Customer Reviews

The Liberal Imagination (New York Review Books Classics)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

It is an undeniable asset to have this classic work by one of America's greatest twentieth-century critics readily available again. Let me mention right off that the vast majority of the essays here have nothing to do with the fashionable Freudianism or bygone politics of the 1950's. Trilling's concerns as a literary critic and commentator on society go much deeper. He wishes to perform for his time a similar service to that John Stuart Mill rendered contemporaries in the nineteeth-century: the reminder that in disputable questions one has the obligation to see if one's intellectual opponents may possess some necessary portion of the truth. Mill, Trilling reminds us, found in the thought and poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a man, by the way, Mill profoundly disagreed with from metaphysics on down, a vivifying opposition and a liberating opponent, surprisingly able to cure the disabling aridity in Mill's earlier emotionless soul. Trilling feared that the majority "liberals" of the 1950's were especially open to the perennial temptation of bien-pensants of all sides, times, and places - a devolution into mere conformity and rigid ideology, an abandonment of the necessity as thinkers and citizens to be ever vigilant. Trilling's equivalent of Coleridge in this volume is the Master, Henry James, an author he thought certain to offend progressives mindlessly resentful of social hierarchy and supposed aestheticism. Trilling maintained that the James of "The Princess Casamassima" had much insight about art and politics that such "advanced" types ignored at their peril. (In a later volume, the self-identified "liberal" Trilling assigned a similar teaching function to Jane Austen's "Mansfield Park," a novel heavily on the side of tradition whose greatness he declared "was commensurate with its power to offend" the complacent "liberals" of its own day, his day, and most importantly - of any other day.

According to this edition's excellent introduction by Louis Menand (The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America), 'The Liberal Imagination' sold 170,000 copies in hardback and paperback upon its initial release. So when he also states that this collection of essays on literature and culture made literary criticism matter to people who were not literary critics, it is hard to doubt it. There are also a great many other things Mr. Menand points out in his brief remarks, yet after finishing the collection, what stands out most is what he says the quietest.

First, it's important to note that this book is not a random collection of essays simply recycled from literary journals - Trilling had a particular intention in mind when he gathered and revised these selections. Above all, from both his preface and from the inherent points within his writing, it is apparent that he believed in a liberalism that, in its purity, seems to barely resemble today's common usage - often as not used as a shortcut term for certain political positions rather than a belief in social betterment through systemic change. Regardless, though, of how liberalism's definition may have changed over the years, Trilling sought, with this book, not to confirm liberalism 'in its sense of general rightness but rather in putting under some degree of pressure the liberal ideas and assumptions of the present time'. These ideas Trilling understood to have been somewhat corrupted by the process of dissemination and implementation, and he hoped with his critiques 'to recall liberalism to its first essential imagination of variousness and possibility, which implies the awareness of complexity and difficulty'. Thus, 'The Liberal Imagination'.

Lionel Trilling found the 'liberal ideas and assumptions' in both contemporary (to him) literature, and in the writers of the past who 'command our continuing attention'. That is how a book of literary criticism is also a book about culture and politics. If each selection here were only a microcosmic example of that criticism, then Mr. Trilling would have fulfilled his goal - yet he takes it a step further still. Surely it is no accident that the first essay is 'Reality in America', and the last is 'The Meaning of a Literary Idea' - enforcing a structure over the entire book that moves from 'what is' to 'recalling liberalism to its imagination'. It is an extremely subtle dialectical approach, where each essay builds on previous material not so much like links in a chain but rather like equidistant guideposts just barely within sight of one another.

Lastly - by way of summary - there was also one other goal. Since Mr. Trilling was well aware of the possible abuses inherent in pursuing liberal social theory, he designed 'The Liberal Imagination' to warn of those excesses and to refute Stalinist ideology. This was admitted by Mr. Trilling himself, years later, as noted in the introduction. So indirectly does he approach it though (or because of the gulf that separates the last sixty years) that frankly, many readers may miss this idea entirely without help, as this reader would have. This blind spot accurately summarizes the sea change of reference points between his time and ours, and it also illustrates what Mr. Menand lightly touches on near the end of his introduction - what level of relevance can this book have to today?

That isn't to suggest there is none - to the extent that the two time periods share similarities, the author's comments are still worthwhile - but the liberal imagination of the 1950's seems essentially different from the liberal ideology of today, so much so that they might not recognize one another if they were to meet. Political commentary through literary criticism has fragmented into special interest agendas instead of a call for cohesiveness, and Lionel Trilling's attempt to be liberalism's gadfly is quaint and outdated, no matter how appealing that intellectual tradition appears in the rear-view mirror.

Despite this, there are still good reasons to spend time with these essays. Taken individually, they are of interest purely on the literary level, and Trilling's challenging style is excellent mental exercise. Concerning subjects as varied as Huckleberry Finn, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and the Kinsey Report, these essays examine the country's moral life as often as its political one, though perhaps in his day, these two were not yet divorced from one another. Yet even this simpler approach to Trilling's work has its problems, as the upheavals of the 1960's - and the resultant attitude shifts - were still almost two decades away from the time of his writing. In retrospect, social changes of the last forty years make his assumptions and conclusions incomplete.

But in his cautionary statements, he could be prescient. 'Where misunderstanding serves others as an advantage, one is helpless to make oneself understood'. If that doesn't describe our current situation, nothing does.

There probably is no more important book of criticism than this one as it shows the power of imagination in Western democracy and literature -- but also its limitations. I think I learned more about it limitations from reading this than I do its power.

What today passes for unchallenged forms of theoretical discourse are chastened by the intellectual courage, independent-mindedness, and literary skills of Mr. Trilling. One reviewer calls his thought "anachronistic," which is a bit like saying that Rousseau is anachronistic. It's a kind of generational chauvinism with we are sadly afflicted.

This book wasn't really designed for me, and I wonder whether it was designed for anyone born a quarter-century after it was written. If you read the Louis Menand introduction after you've read the book -- which was my approach -- you'll be puzzled that The Liberal Imagination is apparently anti-Stalinist. If it's pro- or anti-anything, it's pro-Freud. Those of us with a scientific temperament, living as we do under the watchful gaze of Karl Popper, roll our eyes at the first mention of the Austrian psychoanalyst.

But we're openminded folks, and we're eager to learn that Freud, like Marx, has been filtered too many times through popular media. Sadly, if this is what we want, then Lionel Trilling's Liberal Imagination is not the book we want to turn to.

Instead we get chunks like so, on the subject of Freud's interpretation of dreams:

'Freud showed, too, how the mind, in one of its parts, could work without logic, yet not without that directing purpose, that control ofintent from which, perhaps it might be said, logic springs. For the unconscious mind works without the syntactical conjunctions which are logic's essence. It recognizes no because, no therefore, no but; such ideas as similarity, agreement, and community are expressed in dreams imagistically by compressing the elements into a unity. The unconscious mind in its struggle with the conscious always turns from the general to the concrete and finds the tangible trifle more congenial than the large abstraction. Freud discovered in the very organization of the mind those mechanisms by which art makes its effects, such devices as the condensations of meanings and the displacement of accent.'

The writing there is almost so boring that I can't pay attention to how empty the content is. All I see in the content is that Freud locates the roots of art in the logic of dreams. It's not at all clear why Freud was responsible for this: surely people before Freud realized that dreams are often illogical and, in their own way, magical. What does Freud add to this? In Beyond The Pleasure Principle, Freud writes that dreams are a way of conquering our fears; or, as Trilling puts it,

'The dream, that is, is the effort to reconstruct the bad situation in order that the failure to meet it may be recouped; in these dreams there is no obscured intent to evade but only an attempt to meet the situation, to make a new effort of control.'

Is there any good reason to think that this is what dreams "mean"? Is there any reason to think dreams mean anything whatsoever? On this topic, I like Peter Medawar's jab at Arthur Koestler:

'[Writes Koestler,] `There is no need to emphasize, in this century of Freud and Jung, that the logic of the dream ... derives from the magic type of causation found in primitive societies and the fantasies of childhood.' But those who enjoy slopping around in the amniotic fluid should pause for a moment to entertain ... the idea that the content of dreams may be totally devoid of `meaning'. There should be no need to emphasize, in this century of radio sets and electronic devices, that many dreams may ... convey no information whatsoever: that they may just be noise."'

I could multiply without end the examples of Trilling's love for Freud. They all sound anachronistic and faux-scientific -- as, for instance, when Trilling quotes (in "Art and Neurosis") a "Dr. Bergler" to the effect that "there is a particular neurosis of writers, baed on an oral masochism which makes them the enemy of the respectable world...". It is hard to read this today without laughing.

What has all of this to do with liberalism? My best guess is that Trilling is addressing the same point that Saul Bellow made in his Nobel Prize speech: that the artist is in constant revolt against the ideologue. The ideologue dwells in abstractions, whereas the artist lives in the details. In a world where we've become numbers on a government's or a corporation's hard drive, some literary theorists would assert that the age of the individual man is over. Bellow would insist that the novel -- based as it is around characters painted to perfection -- is our last stand against the age of anonymity. Trilling seems to be making the same points, only with substantially less clarity. This lack of clarity isn't especially surprising, since Trilling seems to venerate the dream at the expense of the essay.

Finally, Trilling deals in epigrams which I think are supposed to sound profound, but which instead elicit one "Oh, come on" per page. E.g., his claim in "Manners, Morals, and the Novel" that "The characteristic work of the novel is to record the illusion that snobbery generates and to try to penetrate to the truth which, as the novel assumes, lies hidden beneath all the false appearances." That's it, huh?

I suppose that if you want a particular picture of intellectual life among the anti-communist left in the 1950's, this book is for you. If not, there are better ways to spend your time.