Anything in principle may be theorized, though not everything needs theory in order to be understood, or is equally amenable to theorization. Consequently, not all theories are alike. Some are mere generalizations from past experience, while others have, or acquire, genuine explanatory and predictive power. In many cases practical familiarity with the thing to be understood is enough. In others, it is not, because the said thing does not wear its explanation on its face.

We need no ‘deep’ theory to understand why Othello murders Desdemona. All we need, though these things demand more effort than many a theory, is a sensitivity to language (including Shakespeare’s), some knowledge of the human world (ditto), and a habit of grown-up reflection. On the other hand, only a theory can tell me that my solid-seeming desk is ‘really’ a lattice-work of atoms vibrating in empty space. Of course, to the joiner who made it, as to me who am using it, the desk actually is solid. The scientific and the practical views differ, but do not conflict. It is all a question of scale, and which view we adopt will depend upon our purposes.

For forty-odd years a movement called ‘Theory’ (mostly Paris ’68, by provenance) has attempted to colonize the humanities, particularly literature. Several things deserve note. First, literary theory proper is nothing new. Indeed, it continues to be fruitfully pursued, only in philosophy departments, which have overwhelmingly shown big-T Theory the door. Next, though Theory’s ambitions have latterly (and ludicrously) extended even to science, it is only in the ‘soft’ subjects, literature and sociology (where some of it originated), that Theory has found a haven, and occasionally even a crown. (Those disciplines are ‘soft’ in permitting maximum liberty of interpretation: in literature because its subject-matter, fiction, virtually requires it; in sociology because, despite its scientific pretensions, nobody is quite sure what constitutes evidence, or what it is evidence for.)

Theory embraces two or three genuine (if largely discredited) theories, such as Marxism and psychoanalysis, but is otherwise a rag-bag of loosely related metaphorical ‘takes’ on the world. It sees itself, correctly, as a broadly left-wing phenomenon; and, less accurately, as one whose academic credentials are in no way compromised by its being politically affiliated. Its non-political sources, structuralism and formalism (both pre-war in origin) are almost extinct. Structuralism deliberately never turned its attention from signs to the things they signify, and thus threw no light on the ‘real’ world (which according to it was mostly derivative shadow-play, and in any case irrelevant). Formalism might interest the curious, but explained little. A formula for all fictions is like a grammar for all sentences: it may be true, but it tells you nothing about the content of any particular fiction or sentence, which is what you want to know.

Such introverted, purist approaches are clearly useless, at least in their original guises, for unmasking the iniquities of Western culture, capitalism, rationality and other bêtes noires of the Left. To be convincingly oppressive, those evils have to be objective realities, not mere linguistic precipitates. Now, Marx and Freud thought they were scientists, and were certainly metaphysical realists. As they saw it, they had discovered the truth beneath appearances, which was normally suppressed by various cultural or psychological mechanisms (ideology, false consciousness, repression, and so on).

Theory is permeated, perhaps even generated, by this conflict model, a paranoid discourse of power, hegemony, domination, concealment and resistance. Socialist, feminist, post-colonial and queer theory not only are, but even boast of being, the ‘academic arm’ of political movements agitating on behalf of ‘oppressed’ or ‘marginalized’ groups. Literature, by or about such constituencies, is their supposed ‘voice’. (It is as though artistic representation were somehow equivalent to political.) The question is not whether the oppression is real, nor whether we should do anything about it. It is how far literature and criticism can relevantly be conscripted into the cause of ‘liberation’ (or anything else), and thus serve, and be judged by, an external end. A novel may be unexceptionably feminist, and thus as virtuous as you please, but still be a very bad novel. Does its content, of itself, give it a claim on our specifically literary attention, or constitute an alternative kind of literary merit, perhaps with its own matching ‘canon’? Or is there no such thing as specifically literary merit, or a literary sphere?

If not, then exit literature as an academic study, and eventually all the humanities, politics included. It might be thought that, though firmly in the Theory camp, deconstructionists, post-modernists and the like, being the wayward progeny of structuralism and thus extreme anti-realists, were innocent bystanders, especially since some radicals criticize them as not far enough Left, and even as ‘conservative’ (Terry Eagleton). These are grave charges. But the accused can rest easy. Their ‘obscurantist terrorism’ (Foucault on Derrida, no less), their quasi-Dadaist denial of meaning, truth and reference, their refusal to engage in genuine dialogue, their substitution of sophisms for argument, are perhaps the ultimate in nihilist ‘subversion’. In them we see prefigured a world with no common discourse, no objective proof, no negotiation, no adjudication, no reconciliation of interests or anything else, but only naked power and will, and no settlement of differences except by force. I say prefigured, but we have been there before. What kind of deliverance from ‘bourgeois’ power can this be, that ends in the Gulag?

We may console ourselves with two things. First, none of this structuralist-descended Theory can be true, since it denies the possibility of truth (the Liar Paradox, to be shouted from the housetops). Secondly, Theory as a whole is more or less confined to the universities, where it functions mostly as a promotional ladder for staff. It is just tough on honest students forced to simulate belief in it. You will search their prescribed reading in vain for any counter-arguments, though there are plenty, let alone for any mention of the De Man scandal or the sublime Sokal hoax.