trilling

I re-read Lionel Trilling's essays through the screen of his son's recent characterization of his father as a sufferer of Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). ("My Father and the Weak-Eyed Devils", The American Scholar, Spring 1999, pp. 17-41.)

Lionel Trilling's profound attachment to Freud and his interest in mental illness seems ironically apt in light of James Trilling's review of his father's life.

James's essay upset some who were loyal to the memory of Lionel Trilling as the preeminent guardian of high modernist culture. They felt that the son's candid "diagnosis" diminished his father's stature as the voice of liberal humanism.

My impression was different. After re-reading The Liberal Imagination, this central collection of his writings, I think that James did his father's memory a service. He placed him in an all-too-human context. In doing so, he helped rescue the essays from obsolescence. He gave them a new interest in a new day--when Lionel Trilling's mantras of high modernism prevail no more but offer us a foil against which to understand the orthodoxies of postmodernism.

Lionel Trilling in these essays took a critical stance toward the negative effects of modernist rationalism. He was trying to soften its imperative to organize and totalize. He resisted its tendency to transform life into abstraction. He feared that this tendency would create a vision of reality--a molar aggregate, to use a term from Deleuze & Guattari--that would replace "direct human feeling." ("Manners, Morals and the Novel," p. 212.)

Trilling's critical insight in the late 1940s thus revealed what postmodernists a couple of decades later would identify as a fatal weakness of modernism. He had what seemed like a visceral dislike for the inescapable logic of modernist rationalism. He saw and recoiled from its urgent "metanarrative" of totalizing truth.

Yet, his essays in The Liberal Imagination did not offer a manifesto. He saw himself as a priest of liberal democratic ideas, and these had to be grounded in modernist rationalism. What he offered was a corrective--reasonable amendments that would ameliorate the hazards of excess in the reigning order of ideas.

Trilling's essays time and again suggest that an acknowledgment of "complexity" holds the best hope for correcting the liberal democratic program. Complexity for Trilling was the rich tangle of ideas that animated morals, manners, philosophy, and art in a culture.

For example, Trilling faults the Kinsey Report, then making a sensation, because it oversimplified the complex social realities of sexuality in American life (p. 232). He faults Vernon L. Parrington's cultural reading of America because Parrington insisted on a simplistic choice of "reality" over "mind" or ideas (p. 8). He praises Nietzsche's "sense of the past" because Nietzsche had the intellectual suppleness to combine his "historical sense" with his "sense of art" (p. 191). When he talks about "the meaning of a literary idea," Trilling hopes that Americans would conceive of ideas "as living things, inescapably connected with our wills and desires, as susceptible of growth and development by their very nature...." (p. 293). He praises F. Scott Fitzgerald because he dared to think of his role as novelist in exemplary, heroic, dimensions (p. 242). He finds the New Critics, then ascending in influence, deficient because they sought to eliminate the "appropriate complication" that we derive from historicity, "pastness" (p. 179).

In Trilling's view of art and culture, ideas were to moderns what gods were to the ancients. (p. 187) They generated the energy to create. While they were identifiable, they presumably were like the gods--unpredictable and never fully susceptible to capture. Ideas for Trilling thus had the delightful quality of evasiveness combined with potency. It was always possible to interpret their caprices in a new way. And when you read his essays, you come to expect a twisting trail from idea to idea in surprising directions. There is always the chance of one more qualification, one more "refinement" (a favorite word that accompanies "complexity"), before he concludes.

Re-reading Lionel Trilling after many decades, I feel that his son's interpretation of his father's style of thought is useful. James, in his controversial article in The American Scholar, reinterpreted his father's behavior after his death. James had come to the conclusion that he inherited ADD from his father and Lionel in turn from his father, James's grandfather.

Lionel, however, never was diagnosed for ADD. James, who was diagnosed, tells of his difficulties in growing up with ADD and with a father whose teeth-grinding approach to life compounded them. The disorder, James said, was mainly characterized by an inability to "focus." He saw his father's life as a never-ending struggle against that inability, with the attendant bouts of outrage, drinking (self-medication), and ineptness at the practical affairs of life.

Mainly James believed that his father developed his intellectual style as an adaptation to ADD. Lionel favored complexity over clarity. He would take the path of most resistance, James said, and later in the essay gave us the following description of Lionel's special attachment to complexity as an intellectual strategy:

During his entire career as an interpreter of literature, I doubt that my father ever solved a problem, in the sense of marshaling evidence to prove or disprove a theory. On the contrary, he built his career on the mistrust of certainties and was rarely content with a simple answer when a complex one could be found....He was most comfortable exploring implications, ambiguities, cultural states of mind: issues without a beginning or an end, without a right or wrong answer....he made it his job to remind people that there were more than two sides to every question and that effective action was usually the result of oversimplification.

James adds a final thought to this description that is important because it situates his father comfortably within the high modern moment of post-World War II:

It was his extraordinary good fortune that the cultural climate and his personal style combined to make these reminders not just acceptable but popular. (p. 36)

It would of course be a mistake to think of Lionel Trilling as a precursor of postmodernism just because he distrusted the architectonic certainties of theory. We can accept or reject James's thesis that his father favored complexity because of a mental illness. Either way, Lionel's championing of complexity amounted to an affirmation of the prevailing intellectual conviction. It was Trilling's way of affirming a deep-structured, universal ground for the human condition. This affirmation is just what postmodernism renounced.

In the post-World War II period, the simple certainties of the modernist idea of progress had disappeared. But the prevailing worldview remained attached to a bedrock universalism, though the pressures of twentieth century calamities transformed it into ambiguous symbolism, hard to apprehend. Eliot and others declared that the modernist style would have to be difficult to understand, and Trilling agreed. But none of them said it would be impossible.

Lionel Trilling's interest in Freudian psychoanalysis seems eerily important in light of James's claims about his father's mental illness. He devotes two of the major essays in this book to it: "Art and Neurosis" and "Freud and Literature." As we might expect, he does not relate Freudian thought to artistic performance in any simple way. But the centrality of Freud's thought to Trilling's conception of literature and life is unmistakable. His son's understanding of this is straightforward:

Freud was my father's hero. Civilization and Its Discontents was almost a sacred text. It is a paean to the repression of instinct--above all, repression of what Freud calls the death instinct....My father's tragic view of life owed much to Freud's reminder that civilization in all its supposed glory had failed to keep its house in order.

It was a fundamental truth, according to Freud, that civilization was the outcome of the struggle against the death instinct. According to James, this Freudian truth gave Lionel the assurance that his struggle for self-control was not a private matter but "part of the great battle of humankind against all that is worst in itself." (p. 38) Trilling's attachment to Freudian concepts thus conformed to the more general belief that reality had a substructure of ultimate importance. It reinforced his high modernist position.

Lionel Trilling in these essays does not labor to clarify for us the difficulties of understanding. He uses difficulties and complexities of ideas as performers in a virtuoso high-wire act of thinking.

But I think James erred in one important respect in his assessment of his father's work. Lionel's style did in fact lead him to some critical solutions. While he may appear to have dithered endlessly with refinements of ideas, he rendered large judgments with a ringing clarity--and, ironically, with simplicity.

In 1947 it was not the common view that F. Scott Fitzgerald, who died at age 44 in 1940 after failing to finish The Last Tycoon, belonged in a line of artistic descent from the likes of Racine, Goethe, and Milton. Trilling asserted the weighty importance of Fitzgerald's fiction with no hesitation and no ambiguity--and well in advance of the wave of critical affirmation of Fitzgerald that would come in the 1950s. Similarly, he vigorously and directly stated the failings of the notorious Kinsey Report on the sexual behavior of American males.

When I was in college, Lionel Trilling was one of the Apollonian gods of criticism. In those years following World War II, high seriousness surrounded the critical enterprise. Trilling was one of the special voices who carried that seriousness out from the classroom into the literate lay press that still shaped informed opinion. Critical judgment such as Trilling's was something that came from on high and received respect. His style to me in those days would have seemed right in its elevation, in its rounded periods, in its lengthy sentences linked by multiples of "which."

By coincidence, while revisiting Trilling, I was reading some essays by the young postmodern writer, David Foster Wallace. (A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. New York: Little Brown, 1997.) This was like watching Saturday Night Live while simultaneously reading Hamlet.

Wallace's earthy basics, his outrageous juxtapositions of absurd and sublime, when placed beside Trilling's baroque sonorities, left me acutely conscious of the changing styles of changing times. Trilling's tragic view of life, Wallace might be tempted to say after reading James's essay, could have been cured if he had just taken a dose of mood medicine. What's to worry? Why all the moaning and groaning?

And yet, Lionel Trilling's essays took me back, however fleetingly, to a moment that seems to me larger than life. Mundane happenings could be thought to be infused with something essential and general. It was a time when literature had something of the sacred still clinging to it, however tenuously. Trilling helped to sustain the sense of that import. His essays still stir wisps of Significance floating in my long memory. And then I see David Foster Wallace reporting in his T-shirt for Harper's Magazine on the absurdities of the Illinois State Fair. I see him snorting at the pigs. Perhaps I could squeeze a classical allusion out of that, in deference to the memory of Trilling's high seriousness. But, hey, a half century's come and gone....