a recurring and universal symbol is an indispensable correlate of the collective unconscious, which is pre-established long time ago in the unconscious human psyche and inherited, handed down by generations of people in different historical periods and geographical locations. Section Two makes a survey of organicism, the doctrine of organic unity as well as a full-fledged embodiment of the collective unconscious mentioned above. The English Romantic critics believe that the growth of a work of art, also as an independently organized unity, bears uncanny resemblance to a living being from the germ to the embryo and at last to the fully developed organism teeming with life and composed by dynamic systems. All parts, although probably diverse and even disparate, should in one way or another keep congruent with each other, so as to guarantee the unified whole a total integration. The successive critical schools such as New Criticism, Phenomenological Criticism and Deconstructive Criticism are all deeply influenced by the principles of organic unity, which is considered as the embodiment of the desire for wholeness. The tenets and ideals of organicism—despite much fierce controversy and criticism—remain a firm backdrop for even diversified thoughts. The argument on this point is subsumed in Section Three. Section Four spells out the organization of the paper.Chapter Two,"Marxist Totality and Its Representative—Terry Eagleton", contains two sections. The author of the present paper in Section One tries to make a brief review of the origins of totality, a key concept enjoying conspicuous role in the lexicon of Western Marxism. The focus in this section is on how Marxist Criticism as a form of historical theory not only provides particularly resourceful opportunities to approach literature in the corresponding social and economic context—as well the essential conditions to the popular cultural studies—but also demonstrates its enduring enchantment by its classical concept—totality. Totality, in other words, is wholeness or completeness. Marxist totality is not simply a derivative of the"circle-archetype"—the commonest symbol for the unconscious; its ideological strategy convincingly provides apt possibilities for the dialectical analysis of literary works studied as an organic unity. In order to achieve incisive understanding of the"dialectical unity"of Terry Eagleton, the author in Section Two, Chapter Two has made a brief introduction to Eagleton's critical career. The author believes that it is Terry Eagleton's contradictory identities that help shape the form of his literary criticism.Chapter Three,"Contradictory Unity in Literary Works"is composed of three sections. Taking the change and development of the concept"ideology"into account, Section One tries to elaborate Terry Eagleton's view on the relation between ideology and unity more detailedly. The author of this paper infers from Eagleton's ideological analysis of several literary works and his fruitful study of the leading Western Marxists that he is greatly influenced by both Georg Lukács and Pierre Macherey. The author thus concludes, at the end of Section Two, Chapter Three, that it is Terry Eagleton's peculiar living background and his identity as a deconstructionist Marxist that contribute to the formation of his extraordinary dialectical unity, which is carried out by the interaction between ideological contradictions and organic form. Section Three deals with Eagleton's smart analogy between literary criticism and the analysis of dreams, which is with no doubt a further illustration of his proposition that the incoherence and incompleteness of the text is determined by the fierce conflicts and contradictions within and between ideologies, and the text as a dynamic, relatively autonomous entity is actually"a process of becoming at one with itself".Chapter Four,"Unity in the Post-colonial Climate", has made in attempt to apply Terry Eagleton's dialectical unity to the analysis of the thorniest problem of cultural clashes. The purpose of communication and then cultural interaction have turned into negatives under political and ideological emphasis. The clash of ideologies more often than not manifests itself in the form of cultural clashes. It is inferred by the author of this paper in Section One that the concept of culture itself actually forms a dialectical unity. In the following section, the author goes even further to discuss the typical issues haunting postcolonial studies, which is considered as alternative means of perceiving culture. In the last section of Chapter Four, the author puts forward a proposal that to assume a totalistic perspective and stick to the methodological commitment to dialectical unity when speaking for one's own culture in the postcolonical climate and global context, perhaps, is a possible strategy for the resolution of the distressing clashes between hegemonic cultures and peripheralized cultures.Chapter Five,"Conclusion", summarizes the main points of this paper and particularly points out that to pursue harmonious unity is always inherent and universal; however, it is not necessary to make diversity impoverished and leached out of the world. Both similar and diverse cultures are complementary and necessary to human cultures as a whole. To assume a totalistic perspective is more or less similar to a famous Chinese saying,"a man of virtues sings in unison but never echoes another's word". The significance of this paper lies in providing a perspective to view postcolonial studies and provoking further discussion of it. The author of this paper hopes that the present study is a contribution to postcolonial analysis.