Railing Against Dogma: Lionel Trilling

It is important to realize the limitations that are part and parcel of one's personal history – people are formed by their lives and decisions like figures are made from clay: all the matter cut away is not just missing, it also makes the form. This is why no person can be everything to everyone – one will always be not enough of one quality, too much of another. This is especially true in the realm of literary criticism, where, it seems, not only can you never make everyone happy, but, increasingly, you can never make anyone happy. Every critical pronouncement is met with a violent chorus decrying the critic's intelligence, their critical acumen, their variety of biases – even their very existence.

These days, one only compliments one's friends, and even then only sparingly. "Quite a nice review," is a common compliment, and while it's best not to seem ingratiating I tend to think this stoic New England reticence has gone far enough. There are probably a whole variety of reasons for the state of things; who can be sure. It is, however, certain beyond any reasonable doubt that the last person to write a book of literary criticism that pleased as much of everyone as possible was Lionel Trilling, with his collection of essays, The Liberal Imagination (New York Review Books Classics).

Upon its publication in 1950, The Liberal Imagination captured the minds of almost the entire literate public – that group affectionately referred to today as the 'general reader'. Although Trilling's writing style and his personality tics grated on some (his use of the royal 'we' is admittedly affected), the vast majority found his work engrossing. His book contained essays on topics such as the Dreiser/James divide, Wordsworth's 'Immortality Ode', Sigmund Freud, German Romanticism and the Nazis, and the Kinsey Report. It would prove to be a watershed in public discourse; it was criticism that was intellectual, deathly serious, fairly dry, and somehow – despite all that – widely appealing.

Still, it is easy to dismiss Trilling now. He wrote in a era of moral assurance, when the deep skepticism that would come to embody postmodernism was easily dismissed as mere nihilism. Stefan Collini writes in her review of The Liberal Imagination at The Nation, '"Mind," "culture," "the moral life" – these Big Words make us a little uncomfortable nowadays, and we have difficulty using them other than in a knowing, allusive way. But they are the notes that make up the habitual music of Trilling's seriousness.'

Our contemporary awareness of these 'big words' makes it difficult to see past Trilling's liberal use of them (ahem) and his many capital-letter Western Canon references, to appreciate the really admirable work he was doing. We know that there is no going back to the good old days, before we knew how empty and manipulative those big words can be; and it would be foolish to think that Trilling himself lived in such a time. In his essay 'The Sense of the Past', Trilling writes about the relationship – or lack of relationship – between German romanticism and the rise of Nazism: 'The failure of logic is not however what concerns us, but rather what the logic is intended to serve: the belief that ideas generate events, that they have an autonomous existence, and that they can seize upon the minds of some men and control their actions independently of circumstance and will.'

To Trilling, no concept is ever larger than human existence in its complex and powerful mundanity, and the human will is his sole first principle. There are just no better words for it than these big ones. Really, Trilling can use any jargon or ideas he likes – and he likes Freud's very much – to explain his own arguments, because reinstating the totemic power of these words and ideas is not his goal. These concepts exist only as far as people put them into existence through their will. In this important way, Trilling's work is as dissimilar from that of often-compared Matthew Arnold as it is that of Gramsci or Foucault.

It is not as if people are without vice though – Trilling is not an ideal humanist – and the elimination of 'vices' is besides the point anyhow. In his essay 'The Meaning of a Literary Idea', though, Trilling attacks what he considers to be the single worst tendency of our culture: dogmatism, partisanship, ideology. He writes, 'to call ourselves the people of the idea is to flatter ourselves. We are rather the people of ideology, which is a very different thing. Ideology is not the product of thought; it is the habit or ritual of showing respect for certain formulas to which, for various reasons having to do with emotional safety, we have very strong ties of whose meaning and consequence in actuality we have no clear understanding.'

In a talk on The Liberal Imagination in Cambridge, Louis Menand discussed very briefly the ways that Trilling both made possible the popularization of French Theory and was totally opposed to its tenets. If I was to understand Menand correctly, Trilling's willingness to draw broad, only somewhat related cultural criticism from works of literature, and to use a variety of texts as occasions to consider those huge concepts, was an approach that Modernism and the New Critics had effectively made de clasé. But one can imagine how the a-priori determinism and abstraction of these new Theories must have offended Trilling's pragmatic, liberal-democratic sensibilities; it's no surprise that the most vitriolic reactions to the recent re-appearance of The Liberal Imagination comes from those who are most inclined to evangelize the ideologies of those Theorists. He is the Jean Valjean to their obsessive Javert.

The recent revival of interest in Lionel Trilling happens to coincide with the collapse of political partisanships erected by Nixon and with the long-awaited suspension of the culture wars. These changes give the impression of a larger cultural shift, away from the dogmatisms of the last thirty years. Perhaps that is a too-optimistic version of unrelated events, but I'm not sure that it is. Critics such as Stanley Fish often invoke postmodernism as a breaking point in history, a man-made canyon beyond which it is impossible to gather fuel any longer – but what will the next generation of critics have to say on that matter? Will postmodernism be a impasse or just another feature in the landscape? If you believe Fish, then cultural heterologies have ruled on it already; if you believe Trilling, though, then there are still many decisions to be made, still much work to be done.