Defending Her Son: A Memoir, Vol. 1 Book

I read the Task of the Critic with zeal. The interviews in the book move fluidly between autobiography, philosophy and theory, catholic theology, professional anecdotes, politics, the English novel, activism, feminism, Shakespeare, public spats, and discussions around subjects like a "marxist theory of humor", Eagleton's screenplay for the film Wittingstein, and the catholic left journal Slant. Because the Task of the Critic is an endlessly entertaining book, I find it hard to be a critical reviewer. Instead, I've presented a few moments from the author's extensive discussion with Matthew Beaumont that I think are interesting.

On humor:

"I'm not as temperamentally upbeat or affirmative as him [Brecht]. In that sense I'm more of a Beckettian than a Brechtian." (insertion in brackets mine)

Eagleton is a funny dude.

On "the demonic":

"I mean by the demonic a condition in which one's trapped between life and death, unable to die for real and drawing some kind of ghastly pseudo-existence from the deathly pleasure involved in destroying others, or sometimes oneself."

Eagleton has moments of profoundity.

On life as a Marxist critic:

"There is something profoundly contradictory about the act of intellectual critique, in that at the very moment at which it aims to be emancipatory it must find itself distanced from that which it hopes to emancipate. I dont think this contradiction can be solved within a class society; and all the individual critic can do is find a way of living within that contradiction as best he or she can. It is not our fault if this contradiction is there, produced by a class divided society, and will only be abolished with the abolition of class society itself. Meanwhile, we find ourselves inevitably torn between the offensive privilege of our being able to address these problems in relation to the aesthetic--offensive because the aesthetic is hardly the most important political issue--and an awareness that simply abandoning it, in a crisis of guilt, plays right into the hands of a social order whose aim is actually to eliminate radical ideas altogether. A radical intellectual dares not be complicit in this system, even if the result of this refusal is the perpetuation of a discourse that stands at a distance from the daily experience with which he or she should be concerned." (typos and errors mine)

The longer quote above leads me to wonder a bit about the expectations that we have of a Marxist literary critic. I've given some of the complaints and reviews of this book a bit of thought, as well as in a wider context of criticism against Eagleton. His answer may not satisfy us all, but his answer isn't a mealy-mouthed rationalization.

According to Eagleton, the task of the socialist critic is the cultural emancipation of the masses. How? To name just a few of the roles Eagleton calls out by name- Organizing writer's workshops on popular themes, theater, architecture, and urban planning. In his own words (pg 312):

"All this, needless to add, describes the socialist critic in far more politically hopeful times than we're living through at present. I'm recalling the enormous cultural upheaval and excitement of the Bolshevik and Weimar eras. But I think we need to keep this goal in mind in order to prevent us from imagining that the task of the socialist critic is simply to write Marxist accounts of Henry James."