Page 121 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Unit 10: Freud and Literature—Lionel Trilling: An Introduction

The Liberal Imagination, was published in 1950, followed by the collections The Opposing Self Notes
(1955), focusing on the conflict between self-definition and the influence of culture, Freud and the
Crisis of Our Culture (1955), A Gathering of Fugitives (1956), and Beyond Culture (1965), a collection
of essays concerning modern literary and cultural attitudes toward selfhood. In Sincerity and
Authenticity (1972), he explores the ideas of the moral self in post-Enlightenment Western
civilization. He wrote the introduction to The Selected Letters of John Keats (1951), in which he
defended Keats's notion of Negative Capability, as well as the introduction, "George Orwell and
the Politics of Truth", to the 1952 reissue of George Orwell's book, Homage to Catalonia.
In 2008, Columbia University Press published an unfinished novel that Trilling abandoned in the
late 1940s. Scholar Geraldine Murphy discovered the half-finished novel among Trilling's papers
archived at Columbia University. Trilling's novel, titled The Journey Abandoned: The Unfinished
Novel, is set in the 1930s and involves a young protagonist, Vincent Hammell, who seeks to write
a biography of an elder, towering figure poet - Jorris Buxton. Buxton's character is loosely based
on the nineteenth century, romantic poet Walter Savage Landor.[9] Writer and critic Cynthia
Ozick praised the novel's skillful narrative and complex characters, writing that The Journey
Abandoned is "a crowded gallery of carefully delineated portraits, whose innerness is divulged
partly through dialogue but far more extensively in passages of cannily analyzed insight."
Politics
Trilling's politics have been strongly debated, and like much else in his thought may be described
as "complex." A much-quoted summary of Trilling's politics is that he wished to:
"[remind] people who prided themselves on being liberals that liberalism was ... a political position
which affirmed the value of individual existence in all its variousness, complexity, and difficulty."
Politically, Trilling was a noted member of the anti-Stalinist left, a position that he maintained to
the end of his life.
Neoconservative
Some, both conservative and liberal, argue that Trilling's views became steadily more conservative
over time, and Trilling has been embraced as sympathetic to neoconservativism by neoconservatives
(such as Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary), though this embrace was unrequited, Trilling
criticizing the New Left (as he had the Old Left), but not embracing neoconservativism. The extent
to which Trilling may be identified with neoconservativism continues to be contentious, forming
a point of debate in (Rodden 2000).
Moderate
Trilling has alternatively been characterized as solidly moderate, as evidenced by many statements,
ranging from the very title of his novel, The Middle of the Journey to a central passage from the
novel: "An absolute freedom from responsibility - that much of a child none of us can be. An
absolute responsibility - that much of a divine or metaphysical essence none of us is."
Our fate, for better or worse, is political. It is not in itself a happy fate, even when it has an heroic
sound. But there is no escape from it and the only possibility of enduring it is to force into our
definition of politics every human activity and every subtlety of every human activity.
Indeed, early in The Liberal Imagination, Trilling declared his interest in what he called "the dark
and bloody crossroads where literature and politics meet," except that for him "bloody" meant
embattled rather than violent; and literature, because of its intrinsic humanism, had more wisdom
to offer than the activist and morally troubling world of politics. It is this interplay of literature,
politics, and ideas that gives Trilling's work a scope and a richness not found in most literary
criticism. Still, it is as a literary critic that he gained his reputation and must be judged. John
Rodden recognizes this priority by structuring his collection around Trilling's books chronologically,
with a final section devoted to more general "Appreciations, Influences, Controversies,
Reconsiderations.
Trilling added to the novel treated questions regarding a character called Gifford Maxim, who
was based on Whittaker Chambers, a Columbia College student at the same time as Trilling.

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