Customer Reviews

The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent: Selected Essays

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

 

 

On Sunday 7/30/00, The New York Times carried a review of "The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent" -- an article by Edward Rothstein entitled, "Dated? Perhaps, But His Insights Remain Powerful" -- Rothstein's insights are useful and I agree with most of them, but I found more than Rothstein had space or inclination to address.

Trilling's essays cover the core moral issues 19th and early 20th century writers addressed--fascism, communism, pornography, evil, the nature of beauty, the existence and nature of God. While the book focuses on the thoughts and writing of mostly dead white males (and Jane Austen), the struggle continues, and we all have a moral responsibility to be actively informed.

I bought this book because it contained two essays on Jane Austen of whom I am excessively fond. One of these essays, "Mansfield Park", addresses her most controversial book. Trilling wrote "Mansfield Park" because he believed the book has had been mischaracterized by those who disliked Fanny Price.

Trilling discusses a major moral issue in this essay--one many "sophisticated" people deliberately ignore--irony can be evil. He says that "In irony, even in the large derived sense of the word, there is a kind of malice." He suggests there may have been malice on the part of Austen when she engaged in irony. But, he suggests, there are two kinds of irony--the detached kind and the engaged kind. It is the former that is evil because it takes place at the expense of others, i.e. is not charitable. The other kind of irony is involved, the user is attempting to meliorate a painful situation within which she or he finds himself. An example of the latter is the narrator's comment in "Pride and Prejudice" -- "it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single young man in possesion of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." An example of the cruel kind of irony occurs in "Mansfield Park" via Mary Crawford's comments meant in jest.

Trilling suggests the greatness of "Mansfield Park" is "commensuate with it's power to offend." He says whereas "Pride and Prejudice" celebrates the "traits of spiritedness, vivacity, celerity, and lightness" and "associates them with happiness and virtue" Mansfield Park does the opposite. "Mansfield's Park"'s impulse is not to forgive, but to condemn. Its praise is not for social freedom, but social constraint. The condemnation is of the wrong kind of irony, the hurtful kind of irony, the irony of the uncharitable toward Fanny Price. "The virtue of Fanny Price is rewarded by more than itself." It is beyond the pleasure principle. Remember duty, honor, sacrifice? In the end, Trilling suggests Fanny Price is a kind of Christian saint like the pale Milly Theale in James' "Wings of the Dove."

Does it matter? Are those who seek goodness fools? He raises this issue and shares what he believes to be Jane Austen's thoughts on the topic, which he latter expands in "The Fate of Pleasure." Is there something beyond mere pleasure?

Keats thought so. He said "Truth is Beauty." But what about evil. Is evil real? Keats says yes, but so is beauty. The reality of evil does not cancel the reality of beauty. The world is a terrible place where evil and beauty lie side by side. Trilling's essay on Keats was so wonderful, it made me cry.

I marked dozens of passages in my book that I wanted to share, but there is not enough space. The sections of the essays that I enjoyed most, other than those on Austen (the second essay was not completed when Trilling died), coverend the writing of Henry James. I had never seen him as the natural heir to Austen. Now I shall go back and reread James. Also, I was pleased to see Trilling trash Theodore Dreiser. I hated his writing and so apparently did Trilling. A more modern critic would have done a better job of covering George Elliot--Mary Ann Evans--certainly "Adam Bede" is a book about morality, but Trilling did not pay much attention to women or ethnic writers--why I have to give it 4 stars. Too bad, they could have added to this discourse, but don't let that prevent your reading this fine book.

Okay, so it isn't precisely beach reading, but this collection of literary and cultural pieces by one of the most influential critics and essayists of the 20th century belongs on the bookshelf of every literate person. The essays on Wordsworth, Twain and Austen's "Mansfield Park" are minor masterpieces. Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic, contributes a fine introduction.

I'm an English major, and last year, in my third year of university (I'm 27, however), I purchased this book, struck by
the title. I'd read a couple of Trilling's essays several years
earlier and liked them, but I was put off by his tendency to relate literature to moral and political issues. "Boring," I
thought, having had my ideas of art formed in high school by Oscar Wilde and, later, Camille Paglia. But I've become more
open-minded since then, and when I started reading this book I

couldn't put it down--I read 80% of it in one weekend of doing
nothing else and the rest of it by the end of the month.

Trilling is a fantastic essay-writer who knows how to draw the
reader in with his rhetoric and draw everything towards a
resounding, moving climax. Most of the essays in this collection
are less works of criticism than erudite ruminations to which
Trilling has been moved by specific works of literature or by
considering literature as a whole. He comes up with simply

fascinating, extremely suggestive ideas; for example, in "The
Fate of Pleasure," one of my favourite essays in the volume, he
suggests that pleasure has fallen out of favour in the modern era. Like many of his other intriguing ideas, it is the sort of
thing that rings generally true without really being susceptible
to proof; nor is Trilling that great at arguing his positions or
even defining his terms. However, he offers lucid and passionate
discussions of ideas, drawn from his study of literature, that
are generally only found in dry or head-breakingly difficult
philosophical works. These are essays for the dabbler in philosophy, but that's not to belittle them: in one of the essays
Trilling complains that in the modern era (naturally) philosophy
has become a subject for specialists rather than for the person of "ordinary strong intelligence" (I'm quoting from memory, but that's the idea). Even if he's not always successful in focussing his argument or proving his thesis, he'll start your
mind going on broad, fascinating topics (pleasure, the abyss,
the will, "being," "mind"), and you can pursue the ideas in greater detail on your own, at your leisure. Also, like Camille
Paglia and Harold Bloom, Trilling loves to play the devil's advocate, and he therefore loves to criticize liberalism although he was himself a passionate liberal. This will probably
give him an unfortunate appeal for conservatives, but the people
who will get most out of the book are liberals who enjoy having
their assumptions questioned. That constant questioning of his
own assumptions, when they are shared by the reader, is one of
the things that makes Trilling such an electrifying writer.

I read numerous glowing reviews of Trilling's work in the press, and so was eager to get this book. But the book itself was something of a let-down. Trilling is said to be "brave" simply for observing that certain left-wing novelists of the 1930s weren't very good writers: but no one today reads these novelists outside of graduate seminars on 1930s literature. It is more an indictment of that decade that they were ever taken seriously rather than evidence of Trilling's brilliance. Similarly, Trilling now seems almost quaintly naive in taking Freud to be irrefutable Science, and his dicta about what "modern men" can and cannot take seriously seems very dated. What I found most interesting in Trilling's criticism was his effort to capture and convey the "course" of literature, to understand what is "happening" in our novelists and what that implies about the society out of which novelists write. But in the end, Allen Tate's Essays of Four Decades seems--to me, at least--to have held up better over the years. If you are interested in "classic" criticism from the middle decades of the twentieth century, I would look there.

I agree with the previous reviewer that this collection of essays belongs on every literate person's bookshelf. After all, Trilling's essays on Frost, Wordsworth, Keats, Austen, the artist and neurosis, and the teaching of modern literature are essential for all students of English and indeed anyone who cares passionately about literature and its place in our society. His essays are engaging, his content original, and his diction precise. However, as Trilling was a professor at Columbia, he tends to verge on the erudite. That is, his rather advanced vocabulary and at times archaic, complex sentences do not make for easy reading. More than once I had to reach for the old Webster's to decipher his meaning. This is the only major drawback I saw, aside from his essay on Keats's letters being WAY too long. Still, with all its academic emphasis and at times difficult vocabulary, THE MORAL OBLIGATION TO BE INTELLIGENT is an essential and engaging book.

Our literature choices is one of the vehicles where we can show how intelliigent we are. But, a quick glance to the charts shows well, other choices. Trillings book demostrate that we do not have the choice of NOT being intelligent; we have to understand the beauty and the complexity of different authors and enjoy throughly the experience of life.

But, how can we judge other's choices? We are opinionated, and that is fine, because we have the base to explain our own catalog of likeness, but the world continue to turn wtihout the population reading Ulysess, Pride & Prejudice, The Turn of the Screw or any other work of art of the sort.

We do not have the obligation, but Trillings shows us that it is much better to be intelligent, to read books that will have more questions than answers, more ways than dead ends.

Excellent essasys, that permits an approach to the magical world of exquisite literature