The publication of The Function of Criticism in 1984, Terry Eagleton’s fourth book in four years, consolidated his reputation—recognized on both the Left and the Right—as the most prominent and prolific Marxist literary theorist currently writing in this country.footnote^＊ The character of such a reputation is, however, inevitably problematic. Tending on the one hand to reflect the strategic alliances or tactical deflections of sympathetic or antagonistic critics rather than any consistent theoretical position sustained across the texts themselves, it also proposes a representativeness (Eagleton as ‘leading Marxist critic’; target or icon) which both evades the real challenge of Eagleton’s polemics and positively distorts the nature of their significance. With liberal criticism currently rallying and recuperating around an academy forced decisively onto the political defensive, and with the fashionable ‘post’-discourses whose literary critical paradigm is (somewhat paradoxically) deconstruction in the ascendant, it is hardly surprising that Eagleton’s recent books should have been received with considerable hostility. Four years ago Eagleton himself, already fully aware of the antagonism of his various projects to traditional criticism, registered the challenge of these ‘new accents’ of literary theory in a comment in nlr which was to anticipate his renewed theoretical activity: ‘In all the heady negotiations over the past few decades between Marxism, semiotics and psychoanalysis, Marxism has been the first casualty.’footnote¹ If, as I shall argue, Eagleton’s subsequent work has done little to disturb this balance, the recent hostility to his books, countering the reanimated assiduity of his rhetoric with an equally belligerent invective of its own, has done still less to speak out the real sources of conflict involved. The following notes aim to move beyond the barrenness of this exchange by engaging with the strategic and theoretical claims of Eagleton’s texts in the problematic context of crisis they themselves propose.

Eagleton’s publications seem to form three distinct periods, each divided by an interval of five years. His first four books appeared between 1966 and 1970, beginning and ending with an attempted reconciliation of socialist humanism and Roman Catholicism (The New Left Church, Body as Language). The next stage—three more books between 1975 and 1976—was dominated by Criticism and Ideology, an implicit repudiation of his former positions (especially in its attack on Raymond Williams) in favour of an overtly anti-humanist Marxist ‘science’ of the literary text. The third and most recent phase of Eagleton’s activity, beginning five years later with the publication of Walter Benjamin or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism in 1981, represents a moment both of development and stasis. On the one hand, his four latest books further the implicit institutional critique of Criticism and Ideology, promoting the politicized study of rhetoric as a radical alternative to the conventional university notion of ‘English’. Thus Walter Benjamin offers, amongst other things, a ‘Small History of Rhetoric’, Literary Theory advances a politics of radical pluralism with The Rape of Clarissa as its practical realization, while the most recent book, The Function of Criticism, derives a traditional (political) future for criticism from the unacknowledged radicalism of its past. On the other hand, these works repeat a polemic against Leavis which Eagleton began in the late 1960s and which reached its rhetorically destructive height in the powerful concision of the opening chapter of Criticism and Ideology a decade later. This position, fundamentally informed by the work of Raymond Williams and Perry Anderson, was firmly consolidated by the publication of Francis Mulhern’s comprehensive study, The Moment of Scrutiny (nlb 1979), and the theoretical case against Leavis decisively won. Why, then, this repeated resurrection of Leavis? If it was Scrutiny which provided the most radical challenge to Marxist criticism in the 1930s, it is surely post-structuralism which looms as the most threatening usurper of the position of Marxist literary theory today.

Eagleton’s recent books, and Literary Theory in particular—constituting the most coherent synthesis of his theoretical position—offer a revealing, if finally inadequate, answer to this paradox. For ultimately Eagleton will argue that the celebrated indeterminacies of deconstruction are ‘not far from traditional bourgeois liberalism’; that deconstruction is ‘liberalism without a subject’, a final anti-humanist mutation of the conscientious liberal humanism of Leavis. As an identification with Leavisian liberalism, however, gradually dominates Eagleton’s discussion of theorists as far apart as Husserl and Derrida, Heidegger and Saussure, increasingly fewer arguments are offered in reply. Where Eagleton had placed the Leavisian moment historically, revealing its unspoken premises in order actually to out-argue and out-manoeuvre them, in the case of deconstruction a potted political genealogy stands in for any other kind of theoretical engagement, and Eagleton’s arguments amount less to refutation than to a repeated (and, at the end of the day, moral) refusal. Later it will be argued that this shift has much to do with a privileging of the moral claims of a socialist humanism over the theoretical propositions of an ‘academic’ Marxism implicit in Eagleton’s distantiation from the scientism of Althusser. Firstly, however, it is necessary to consider the dynamics of this new emphasis in terms of its place within Eagleton’s strategic tropology as a whole. The purpose here will not be to offer a regressively deconstructionist reading of Eagleton’s literary theory (triumphantly reducing strategy to the ineffectuality of metaphor), but, in revealing those moments at which his polemic is frustrated by the figures and untheorized concepts of its own powerful rhetoric, to mobilize his critique beyond the stases of repetition and, as regards deconstruction, refusal.

The Function of Criticism extends and refines the narrative of ‘The Rise of English’ outlined in Literary Theory. In its discussion of post-structuralism it directly quotes the text of Walter Benjamin, offering only minor modifications. The extent of thematic and polemical overlap here raises questions of audience and strategy: to whom are these texts addressed, and what urgency justifies their repetition? The closing sentence of The Function of Criticism provides the most concise formulation of Eagleton’s immediate answer: ‘Modern criticism was born of a struggle against the absolutist state; unless its future is now defined as a struggle against the bourgeois state it might have no future at all.’ Eagleton’s texts are in their own terms a response to a crisis; and ultimately, given the context of his latest book, to the ‘Crisis in English Studies’. While in Criticism and Ideology it was the crisis of Scrutiny mentality which was to be addressed, (‘the impotent idealist conscience of a capitalism in the process of definitively transcending its liberal humanist phase’), by 1981 it had become the ‘desperate, last-ditch strategy’ of deconstruction to ‘salvage some of the dominant themes of traditional bourgeois liberalism’.footnote² There is, of course, a sense in which criticism is always in crisis, as the strategic juxtaposition of the two terms by critics as far apart as Paul de Man and Alec West (as well as the words’ related etymologies) would suggest. But if the last dying kicks of deconstruction are to be seen as little more than an ideological mutation or prolongation of the death throes of Leavisian liberalism, then we have been witnessing a long and extremely productive fatality. Eagleton himself not only admits of the founders of Scrutiny that: ‘No subsequent movement within English studies has come near to recapturing the courage and radicalism of their stand’,footnote³ but also concedes that the ‘formidably rich and intricate corpus of literary theory’ produced by the Yale deconstructionists and their idealist predecessors in America has found little to match it this side of the Atlantic.footnote⁴ It is precisely this productivity, however, which indicates that other crisis which haunts Eagleton’s self-quotations and the ever more polished rehearsals of the cause célèbre against Scrutiny; a crisis implicated in his very compulsion to reproduce, in a displaced form, its continual effect. As deconstruction picks its euphoric way along the seams of literature and philosophy, leaving not only volumes of suggestive readings but scores of handbooks and introductions in its wake, Eagleton’s Marxist criticism or ‘radical pluralism’, finally emerging triumphant from a long and hard-fought campaign against Leavis in the latter half of the seventies, seems condemned to the eternal re-enactment of its finest hour.

The effects of this displacement of crisis are far-reaching and readily locatable in Eagleton’s recent historical and theoretical work. Produced within a polemic against traditional (liberal humanist) criticism, its terms of reference rarely extend beyond the specificities of English. On the one hand, of course, neither the ‘Crisis in English Studies’ nor the continued influence of Leavis is to be underestimated. Whatever the theoretical gains of the debates of the seventies, Eagleton is to some extent justified to argue that ‘English students in England today are “Leavisites” whether they know it or not’;footnote⁵ and the critique of the institutional practices which reproduce this situation remains a major priority, even within an equally urgent defence of university faculties from the political forces which now threaten their extinction from the outside.

On the other hand, problems arise when this critique is allowed to form the final (and determining) context for Eagleton’s global approach to literary theory. Indeed in Literary Theory itself, the book’s proposed internationalism tends towards a radical dehistoricization: for example, the relation between two consecutive chapters, ‘The Rise of English’ and ‘Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Reception Theory’—currents which found little support in the traditionally empiricist academy of England—remains untheorized. Philosophically tenable, yet ahistorical, parallels are continuously drawn in the production of a synchronic ‘history of ideas’ which evidences a predilection for analogy rather than the insistence on the historical specificities of local conventions which had characterized the fastidious placing of Scrutiny. Thus Husserl’s ‘return to “things in themselves” (sic) . . . is not so far from Leavis’s naively mimetic theory of poetic language as embodying the very stuff of reality itself’,footnote⁶ while Saussure’s concept of langue is said to function rather like T.S. Eliot’s notion of Tradition. As the critique of English gains momentum, time and space are disturbingly suspended: whether the Germany of Heidegger or the Germany of Gadamer, the France of Saussure or of Derrida, the alien can always be domesticated into a version of English liberalism of which Leavis remains the original and unsurpassable paradigm. A diversity of competing and conflicting reading practices are conflated into articulations of a single, homogeneous (and already triumphantly discredited) tradition. English and Criticism become synonymous terms.

Construction like ‘for Heidegger . . . just as for Leavis’ function primarily to reiterate this frame of reference rather than to propose parallels which will bear much critical examination. Leavis, and the various parodic versions of his position, punctuate the text of Literary Theory, fuelling its polemical tone throughout. Thus in the concluding chapter, after all the discussion of the fundamentally un-English currents of ‘Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Reception Theory’, ‘Structuralism and Semiotics’, ‘Post-structuralism’ and ‘Psychoanalysis’, Eagleton’s target is once again the familiar paraphrase of Leavisian criticism: ‘Literature, we are told, is vitally engaged with the living situation of men and women: it is concrete rather than abstract, displays life in all its rich variousness and rejects barren conceptual enquiry for the feel and taste of what it is to be alive.’footnote⁷ It is precisely this position which made Leavis such a vehement anti-theorist. However energetically one searches for sinister parallels with Husserl, Heidegger, Iser, Barthes and Derrida, this anti-theoreticism, in its distinctively English combination of traditionalism and empiricism, marks national boundaries which demand representation. To end a critique of international literary theory with an attack on Leavis is to score an insubstantial victory over an opposition which had few pretensions to argument in the first place.