Page 124 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes which describe madness (to use the word that cant prefers) in terms of trascendence and charisma
will fail to penetrate to the great refusal of human connection that they express, the appalling
belief that human existence is made authentic by the possession of a power, or the persuasion
of its possession, which is not to be qualified or restricted by the co-ordinate existence of any
fellow man?
"Perhaps exactly because the thought is assented to so facilely, so without what used to be called
seriousness, it might seem that no expression of disaffection from the social existence was ever so
desperate as this eagerness to say that authenticity of personal being is achieved through an ultimate
isolateness and through the power that this is presumed to bring. The falsities of an alienated social
reality are rejected in favor of an upward psychopathic mobility to the point of divinity, each one of
us a Christ- but with none of the inconveniences of undertaking to intercede, of being a sacrifice, of
reasoning with rabbis, of making sermons, of having disciples, of going to weddings and to funerals,
of beginning something and at a certain point remarking that it is finished."
The fierceness of this denunciation is unmatched in Trilling, but it conveys the passion he
everywhere brought to considering the relation between emotions and ideas.
As I approach my conclusion I must not fail to remark that Trilling wished to speak for and to
everyone, and not for a particular sect or party. He sought to do this by speaking on each occasion
from the freedom of a judgment unconstrained by doctrine.
I am reminded of one of my happiest memories of him. John Thompson 1902C and I loved fly-
fishing and taught Trilling to fish. One day a shout of pleasure from a neighboring pool greeted
us. It was his celebration of his first ten-inch trout.
10.3 Trilling Major Works

The Opposing Self (1955) is titled for an observation Trilling attributes to Hegel, who had held that
in the eighteenth century individuals came to oppose the self to the culture in which it had grown.
This conception of the self was to be a central theme in Trilling's later work, particularly in his
discussion of authenticity in Sincerity and Authenticity.
A Gathering of Fugitives (1956) prints the introductions Trilling had done for The Reader's
Subscription, a book club headed by W.H. Auden, Jacques Barzun, and Trilling. Sincerity and
Authenticity (1972) presents the lectures Trilling delivered as Charles Eliot Norton Professor at
Harvard in 1970. Trilling had earlier edited an anthology called The Experience of Literature,
published in 1967. The prefaces to the individual selections it contains comprise a volume in the
Uniform edition. The present writer suggests that the original anthology, including Trilling's
prefaces together with the works they deal with, make an excellent introduction to the powers and
interests of Trilling himself.
Beyond Culture (1965) contains powerful essays on Jane Austen's Emma, on Isaac Babel, on the
modern view of pleasure, and on other topics. One of these, "On the Teaching of Modern Literature,"
is more often discussed than others nowadays because it is thought to have a particular importance
for students of literature. This essay demands nothing less than full attention, and I can't attempt
to give it that here, except to note that those whose lives are exclusively devoted to money and
success find little sanction or excuse in its pages.
Of this book as a whole, Diana Trilling, the editor, notes, "A central enterprise of the volume is its
search for a way out of the adversary culture which will not preclude a genuine experience of life.
One such rescue from the tyrannies of contemporary cultural subversion Trilling finds in Freud's
tragic acceptance of the biologically given." The speech Trilling addressed to the New York
Psychoanalytic Society in 1955 gives the volume its title. It was the first occasion on which the
members of the society were addressed by someone outside their number. It should be noted that
Trilling collaborated with Steven Marcus '48C '61GSAS to produce a one-volume version of Ernest
Jones's three-volume biography of Freud.

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