Page 135 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Unit 12: Freud and Literature—Lionel Trilling: Critical Appreciation

The biography succeeded in large part because Arnold offered Trilling a particularly sympathetic Notes
subject: an author who combined the roles of creative artist (poet rather than novelist), literary
critic, and social-political thinker. Both men knew the internal tension felt by those who were at
the same time cultural conservatives and political liberals. And Arnold's brooding meditation on
the displacement of religious faith by science, in his famous poem "Dover Beach" ("we are here as
on a darkling plain ... Where ignorant armies clash by night"), anticipated a similar disposition
toward melancholy and fatalism which surfaced in Trilling's later work.
The Arnold biography won for Trilling the tenure at Columbia University that the English-
department faculty had earlier withheld because some believed that a Jew could not properly
appreciate English literature. After the university's president, an ardent Anglophile, declared
himself deeply impressed by the book, the faculty reversed itself; ultimately Trilling became one
of only two department faculty members to receive the prestigious title "university professor." By
the 1950s, as a former student recalls in Rodden's collection, "Trilling was already something of a
legendary figure, the intellectual conscience of the undergraduate English Department ... a link to
the turbulent world of the New York intellectuals." His next book, a study of E. M. Forster's novels
(1943), provided Trilling with an occasion to test the approach to literature that he later developed
more fully in The Liberal Imagination. Forster was at the time moderately admired in England but
little known in the United States. Trilling's enthusiastic portrait stimulated a reissue of Forster's
novels and a new assessment of his importance. The book's famous opening sentence has a deceptive
simplicity that startles the reader into sudden attention.
E. M. Forster is for me the only living novelist who can be read again and again and who, after
each reading, gives me what few writers can give us after our first days of novel-reading, the
sensation of having learned something.
In recent years moviegoers could experience a similar sensation without actually reading the
novels. Four of the five, written from 1905 to 1924, have been made into fairly faithful films: A
Room With a View, Where Angels Fear to Tread, Howards End, and A Passage to India. (The
Longest Journey has not yet reached the screen.) What Trilling found compelling in Forster's
novels was their distinctive approach to moral issues. He wrote,
All novelists deal with morality, but not all novelists ... are concerned with moral realism, which
is not the awareness of morality itself but of the contradictions, paradoxes and dangers of living
the moral life.
Trilling admired Forster because he was a liberal who resisted liberal shibboleths. For example,
his novels often touch on the idea of class, but class is not defined primarily in terms of income. In
Howards End especially, Trilling wrote, Forster "shows the conflicting truths of the idea -- that on
the one hand class is character, soul and destiny, and that on the other hand class is not finally
determining." But here class tensions operate within the middle class on three levels: at the extremes
are the wealthy businessman disdainful of art and weakness and the lowly clerk with a taste for
poetry, and between them are the two intellectual sisters. The scene at the novel's end of the happy
child of the clerk and the younger sister playing in a hayfield symbolized for Forster the secret of
the good life: "Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love
will be seen at its height." This sudden mood of transcendence, bursting out of Forster's otherwise
unpretentious conversational style, shows the novelist, as Trilling approvingly put it, "content
with human possibility and content with its limitations."

12.1 Text—Freud And Literature: Critical Appreciation

I
The Freudian psychology is the only systematic account of the human mind whch, in point of
subtlety and complexity, of interest and tragic power, deserves to stand beside the chaotic mass
of psychological insights which literature has accumulated through the centuries. To pass from
the reading of a great literary work to a treatise of academic psychology is to pass from one order
of perception to another, but the human nature of the Freudian psychology is exactly the stuff
upon which the poet has always exercised his art. It is therefore not surprising that the psycho-
analytical theory has had a great effect upon literature. Yet the relationship is reciprocal and the

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