Sir: Nicolas Tredell's essay on 'The Politicization of English' (PNR 37) says the new radical criticism is 'totalitarian', represents 'mediocrity collapsing towards chaos' and leads to Nazism with a touch of Torquemada ('No need to burn books; now, there are subtler methods'). In response I shall try to do three things: correct a matter of fact; suggest why the mode of discourse the essay exemplifies makes reply impossible; outline an alternative form for future polemic.

The issue of fact comes up in the first two sentences. The essay says that the new criticism was at first ignored, then subject to 'plundering attacks', and is now becoming tolerated. I wish this were true but in fact it omits the way in which such work has been opposed by a much more direct exercise of power. To give one main instance (there are others). Re-Reading English was indeed given a blundering and hysterical verbal attack in the London Review of Books ('a nightmare', 'Stalinist', 'un-English', etc.). Another hysterical denunciation in the Times Literary Supplement (10 March 1982) surpassed this by going on to blame Methuen for letting the book come out at all. However, this TLS review was actually the second review of the book commissioned by Rupert Murdoch's newspaper. The first praised the New Accents series as 'a most intelligent and coherent contribution to literary studies' and said that Re-Reading English was a book 'everyone should read' This review was turned down. Possibly it was rejected on stylistic grounds; but it is very unusual for the TLS to commission a second review rather than ask for the first to be revised.

I would guess most contributors to Re-Reading English had read Marx's assertion that 'the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas' because that class controls 'the means of material production'. Most would have given vague assent to this while believing in their hearts that Britain was not Albania or El Salvador; that here a book which argued reasonably might expect the literary establishment to criticise it reasonably, even when disagreeing. Well, Marx was right and the contributors were naive.

Apart from matters of fact, the effect of Tredell's essay on a dissenting reader is suffocating. This is because it denies any position to the reader except that of submission to authority. Aiming not to argue but merely to re-assert received ideas (e.g., 'totalitarian') in a rhetoric of personal condemnation, its closure is such that to oppose it one would first have to state explicitly what its assumptions were-thus necessarily risking the riposte 'that wasn't what was meant'.

In this respect the essay is in no way peculiar but rather exemplifies a mode of discourse with roots in British eighteenth-century culture and specifically (I suspect) Pope's satiric portraits of Atticus and Sporus. Briefly, the features of the discourse can be characterised by four things in Tredell's essay:

1. The assumed primacy of personality. Writing is seen as a matter of authorship. Authors write mainly from motives of personal ambition-to become 'a chic guide' (a woman, of course), to launch a 'claim for canonization'; if they don't, this is considered to be due to what is called 'morality'.

2. Evasive irony. After citing the view that there should be 'the democratic election of everybody in power' the essay comments, 'Well, that might put a few radical lecturers out of a job'. Is the comment conceding the claim about democracy with some uneasy qualification? Or is such radical democracy being opposed, and if so from what point in the political spectrum? This kind of irony (it is pervasive) avoids explicit statement which would lead to the clear staking out of a position. By nestling invisibly within the dominant ideology it remains conservative whatever progressive gestures it seems to make.

3. The flight from reason. This is a deliberate effect in such writing, intended to throw an insupportable burden of clarification on to any reader who does not already agree with the pregiven judgements reproduced. Except as a device, how else is one meant to move from the assertion in a left-hand column that readers 'in recreative reading, experience literary texts' to that in the right-hand column that 'it is necessary to "construct" them, as "competent reading subjects" '? Or the view that one has to be able to construct unified reading texts before deconstructing them? The device works to throw opposed readings at the reader too fast for him or her to catch, as it does with the meanings of 'productive' in the following:

Also significant is the currency of notions of 'critical production', of 'productive' ways of reading texts: notions not a world away from those ideas of 'higher productivity' close to Mrs Thatcher's heart. But was traditional English so 'unproductive?

By an exemplary coincidence the refusal of argument is in fact explicit at one point in the essay when it is said that the differences between the work of various French writers is doe only to 'the whirligig of fashion'. In default of reasoned argument this type of discourse can proceed only through rhetorical re-statement (hence the premium attached to 'good' writing).

These assumptions with their inherited tropes may explain why literary polemic in Britain generally proves so futile, so rarely leads to understanding. I want to propose an alternative. The need for it might be put like this. As Britain's now chronic economic crisis worsens and the post-war political consensus continues to break down, intellectual positions will become ever more violently polarised. If we are to go on talking to each other across deepening divides, we must develop a discursive form better suited for conducting polemic. In France for some time intellectual debate has been inextricable from political commitment, and we might learn something from this model.

It would be a form of discourse which aimed to be wholly explicit and to eschew evasive irony. It would not identify the views put forward with an author but rather direct itself at the coherence of those views: as the MP for Chesterfield likes to put it, we should be concerned with policies, not personalities. A much higher value could be set on clarity and consequence of argument. Since to argue presupposes reply, this addresses the reader in an open rather than closed position; and there is always the possibility that in the exchange of views knowledge may be increased. Finally, let us at all costs renounce the English vice-moralism.
Didsbury, Manchester
ANTONY EASTHOPE

In view of the allegations concerning The Times Literary Supplement contained in Antony Easthope's letter, we invited the editor of the TLS, Jeremy Treglown, to reply.

Sir: So far as they concern The Times Literary Supplement, the facts about Antony Easthope's 'facts' are briefly these.

The TLS has an incomparable record of responsiveness to the new criticism at its best (as to any kind of criticism at its best), from the 1960s, when Barthes contributed several unsigned essays, to the last couple of years, in which our contributors have included the late Paul de Man, Terry Eagleton, Stanley Fish, Terence Hawkes, Colin MacCabe and Stephen Heath-whose review of four books by and about Barthes followed Claude Rawson's of Re-Reading English on December 10, 1982.

Anyone who takes the trouble to look up Professor Rawson's piece will be able to judge Mr Easthope's claim that it is a 'hysterical denunciation'. Rawson found a number of things to praise in the book, and his openness to the new criticism is suggested by his reference to the New Accents series as including 'books of such alert informativeness and intellectual distinction as Christopher Norris's . . .Deconstruction'. But it is true that he thought Re-Reading English unworthy of the series, and made some trenchant criticisms of Antony Easthope's contribution to it.

It is true, too, that Rawson's was not the first review of the book I commissioned. I turned one down, not-as will now be clear-because it favoured the new criticism, but because in my view and the Deputy Editor's it was irredeemably weakly argued and badly written. As it happens, a short while afterwards I turned down on similar grounds a flat-earthish denunciation of the New Accents crowd' and all their works. Such decisions are painful and problematic. But as Claude Rawson pointed out in his review, it is an editor's job to make them.
TLS ,Priory House, London EC1
JEREMY TREGLOWN

Nicolas Tredell writes: My essay cited published statements, not 'personalities'. But Antony Easthope, for a materialist, seems curiously naive in denying the existence of an intellectual 'star system (closely linked with 'capitalist' publishing) in which certain radical figures are promoted-by their friends more than their enemies-as 'personalities' Within this system, Easthope's Poetry as Discourse inevitably appears as his 'bid for canonization', irrespective of his actual motives, which no doubt were of the purest.

The alternative mode of discourse Easthope proposes turns out to be a politicized discourse: and the notion that every teacher and critic of literature should be obliged to state a political position surely has 'totalitarian' implications. Only those, like East-hope, who specifically advocate a politicized discourse are required, by that advocacy, to state, and justify, such a position, which must be ethically grounded-why, otherwise, would politics matter at all? But they substitute confused rhetoric, of the kind quoted in my essay, for the fulfilment of this obligation.

I am happy to be placed by Easthope in an English tradition that stretches back to Pope: and much as I admire French intellectual culture (including the work of Barthes and Foucault), that culture is bound up with a specific national history and language, and cannot be reproduced here. The texts of Easthope and his comrades inadvertently demonstrate this: despite their ostensible Gallic sympathies, they crash down on French jouissance like a ceiling-full of cold showers. Paradox becomes doxa. And of course, the French eschew neither an irony that Easthope would call evasive' (see the later Barthes) nor (see Sartre) the argument ad hominem.

There is one way, however, in which radical critics could both revive the English tradition, and follow recent French-and American-practice. In France and in the United States, there has been a cross-fertilization between new developments in literary theory and what I must still, impenitently, call 'literature' (the prose of Philippe Sollers, the poetry of John Ashbery). There are also a number of English writers-such as J.H.Prynne, John Ash, Roy Fisher, Tom Raworth-whose work can be seen as converging (whether or not through direct 'influence') with contemporary critical perspectives. But these writers have been relatively neglected by our homegrown radical critics. They should not be: for, as the long shadow of Leavis attests, criticism has had most influence (influence beyond the 'literary') when it has explored significant creativity, of both past and present. And it is in such exploration that minds of differing political persuasions can, without compromise of principle, meet. Critics chiefly concerned to play politics may make a short-term impact; but their ideas will not endure.

Sir: The easiest way of being sure to win an academic debate is to invent your opponent. Nicolas Tredell has invented a collection of literary critics called Terry Eagleton, Antony Easthope, Catherine Belsey and others, who preserve their radical chic by throwing flour at the Prime Minister and getting involved in guerrilla wars. These characters, most of them bent primarily on self-canonization, cling desperately to their power and status (sic) in order to impose on their students a regime of critical theory designed to keep them away from literary texts (PNR 37).

Oddly, Tredell also quotes in the same piece some perfectly sensible remarks by other radical critics with the same names. This leads to a certain amount of confusion. Last time he denounced the fictional Catherine Belsey for denying students the right to read traditional texts (THES, 25 November 1982), I replied on my own behalf as follows: 'I want them to read Shakespeare and the Bible and Milton, Middlemarch and Sybil, Leavis and Barthes and Foucault-and consider the problems they present' (THES 11 March 1983). But I see that Tredell's fictional opponent still holds to much more sinister (or possibly more fatuous) purposes.

Terry Eagleton, Antony Easthope and I all teach English; we all write books about literary texts; that we read them differently from Tredell (and each other) does not justify the supposition that we want them suppressed or extirpated, as Tredell claims. Nor does it turn us into flour-throwing guerrillas.

I understand (though I do not share) Tredell's repudiation of 'philosophy' in favour of experience as a source of knowledge, but the difficulty with this familiar Leavisian position is that in its hostility to theory it kicks from under its own feet the grounds of rational argument. What remains is largely smear and innuendo of the kind which is persuasive, I hope, only to those who are determined to ignore what Tredell's real opponents actually say.
University College, Cardiff
CATHERINE BELSEY

Nicolas Tredell writes: Catherine Belsey has ignored what I 'actually say' in my essay. Of course she, Eagleton, Easthope etc. are not 'flour-throwing guerrillas': this was precisely my point. Their radical rhetoric gives an impression of political activism which is belied by the reality.

That rhetoric is strangely absent from Belsey's letters to the THES and PNR. There is a marked contrast between the impeccably liberal statement that features in both ('I want them to read', etc.) and the 'there-is-no-alternative' tone of the writings in which she has invented herself as a radical heroine (see, for example, Critical Practice and her contributions to Re-Reading English and Literature and History, Spring 1983). Her intentions as an individual teacher are not in question: my case is that the systematic devaluation of literary texts and the elevation of a politicized canon of theory in those writings contribute to a situation in which it will become increasingly difficult for students to read traditional literature.

Predictably, Belsey reduces my arguments to a Leavisian rejection of theory, and a naive appeal to experience. But far from rejecting theory, I pointed out that the range of theoretical perspectives available to English studies is 'far wider, in fact, than that represented by the politicized canon of theory' (PNR 37, p. 13). And one need not hold a naive notion of experience to affirm that experience is important. Belsey's concluding characterization of my essay as 'largely smear and innuendo' is, of course, a smear and innuendo in itself.

EXPLORING LANGUAGE

Sir: The policy of reviewing the current output of British small presses one press at a time seems a constructive approach to a field whose actual dispersiveness easily relapses into a self-protective and rather brittle marginality. PNR should be congratulated for attempting to cover some of this field responsibly. In particular, Geoffrey Ward's review of recent work from Grosseteste (PNR 37) was clearly more than a determined outsider's view; nevertheless, he seemed to come unstuck over Thomas A. Clark's Twenty Poems, seriously underestimating how little Clark's work can be read as latter-day pastoral. Clark's choice of vocabulary, though not neutral, cannot, in itself, be taken as a simple index to the poetry's relevance to, or claims to belong with, the 1980s. The 'sheer weight of matters excluded' about which Ward feels uneasy, is itself (as Ward's conscientious puzzlement goes some way to conceding) the key to Clark's (political) strategy, one only possible in a practice of writing always more language- than world-centred. Descriptive ascesis rather than scrambled reference or ironic disjunction (but involving, as Ward notes, a winding syntax with powers to delay) signals Clark's explorations of language in ways which speculatively ramify from within a constructed bed, rather than being overtly problematic. This does not mean that Clark's poetry does not aim at some recuperation of a world whose conditions might (putatively) be celebrated, or that his paradisal echoes are not overdetermined, as in any poetry working from the English landscape or landscape-gardening tradition (as much classical as romantic). But Clark intends to be read for his liabilities rather than in spite of them; that is to say, not for an occasional word like 'affliction' that seems to have every right to belong to the lexicon of the 1980s, but for a language whose receding familiarities are, more than ever, guardian proverbs of our strife.
The Library, University of Warwick
PETER LARKIN

A DITTY

Sir; Staggering back from the first paragraph of Michael Hulse's review of Alan Brownjohn's Collected Poems (PNR 38), I have written the following ditty:

A LONG WAY AFTER O'SHAUGHNESSY

We are the yawn-makers,
We are the P.E.N. lot,
Sombre as undertakers,
Boringly boiling the pot.
We are the sleep-provokers
But nobody dreams our dreams:
Trend-spotters and cultural brokers
Prefer poets with other themes.
We cling to old Sixties notions
Like dominies who have grown old,
While the Morrisons and the Motions
See the stacks of our books unsold.
We're outstripped by the under-thirties
With their fingers still on the pulse:
Put your bets on where your shirt is-
On Hofmann and Reed and Hulse.

Low Tharston, Norfolk
ANTHONY THWAITE
(and I hope on behalf of Abse, Beer, Brownjohn, Causley, Holbrook, Joseph, Scannell and Wright)