Daily Briefing : LIONEL TRILLING -A RELUCTANT CRITIC OF LITERATURE AND CULTURE (February 21,2020)

But although he may not have wanted what he had, and he may not have understood entirely why he had it, he appreciated its value and tended it with care. This meant cultivating a discreet distance from any group with which he might be too quickly identified—professors, public intellectuals, liberals, Jews. He was all of those things, of course; he would never have denied it. But he resented being understood under the aspect of anything so insufficiently nuanced as a category. Around the time “The Liberal Imagination” was published, he gave an enthusiastically received lecture at Princeton. He registered his reaction in the journal:

Feeling of total alienation from the academic profession and that I must not any more identify myself with it at such occasions. But I must in all things declare myself and go on being “brilliant,” and wrong if necessary, extreme. The sense that I fall between the two categories, of the academic and the man of genius & real originality, but better to make a full attempt toward “genius.”—To learn to make no concessions of a personal social kind toward the academic, but also not to signalize in a personal way my separation from it. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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Lionel Trilling, Reluctant Critic
Joseph Epstein
Commentary, March 2019

‘The age of criticism”—that is what Randall Jarrell called the period between the 1930s and the early 1960s, a time when the power of literary criticism threatened to swamp the power of literature itself. In England, the magisterial T. S. Eliot was at work, as were F. R. Leavis, William Empson, I.A. Richards, and others. In America, Edmund Wilson was at the top of his game, and at our universities, the prestige of the critics who made their living on campuses—R.P. Blackmur, Allan Tate, Cleanth Brooks, and John Crowe Ransom among them—made the philologists and literary historians look like mere pedants.

The name missing from this roster of distinguished academic critics was the most famous of them all, Lionel Trilling. Then and now, Trilling doesn’t seem quite to fit in anywhere. He was never entirely comfortable with Columbia University, where he taught for decades—or, for that matter, with thinking himself an academic or even a critic. He was often listed among the group known as the New York Intellectuals, which included Philip Rahv, Irving Howe, Harold Rosenberg, Dwight Macdonald, Alfred Kazin, Delmore Schwartz, Lionel Abel, and others, but he was less political and more intellectually refined than they. He wrote for the same magazines they did—Partisan Review and Commentary here, Encounter in England—but he was never fully in the mix. 

 What set Trilling apart above all is that he was a critic not alone of literature but of that wider entity, culture. “My war,” he wrote to the English writer John Wain, “was always a cultural rather than a political one.” Culture, he noted in his essay “The Sense of the Past,” should be “studied and judged as life’s continuous evaluation of itself.” Cultural criticism, even when grounded in literary criticism, widens the lens, considers the outside forces that produce certain works, and reckons the importance of the works themselves to the culture that produced them. Thus Trilling, in a reconsideration of the novelist Sherwood Anderson, writes that Anderson was of “the tradition of the men who maintained a standing quarrel with respectable society and have a bone to pick with the rational intellect.” By considering the novel through the lens of culture, Trilling could not merely assert but establish why The Great Gatsby seemed to grow better with the passage of time. Money, social class, snobbery, politics, history—all these fell within his purview as a cultural critic.

The Liberal Imagination (1950), Trilling’s first collection, includes essays on the liberal imagination in literature, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Freud and Literature, Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima, intellectual magazines, Huckleberry Finn, Rudyard Kipling, Wordsworth’s “Immortality Ode,” art and neurosis, and The Kinsey Report. This partial table of contents gives some notion of his range. Criticism for Lionel Trilling was part of the history of ideas.
 
All the essays in this rich intellectual buffet remain readable today, which is remarkable for a work of criticism, a literary form not noted for its lengthy shelf life. If the book may be said to have a theme, it is the literary poverty of liberalism, the inability of writers under liberalism’s sway to convey in their writing anything like life’s rich complexity. The essay that gives the book its title ends by noting the contradiction that the writers most valued at the time, Yeats and Proust, Eliot and Joyce, D.H. Lawrence and André Gide, “are indifferent to, or even hostile to the tradition of liberal democracy as we know it.” Yet, Trilling argued, they supply what writers in the liberal tradition do not: “The sense of largeness, of cogency, of the transcendence which largeness and cogency can give, the sense of being reached in our secret and primitive minds—this we virtually never get from writers of the liberal democratic tradition at the present time.” Trilling would later write to Bruce Bliven, then editor of the New Republic, “Nothing could be more useful to a liberal political point of view than the fostering of a strong interest in literature.” … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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Bad Infinity:  The Endurance of the Liberal Imagination
James Duesterberg
The Point, Issue 20 | Essays, Sept. 5, 2019

“In the United States at this time,” Lionel Trilling wrote in 1949, “liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition.” These words are strange to read today. One cannot imagine someone writing them now and, in retrospect, they suggest a dangerous hubris. And yet it is not clear that, applied either to Trilling’s time or to ours, they are wrong.

Since the global political unraveling in 2016, liberalism has lost its voice. From the “basket of deplorables” to the “#resistance” pins to the eat-pray-love liberalism of “a thousand small sanities,” public defenses of the West’s regnant political ideology ring hollow and desperate. Read the Times or the Post, listen to politicians, sit for a second and catch the mood in the airport: the absence is in the air, not just in our language. Max Weber called twentieth-century governance the “slow boring of hard boards”: they have been bored, and so are we.

To literary critics and political theorists—those whose job it is to front-run the zeitgeist—liberalism now seems not so much an opponent to battle as a corpse to put to rest. It is something to be, at most, anatomized, if not simply buried and forgotten. The new right tends toward the former: Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed, published in 2018 and blurbed by everyone from David Brooks to Cornel West, blames the very idea of America, with its manic commitment to a radical and spiritually empty freedom. For millennial socialists and fully automated luxury communists, liberalism is, instead, a kind of dad joke, a boomer blooper: faintly embarrassing and best ignored. Maybe we grew up believing in Obama, but that’s all over; now we’ve grown up and moved out.

Wake up! critics seem to say; Get Real. Liberalism is dead. All you have to do is look around: the world we live in is one our old categories can’t explain. Liberalism envisions the tools of reason—science, public debate, law—liberating individuals, tempering passions and leading, however slowly and unevenly, to a world felicitously governed, in harmony with itself. It is very hard to square such a vision with the present world, in which governments have been captured by grifters and demagogues, algorithms move markets and ambient anxiety reigns.

We are more administered than ever. But by what? Two minutes after I wrote “liberalism is dead,” unsure of what to say next and ready for a dopamine hit, I checked my email and found a message from Amazon’s recommendation engine. The subject line read “Capital Is Dead.” I had searched for McKenzie Wark’s book by that name weeks before, but the timing was a bit much. This kind of micro-uncanny occurrence, a glitch where the system works too well, is now a common experience, one of the thousand small insanities of everyday info-capitalism. Low-level paranoia creeps in, lit up by a little thrill. How did they know? Never mind that: What did they know? Sometimes you get ads for things you’ve only thought about. So, where does the thought come from? … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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Sincerity and Authenticity
Geoffrey H. Hartman
NYTimes, Feb. 4, 1973

For more than 30 years, starting with a book on Matthew Arnold (1939), and a brief work on E. M. Forster (1943), and via several well known collections of essays, “The Liberal Imagination” (1950), “The Opposing Self” (1955), “A Gathering of Fugitives” (1956) and “Beyond Culture” (1965), Lionel Trilling has seen literature as a “criticism of life.” The phrase comes from Matthew Arnold, and Trilling rightly interprets it to mean That literature is moral rather than moralistic in character, that it always makes its comment on the individual caught up in society or culture. Every person’s freedom is affected by the habits and presuppositions of his time, which often sustain him unconsciously; and our culture could not exist for long without the antagonism of what Trilling calls, drawing among others self.”

Yet Trilling, of course, has no grand philosophy or overview of the conflict between the two powers he isolates: the self and culture. It is here as in morals generally: the good and The evil grow up together, inseparably. A critic’s soul is made, like any other man’s, by recognizing that life in society —civilized, cultured life—is an irreversible necessity: what Keats called a “world of Circumstances” is the only school or testing place for a self always in search of its identity.

By defining Trilling as a moral critic, one says the obvious, but it is not easy to describe further the at once subtle and strenuous nature of his enterprise. Morals, as R. P. Blackmur suggested, are the quarrel we have with behavior, which evades strict ideals or categories. Yet they are also, surely, a quarrel we have with art itself. For art also evades morality, being on the one hand too playful or esthetic, and on on the other surreal and even demonic—in either direction, art reaches beyond accepted definitions of good and evil. What is remarkable about Trilling is that he has remained, despite pressures, a man in the middle, trying to value art’s thrust beyond morality while maintaining a belief in its humanizing and acculturating virtues.

His task has not become easier with the years. The critical spirit, in its modem exacerbated form, not only aspires, like Socrates, to examine everything, but conspires to alienate us from whatever was previously accepted as truth. Having forsaken nature for culture, it now treats culture as a second nature, and is equally suspicious of it. Traditions, customs, institutions — the “rich horn” and the “spreading laurel tree” in Yeats’s pastoral and nostalgic view — all these have to pass like guilty things before the bar of consciousness.

Our powers of indignant perception, as Trilling so elegantly calls them, are now directed not only against prisons of stone but also against “mind‐forged manacles.” The fear grows strong that it is we who commit ourselves to prison by accepting the ideals and subtle coerdons emanating from bourgeois society. The new coercion, writes Trilling in “The Opposing Self,” requires of each of us that he sign his own liberty away and be benevolently locked up “in the family life, in the professions, in the image of respectability, in the ideas of faith and duty, in (so the poets said) the very language itself.” … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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FOR FURTHER REFERENCE:

Ginsberg and Trilling: The Columbia Connection:  Mark Shechner, Michigan Quarterly Review, Volume XLVI, Issue 4, Fall 2007 — The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice: First Journals and Poems, 1937–1952. By Allen Ginsberg. Edited by Juanita Lieberman-Plimpton and Bill Morgan. New York: Da Capo Press, 2006. Pp. 523. $27.50.

Trilling’s Journey Resumed:  Columbia Magazine, Summer 2008 — Scholar Geraldine Murphy finds an unknown novel by Lionel Trilling and midwifes it to publication by Columbia University Press. Columbia Magazine presents the first excerpts.

Orwell on the Future:  Lionel Trilling, New Yorker, June 11, 1949 — George Orwell’s new novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four” (Harcourt, Brace), confirms its author in the special, honorable place he holds in our intellectual life.
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This week’s French-language briefing is titled: Communique: With Trump’s peace plan, the Palestinians will finally be judged for their actions (Feb 21,2020)