Pamphleteer’s Progress

Patrick Parrinder

The Function of Criticism: From the ‘Spectator’ to Post-Structuralism by Terry Eagleton
Verso, 133 pp, £15.00, September 1984, ISBN 0 86091 091 1

Terry Eagleton’s books have been getting shorter recently. It is eight years since he offered to re-situate literary criticism on the ‘alternative terrain of scientific knowledge’; three since, self-canonised, he included his name in a list of major Marxist theoreticians of the 20th century. The Function of Criticism is a history of three centuries of English criticism in little more than a hundred pages. Its conceptual basis seems (not for the first time) to have been hastily borrowed for the occasion. The scholarship is cobbled together from the works of others. Since he makes great play with the split between the professional and amateur pretensions of literary critics, it would be tempting to adapt his own style and portray him as the helpless victim of contradictory impulses. Yet in many ways he thrives on contradiction. His struggle against ‘bourgeois’ criticism has the agility, the opportunism and the sniping provocativeness of a guerrilla campaign. Though his books have grand titles, he has lately abandoned any pretence of working towards a Grand Theory. His recent work has consisted of critical introductions, essays, and theoretical pamphlets like the present one.

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Vol. 7 No. 2 · 7 February 1985 » Patrick Parrinder » Pamphleteer’s Progress (print version)
Pages 16-17 | 3229 words

Letters

From Ken Hirschkop

SIR: Faced with a review like Patrick Parrinder’s (LRB, Vol. 7, No 2), it is tempting, naturally, to simply snipe back. Clearly he feels that Eagleton’s work has a prestige beyond its merit, and that its lack or seriousness and intellectual depth is so self-evident that a combination of sarcasm, ad hominem remarks and hyperbole will convince us that we need not attend to the book’s central argument. But Eagleton is himself not one for kid gloves and so complaining about the tone of the review might seem like a case of special pleading. However, Eagleton also had a serious case to make about the state or criticism today. I suspect that Parrinder disagrees with his argument but he ought to confront it and offer a considered critique. Instead we get just the kind of academic one-upmanship which Eagleton is polemicising against. To say that Terry Eagleton is not a serious historian like E.P. Thompson is both true and, in this instance, irrelevant. The Function of Criticism has no pretensions to being that kind of history and unless Parrinder can connect this ‘fault’ to an objection to Eagleton’s basic point then he has told us nothing that Eagleton did not admit himself in the book’s preface. A general prejudice in favour of a certain kind of academic writing as against what Parrinder regards as the unserious genre of pamphlets it not a sign of intellectual depth and is not a substitute for debate over the issues at stake. Parrinder must use his scholarship to show us why a public sphere is not necessary or helpful to criticism. But his only approach to this question, the claim that even Marxist theory has been largely the product of isolation, is not very convincing, the implication being that the connection of Lenin, Trotsky. Luxemburg, Lukacs and Gramsci to political movements had a minimal or deleterious effect on their theoretical work. This, of course, is precisely the point which needs to be discussed: let Parrinder address his scholarly energies to it.

Finally, it is irresistible to note that amid a page and a half of accusations of philosophical inconsistency, shoddy thinking and poor scholarship, Parrinder finds two sentences to remind us that Eagleton has held steady in his political convictions. Nothing else could indicate so bluntly what he must think it means to be principled.

Ken Hirschkop
St Antony’s College, Oxford