Seventy-Five Years of The Liberal Imagination, by Lionel Trilling
Of all the great midcentury literary critics, Lionel Trilling endures as the most compelling for the approaching middle of the twenty-first century. “Clearly,” he observes in his 1950 landmark collection The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society, “it is no longer possible to think of politics except as the politics of culture.” Who could disagree today?
Trilling’s book was shockingly popular, selling 70,000 copies in hardcover and even more in paperback. As Louis Menand remarks in his introduction to a 2008 reissue of The Liberal Imagination, “it changed the role of literature in American intellectual life,” convincing a generation of readers that the study of fiction was deeply relevant to the pulse and progress of civic life in the United States.
As a persona, Trilling remains hard to pin down. He was a Columbia University literature professor, a public intellectual, a New York critic. On the one hand, he will no doubt strike modern readers as a figure of the “left”—a self-described “liberal” trumpeting both the popular Marxist ideologies of the college campus and the social values of the cosmopolitan coastal elite. On the other hand, within academia today Trilling can appear as another dead white guy, a tone-deaf Matthew Arnold scholar who promoted a narrow study of old books and eschewed the “radical” politics of colleagues fighting for social justice in favor of a much more conservative liberalism.
Trilling’s liberalism wasn’t terribly complicated. As part of a generation that had dabbled in Communism during the Depression only to recoil at the horrors of Stalinism, he championed U.S. culture in the early years of the Cold War and found value in the basic confluence of democracy and capitalism. Trilling saw little in America that mirrored the monarchical and ecclesiastical spirits of European conservativism, and he was adamantly opposed to the fascist, totalitarian regimes that rose to power during his life. The “liberal imagination” was part of the ongoing Enlightenment project to promote a secular worldview respecting the rights and dignities of the human individual.
What it imagined, in other words, was the free human self—the subject of the nineteenth-century novels that Trilling loved. And the biggest threats to this imagination were the predatory, anti-intellectual social forces that would reduce human existence to a bare common denominator devoid of richness and adaptability. Trilling worried that the minds of his students and readers were being sapped of their power and rocked into complacency by a modern culture of conformism and consumerism.
As a political and cultural critic, he—perhaps counterintuitively—found the greatest promise in literature. It would have been quite easy at the time to dismiss literature as increasingly outmoded, a historical holdover being gradually displaced by vinyl records, feature films, and television shows. But Trilling saw instead the “unique relevance” of literature, which is “the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.”
We might hear an echo of George Orwell’s 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” which wrings its hands about the corruptions of language usage, worrying that a muddled grammar and simplified vocabulary (exemplified by the “Newspeak” Orwell would feature in Nineteen Eighty-Four) led to a paucity of thought. Those who wish to address the complex and difficult modern world need to possess minds capable of holding and assessing and articulating multiple, intersecting ideas.
Trilling also echoes literary critic Cleanth Brooks’s insistence, in his 1947 book The Well Wrought Urn, that the most valuable poems in English literary history feature irony, ambiguity, and paradox—because real life is itself ironic, ambiguous, and paradoxical; we cannot understand the beauty of human experience by oversimplifying it into a set of crude critical dicta.
Those who wish to address the complex and difficult modern world need to possess minds capable of holding and assessing and articulating multiple, intersecting ideas.
In the brilliant opening essay of The Liberal Imagination, “Reality in America,” Trilling develops this point on his own by declaring that Henry James, of all authors, is most relevant for training young minds to grapple with the most challenging issues of modern social and political life. This would have initially struck many of Trilling’s readers as absurd; James’s reputation was that of an aloof, un-American aesthete who preferred European gentility and wrote ridiculously long sentences quite detached from his birth-country’s vernaculars. But James’s prose, as Trilling insisted, exhibits “an extraordinary moral perceptiveness” and “electric qualities of mind.” And those weird, complex sentences are essential to the intellectual value of the narratives; if you can’t follow the narration of a Henry James novel, good luck understanding the military industrial complex or multinational corporate economics.
Perhaps most amusing today is Trilling’s elevation of the novel as the paramount literary genre—a preference that would not have been taken for granted for a literature professor in the 1940s. Rather than an appreciation for the detailed movements of recondite poems, Trilling suggests that an ability to read a complex novel is what is most needed in midcentury America. This move proved prescient; whereas the study of poetry was central to the college English departments of Trilling’s day, the novel—especially as illuminated by its culture-historical context—would take over as the dominant form by the century’s end. If we wish to understand society, Trilling argues, we need to be reading thick fictions that expose the intricate workings of social networks. In his wonderful essay “Manners, Morals, and the Novel,” he declares that “for our time the most effective agent of the moral imagination has been the novel of the last two hundred years.”
Readers of The Liberal Imagination today will, of course, notice many elements that were of its time. For example, Trilling is terrifically enthusiastic about the significance of Sigmund Freud, going so far as to suggest that Freud is the most important intellectual since Aristotle. This in part goes hand in hand with Trilling’s insistence that we focus on complexity and difficulty, reflecting the belief that the human mind is itself irreducibly complex and difficult. Readers might also notice in Trilling’s style his critical, authoritative voice. He often speaks in an assured first-person plural (“we”), confident that his readers share his knowledge and his perspective—a tendency met with some reproach even in his day.
But Trilling remains so appealing because he includes us as part of his set—literate people who care deeply about human intellect and imagination. Trilling didn’t want to congratulate a select society of the cultural elite; he wanted to promote humanity in all its fullness. And he did this through unapologetic intellectualism. He reminded readers of their “moral obligation to be intelligent,” a phrase borrowed from his Columbia mentor John Erskine.
Trilling saw value, even valor, in mental struggle, a word that recurs throughout The Liberal Imagination. Life was not about finding the right answers and sticking by them with a satisfied grin, and he worried that academics in particular had become too occupied with discovering and defending the right ideas—as opposed to fostering the ongoing activity of thought itself. As he remarked near the end of his life, “Mind does not move toward its ideal purposes over a royal straight road but finds its way through the thicket of its own confusions and contradictions.” For those of us working through the thicket, Trilling remains a helpful guide.
Las Vegas Review of Books 