30
LIONEL TRILLING
or the stern pleasures of the moral masculine character. The
possibility of options different from the one that Freud made is
proposed theoretically by two recent books, Herbert Marcuse's
Eros and Civilization
and Norman O. Brown's
Life Against
Death.
With Freud's essay I brought to a close my list of prolego–
menal books for the first term of the course. I shall not do much
more than mention the books with which I introduced the second
term, but I should like to do at least that. I began with
Rameau's
Nephew,
thinking that the peculiar moral authority which
Diderot assigns to the envious, untalented unregenerate protagon–
ist was peculiarly relevant to the line taken by the ethical ex–
plorations of modern literature. Nothing is more characteristic
of the literature of our time than the replacement of the hero by
what has come to be called the anti-hero,
in
whose indifference
to or hatred of ethical nobility there is presumed to lie a special
authenticity. Diderot is quite overt about this--he himself in
his
public character is the deuteroganist, the "honest consciousness,"
as Hegel calls him, and he takes delight in the discomfiture of
the decent, dull person he is by the Nephew's nihilistic mind.
It seemed to me too that there was particular usefulness in
the circumstance that this anti-hero should avow so openly
his
envy,
which TocqueviIle has called the ruling emotion of democ–
racy, and that, although he envied anyone at all who had access
to the creature-comforts and the social status which he lacked,
what chiefly animated him was envy of men of genius. Ours is
the first cultural epoch in which many men aspire to high
achievement
in
the
arts
and, in their frustration, form a dis–
possessed class which cuts across the conventional class lines,
making a proletariat of the spirit.
Although
Rameau's Nephew
was not published until fairly
late in the century, it was known in manuscript by Goethe and
Hegel; it suited the temper and won the admiration of Marx and
Freud for reasons that are obvious. And there is ground for sup–
posing that it was known to Dostoevsky, whose
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