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Trilling - by hkhalek

CHAPTER TWO
As an American Jewish literary critic and intellectual, Lionel Trilling was often accused of disengaging from his ethnic cultural heritage and of the continued conscious suppression of his Jewishness. Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser strenuously defend Trilling against this charge. Trilling did not deny his Jewishness, nor did he strive towards the suppression of his ethno-religious identity. Rather, he sought the definition and formulation of a self which allowed him a transcendence of societal labelling. Trilling sought an acultural identity (Budick and Iser, 157-58).
Many of Trilling’s biographers and critics have echoed this defence, among them Edward Alexander in his The Jewish Idea and Its Enemies. In his quest for a spiritual/cultural/intellectual father-figure, Trilling initially wavered between Mathew Arnold and Sigmund Freud. Being the academic and intellect that he was, Trilling predicated his selection on research and information. Within the context of his research on either, Trilling uncovered the anti-Semitic leanings of Dr. Thomas Arnold and proceeded, quite systematically, to expose them. In his biographical expose of Mathew Arnold, Trilling highlighted the anti-Semitic environment of Arnold’s character and intellectual formation, stressing that Dr. Thomas Arnold was not only opposed to the presence of Jews in Academia but to their presence in Britain herself (Alexander, p. 31):
Trilling, in the course of elucidating Dr. Arnold’s theory of the state, stressed Arnold’s opposition, both in principle and emotion, to the presence of Jews in England. Jews, in Arnold’s view, had no right to full citizenship or to the privileges attendant on it, such as entry to the universities. England was the land of Englishmen, not of Jews who, as “lodgers” had claims to nothing more than an honorary citizenship (Alexander, 31).
It is well-worth noting that consequent to the respect and admiration which both Thomas and Mathew Arnold had, across the generations, garnered among intellects and within academia, the Senior Arnold’s blatant anti-Semitism has rarely been discussed in published records. In fact, apart from Arthur Stanley’s 1844 edition of the Senior Arnold’s letters, one is hard-put to find mention of Dr. Thomas Arnold’s anti-Semitism (Alexander, 31). That Trilling should so thoroughly research Mathew Arnold and then proceed to expose the anti-Semitic environment of his upbringing, prior to eliminating him as a prospective intellectual father-figure, speaks to the fact that Arnold neither sought the denial of his Jewish identity nor of his cultural heritage. Despite his well-recorded admiration for Mathew Arnold, Trilling rejected him as an academic father figure because of the stain of anti-Semitism which coloured the younger Arnold’s environment of upbringing. That rejection, and most especially the reasons which incited it, is expressive of Trilling’s own acceptance of his Jewish identity and heritage.
Having rejected Arnold as a potential intellectual father-figure, Trilling finally settled on Sigmund Freud. Influenced by Freud’s biological notions of culture, Trilling sought to emulate Freud’s successful transcendence of societal labellings and forge for himself an acultural identity which allowed him to redefine himself as a quintessential American intellect, rather than a Jewish immigrant to America. In so doing, Trilling did not, as some have insisted, deny his Judaic identity but he did not emphasize it. Instead, he escaped the narrow bounds of cultural labellings, the confining restraints of religious tradition and the burdensome baggage of ethno-cultural heritage through the embrace of, not only liberalism, but of multiculturalism.
Trilling, and as shall be argued throughout this chapter, translated Freud’s biological notions of culture into multiculturalism, into a stand beyond culture. The cultural coherence argued by liberalism is, according to Trilling, nothing more than a myth. Certainly, Trilling believed in a universal cultural, and acknowledged the fact that cultures, even seemingly opposite ones, had shared affinities and countless areas of overlap. Nevertheless, he similarly believed in the mutual nontranslatability of cultures, maintaining that despite cultural affinities and similarities, there exist unbridgeable cultural differences which are not political impositions but historical creations (Dickstein and Roden, 41-42). Cultures, in other words, possess numerous points of similarity and overlap because culture, in itself, and as emphasised by Freud, is biological and inextricably linked to pure human nature, or the biological nature of man without the trappings of civilisation. At the same time, however, culture is akin to a living organism in the sense that it is responsive and adaptive to experiences. Accordingly, as defined by Trilling, and as influenced by Freud, culture is both universal and particular; it is a product of shared/universal/biological human nature and unique national/ethnic/racial historical experiences. Within the former lie the roots of cultural affinities and within the vast arena of the latter lie those of unbridgeable differences (Dickstein and Roden, 41-43). Trilling, in his very personal project for the recreation and redefinition of his immigrant-Jewish self, elucidated and expounded upon the Freudian notion of biological culture and, as shall now be argued through particular reference to his essay “Wordsworth and the Rabbis,” redefined both himself and Culture in acultural and multicultural terms, thereby synthesizing the Judaic with the Christian tradition, the immigrant identity with the American one. By the project’s conclusion, Trilling attained recognition as a quintessential American twentieth century intellect, effectively transcending Jewish and immigrant labellings.
“Wordsworth and the Rabbis” expresses Trilling’s acknowledgement of his Judaic identity and, paradoxically, his rejection of Judaic labellings; his transcendence of his ethno-cultural identity and his embrace of Culture. “Wordsworth and the Rabbis” is Trilling’s exposition of his acultural self and a testimony to his commitment to liberal, and culturally liberating, multiculturalism. “Wordsworth and the Rabbis” is Trilling’s indictment of the anti-Semitism and racial prejudices which pervaded (still pervades according to many) modern culture and his determination to expose the Western/Anglo-Saxon culture’s persistent, pernicious and morbid attempts to overwhelm and destroy the “other.” This historically charged essay is not only premised on Trilling’s contention that “the quality in Wordsworth that now makes him unacceptable is a Judaic quality” (123) but is informed by the events of the Holocaust. The Holocaust, as portrayed by Trilling, was nothing other than a crime against one culture by another. It was the outcome of Western culture’s obtuse rejection of the Judaic culture, identity and heritage and its subsequent determination to obliterate and eliminate it. Trilling, who has so often been identified as the quintessential personification of the classical liberalism, with its commitment to elitism (Pease, 11-12), has similarly been treated by critics and the public alike. Just as the Holocaust sought the elimination and obliteration of all that was Jewish, critics have persistently denied Trilling his Jewishness.
Numerous Trilling scholars and critics have persistently, even stubbornly, held on to the belief that Trilling suppressed the Jewish within him, that he deliberately fashioned himself as a non-Jewish Jew (West, 235-236; Pease, 11-13; Reising, 45-48). Others have held this to be very far from the truth. Trilling did not deny his Jewishness and certainly did not seek its suppression. Instead, and following through on Freud’s views on religion, civilisation and human nature, he rejected the labelling and its associate baggage but not the identity. Trilling, in other words, refused his own categorisation as a Jewish immigrant to America and the associate Anglo-Saxon imposed ethno-centric stereotypes but never rejected that identity. Critics may have rejected it on his behalf but, as evidenced in the linkage he makes between antisemism/ethnocentrism/cultural imperialism and the failures of the modern world in “Wordsworth and the Rabbis,” Trilling never did. Indeed, as evidenced from the collective body of his works and most especially, in his unwavering commitment to sincerity and authenticity, identity denial was antithetical to his personal ethos.
Trilling may have not exhibited a commitment to Jewish causes and may have striven to rise above Jewish-immigrant labellings but, his Jewish identity is infinitely much more pronounced than Trilling scholars and critics have ever admitted to. In her The Beginning of the Journey, Diana Trilling deliberately devotes a significant amount of space to the restoration of Trilling’s religious and ethno-cultural heritage; a heritage which Trilling scholars and critics have so enthusiastically denied him. Certainly, where one to look through the collective body of his writings letters and lectures one would not find anything to suggest that Trilling was a partisan of Jewish affairs and causes. Nevertheless, it would be unforgivably simplistic to assume that Trilling, who came from a traditional Jewish background, spent his early years at Columbia, in the midst of the Jewish intelligentsia, surrounded by Jewish students, who had been deeply involved in the publication of The Menorah Journal, and whose tenure at Colombia had almost been refused because of his Judaic heritage, did not have the Holocaust somewhere in his mind when writing his essays in the 1940s and 1950s.
Apart from assumptions, however logical, of the improbability of Trilling’s ever have denied/rejected his Jewishness his writings evidence a commitment to the Jewish identity. Trilling's contribution to The Menorah Journal included reviews of books by Jewish American writers as well as stories specifically tuned to the problem of Jewish identity and antisemitism in America, for example, "Impediments," first published in 1925 and "Notes on a Departure," 1929--both collected in Of This Time, of That Place and Other Stories. He continued, throughout his career as a literary critic, to participate in Jewish debates, to publish in Jewish journals, like Commentary, to refer to instances of antisemitism among the writers of the tradition, and to include fleeting references to the events of Nazi Germany in his .writings. There is, for example, Trilling's discussion of Theodore Dreiser's antisemitism in "Reality in America"; his noting Henry Adams's "hateful "anti-Jewish utterances"; (Trilling, “A Gathering of Fugitives,” 117) a reference to the antisemitism of Santayana, (Trilling, “A Gathering of Fugitives,” 155) and his comment on Joyce's objections to another writer who was antisemitic (Trilling, The Last Decade, 46). There are also, of course, Trilling's more sustained attentions to anti-semitism and Jews, not only in some of his early fiction, but, for example, in his afterword to the republication of Tess Slesinger's The Unpossessed, (Trilling, The Last Decade, 11-14), his essay on Isaac Babei, (Beyond Culture), and his review of C. Virgil Gheorghiu's The Twenty-fifth Hour (“A Gathering of Fugitives”). Also relevant in this context is Trilling's participation in two important symposia published in Commentary: "The Jewish Writer and the English Literary Tradition" and "Seven Professors Look at the Jewish Student," and a third one in Contemporary Jewish Record: "Under Forty: A Symposium on American Literature and the Younger Generation of American Jews," where Trilling states that "it is too clear to me that my existence as a Jew is one of the shaping conditions of my temperament, and therefore I suppose it must have its effect on my intellect” (Trilling, Commentary, 1949, 368-369). Trilling directly acknowledges the Holocaust in "Art and Fortune" when he observes that "the great psychological fact of our time which we all observe with baffled wonder and shame is that there is no possible way of responding to Belsen and Buchenwald. The activity of mind fails before the incommunicability of man's suffering” (Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, 256). He notes it as well in "The Changing Myth of the Jew," first written in 1930 but only published in 1978 in Commentary, (D. Trilling, Speaking of Literature and Society), and in "The Sense of the Past” (The Liberal Imagination). Furthermore, his refusal of tenure at Columbia definitely labeled him a Communist, a Freudian, and a Jew. Nor was the antisemitism of the Hitler period irrelevant to his thinking about his experience at Columbia. As Diana Trilling put it in her memorial essay "Lionel Trilling: A Jew at Columbia," Trilling's experience is "the story of what it meant to be a Jew in the American academy before we actually let ourselves recognize what was happening in Germany and what the casual anti-Semitism in our own country would portend." She then goes on to note that even after Trilling had talked the Columbia faculty into endorsing his tenure, his former thesis advisor, Emory Neff, found it necessary to caution Trilling not to use his own success as an occasion for letting more Jews into Columbia (D. Trilling, “Lionel Trilling: A Jew At Columbia,” 40).
To reconcile between the above stated and earlier assertions regarding Trilling’s identity as a non-Jewish Jew, so to say, it is important to note that the point here is that Trilling did not deny his Jewishness, but he never highlighted it. His very commitment to authenticity, sincerity, and being entailed his recognition and unqualified acceptance of his Jewishness. Similarly, however, his commitment to sincerity, authenticity and being, fuelled his incontrovertible rejection of Jewish-immigrant labellings and incited his transcendence of ethno-cultural categorisations but never his denial or rejection of his Jewishness.
A review of the collective body of Trilling’s works, not to mention the numerous insights which Diana Trilling provides into this complex man, evidence an acceptance of his Jewish identity but an outright rejection of Jewish-immigrant societal labellings. Acceptance is implicit, as outlined previously, in the numerous contributions he made to Jewish publications and, most especially, in his essays of the 1940s and 1950s. While openly accepting of his Jewish identity, however, Trilling never perceived of his Jewishness as his penultimate identifier, nor was it the driving force behind his writings. Throughout his career, and underscoring his identity as a multicultural American intellect, rather than a Jewish immigrant to America, Trilling rarely commenting on explicitly Jewish affairs nor was h known for making direct statements on Jewish cultural or political affairs.
Within the context of the stated, “Wordsworth and the Rabbis,” is a seemingly problematic anomaly. Interpreted by some critics as an explicit acknowledgement, and embrace of his Jewish identity, it has sometimes been cited as evidence against the prevalent image of Trilling as a non-Jewish Jew (Levinson, 709-709). Such criticisms, upon which statements pertaining to the problematic nature of “Wordsworth and the Rabbis” are predicted, are founded upon two fallacies. The first is that Trilling’s successful transcendence of ethno-cultural labellings amounted to a denial and suppression of his Jewish identity. This, as earlier argued, is simply untrue. The second is that “Wordsworth and the Rabbis” is invested in, and informed by, specifically Jewish issues. This, too, is untrue. “Wordsworth and the Rabbis” is a statement on multiculturalism and even though it draws upon Trilling’s ethno-religious heritage, does not represent a commitment to that heritage. Evidencing this is the fact that upon its publication on the event of Wordsworth’s centenary, the essay was titled “Wordsworth and the Iron Times” (Dunklin, 108). Furthermore, the essay itself is not, in any sense, explicitly Judaic, whereby the comparison between Wordsworth and the rabbis is nit sustained in the essay nor, in any way, can it be regarded as its primary theme. In addition to that, only six of the essay’s thirty-two pages deal with Judaism. Therefore, the question becomes the reason why Trilling introduced the rabbis in the first place and why such an undemonstratively American Jewish critic, introduce an explicitly Jewish element into an essay on an English Romantic poet. More interesting a question is why Trilling established a parallel between modernism’s rejection of Wordsworth and its violent rejection of the Judaic ethno-cultural heritage and religion.
As is the case with much of his work, Trilling confronts Western culture in “Wordsworth and the Rabbis,” and exposes its rejectionist stance towards the Other. As he writes,
[Western culture] is committed to an idea of consciousness and activity, of motion and force. With us the basis of spiritual prestige is some form of aggressive action directed outward upon the world, or inward upon ourselves" (131). [Western culture is] powerful, fierce, . . . assertive . . . personally militant (133) … We need, in Coleridge's words, something to 'startle this dull pain, and make it move and live.' Violence is a means of self-definition; the bad conscience, Nietzsche says, assures us of our existence (141)
Rabbinic Judaism is subsequently introduced as a less violent, more passive and liberal cultural alternative. Were Jewish, Christian and romantic culture, according to Trilling’s contentions, reduced to their purest form, necessitating the removal of the multiple layers of civilization their shared commitment to authenticity and being, to “quietism … an affirmation of life so complete that it needed no saying," (131) would be exposed. Western culture, consequent to the trappings of civilization, is committed to a peculiar notion of the acceptable versus the unacceptable, the proper versus the improper, that it has rejected the affirmation of life referred to. Modern Western culture, in fact, is intent on the supremacy of seeming, as opposed to being and, as a result, expresses a disdain for Wordsworth which Trilling focuses upon in this essay. This disdain is, within the context of “Wordsworth and the Rabbis,” equated with both antisemitism and the violent rejection of the Other. As Trilling writes,
If we ask why Wordsworth is no longer the loved poet he once was, why, indeed, he is often thought to be rather absurd and even a little despicable, one answer that suggests itself is that for modern taste he is too Christian a poet … I am not . . . so much concerned to prove that Wordsworth is a Christian poet as to account for a certain quality in him which makes him unacceptable to the modern world. And so, without repudiating my first hypothesis [that "the world does not like him because it does not like the Christian quality and virtues"], I shall abandon it for this fresh one: that the quality in Wordsworth that now makes him unacceptable is a Judaic quality (119-20,123).
The relationship between antisemitism and modernism’s rejection of Wordsworth is incited by modern culture’s unwavering rejection of being and its disdain for the affirmation of life which forms the very core of Christianity and Judaism and is expressed so eloquently by Wordsworth. Christian/Western culture has moved beyond being and occupies a space outside of sincerity and authenticity. This is precisely what Freud asserted in Civilization and Its Discontents and is the very founding bloc of the Nietzschean, Sartrian, Existentialist and Absurdist philosophies. Modern culture, the culture which so-called civilization and science have given birth to, has conspired to define man in absolute terms – as a creature that must think, act and behave within the narrow confines of what has been defined and identified as acceptable. The civilized, the modern Western man, must subscribe to the trappings of civilized behavior whereby, according to Freud, he is compelled to suppress his ego, basic instincts and nature, even as he is required to unthinkingly embrace and integrate within him societal and ethno-religious prejudices (Freud 26). The civilized man, accordingly, is one who fits perfectly into the neat categories which Western civilization has defined and identified for all. Thus, the Western man must exhibit specified characteristics and behave in a specific manner, just as must the Oriental, the Jew, or any other racial and ethno-religious group. The rejectionists, the rebels and all those who refuse to subscribe to the trappings of civilization and all that it entails – those who refuse to fit into these neat categories – are regarded as dangerous, as unmitigated threats to civilization which must be eliminated, not simply contained. This is the focal point, the message, of “Wordsworth and the Rabbis.” Nowhere is this more evident than in the following passage:
In the chapter on Wordsworth in the third volume of his Religious Trends in English Poetry [Professor Hoxie Neal Fairchild] tells us that Wordsworth was not a Christian poet and goes on to express his doubt that Wordsworth was ever properly to be called a Christian person even when he became a communicant of the Church and its defender. And Professor Fairchild goes so far as to tell us that as a poet Wordsworth is actually dangerous to the Christian faith. He is dangerous in the degree that he may be called religious at all, for his religion is said to be mere religiosity, the religion of nothing more than the religious emotion, beginning and ending in the mere sense of transcendence. Naked of dogma, bare of precise predication of God and the nature of man, this religiosity of Wordsworth's is to be understood as a pretentious and seductive rival of Christianity. It is the more dangerous because it gives license to man's pretensions--Professor Fairchild subscribes to the belief that romanticism must bear a large part of the responsibility for our present ills, especially for those which involve man's direct and conscious inhumanity to man (120-1).
Trilling exposes Western culture’s violent rejection of the Other throughout “Wordsworth and the Rabbis.” The essay is not about antisemitism per se but of the violent opposition between antithetical cultural forces. One force is the self-assertive and self-conscious modern Western culture, as defined by Freud and, the other is the liberating acultural romantic/rabbinical/pure Christian culture of quietism. However, the essay is not simply about two alternate notions of culture as some have argued, and the defense of one over the other (French, 181-20). Certainly, on one level it can be interpreted, as does Philip French, as an exposition of the artificiality and inauthenticity, not to mention ingrained violence, of modern Western culture, versus the authenticity and sincerity of purist romantic/Christian/rabbinical cultures (French, 121). That interpretation, although undeniably valid, is extremely superficial because it ignores the much wider issue at stake. That issue is the violent conflict between modern Western culture and purist Judeo-Christian culture, of which romanticism is an undeniable part of. It is not a conflict between the cultures of secularism and religiosity, for as revealed by Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents, modernism is not secular, but a conflict over meaning itself; the meaning of culture, religion, civilization, being, self and personhood. That “Wordsworth and the Rabbis” is an essay on conflict over meaning, is perfectly evidenced in its exposition of the debate over Wordsworth’s religious identity. Was he a Christian or was he a danger and threat to Christianity? According to Trilling, Wordsworth was the personification of Christianity in its purest form but according to others, such as Fairchild, Wordsworth was not a Christian and, indeed, was nothing less than an unmitigated threat to that religion and all that it was premised upon. This essay is, thus, not simply a debate over the merits of one culture versus another but a debate over antithetical constructs of meaning.
Trilling, as may be inferred from the above, constructs the argument of "Wordsworth and the Rabbis" in such a way as to expose the violence of definition – definitions of the self and of the other. These definitions are so entrenched in modern culture and in the Western consciousness that the Other is immediately identified as a threat which need be confronted. These definitions are, according to Trilling, the source of the numerous intolerances which Western culture has violently exhibited towards the Other and, indubitably, the very foundation upon which antisemitism was constructed. These definitions, as Trilling contends throughout “Wordsworth and the Rabbis,” have incited the violent denial of the personhood of the Other and, even more so, the denial of the authentic self; the self which Trilling sought the reclamation of in his rejection of the immigrant-Jewish categorizations and labellings which were imposed upon him by society, by the dominant conservative American/Western culture of the twentieth century. That culture’s definition or interpretation of Christianity incited modernism’s rejection of Wordsworth and of romanticism, just as it did the Judaic culture, heritage and religion. As such, Trilling critiques Professor Fairchild’s treatise in terms which expose Christianity’s objection to Judaism as resting upon the fact that it is a rival to Christianity, an alternative to it. Similarly, Fairchild’s rather violent objection to Wordsworth rests on the fact that he, as did Romanticism, embraced an alternative (pacifist and quietist) interpretation of Christianity.
As far as Trilling is concerned Christianity's rejection of Romanticism is identical to its historical rejection of Judaism. Whether or not Judaism, in the view of Orthodox Jews, conforms to Trlilling's sense of it as a religion of transcendent emotions, for Trilling the parallels between Romanticism and Judaism are clear:
[the core of Judaism] the study of the Torah [meaning] much more than the study of the Pentateuch, or even of the whole Scripture, regarded as mere literature, written documents. It means the study of the revelation made through those documents, the divine teaching therein imparted, the divine thought therein disclosed. Apart from the direct intercourse of prayer, the study of the Torah was the way of closest approach to God; it might be called the Pharisaic form of the Beatific Vision. To study Torah was, to the devout Pharisee, to 'think God's thought after him' (126).
Christianity's violent stance against romanticism is evocative of historical Christian antisemitism. The absolute and unmitigated rejection of the Other, whether expressed as antisemitism, racism or violent opposition to Romanticism is not, however, the domain of the Church alone. In his critique of modernism, or the modernist project’s attempts to redefine and reshape culture and individuals towards the wholehearted embrace of particularistic definitions of the self and of the Other, Trilling outlines precisely where it is that one may find manifestations of the struggle between the self and the other; between being and seeming; between conservatism and liberal multiculturalism. Here he cites Theodore Dreiser whose rather vitriolic antisemitism and absolutist rejection of the Other, of Being, Sincerity and Authenticity, he strongly denounces in “Reality in America” (147). Dreiser’s antisemitism represents, not only the embrace of modernism’s definitions of the self and its associate labellings, stereotypes and categorizations but, betrays a history of "saintly martyrdom" (Trilling, 147). That is, the history of Christianity itself and especially as regards its conflict with Judaism; a struggle which led to the Crucifixion and which, from that moment onwards, escalated into the denial of the very personhood of the Other. This phrase, thus, is not only evocative of the Crucifixion but of the pernicious and persistent struggle between the Church and the Other. It further recalls to mind T.S. Eliot, a poet which Trilling contended to be tainted with the stain of antisemitism and obsessed with the notions of violence and conflict. As Trilling writes of Eliot:
… we are drawn to the violence of extremity. We imagine, with nothing in between, the dull not-being of life, the intense not-being of death; but we do not imagine being--we do not imagine that it can be a joy. We are in love . . . with the fantasy of death. Death and suffering . . . are our only means of conceiving the actuality of life" (146).
Quoting Richard Chase words on John Stuart Mill, Trilling puts his argument on modernism’s relation to antisemitism and the rejection of the Other, into perspective:
… among the Victorians, it is Mills who tests the modern mind. . . . In relation to him at least two of its weaknesses come quickly to light. The first is its morose desire for dogmatic certainty. The second is its hyperaesthesia: its feeling that no thought is permissible except an extreme thought: that every idea must be directly emblematic of concentration camps, alienation, madness, hell, history, and God (134).
As far as Trilling was concerned, there existed an immutable relationship between the tortured consciousness of the modernist discourse, with its determined insistence towards the imposition of narrow definitions and the self and others, and between religion, politics, economics or even culture. In the wake of the Holocaust, itself nothing other than a violent expression of the modernist project and its intent on destroying the other and imposing a uniform definition of the `us,’ of the `self,’ no one could afford complacency vis-à-vis the modernist project. Modernism, with its stringent and narrow definition of the self, a definition which violently suppressed being and authenticity and which allowed for no alternatives, put selfhood itself at risk. It actively questioned the very personhood of those who did not subscribe to the modernist criteria of the self. The unmitigated denial of the other and the determination to suppress alternative definitions or conceptualizations of the self, are the primary determinants of Trilling’s unwavering objection to modernism and, indeed, are what lead to his embrace of liberalism and multiculturalism.
Trilling’s rejection of modernism is not devoid of political intent. Several Trilling scholars and critics have argued his embrace of liberalism to be a reaction against communism and Diana Trilling, herself, concurs, asserting that his professional agenda was, at last in part, shaped by his disillusionment with communism (Murphy, 386-87; Reising, 103-105; Hersch, 96-98). However, Trilling’s earlier attraction to the communist ideology and his later rejection of it do not undermine his status as a liberal multiculturalist and, indeed, fortify it. As Murphy explains, his attraction to communism was predicated on the assumption that as a politico-economic ideology, communism established absolute equality between all and protected the dignity of man. These were Trilling’s concerns; equality, as would eliminate racism, antisemitism and all forms of cultural oppression; and the protection of dignity, as would ensure the sanctity of personhood (389-90). However, upon his realization that communism was as guilty of oppression and of the violation of the sanctity of personhood and selfhood as were antisemitism, cultural imperialism and any and all forms of racism, he adopted a stance against it comparable to that he had earlier adopted towards antisemitism (Murphy, 391-92; Reising, 103-105; Hersch, 96-98).
Freud’s influence is evident in both Trilling’s earlier attraction to and later rejection of communism, as well as in his concern with the question of being. Freud, as Chace implies, was Trilling’s intellectual father-figure and, arguably, the one thinker who influenced and shaped his thoughts more than any other. Hence, Trilling’s earlier attraction to communism has been interpreted, at least by Chace, as having a Freudian dimension to it, insofar as it purported to remove the restraints which had dehumanized men and prevented them from being. Communism was attractive to Trilling in the Freudian sense because, apart from claiming that it gave men the freedom to be and become, it annihilated organized religions and, supposedly, the illusions with which they surrounded men, clouded their thoughts and prevented them from emerging as authentic individual beings. Trilling’s later rejection of communism also has a Freudian dimension to it, insofar as rejection was incited by the discovery that communism was just as oppressive as were organized religions and sought, just as did culture, the obliteration of individuality and being (67-69). The implication here extends beyond the consistency of the Freudian influence on Trilling; the implication is that Trilling’s concerns were essentially Freudian ones. These concerns pertain to the nature of the individual, the meaning of selfhood and personhood and the nature of the socio-cultural environment which would protect individual freedoms and offset the pernicious and morbid determination of some cultures to obliterate others.
The cited concerns are evident in “Wordsworth and the Rabbis.” Implicit in this essay are such questions as what prevents a Holocaust and what do selfhood, personhood and individuality mean. In other words, “Wordsworth and the Rabbi,” similar to several others of Trilling’s works, may be interpreted as a philosophical discourse on the nature of identity and the relationship between alternate cultures. Within the parameters of this discourse, Trilling’s humanism is exposed when he looks towards Wordsworth for an answer. According to Trilling, the greatness of Wordsworth, not to mention his pertinence to the contemporary political and moral debate, lies in his answer to the question(s) posed. Wordsworth taught us “to feel,” and in so doing, “undertook to teach us how to be” (Trilling, 136):
In The Prelude, in Book Two, Wordsworth speaks of a particular emotion which he calls "the sentiment of Being." The "sentiment" has been described this way: "There is, in sanest hours, a consciousness, a thought that rises, independent, lifted out from all else, calm, like the stars, shining eternal. This is the thought of identity--yours for you, whoever you are, as mine for me. . . ." This, of course, is not Wordsworth, it is Wait Whitman, but I quote Whitman's statement in exposition of Wordsworth's sentiment of Being, because it is in some respects rather more boldly explicit, although not necessarily better, than anything that Wordsworth himself wrote about the sentiment, and because Whitman goes on to speak of this "hardest basic fact" as a political fact, as the basis, and the criterion, of democracy" (136-7).
By teaching us how to “feel,” Trilling contends that Wordsworth taught us to connect with our internal selves and to empathize with others; by teaching us how to be, Trilling asserts that Wordsworth taught us how to become our own authentic selves, respect our beings and the sanctity of the being of others. Therein lies the response to the question pertaining to the prevention of a repetition of the Holocaust, racism and the pernicious attempts of one culture to obliterate, murder, another. Were we to learn how to feel and were we to become, we would connect with our selfhood, our deeper being and, in the process, learn how to recognize, therefore, appreciate the personhood and being of others.
Modernism and modernists, as may be deduced throughout Trilling’s “Wordsworth and the Rabbis,” were predominantly concerned with the self and with the design and formulation of uniform selves which, apart from rejecting the notion of otherness, accepted no alternatives to their definition of the self. Trilling substituted the modernists’ concern with selfhood with a concern with being. The primary difference between selfhood and being-hood is that the former, as preoccupied as it is with compliance with a highly specified definition of the self, is driven towards the violent suppression of the real/authentic self, while the latter, acknowledging as it does the authentic self, is at peace with its self. In other words, the difference is that of violence versus non violence, inauthenticity versus authenticity and seeming versus being. It is, in essence, the difference between repression and self-actualization as defined and discussed by Freud (Chace, 48-50). For Trilling, as with Freud, the essential feature of the self, or that which defines the self, is the relation between the self and other selves or, the relationship between the individual and the community. Self exists in a relational context, whereby existence is defined and shaped, at least partly, by the selfhood of others (Chace, 50). In Wordsworth, just as he does with rabbinical Judaic culture, Trilling uncovers the expression of this very Freudian notion of the self:
Hillel said--was, indeed, in the habit of saying: He 'used to say'--'if I am not for myself, who, then, is for me? And if I am for myself, what then am I?' . . . it is not difficult for the reader of Wordsworth [to find] the Wordsworthian moral essence here, the interplay between individualism and the sense of community, between an awareness of the self that must be saved and developed, and an awareness that the self is yet fulfilled only in community (Trilling, “Wordsworth and the Rabbis,” 127).
This definition of self as being (a word which carries with it biological as well as metaphysical implications; the justification of life in its elemental simplicity, its simple right to exist) explains Trilling's recourse to the rabbis. It also clarifies the odd definition of identity that this essay produces. As Trilling represents both Wordsworth and himself in "Wordsworth and the Rabbis," neither one of them is strictly speaking either Christian or Jew. Neither one, that is, has an essentialist identity, at least according to the criterion of religion. Rather, both of them are non-Christians and non-Jews. Wordsworth, he writes, "was not a Christian poet," in the technical, doctrinal sense of the term (120). He explicitly refers twice in the essay to the fact that he, Trilling, is also not a Christian (122-23,where Trilling argues that the "Christian element" of Wordsworth's poetry speaks to "many who were not Christians," by which Trilling means, among others, himself). Similarly, both Trilling and Wordsworth are in some sense non-Jews: Trilling in the same technical sense that Wordsworth is a non-Christian, i.e., that he does not follow Orthodox Jewish ritual (123-24); and Wordsworth, of course, literally.
For Trilling, then, identity is as much constructed by what one is not as by what one is. But rather than imagining what one is not as the negation of something (its rejection or refusal or annihilation, as in the term anti-semitism), the definition of self as non-Jew or non-Christian grants to someone else his or her essentialist otherness, even as it acknowledges the degree to which self-identity is dependent upon a relationship to that otherness. To explain this differently, Trilling's definition of identity does not deny the existence of something called Christianity and of something else called Judaism (or, for that matter, of individuals called Jews and Christians). Rather, it defines such identity as exists and as is capable of assuming direct, personal, moral responsibility in the world, as coming into being, not by taking on essentialist identity (Jew, Christian, romantic), but through establishing a complex relationship to such essentialisms. In Sincerity and Authenticity (his last and most Hegelian text) Trilling, working through the ideas of Raymond Williams and others, describes an idea of self-fashioning consonant with Stephen Greenblatt's later evolution (also through Williams) of this concept. For Trilling, as for Greenblatt and many new historians, identity is a construction that is contingent upon the ideological, social world in which the "self" exists. Nonetheless for Trilling there is an "I" that, even if it does not precede such self-fashioning or exist independent of it, becomes its locus, and (even more importantly) that retains direct moral responsibility for its actions. Trilling's choice of text as he discriminates between "man" and the "individual" is not arbitrary:
How was a man different from an individual? A person born before a certain date, a man--had he not eyes? had he not hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? If you pricked him, he bled and if you tickled him, he laughed. But certain things he did not have to do until he became an individual. He did not have an awareness of. . . internal space (Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, 24).
Besides being highly Freudian in nature, Trilling’s understanding of the self, particularly expressed in his resistance to any and all absolutist definitions of the self and essentialist conceptualizations of identity, concomitant with his insistence on personal responsibility, is undeniably Emersonian. In arguing the influence of Emerson on Trilling, the well-respected Emerson scholar, Stanley Cavell, contented that Trilling, just as did Emerson, defined the self as aversive. The aversive definition of the self is an essentially social one and implies a ` becoming of self in the process of its constantly turning away from and toward society.’ It further implies the evolution of social responsibility in response to external and internal conditions. In brief, Trilling’s aversive self is an essentially Emersonian one (Cavell, 36-39).
Within the context of Trilling’s literary aesthetics and philosophical discourse, the aversive self is a social, relational and responsive self. Both relationality and responsiveness, at least as pertains to his discourse on the self, are major themes of Trilling’s works. Indeed, as Trilling argues, it is consequent to its relational nature and upon its acknowledgement of its relationality does the responsive self emerge:
Between the Law as the Rabbis understood it and Nature as Wordsworth understood that, there is a pregnant similarity (125) ... Different as the immediately present objects were in each case, Torah for the Rabbis, Nature for Wordsworth, there existed for the Rabbis and for Wordsworth a great object, which is from God and might be said to represent Him as a sort of surrogate, a divine object to which one can be in an intimate passionate relationship, an active relationship (126-27).
The above quote, if superficially interpreted, may be understood as signifying a break between Trilling and Freud. As stated in Chapter 1, Freud strongly criticized organized religion, maintaining that it was effectively being used to control and shape the very concept of selfhood and suppress being. From the Freudian psychoanalytical perspective, therefore, religion promoted seeming and suppressed being. If understood correctly, however, the above quote strengthens, and does not undermine, the consistency between Freud and Trilling. In this passage, Trilling is not speaking of religion per se but of that higher guiding ideal which all men must believe in and whose nature/identity differs from one individual to another. For the rabbis it was God, the Torah; for Wordsworth it was nature. More importantly, Trilling speaks of the necessity of an active and dynamic, rather than passive, relationship with that ideal. By defining relationship with that ideal as individualistic, intimate, passionate and dynamic, Trilling is portraying man as a self-actualizing creature who owes it to himself, not only to realize his own being and articulate his own selfhood away from societal expectations but, to conscious responsibility for the development and evolution of his own authentic self.
The authentic being, according to Trilling, is both relational and responsive, with relationality and responsiveness combining to produce a sense of moral responsibility which is expressed in terms of commitment to the truth and to sincerity. The authentic being is, thus, a passionate being whose commitment to the truth transcends all barriers to the realization of the truth (Chace, 78-80). The implication here is that the authentic being is a morally responsible being and fulfils his/her responsibilities towards the truth and towards his/her own selfhood and the personhood of others irrespective of societal barriers and restrictions. Responsibility, in other words, is the key characteristic of the authentic being (Chace, 79-80).
Indeed, Chace’s identification of moral and relational responsibility as key characteristics of the authentic being within the context of Trilling’s aesthetics and philosophy is borne out through a review of Trilling’s works. Apart from “Wordsworth and the Rabbis,” much of which centers upon the immutable relationship between authenticity and truth and responsibility, Trilling’s “Huckleberry Finn” expounds upon this relationship and expresses the inextricable link between responsibility and self-affirmation. In “Huckleberry Finn,” written two years before “Wordsworth and the Rabbis,” responsibility emerges, not only as Huck Finn and Jim’s defining personality trait but, is singled out as that trait which allows them to operate from without societal restrictions, cultural stereotypes and historico-traditional prejudices and, thus, form a “family, “a community of saints” (Trilling, “Huckleberry Finn,” 104). It is hardly coincidental that this essay focuses on the manner in which the realization of being leads to the transcendence of slavery and racism, just as “Wordsworth and the Rabbis” exposes seeming and inauthenticity as the driving forces behind antisemitism. In “Wordsworth and the Rabbis,” Trilling establishes the correlation and affinity between the very being of Christianity and rabbinical Judaism, just as in “Huckleberry Finn” he identifies Jim, a runaway slave, a black man, as a white boy’s spiritual father. As Trilling writes, “in Jim ... [Huck] finds his true father, very much as Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce's Ulysses finds his true father in Leopold Bloom" (104). In "Wordsworth and the Rabbis" Trilling clarifies the moral implication in the relationship between the white boy and black man, and the extent to which it expresses a Wordsworthian/Judaic, affirmation of being, as does the relationship between the Catholic Dedalus and the Jewish Bloom:
One of the striking things about Ulysses . . . is that the idea of evil plays so small a part in it. One hears a good deal about the essential Christian orthodoxy . . . but his orthodoxy, if he has it, takes no account of the evil which is so commonly affirmed by the literary expressions of orthodoxy; the conception of sin has but a tangential relevance to the book. . . . The character of Leopold Bloom, who figures in the life of Joyce's Poet much as the old men in Wordsworth figure in his life--met by chance and giving help of some transcendent yet essentially human kind--is conceived in Wordsworthian terms: in terms, that is, of his humbleness of spirit. If we speak of Wordsworth in reference to the Rabbis and their non-militancy, their indifference to the idea of evil, their acceptance of cosmic contradiction [do I contradict myself? asks Whitman; I contain multitudes]; are we not to say that Bloom is a Rabbinical character? It is exactly his non-militancy that makes him the object of general contempt and, on one occasion, of rage. It is just this that has captivated his author, as the contrast with the armed pride, the jealousy and desire for prestige, the bitter militancy of Stephen Dedalus. Leopold Bloom is deprived of every shred of dignity except the dignity of that innocence which for Joyce, as for Wordsworth, goes with the "sentiment of Being" (149-50)
In the above quoted passage, Trilling does not highlight Bloom’s Jewishness, just as he did not Jim’s blackness in the “Huckleberry Finn” essay. Instead, he constructs and presents the dynamics of ether cross-ethnic/racial relationship in such a way that the reader is able to immediately recognize that socio-cultural rejection of such relationships are predicated on a perverted and pernicious ethnocentrism. Rejection of the relationship between Huck Finn and Jim and disdain for Bloom’s non-militancy are, as argued by Trilling, expressive of a racism and antisemitism borne of a determination to define the self in such absolutist terms that they render alternative definitions of the self and the other absolutely unacceptable.
Trilling rejects societal labellings and definitions of the self, not simply because they lead to the suppression of being and rejection of the other but because they lend to a moral crisis which determines a denial of the truth, of reality. This is the reality of our own humanity, the humanity of others and the associate right to realize Being-hood. For Trilling, as with Freud, the defining aspect of humanity is the basic and elementary biological right to exist, with existence implying the realization of being. This right to exist, the right to realize being, is something which culture often denies both its members and outsiders. Culture, according to Trilling, is so intent on defining the self and projects such absolutist definitions of the self that it allows for no alternatives and, most definitely, does not allow for the affirmation of Being and the exercise of independent, individual will (Chace 81-83).
Culture is being’s antagonist and it is for this reason that Trilling deliberately adopts a Freudian stance against culture, embraces multiculturalism and promotes a biological definition of cultures as which allows for the realization of being and affirms free will. It is as such that Trilling adopts a position outside of culture and, it is precisely because of this that Trilling rejected definitions of the self which highlighted his immigrant-Jewish identity. He never denied his Jewishness, nor did he seek the suppression of his ethno-religious identity. Instead, and as evidenced in “Wordsworth and the Rabbis,” Trilling embraced acknowledged his ethno-cultural religious heritage and identity but, most definitely, did not emphasize it. He did not emphasize it because were he to accept societal labellings of his own self, he would have been actively complicit in the denial of his own identity and in the suppression of his authentic being. Influenced by Freudian philosophy and psychoanalysis, Trilling could not and would not do so. Therefore, in mediating between his own self and culture, Trilling opted for a liberal multiculturalism as which allowed for the acknowledgement of both his authentic selfhood and the personhood of others. Trilling, as shall be discussed in the next chapter, ultimately fashioned a liberal multiculturalist cultural approach which drew on Sartrian existentialist philosophy and, as such, focused on being, as opposed to seeming.

CHAPTER THREE
Trilling’s professional and personal projects were not, as some critics have maintained, the dissociation of his own self from his Jewish heritage, identity and culture. Certainly, Trilling was a non-Jewish Jew and few have argued against that particular label. The question, however, is what precisely does this mean. Chace quite persuasively argues that the non-Jewish Jew label does not mean that Trilling was a Jew who denied and suppressed his identity but means that he was a Jew who did not subscribe to the stereotypical cultural image of Jews; he was a Jew who did not fit into the stereotype image of the immigrant Jew (108-109). He did not define himself as a non-Jewish Jew but, instead, modernism’s obsession with the labeling and categorization of individuals, imposed that appellation upon him. It imposed it upon him because Trilling operated from without modernism’s understanding of how a Jew should think and behave, thereby making him a non-Jew. Nevertheless, Trilling was a Jew; he was an “Other.” Therefore, to that title (non-Jewish Jew) society/critics, added the word Jew, simultaneously stressing Trilling’s “other-ness” and the virtual impossibility of operating from without the bounds of modernism’s labels.
Trilling challenged modernism’s categories and labels. He rejected its labels and refused to be regarded as either a Jew or an immigrant. Trilling neither denied his Jewishness, nor did he emphasize it. He, therefore, became a non-Jewish Jew because his immutable concern with being, personhood and the authentic self determined a humanistic concern which influenced him to take a stand beyond culture, with that stand ultimately elevating him above societal labellings. Trilling was not only a non-Jewish Jew but he was also a non-academic, academic, among other things (Chace 109). Just as he was a Jew who did not fit into the stereotypical image of the Jew and rarely engaged in the direct discussion of Jewish issues, he was an academic who did not fulfill the stereotypical image of the academic and, indeed, rarely referred to, or defined himself in this term (Chace 108-10). Trilling, in other words, defied labellings and, in the process, exposed the underlying prejudices and myopic nature of modernism’s determination to define the self, and others, in absolutist terms.
Trilling is innocent of the accusation that he was a Jew whose professional and personal projects revolved around the denial of his ethno-cultural identity. The collective body of Trilling’s works, including his letters and statements and conversations he may have had with friends and colleagues, indicate that Trilling’s professional and personal projects extended beyond the self. His concern was not the definition and development of his own self, as such, but the definition and formulation of a liberal multicultural culture which stood apart from modernism and allowed for the development and expression of both Being-hood and the authentic self; the being and self which were uniquely individual, did not subscribe to socio-cultural labellings and which accepted and respected the personhood of the Other, in direct comparison with modernism. Trilling’s professional and personal projects, thus, extended beyond the self because they were inherently cultural and humanistic in nature.
In part, Trilling’s project was to dissociate himself and American liberalism from the radicalism of the 1930s, on the one hand, and from modernism’s absolutist definitions of selfhood, personhood and the Other, on the other hand. Trilling wanted to propagate a more humanistic and multicultural American culture an, as early as 1939, began to orient his work towards the expression and attainment of that objective. This is evidenced in his 1939 Parisian Review symposium on the “Situation in American Writing.” In this symposium he quite clearly identified his literary interest to lie “in the traditional humanistic thought and in the intellectual middle class which believes it continues this tradition” (Trilling, Speaking of Literature and Society, 120). Among his targeted audience, Trilling found a receptive readership whose awareness of America's new political responsibilities and cultural opportunities engendered an appreciation for the complexity of literature and politics and determined their enjoyment and respect for intellect.
In The Liberal Imagination Trilling addressed this same audience and sought, through them, to redefine American culture, to instigate a movement away from conservatism and elitism to liberalism. The liberalism which he sought to propagate, however, was at variance with the known, and popular, variety. This is evident in his designation of two broad patterns of liberalism, the first of which he challenges and the second of which he sought to develop, refine and propagate. The first type of liberalism, or that which Trilling sought to subvert, was political liberalism, embracing a wide spectrum of American political opinion, from the progressive to the Stalinists camps. The second type of liberalism, and that which Trilling embraced and sought to develop and propagate as an American cultural alternative was a deeply humanistic one which transcended both political and ethno-cultural allegiances. This type of liberalism was closely related to the tradition of humanistic learning and historically grounded in the critical spirit, characteristic of the humanistic intellect. The humanists, as defined by Richard Rorty, were those who "read books in order to enlarge their sense of what is possible and important – either for themselves as individuals or for their society" (Rorty, 9). As teachers, they "instill doubt in their students" about their own self-images, about their society and their inherited cultural baggage (9). The humanist does so in order to ensure "that the moral consciousness of each new generation is slightly different from that of the previous generation" (Rorty, 9).
The two categories of liberalism which Trilling identified and discussed provide an important insight into his professional and personal projects. Trilling, as numerous critics and Trilling scholars have asserted, was, first and foremost, a humanist and a culturalist, not a literary writer and critic. Through the medium of writing, as a humanist and culturalist, he sought the instigation of a cultural revolution whose main objective was to deepen understanding of, and appreciation for the Other. Possibly, even quite probably, his identity as an immigrant Jew, determined the very nature of the defined professional project and articulated its objective. As an immigrant Jew, society, as in mainstream conservative and/or elitist American culture, imposed a particular stereotypical identity upon him, even going so far as to impose highly specific characteristics and traits upon him. Trilling, as an individual, rejected the image of the self imposed upon him by society and, as an intellect, addressed the source of those images and stereotypes – mainstream culture. In other words, recognizing that mainstream American culture's tendency towards the stereotypical categorization of individuals, not to mention their grouping into the `I' and the `Other' was the main culprit, Trilling sought the development and popularization of an alternative culture. That alternative was multicultural liberalism, informed by humanism and the critical tradition.
Within the context of his proposed cultural alternative, Trilling focused upon the concept of "moral realism," and sought to impress its importance upon the educated classes. While some have contended that Trilling `borrowed' this concept from his friend, Reinhold Niebuhr, this is not true. There exist seminal differences between Niebuhr's moral realism and that of Trilling. Niebuhr insisted on an activist form of moral realism and, indeed, defined the concept in accordance with neo-orthodox theology. In comparison, Trilling proposed a secular form of moral realism which reflected a Freudian influenced and, as such, eschewed both ideological commitment and activism, calling instead for the adoption of a liberal multicultural worldview which was both accepting and tolerant of differences. Moral responsibility, for Trilling, was not the Niebhurian embrace of causes and ideologies but was the humanistic understanding of differences and, above all, the acknowledgement of the rights of others to be different, to become their own individuals.
Moral realism was one of Trilling's undoubtedly central concerns and was the cornerstone of his humanist, multicultural liberalist philosophy, or worldview. The term `moral realism,' was first used by Trilling in 1938 but he did not define it until 1948 and, in particular, in The Liberal Imagination. In "Manner, Morals and the Novel," he articulates his understanding of the implications of moral realism and records his objection to its popular definition. As he writes, "at no other time have so many people committed themselves to moral righteousness … [intellects and writers applaud themselves and one another] for taking progressive attitudes … [but] we have no books that raise questions in our minds not only about conditions but about ourselves, that lead us to define our motives and ask about what lie behind our good impulses" (The Liberal Imagination, 213-14). Modernism had so subverted moral reasoning that it motivated a moralistic passion which justified imperialistic impulses and ethnocentric cultural attitudes and actions. In other words, modernism had defined and propagated a dangerous conceptualization of moral reasoning and, had so acculturated people into that understanding that few, if any, questioned that conceptualization or the so-called morality of either cultural or political imperialism. As such, Trilling rejected modernism's moral reasoning and its conceptualization of moral realism, urging their critical reevaluation and redefinition. As he writes, at no time in human history was the "enterprise of moral realism … so much needed" (214-15). He warned America's political liberals of the dangers of their version of liberalism, insofar as it perverted the very nature of morality and subverted the process of moral reasoning:
It is to prevent this corruption, the most ironic and tragic that man knows, that we stand in need of a moral realism which is the project of the free play of the moral imagination (Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, 215).
Liberalism, which Trilling defined as a culture rather than an ideology or a political movement, was in jeopardy. Political liberalism had given rise to a conceptualization of moral reasoning which threatened the very moral authority of liberalism itself and severely constrained its capacity for enhancing opportunities and expanding humanistic concerns and understandings. As liberalism approached Stalinism, which Trilling believed it was doing, he warned liberals that political and ideological liberalism had reached the point where it was in danger of corrupting itself. (Trilling, "Letter to the Editor," 655).
Liberalism's moral crisis was the focal point of Trilling's earlier body of works, including his 1947 novel, The Middle of the Journey. As a critic, scholar and intellectual, Trilling took it upon himself to urge the liberal intelligentsia to play a more active role in negotiating liberalism out of its moral crisis. That moral crisis, from Trilling's perspective, was immediately consequent to the politicization of liberalism in the early 1930s. The merger between the arts, including literature and literary criticism, and politics, which had occurred during the 1930s, had effectively led to the suppression of innovation and creativity. In essence, the politicization of the arts had comprised its independence, constrained its innovative exploration of novel terrains, and rendered it in the service of politics. As Trilling urged, it was imperative that liberalism be redefined as a culture and that the arts reclaim their independence from political ideology. Only then could liberalism resolve its moral crisis. However, for that to occur, liberalism, as a culture, needed more sustenance from the intelligentsia, whether writers or critics, than it was currently receiving. (Trilling, Speaking of Literature, 121-134, 186-191).
Criticism, which had earlier provided culture and liberalism with the sustenance they needed to flourish, had become politicized. In arguing this particular issue, Trilling highlighted a number of serious flaws in the practice of literary criticism (Leitch, 121). The problem with academic literary criticism lay in what Trilling termed its "scientific" and/or "historical" approach to literature. That approach invariably led to the imposition of meaning upon texts and rarely allowed the text to express itself. The "sociological" approach to literature had crudely reduced art to a set of political categories and, as such, left literature severely devalued. One of Trilling's greater achievements lay in his critical approach to literary texts. While he primarily adopted a historical approach, he never lost the importance of the literary work itself and, even as he made social and historical commentaries on textual meaning as a means of illuminating fundamental socio-historical questions, read literature in a way which emphasized, and highlighted, literary value (Leitch 121-124, 145-147).
Trilling's achievement can be better clarified by referencing his relationship to the New Critics. While many have regarded them as separate and distinct from Trilling (Webster; Graff; Leitch), they shared an ambition to develop nonpolitical categories of literary analysis. While we, in an age of Marxist and post-Modern literary criticism, may experience difficulties in understanding the very notion of nonpolitical categories of literary analysis, Trilling and the New Critics' intent was more complicated than the simple de-politicization of literary criticism. Indeed, their aim was to reclaim cultural liberalism and rescue authentic liberalism from the corrupting influence of ideology. Trilling and the New Critics united forces in the effort to displace the so-called "liberal" literary interpretations which predominated throughout the 1930s and 1940s (Webster; 98-106; Graff; 130-133; Leitch, 121-124).
While Trilling shared the intent to reclaim authentic liberalism with the New Critics, much separates them in terms of approach, method and goal. The New Critics characteristically marginalized biography, culture and history while Trilling embraced them, enhancing the critical attention awarded all of history, biography and culture. His approach to literature embraced both the text and its cultural, historical and biographical surroundings. Trilling, in essence, believed that culture, history and biography were the primary forces in the shaping of the writer and in the formulation of his concerns and, as such, argued all three as keys for the exposition of textual meaning.
Apart from differences in method and approach, the goal or central concerns of Trilling and the New Critics, were distinct. Trilling's central concern was not the interpretation and analysis of literary texts for the illumination of artistic meanings and imageries but the analysis of literary works for the exploration of the state of moral values in contemporary, modern culture. Trilling, as compared to New Critics such as William Empsom, Cleanth Brooks and Northrop Frye, was not interested in the development of novel methodologies for the reading, analysis and interpretation of literary texts but in the use of proven interpretive methodologies for the greater understanding of the relationship between individuals and their culture and, especially vis-à-vis the moralisms preached by modernism. This being his primary concern, Trilling rarely engaged in the linguistic analysis of texts or in the exploration of Dennis Donoghue's "literary questions" (Donoghue, 378). As a measure of his disinterest in linguistic textual analysis for the sake of art itself, one may note that his famous essay on the collectivity of William Dean Howell's works does not once quote from any of his texts. As was Cornell West, readers of Trilling's works of criticism are, accordingly, struck by the "looseness" of Trilling's readings" (West, 169). As such, it is hardly surprising that Trilling rarely wrote about poetry (which necessitates close textual and linguistic analysis) betraying, instead, a marked preference for the novel where matters of aesthetics and form were infinitely less important than were, at least in Trilling's opinion, matters of social and moral relations (Trilling, The Last Decade, 228).
In an article entitled "Contemporary American Literature in its Relation to Ideas," later published as the final chapter of The Liberal Imagination, Trilling clarified his interest as "literature in relation to ideas," going on to bemoan the apparent absence of ideas in American literature (Trilling, "Contemporary American Literature," 195-208). Rejecting the Anglo-American notion, commonly associated with Henry James, that art and ideas did not mix well, Trilling argued European literature as infinitely more substantive and substantial than its American counterpart precisely because it mixed art and literature. The richness of European literature lay in the fact that it was "in competition with philosophy, theology and science" (Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, 275). The power of European literature, indeed, lay in its continued "commerce, according to its own rules, with systematic ideas" (283). In comparison, "the intellectual weakness of American literature," characterized by the lack of ideas and the virtual absence of "emotional power," (284) spoke for itself.
Ideas mattered, as Trilling repeatedly argued. They did not matter simply because of their inherent intellectual value but because ideas expressed values. In essay after essay Trilling explored the concept of ideas in relation to values and maintained that the exploration of ideas was synonymous with the investigation of moral meaning and, more importantly, with an individual's relationship to the values of his time and place (Welleck, vol. 6, 141).
Despite the fact that, as earlier stated, he rarely engaged in the close textual and linguistic analysis of literary works, Trilling contributed much to literary criticism in America. .It was he, more than any other, who clarified the intellectual and socio-historical value of prose literature. It was Trilling, more than any other of the New Critics or, indeed the New York Intellectuals, who highlighted the intrinsic link between ideas and substantive literature. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Trilling came to personify the critic in America. He, himself, argued against this, insisting that his principle literary ambition had always lay in becoming a novelist and that, indeed, he was nothing other than an accidental critics whose "work in criticism took its direction from the novel" (Trilling, The Last Decade, 228). As Trilling himself wrote in indirect reaction to the assertion that he was the personification of the American critic and that his works in literary criticism led criticism in America into a wholly different, and more intellectually substantive, path, his work tended to "occupy itself not with aesthetic questions, except secondarily, nut rather with moral questions, with questions raised by the experience of quotidian life and by the experience of culture and history"(228). In Beyond Culture, he defines his "cultural and nonliterary method," in the following terms:
My own interests lead me to see literary situations as cultural situations, and cultural situations as great elaborate fights about moral issues, and moral issues as having something to do with gratuitously chosen images of personal being, and images of personal being as having something to do with literary style (13).
From Trilling's perspective, these were the concerns of the novelist, not the critic and, more specifically, the concerns of European novelists such as Gustav Flaubert.
Trilling expressed a tremendous interest in, and a remarkable affinity with the European novelists, the European literary tradition and its concerns. In the 1940s, Trilling expressed that affinity and in his quest to clarify and justify it, he wrote that the European novel was intensely humanistic in its concerns. Arguing that the "passion" and the "intense life" which marked the nineteenth century European, especially French, novel was not simply expressive of the discourse between author and history but of the author's stance towards the French Revolution's determination to redefine the status of man himself, Trilling maintained this to be the true intent of the serious novelist. In other words, Trilling believed that the novelist should engage himself in the exploration of, not what man currently is but what man should be were he released from the shackles of politics, religion and socio-cultural tradition (Trilling, "Elements That Are Wanted," 374; Speaking of Literature, 156n). Expounding upon the aforementioned in all of The Opposing Self, Beyond Culture and Sincerity and Authenticity, Trilling contended that the task of the novelist was the investigation, not just of morality and moral relations but of the self and Others, with the purpose of the investigation being the exposition of man and the revelation of the authentic and sincere self.
The European novel, as were the ideas of Mathew Arnold, Marx and Freud, was one of the more important of the formative influences on Trilling's professional and personal development. Indeed, several Trilling critics and scholars have maintained Trilling, the critic, writer, academic and intellect, to be a product of these influences, rather than that of his cultural heritage. This is not true. Certainly, the influence of Freud, Marx, Arnold and the European literary tradition on Trilling's intellectual, personal and professional developments is undeniable. However, conceding to the aforementioned influences does not entail a negation of the influence that his own cultural milieu had upon him. Trilling was a product of New York and was a product of the Judaic religio-cultural heritage.
Trilling was one of the primary figures in that group of intellectuals who later came to be known as the New York Intellectuals. However, unlike the case with Alfred Kazin, for example, the metropolitan experiences of that specific time and place hardly entered into his writings at all. Indeed, Trilling's fiction never developed an urban theme and his critical writings rarely made an urban reference. Nevertheless, Trilling, the son of immigrant Jewish parents, was an undeniable product of New York.
As the case with the other members of the New York Intellectuals, Trilling is popularly regarded as a product of the 1930s; a product of radicalism and Marxism. This is not true. Insofar as Trilling was concerned, Marxism was never anything other than a passing, temporary episode, without any permanent formative consequences (Hollinger, 67). His intellectual maturation was in the 1920s, and not the 1930s as has been asserted by several of Trilling's critics. This differentiation is critical as, had Trilling's intellectual maturation occurred in the 1930s as some have assumed, radicalism, in its various strains and guises, would have been the predominant formative influence. Having undergone the intellectual maturation process during the 1920s, however, the formative influences on Trilling were the World War I Greenwich intellectuals, among whom we may mention Van Wyck Brooks, Randolph Bourne and Edmund Wilson, Columbia with its commitment to liberal humanism and the group of Jewish writers associated with the Menorah Journal. These, not radicalism, were the predominant formative influences throughout Trilling's intellectual maturation. The implication here is that the cultural resources available to Trilling during the 1920s, later fortified by the ideas of both Arnold and Freud, furnished him with the critical tools which informed his critical and intellectual orientation. These tools further determined the intellectual emergence of Trilling as a foe of the 1930s and its legacy – the legacy of radicalism and ideological liberalism.
Trilling's association with the Greenwich Village intellectuals and the Menorah Journal began in 1921 when he was an undergraduate at Columbia, and continued uninterrupted until his graduation in 1925. As far as Trilling was concerned, Columbia was the vista to the larger, cosmopolitan world. While its Anglophile curriculum informed the university's liberal humanistic environment, the cultural environment which predominated through Columbia, generated by an enthusiastic student body and an ambitious group of Jewish intellectuals, actively sought the redefinition or refinement of American culture. The Columbia cultural environment provided Trilling and others with a haven away from radicalism, ideological liberalism and modernism, and had an undeniably liberating effect upon the development of their capacity for innovative and critical thinking. Indeed, the very "canon of the grand style" which currently strikes one as an exceeding overt display of cultural prowess, exerted a positive effect on Trilling's intellectual maturation (O'Hara, 63). As was the case with earlier Columbia graduates such as Randolph Bourne, and several of Trilling's contemporaries, Columbia's cultural grandeur instilled within Trilling a deep respect for high culture, the pursuit of intellect and the exploration and formulation of ideas (O'Hara, 63-65; Trilling, Speaking of Literature, 201). Columbia introduced Trilling to the tradition of liberal learning and thinking and, he remained committed to either throughout his life. Whenever he talked or wrote about the condition of the humanities or the state of culture and the moral imagination, the influence of Columbia's liberal humanism was evident (Trilling, The Last Decade, 160-176).
Trilling was, undeniably, an intellectual but, to a great degree, he was always much more than that. Indeed, it was not until 1942 that Trilling, in a Parisian Review article, identified himself as an academic. Just as he rejected the strictures of ethnic identifiers and labels, he also rejected any single professional labeling. Therefore, while conceding to his professional identity as an academic, Trilling also defined himself as a critic, writer and teacher. In all three roles, his primary intent was the declaration of his "solidarity with intellectual life," the refinement of American culture and the reclamation of authentic, humanistic liberalism away from its corrupted, morally questionable political counterpart. In defining and identifying himself as a critic, novelist and intellect, Trilling expressed the salvation and propagation of humanist liberalism as a predominant concern, further stating that his interest in any one of these three activities was framed and informed by his "sense of national culture" and his desire to instigate a "sense of resistance to traditional culture" (Trilling, A Gathering of Fugitives, 53; Trilling, The Last Decade, 229).
Trilling's intellectual and professional concerns and activities, as articulated in the preceding paragraphs, betray the influence of the Greenwich Village critics and intellectuals. Indeed, just as did the Village critics, Trilling emphasized the importance of the "cosmopolitan ideal," and the formation of a "liberal intelligentsia" (Hollinger, 126; Cooney, 67-70). It is, thus, that Trilling can be most accurately identified as a continuation of the Greenwich Village intellectuals' legacy.
Trilling repeatedly expressed his awareness of the intellectual and cultural importance of the earlier generation of Village intellectuals and, on several occasions, conceded to their influence upon his intellectual awakening and maturation. He proclaimed Brook's America's Coming of Age as a work of "critical genius" and identified Van Wyck Brooks as having set out the intellectual and cultural program which framed the intellectual pursuits and priorities of both the earlier generation of Village intellectuals as well as Trilling's own. Even when, in the mid-1950s, the Parisian Review set up Brooks as an object of contempt, Trilling defended the man and publicly acknowledged his contributions to the development of American criticism. In a New York Times Book Review article, Trilling identified Brooks' message and influence as follows:
That ideas should be related to the actual life of a people, that the national existence should be of a kind that permitted ideas to affect it – this was the burden of the early work of Mr. Brooks that won the enthusiasm of the young men between 1914-1924 (Trilling, "A Young Critic in a Young America," 28).
One of those young men was Trilling himself. As Brooks and the Village critics did before him, Trilling spoke of "social justice," explored the "quality of intellectual life and emotional life," and distinguished between ideas and ideologies (Trilling, A Gathering, 229; Bender, 228-241). Continuing in the intellectual tradition of the Village critics, Trilling maintained that the intellect could only emerge and fully express him/herself were he/she independent. Once an ideology is espoused, independence is subsumed by absolutism and the generation of ideas, as in novel, creative and explorative ideas, comes to an abrupt halt. In the wake of World War I, liberalism lost its independence and became a tool in the hands of the war administration. The consequence was that liberalism gradually lost its "poetic imagination," and became a self-negating quasi-intellectual ideal (Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, ix). Writing in the tradition of the Village Critics, and continuing from the point where Brooks left off, Trilling determined the purification of liberalism, the propagation of humanism and the fomentation of a cultural revolution whose objective was the creation of a socio-cultural environment supportive of the emergence and expression of sincerity and authenticity; a culture which allows Being, as opposed to Seeming, full expression.
The Menorah Journal was as crucial to Trilling's social development and intellectual maturation as was Columbia University. Always qualifying his Jewish identity or, at least, refraining from its overt emphasis or expression, the Menorah Journal does not only establish his inherent feelings of ethno-cultural identity but further provided him with the tools with which to analyze the implications of that identity and even reformulate it (Bourne, "Jews and Trans-National America," n.p.). Whereas his association with Freeman, the Nation and the New Republic substantially contributed to his intellectual development, unlike the Menorah Journal, they did not provide him with the grounds "upon which to rear an imagination of society" (Trilling, The Last Decade, 7). The Menorah Journal provided him with that ground, introducing Trilling to the "Jewish situation" in terms "which had the effect of making society at least available to imagination" (Trilling, 13). At the Menorah Journal, Trilling came to understand that ethnicity was merely a social category and modernism's strategy for the imposition of definitions upon the self and the other (Trilling, 7-14).
The Menorah Journal significantly contributed to Trilling's self-definition, allowing him to come to a closer understanding of both his own Jewishness and the implications of ethno-cultural identity. Many have claimed that Trilling, whom they popularly categorized as a non-Jewish Jew, never came to terms with his Jewish ethnic identity or cultural heritage. This, as earlier stated and repeatedly emphasized throughout both this and the previous chapter, is not true. At the Menorah Journal, and primarily influenced by its editor, Elliot Cohen, Trilling came to the realization that his Jewishness was not his predominant identifier and should not be. He further came to understand that modernism's obsession with definitions of personhood, selfhood and other-hood was expressive of Anglo-Saxon culture's inherent racism. More importantly, Trilling learnt that, as an intellectual, a moralist and thinker, he should not embrace those definitions and categorizations, especially as doing so entailed the suppression of authentic being and, instead should give rein to his social imagination and allow his authentic self to develop and express itself.
Trilling, as a moralist, was committed to the realization of being and the opposition of seeming. It was on the basis of this commitment, as some have argued, that he refused to identify himself as a Jewish writer. As Trilling himself wrote in 1944:
I cannot discover anything in my professional intellectual life which I can specifically trace back to my Jewish birth and rearing (Trilling, The Last Decade, 14).
As he claims in the above quote, Trilling did not deny his Jewishness nor did he ever intend to. Rather, within the parameters of his professional life, he did not believe his Jewishness to be of any great importance and, indeed, did not perceive of it as having contributed to his intellectual and professional development. While one can very well take Trilling at his own words and leave the question of his Jewishness or, rather, his non-Jewish Jewish identity at that, the truth of the matter is that Trilling's relationship with his ethno-cultural and religious identity was infinitely more complex than that.
One of the very first of the fictions which Trilling published in the Menorah Journal underscores the complexity of his relationship with, and perception of, his Jewishness. This story, "Impediments," published in 1925 when Trilling was still an undergraduate at Columbia, is written from the first person perspective and tells of his relationship with a Jewish student named Hettner. The narrator, himself a Jew, describes Hettner as "a scrubby little Jew with shrewd eyes," always "writhing beneath a depression" (Trilling, Of This Time, Of That Place and Other Stories, 3). The narrator expresses feelings of fear and repulsion towards Hettner and, by association, towards his own Jewishness. The narrator's predominant fear lies in that Hettner may break through his defenses and force an exposition of his Jewishness. Claiming that Hettner "forced" him to engage in "perfunctory courtesies," and walks from one campus to another, the narrator can only feel relief that these walks were too short to allow for conversations in anything other than the "fewest of subjects, and these he was careful to make the most impersonal" (3). As the narrator confesses:
I always felt defensive against some attempt Hettner might make to break down the convenient barrier I was erecting against men who were too much of my own race and against men who were not of my own race and hated it. I feared he would attempt to win … [himself] into the not-too-strong tower that I had built myself, a tower of contemptible ivory, perhaps but very useful (Trilling, Of This Time, Of That Place and Other Stories, 4).
The narrator is, arguably, Trilling himself and the feelings he confesses towards his own Jewishness are Trilling's own. Certainly, Trilling did not deny his Jewishness and, indeed, he never had the opportunity to. As much as he may have wanted to distance himself from his ethnic identity and as hard as he may have tried to escape the stereotypical image of the immigrant Jew, society persistently defined, identified and judged him on that basis. Even the appellation, non-Jewish Jew, stresses Trilling's Jewishness at the same time that it lauds him for having forged a non-Jewish, `Gentile,' identity. His Jewishness, one may argue, was as much an obsession with Trilling as it was with his contemporary society. Trilling may, like the narrator, have constructed an ivory tower around his Jewishness and he may very well have formulated and propagated and image of the self which was quintessentially American and, as such, very far removed from the immigrant Jewish image but, he remained, nevertheless, a Jew in an America which judged and evaluated people according to their race. Trilling, most certainly, never denied his identity but he never confessed it either, thereby betraying as complex a relationship with his heritage as that of the narrator.
The complexity of Trilling's relationship with, or perception of, his ethnic heritage both instigated and was instigated by his equally complex conceptualization of the self and, in particular, his own selfhood. As Denis Donoghue has pointed out, Trilling's definition of selfhood was indubitably influenced by John Dewey's social definition of the self. Granted that Trilling was a faithful Freudian student and, arguably, considered Freud his spiritual father and mentor, while Dewey was neither a Freudian nor much interested in the psycho-social theories propagated by Freud, it was the Deweyian, rather than Freudian, sense of the ethical self that allowed Trilling to mediate between self and society (Donoghue, "Trilling, Mind and Society," 167). As compared to Freud, Trilling's conceptualization of the self and his understanding of the mind always tended towards the essentially "pragmatic," wherein, similar to Dewey, his primary concern generally rested with the consequences, rather than the possibilities. Like Dewey, Trilling exhibited a pragmatic concern for the interrelationship between ideas and self, arguing that those ideas which emanated from the self were not just an authentic expression of selfhood but that their consequences functioned as a measure of truth (Trilling, "Sincerity and Authenticity: A Symposium," 109). It was, thus, that in 1938 Trilling asserted Dewey's Ethics to be an authority on moral choice, selfhood and agency (Trilling, Speaking of Literature, 109).
Dewey's influence, compounded with Freud's, influenced Trilling towards a rather complex definition of the self, and of his own selfhood. As noted in Chapter 2, Freud insisted upon personal responsibility in the formulation and articulation of a selfhood which was genuinely expressive of an individual's personality and which allowed for the sincere expression of the ego. Indeed, Freud was violently opposed to the tendency towards acceptance of definitions of self and others imposed upon one by society. To this extent, and as argued by the Freudian scholar, Bruno Bettelheim, Freud insisted upon self-responsibility, as opposed to social responsibility. He urged a reclamation of authenticity through the coming to terms with one's own reality, through communication between the id and the ego, as opposed to accepting the `reality' imposed upon one from without, from society and, in so doing, suppressing both the ego and the id (176-178, 183-185). Dewey, in comparison, sought the mediation between the self and society, defining ethics in terms of responsibility towards both self and society. In other words, while Freud propagated a definition for the egoistic self, Dewey popularized a conceptualization of the social self. The complexity of Trilling's understanding of the self, and by association, of truth and morality, emanates from the fact that he embraced both definitions, defining the self as both egoistical and social.
Although Trilling was influenced by all of Dewey's definitions of the self, ethics and moral agency, his understanding of truth and knowledge somewhat differ from Dewey's. Insofar as Dewey is concerned, knowledge, truth and the determination of truth are democratic and participatory undertakings and enterprises. In comparison, Trilling tended towards the association of truth and knowledge with order and hierarchy. This tendency, while detectable in Trilling's early works, such as The Middle of the Journey, is particularly evident in the latter part of his career, and most especially in his Mind in the Modern World.
As is evident at this stage, Lionel Trilling evolved through a complex web of influences and worked within an undeniably dense, albeit well-articulated, rhetorical, literary and critical tradition. Much of the strengths and weaknesses of his own professional enterprise, whether critical or literary, can be traced back to his own sense of self as the progeny of immigrant Jewish parents in a conservative society governed by strict Anglo-Saxon cultural and traditional precepts of the self and others, and to the cited influences. These influences, concomitant with his own evolved sense of selfhood and tolerance for other-hood, determined an explicit faith in art over politics, an abiding awareness of the plurality of both the American experience and American culture, and the development of an amalgamated Freudian-Deweyian sense of the self, ethics, society and moral agency. Trilling never bothered to impose a sense of theoretical coherence upon these influences or, as a matter of fact, to articulate his own personal philosophy as regards the way in which these influences and experiences, determined his comprehension of the self, the other, society, culture, ethics and moral agency. Quite simply stated, on the personal level, Trilling projected an image of the self which was quintessentially American and, on the professional level, an image of a practical and pragmatic critic. Both his personal and his professional conceptualizations of the self were, however, ultimately guided by his ever deepening commitment to liberal humanism.
By the 1940s, Trilling as a liberal humanist, committed to the salvation of liberalism from politics and the propagation of liberal humanism as a culture, judged it to have become both flaccid and vulnerable to corrupting external influences. In his novel, The Middle of the Journey, Trilling forwarded the belief that liberal humanism had been corrupted by Stalinism and in the preface to The Liberal Imagination, he expressed his concern over the weakness of the conservative challenge to liberalism. If liberalism, as a culture and a network, realm, of ideas, was to be toughened, it needed the challenge of an antithesis. In the absence of a challenging set of antithetical ideas, liberalism grew increasingly self-satisfied, flaccid, and vulnerable to ideological and political influences. The decline of ideas, especially antithetical ones, according to Trilling, invited action and, more specifically, left culture and art vulnerable to ideology. This is precisely what happened to liberalism, according to Trilling. Unable to regenerate, renovate and strengthen itself given the absence of a conservative challenge, liberalism became overwhelmed by ideology and was eventually hijacked by politics, rendering it an ideology hostile to the pluralism of American life, as opposed to a culture based upon, and encouraging of, pluralism (Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, ix-xiii).
Announcing his intention to reclaim liberalism as a culture which was both founded upon and receptive towards the inherently pluralistic nature of American life, Trilling declared that he would do so by placing liberalism "under some degree of pressure," thus, allowing for the separation of the "weak" or "wrong" expressions of the larger liberal heritage from the strong or valid ones (Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, x). Contending that American liberalism throughout the 30s and the 40s had tended towards the denial of "emotions and imagination" and had veered towards the `simplification' of thoughts and ideas, Trilling expressed his objective as the recollection of "liberalism to its first essential imagination of variousness and possibility, which implies the awareness of complexity and difficulty" (x-xi). He determined, in other words, the revitalization of liberalism as a culture and fount of ideas.
Trilling targeted "ideology with its special form of unconsciousness" as that which needed to be overcome in the quest to recall, or reclaim liberalism away from ideology and to culture. However, implicit within his discourse is that which favors hesitation over commitment and action (Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, 53). Rather than sound a call for action, Trilling urged American liberals to forgo their ideologies and optimism and, instead, to mull over a phrase introduced by John Keats: "negative capability" (289). "Negative capability," as Trilling explained, referenced the "willingness to remain in uncertainties, mysteries and doubts," and implied the acknowledgement that doing so did not constitute "an abandonment of intellectual activity. Quite to the contrary, it is precisely an aspect of their intelligence, of their seeing the full force and complexity of their subject matter" (289). As evident from the quoted, Trilling propagated a notion of resistance to liberalism's moral weakness, not through action and confrontation but, through the presentation of ideological challenges to formulaic and absolutist political liberalism. Also evident from the quoted is that, insofar as he was concerned, by its very definition, liberalism was opposed to commitment, calling instead for an understanding of thesis and antithesis, for an appreciation of complexity and an acknowledgement of mystery. The liberal is, thus, one who investigates, who wonders and questions and not one who presents absolute answers or adopts definitive stances. Accordingly, once liberalism is hijacked by politics and ideology, it becomes a corrupted and self-corrupting entity, no longer capable of questioning or, indeed, or rejuvenating and revitalizing itself through investigations and the positing of new ideas and challenging insights.
In "Reality in America," the opening essay of The Liberal Imagination, Trilling launches a devastating attack upon both Vernon Parrington's, then much-acclaimed, Main Currents in American Thought and the so-called liberal critics who praised the works of Theodore Dreiser. Whether as regards the fictional writings of Dreiser, the non-fictional, cum-historical writings of Parrington, or the critical attention which either received, political and ideological criteria were blatantly replacing intellectual and literary ones. Critics were no longer judging, evaluating or reading a work on the basis of its literary and intellectual value and merits but on the basis of political and ideological categories of analysis, evaluation and interpretation. Similarly, Parrington presents an ideological re-interpretation of American literary history, often engaging in the forced imposition of ideological and political interpretations of literary trends and currents where none exist. As for Dreiser, at least according to Trilling, only political and ideological sympathy could ever excuse his literary and intellectual failures.
Granted that Trilling's criticism of both Dreiser and Parrington, let alone the liberal critics, is rather extreme but he does engage in the literary and intellectual justification of his critique. Proceeding with the criticism of the title of Parrington's trilogy, Trilling maintains that thoughts and ideas are located either within writers themselves or in the dialectic contest within cultures and not in "currents." Writers, as representatives, or products, of cultures, contain a "large part of the dialectic within themselves." They are expected, even required according to Trilling, to express the "very essence of culture" in their writings and should not, as do both Parrington and Dreiser, "submit to serve ends of any one ideological group or tendency" (Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, 289). Should they do so, they would be effectively engaging in the perversion and simplification of truths, exploiting literature, not for the expression of culture or their own selves but, for the propagation of biased and ideologically prejudiced versions of truth and culture.
Trilling, as may be surmised from the gist of his criticism of Parrington, Dreiser and the liberal critics which applauded the works of either, was uncompromisingly concerned with the concept of `truth.' Truth, according to Trilling, and as can be determined from the body of his work, had to be completely divorced from ideology and, equally importantly, had to emerge from within the depths of the real self, from the core of Being, as shaped and formulated by culture. The failure to define truth in such terms lent to the formulation of a liberal formula which primarily, almost exclusively, drew its content from ideology and politics, culminating in the promotion of restricted understandings of reality, culture, selfhood, other-hood and, indeed, even of politics. Liberalism, insofar as it had succumbed to ideology and, the liberal intellectuals, be they critics or writers of fiction/non-fiction, were engaged in the destruction of liberalism itself, the active perversion of truth and the suffocating restriction of knowledge.
The logic behind Trilling's criticism of liberalism, as argued by the Trilling scholar and critic, Grant Webster, emanated from the very core of his personal and profession projects. As regards his personal project, Trilling was determined to articulate and project his authentic self, give expression to his Being, disprove the stereotypical definitions and character traits imposed upon him, as an immigrant Jew, by society and, ultimately, project himself as authentically, even quintessentially, American. On the professional level, his penultimate objective was the reclamation of literature as an art, not as an ideological tool, and the redefinition of culture as the fount of ideas and thoughts, not as an entity which acculturates its adherents into a set of predetermined and highly restrictive thoughts and ideas. Insofar as he was concerned, the fulfillment of both projects was predicated on the reclamation of liberalism as a culture, rather than an ideology, thereby allowing the plurality of American life and culture to, once again, assert itself (Webster, 251-53).
At the core of Trilling's professional and personal projects were societal concerns. In essence, Trilling aimed to influence societal definitions of selfhood, personhood and other-hood, in addition to which, he determined to propose and propagate liberalism as an American cultural alternative (Donoghue, 168-170). However, within the context of Trilling's understanding and definition of society, certain anomalies assert themselves. For example, although Trilling consistently spoke of American culture and society in relation to plurality and variety, society for him was almost universally middle class – a society without any real variety. In addition to that, he defined moral questions, not as cultural or social ones which, to a great degree, they are but, as personal questions and individual choices. Moral questions were, for Trilling, the burden of the modern self and not cultural or social questions per se (Marx, 431-437).
There is little doubt, at least according to Krupnick (42-44) and Marx (433-436), that Trilling's tendency to define society in terms of the middle class and his insistence on identifying moral questions as personal ones, was a reaction to the sociological crisis of the 1930s. However, the farther Trilling got from the 1930s, the father society, as an arena of social conflict and cultural and moral dilemma, receded from his imagination and criticism. Later in life, and in response to both these tendencies and criticism of his perception of society, Trilling recalled the influence of Freud and Marx on his intellectual development. As he emphasized, both of these thinkers taught intellectuals a lesson of paramount importance. That lesson was that "nothing was as it seemed, that the great work of intellect was to strike through the mask" (Trilling, The Last Decade, 237). Both Marx and Freud, but Freud in particular, forwarded a structure of ideas which deeply penetrated the realm of the private and brought it out into the open, thereby establishing, not only the existence of an inextricable link between the realm of the public and the private but effectively exposing the barrier between them as an artificial, a façade which man and society have established to hide Being behind. As Trilling recalled, both Marx and Freud asked "unremitting questions about motive and intention," as he did himself (Trilling, The Last Decade, 237). That is the "motives and intentions" behind the divide between the public and the private, the go and the id, being and seeming and societal mores and moral dilemmas. In his interpretation and juxtaposition of Freud and Marx's concern with "motives and intentions," Trilling emphasized the individual and not the social, arguing that motive and intention, synonymous with conflict and oppression, unfolded and primarily played out within the private, and echoed out into the public.
Trilling's psycho-cultural concerns, as influenced by both Marx and Freud, was more sharply expressed in The Opposing Self, wherein his criticism moves from the public realm of politics, culture and society to family life and what he termed the "conditioned self." Two essays are particularly important in this respect. The first, on John Keats, is where Trilling introduced, discussed and developed the concept of "negative capability." This essay celebrates uncertainty as a virtue, stressing that the quality of negative capability, implying the contented suspension in uncertainty, invites quietism and questioning. It effectively ensures that culture and intellect do not atrophy but continually renovate themselves.
While the essay on Keats contains important insights into Trilling's philosophy of culture, insofar as Americanists are concerned, however, this essay is secondary in importance to "William Dean Howells and the Roots of the Modern Taste." Expressing appreciation for Howells; concern with, and decision to focus upon the middle class as representative of Americana, Trilling contends that modern dismissal of Howells emanated from extremist commitment to form and absolutist definitions of selfhood, personhood, other-hood and culture. Extremist commitment and absolutist definitions have both functioned to foreshadow rejection of Howells' alternative forms and definitions and, to diminish, to the point of repression, the self and pleasure.
While modernists, Trilling's contemporaries, were committed to the historical necessity of disintegration and, therefore, completely opposed to Howells' portrayal of the middle classes as representative of Americana and offended by his "moderate sentiments," (Trilling, The Opposing Self, 103) Trilling defended both tendencies, further articulating his appreciation of middle-class domesticity (101-104). Later on, in his preface to a reprinted edition of Tess Slesinger's The Unpossessd, Trilling launched a more intense criticism of modernist intellectuals, questioning their rejection of middle class domesticity and family as positive values. Indeed, given their commitment to conditioning, to the illusion of seeming, Trilling expressed his perplexity at modernist intelligentsia's refusal, not just to recognize the worth of family and domesticity but, to acknowledge them as sources of wisdom about the "conditioned nature of life" (Trilling, Opposing Self, 103; Trilling, The Last Decade, 6-9).
Trilling's concern with the conditioned self may appear paradoxical given his adherence to the value of Being and the necessity of expressing the authentic self. While it is difficult to resolve, or explain, this contradiction away, it is quite possible to say that the younger Trilling may have focused his energies on defining and arguing in favor of the willed, as opposed to the preconditioned self, but the older Trilling was more concerned with the conditioned self. His earlier works express a deep concern with the questions of individuality, moral choice and obligation but, in The Opposing Self and especially in Beyond Culture, the concern shifts towards the questions of the vulnerability and coherence of the self. In other words, he explicitly acknowledges that, not only is the self divided but that it is an infinitely vulnerable entity whose primary protection lies in self-conditioning (Trilling, Beyond Culture, 82-84). Certainly, this position seems to be somewhat contradictory with his earlier one, wherein he had actively defined the self as willed. However, at this stage in his professional enterprise, Trilling had discretely resigned his earlier Arnoldian and Deweyian program, expressing a deep concern with, and interest in, the moral fate of the self.
Trilling's students and fellow liberals reacted to The Opposing Self with disquiet and an ever-deepening sense of anxiety. The critic, thinker and writer whom they had once hailed as the vanguard of the liberal renaissance and their guide into the liberal imagination was, according to Joseph Frank, apparently renouncing his commitment to liberalism in favor of conservatism and, in the process, seemed to be catering to the "conservative imagination" (Frank, 44). Expressing the sentiments and thoughts of American liberal critics, Frank worried that Trilling's emphasis on the conditioned life directly targeted the very core of liberalism. If liberalism was to be defined as freedom how, as Frank wondered, could conditioning, the very antithesis of freedom, be linked to liberalism? Although Frank conceded that liberalism did not imply complete and unfettered freedom but freedom within bounds, he insisted that Trilling was straying away even from this moderate definition of freedom and, thus, from responsible liberalism. Trilling, according to Frank, was apparently joining the ranks of those who sought to oppress and suppress free-will (44-46). While admitting that Trilling had invaluably contributed to the rejuvenation of cultural liberalism, Frank insisted that "in defending the conditioned on the level of middle-class values, and in endowing the torpid acceptance of these values with the dignity of aesthetic transcendence, Mr. Trilling is merely augmenting the already frightening momentum making for conformism and the debilitation of moral tension" (46).
Frank may have expressed the sentiment aroused within the liberal circle upon the publication of The Opposing Self but, but he failed to account for the complexity of Trilling's conceptualization of "will." The concept of will looms largely over Trilling's works and, throughout his career, he expressed ambivalent and ever-changing feelings towards this particular notion. There is no doubt that Trilling consistently upheld the importance of free will and throughout his works, his belief that only through commitment to will, can an individual realize his true being, is consistently and constantly expressed. The Opposing Self is not a negation of Trilling's earlier and repeatedly expressed position on the import of will but an expression of his concern regarding the stubbornness of will and the tendency for many to confuse between string will and blind adherence to ideology and ideas. Trilling did not, as Frank seems to suggest, negate himself.
Irrespective of the criticisms which may have been directed against him from the mid-50's onwards, the fact remains that Trilling invaluably contributed to the intellectual life in America and, more so, to literary and critical discourse. There are those, however, who suspect that Trilling's professional project was ultimately guided and framed by his personal one. His determination to restore liberalism as a culture, assert the historical plurality of American society and his disdain of modernism were influenced by his own need to define and project himself as an American, irrespective of ethnic background, religion and heritage. To an extent, Trilling was constantly hounded by a deep personal dilemma; on the one hand, he wanted to be recognized as an American, not as an immigrant Jew, an outsider; on the other hand, the influence which Freud had exerted on his intellectual development was such that he was committed to the realization of Being and of uncovering, discovering and expressing his authentic self. The implication here is that Trilling could not deny his Jewishness or immigrant background and, indeed, despite allegations to the contrary, never sought to. On the personal level, therefore, Trilling's primary objective was to fashion himself as an American while acknowledging his ethnic background. More importantly, he was determined to demonstrate that the one identity did not negate, or undermine, the other. His personal objective influenced his professional one, wherein, as some critics have argued, the critical vocabulary he developed and employed in public discourse, theorized, and emanated from, his personal dilemma; his refusal to commit himself to ideas and ideologies, culminating in his later projection of uncertainty as an intellectual and moral ideal, expressed his private uncertainty about his own identity; and, his determined support of liberalism, was influenced by its being a multicultural project which eschewed concrete definitions of selfhood, personhood and other-hood. In other words, Trilling's personal project influenced his professional one to the extent that the latter was used to serve the former. It was, thus, that Trilling was ultimately successful in promoting an image of himself as the quintessential American.
That Trilling, an immigrant Jew in a day and age wherein Jews where defined as outsiders, as `others,' was able to become an American, a non-Jewish-Jew, was further aided by the fact that he became the representative intellect of Anglo-Saxon art and literature and the voice of liberalism in the postwar years. This shall be discussed in greater detail in the next chapter.






BIBLIOGRAPHY
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