- Alexander, Edward. Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe, and Other Stories of Literary Friendship. Somerset, NJ: Transaction, 2009.
- Kimmage, Michael. The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers, and the Lessons of Anti-Communism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2009.
Why the persistent fascination with Lionel Trilling? An English professor, literary critic, and one-book novelist, Trilling continues to generate interest three decades after his death, while his contemporaries—Newton Arvin, Cleanth Brooks, F.O. Matthiessen, Philip Rahv, Yvor Winters—go quietly into obscurity. Two new books by academics of distinction—one with a long career and the other at the outset—wrestle with Trilling’s legacy only three years after Gertrude Himmelfarb named Trilling as the summit of The Moral Imagination in her book of that title three years ago. Just last year, an unfinished novel called The Journey Abandoned appeared in print for the first time and was the occasion of essays everywhere, including in these pages, just as the New York Review of Books reissued The Liberal Imagination, his best-known -volume, in a “classic” edition.
There is something peculiar in this. After all, liberal anti-Communism, the cause Trilling was most closely identified with, is no longer relevant. The Soviet Union outlived him by just a decade and a half, and those who claim the present-day mantle of liberal anti-Communism, like the journalists Peter Beinart and Paul Berman, have had an exceptionally clumsy time of it. There is no liberal anti-Islamism to speak of. Those who now declare themselves liberals (“a word primarily of political import,” Trilling wrote, “but its political meaning defines itself by the quality of life it envisages”) are more impatient to prosecute Bush-administration officials than the war on terror.
What is more, the style of literary criticism practiced by Trilling—and by Irving Howe, whose long friendship with Trilling is lovingly detailed in Edward Alexander’s book Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe—might itself share some of the blame for its current dreadful state. The rise of “literary theory” in the late 70s entailed the “reduction of literature to politics,” Harold Fromm charged in Academic Capitalism and Literary Value (1991), and since then critics have been “more interested in political goals than intellectual activity or aesthetic response.” The same might have been said of Trilling (and Howe).
As a literary man, Trilling was the sworn enemy of the so-called New Critics—his chief rivals to preeminence in the literary criticism of the time—who sought to disconnect literature from an external reality and study poems only in relation to what R. P. Blackmur, one of their more articulate spokesmen, called “the analyzable features of the forms and techniques of poetry.” The effect was to sever literature from any relation to politics.
Trilling believed that withdrawal from politics was unforgivable in an era in which human freedom was threatened by a Soviet totalitarianism that “wants not so much a liberated humanity as a sterilized humanity” and “would gladly make a wasteland if it could call the silence peace.” Intellectual passivity, he warned, was an invitation to violence. Literature had a very immediate connection with politics—though politics did not mean practical arrangements for the improvement of social existence but “the politics of culture, the organization of human life toward some end or other.” The aesthetic effect of the greatest literature was to be found in its “intellectual power,” in the “mind’s success” at confronting social reality. The greatness of literature, in other words, is measured in the level of its engagement with society and therefore with politics. . . .
Read the whole review here: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/the-never-ending-journey-15249?page=all.
No comments:
Post a Comment