“The problem with modern life,” writes Terry Eagleton, “is that there is too much meaning as well as too little.” It’s a problem the critic and Marxist literary theorist has long embodied in his own prose: just as his writing bristles with surprising similes, you sense that Eagleton is not saying anything very startling after all.

He’s addicted to metaphor at the expense of logic; metaphysical wit stands in for an argument as such. Nothing is ever precisely itself: it is always, instead, somewhat “like” some out-of-the-way image from the Eagletonian repertoire of comic comparisons. Postmodernists are like tortoises (they don’t ask existential questions); anti-Heideggerians are like warthogs (unconcerned about death); “what is the meaning of life?” might make as much sense as “what is the taste of geometry”?

At times, in Eagleton’s slim new essay on being and its bearing, this taste for allegory and anecdote quite gets the better of reasoned delivery or even lively polemic. At one point, astonishingly, he glosses the “answer to the universe” from Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (the answer, absurdly, is “42”) with no fewer than four (worse) jokes of his own. It is “really just like saying ‘broccoli’”, he quips, stating the obvious to no apparent end.

This is not exactly to disparage The Meaning of Life, a book that is mostly, and rather recursively, all about what its own title might mean. If Eagleton spends a good number of his scant 200 pages simply larking about with the traditional terminology, it is partly because he has discerned from the outset the silliness of his undertaking: “there is something absurdly overreaching about the whole project”. The author is not a philosopher, but a literary critic for whom a seemingly lofty phrase like “the meaning of life” sounds overburdened, hollow, bathetic: also somewhat forgetful of its own status as a metaphor to begin with. What if, asks Eagleton, the significance of the human span, or the import of existence per se, were no more than an illusion of language? We may simply have mistaken life for something like a sentence: an entity with beginning, middle, end, and a message hidden between the lines.

Accordingly, much of The Meaning of Life records the history of scepticism regarding the meaning of life. At a pace brisk enough, I imagine, to lose most readers unacquainted with the philosophers in question and annoy those in the know, Eagleton considers Wittgenstein’s dismissal of metaphysical language, Schopenhauer’s positing the willed meaninglessness of the universe, Nietzsche’s post-deistic self-fashioning and the existentialist embrace of the void. He is aphoristically acute on Samuel Beckett’s “meticulous sculpting of sheer vacancy, [ his] crazedly clear-headed attempt to eff the ineffable”, and, when it comes to current offerings in the way of cosmic consolation, bracingly dismissive of new age flummery, liberal individualism and resurgent fundamentalism all alike.

At this point, oddly, The Meaning of Life turns into an entirely different volume: a book with an argument, a point, nothing less than a lesson, in fact. It’s as if Eagleton had first to rehearse a lot of mildly comic stage business before finding the courage for his final soliloquy. The last 30 pages or so advance a polemic that revisits its author’s Marxism and Catholicism. His relation to both may now be somewhat complicated, but the urgency with which Eagleton argues for love, of all (the obvious) things, as the true “meaning” of life, is impressive in its fidelity to his intellectual wellsprings. If our lives have a collective meaning, he concludes, it lies in actions, not states of being or mind: tending the sick, welcoming strangers, sacrificing our own happiness for that of others.

Still, it’s unclear what exactly this conflicted book is for. As an attempt to smuggle big ideas into a very small package, its theoretical passages sorely lack the conceptual audacity and style of, say, Slavoj Zizek. If it is a serious work of ethics, then the French philosopher Alain Badiou, with whom Eagleton shares an interest in St Paul, is a surer guide to the field. As a jeu d’esprit, it shows Eagleton still has a winning way with a metaphor: which may mean something, or it may not. [End]