Page 123 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

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

sure it was true of others also) the experience was unique and unforgettable. The College of those Notes
years had a splendid staff, and many students had occasion to rejoice as I did.
Trilling was to become a friend when I began teaching in the College in 1939, and it may be useful
to note something I found characteristic in him. He took teaching very seriously. For him it was an
occasion to judge, to offer praise, and to seek to see what powers the student had and how they
were being employed. If they were being wasted or misapplied he made it his responsibility to try
to help. When I became his colleague and friend I was on occasion privy to these efforts and to his
sustained fidelity to the obligations of teaching.
In those years the College offered a three-year course in English literature from the earliest times
to the end of the nineteenth century. Trilling taught the third year over a long period. The course
embraced works of the Romantics and the Victorians, and one of Trilling's happiest achievements
is the essay on Keats he published in The Opposing Self. Another figure by whom he set great
store was Wordsworth and there was an annual struggle with an often resistant group of juniors
and seniors to win them to recognition of the poet's powers. Among the Victorians, the novels and
tales of Henry James stood high for Trilling. His interest in the cultural office of the novel carried
over to the twentieth century, as many of his essays attest.
One of the recollections of my colleague that stands out for me is how persistently thoughtful he
was about the ongoing affairs of the College wing of the department. His heart was there. He
taught graduate courses and supervised dissertations, but the College had his deepest loyalty.
The reader of this brief account of a remarkable man, whose abilities exceeded those of any other
I have ever encountered, might be excused for wondering how he exhibited the powers I saw in
him. I despair of conveying more than a suggestion of the fascination offered by a particular work.
Sincerity and Authenticity consists of six lectures delivered at Harvard in the spring of 1970. He
traces the idea of sincerity through the 400 years of its employment in England and elsewhere and
its fascinating permutations from Rousseau and Diderot (in his Rameau's Nephew) through Goethe
and Hegel, to such amazing cultural landmarks as Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Among other
things, he teaches us what an extraordinary wealth of meaning is contained in the customary
signature of our letters, "Sincerely yours." How authenticity then arose as a standard and at what
cost we learn in the lectures that followed. The final lecture in the series concludes with
extraordinary force. The chapter is called "The Authentic Unconscious," and the term "unconscious,"
though it had been Freud's, is not here used with reference to psychoanalysis but to a transformation
in its meaning, which reaches its apogee in a shocking moment of the 1960s. Trilling quotes two
British psychiatrists, David Cooper and R.D. Laing. In an introduction to the English translation
of Michel Foucault's Histoire de la folie, Cooper had written: "What madness is is a form of vision
that destroys itself by its own choice of oblivion in the face of existing forms of social tactics and
strategy. Madness, for instance, is a matter of voicing the realization that I am (or you are) Christ."
Trilling characterizes Cooper's view as follows: "So far from being an illness, a deprivation of any
kind, madness is health fully realized at last." He then quotes Laing as saying that "true sanity
entails in one way or another the dissolution of the normal ego, that false self completely adjusted
to our alienated social reality."
Trilling Comments

"Who that has had experience of our social reality will doubt its alienated condition? And who
that has thought of his experience in the light of certain momentous speculations made over the
last two centuries, of which a few have been touched on in these pages, will not be disposed to
find some seed of cogency in a view that proposes an antinomian reversal of all accepted values,
of all received realities?
"But who that has spoken, or tried to speak, with a psychotic friend will consent to betray the
masked pain-his bewilderment and solitude-by making it the paradigm of liberation from the
imprisoning falsehoods of an alienated social reality? Who that finds intelligible the sentences

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