Page 141 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

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

(iii) Trilling’s biography of Arnold appeared in ............... . Notes
(a) 1938 (b) 1935
(c) 1939 (d) 1940
(iv) Freud was greeted as the ............... .
(a) Inventor of the greats (b) Discoverer of the unconscious
(c) Founded of pshcho-analysis (d) None of these

12.5 Summary
• In 1940 Lionel Trilling in his "Freud and Literature" remarked that "of all mental systems the
Freudian psychology is the one which makes poetry indigenous to the very constitution of
the mind." This quote clearly proves that Trilling had a very high regard for Freud. Trilling
believed that Freud's pioneering method of psychoanalysis combines the preciseness of the
scientific method with the imaginative insights of the romantic notion of the mystery that is
the human mind to understand and appreciate literary works. Trilling asserted that Freud
revealed through psychoanalysis that a creative writer was not a neurotic but a disciplined
literary artist who was capable of creating memorable fantasies.
• WE now know, from parts of his diaries, posthumously published, that Trilling hoped to be
thought of primarily as a novelist rather than a literary critic. An editor at The New Yorker
once showed him a letter Hemingway had sent in 1933, to which Trilling's response was
passionately confessional.
• A crazy letter written when he was drunk -- self-revealing, arrogant, scared, trivial, absurd:
yet Trilling's next three major books were collections of essays, often critical introductions to
new editions of famous books. In these -- The Liberal Imagination, The Opposing Self (1955),
and Beyond Culture (1965) -- we find the unique character of his treatment of particular
novels. Whether he was dealing with Tolstoy's Anna Karenina or Dickens's Little Dorrit or
Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn or Henry James's The Bostonians or Jane Austen's Emma,
Trilling always moved from plot and character and style to larger ideas about morality or
psychology. Even more appealing than this compulsion to explore the wider implications of
a work is the sheer passion with which he responded to it. Morris Dickstein's foreword -- the
most thorough, personal, and balanced essay in Trilling and the Critics describes Trilling's
approach to literature vividly.
• What meant most to him was to be possessed by a book, to be disoriented and changed by
it.... Trilling talked about books as if they might rise up and attack him; he was especially
fond of quoting Auden's remark that books read us as much as we read them.
• Even more colorful is Irving Howe's inventive image. Trilling would circle a work with his
fond, nervous wariness, as if in the presence of some force, some living energy, which could
not always be kept under proper control -- indeed, as if he were approaching an elemental
power.
• Several critics choose Trilling's introduction to The Selected Letters of John Keats as his most
brilliant, most original portrait (included in The Opposing Self). The introduction was called
"The Poet as Hero,"and it responded to the person revealed by the letters in a way that can
best be described as intellectual hero worship.
• The charm of Keats's letters is inexhaustible.... [His] wisdom is the proud, bitter, and joyful
acceptance of tragic life which we associate pre-eminently with Shakespeare.... [Despite his]
mature masculinity ... he had an awareness, rare in our culture, of the female principle as a
power, an energy.... He with his intense naturalism that took so passionate an account of the
mystery of man's nature, reckoning as boldly with pleasure as with pain.
• This is not the tone or savor of most literary criticism. Trilling wrote with similar though not
equal ardor about Jane Austen and Henry James and Charles Dickens. Even if we find his
language excessive, he nevertheless engages us and compels our attention. It is this heightened

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