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LIONEL TRILLING
one particular instance of the irrational, violent, and obscene fantasy
which life in general is, as licensing the counter-fantasy of the poet.
In a recent essay,S William Phillips described in an accurate and
telling way the dichotomy that has developed between modern litera–
ture and a rational and positive politics, and went on to explain why,
for literature's sake, the separation must be maintained.
"It
now
looks," Mr. Phillips said,
... as though a radical literature and a radical politics must
be kept apart. For radical politics of the modern variety has
really served as an antidote to literature. The moral hygiene,
the puritanism, the benevolence--all the virtues that sprout on
the left-work like a cure for the perverse and morbid idealism
of the modern writer.
If
writing is to be thought of as radical,
it must be
in
a deeper sense, in the sense not simply of cutting
across the grain of contemporary life but also of reaching for the
connections between the real and the forbidden and the fan–
tastic. The classic example is Dostoevsky ...
The situation that Mr. Phillips describes will scarcely be a
matter of indifference to those of us who, while responding to the
force of the perverse and morbid idealism of modern literature, are
habituated to think of literature and politics as naturally having
affinity with each other. We cannot but feel a discomfort of mind
at the idea of their hostile separation, and we are led to ask whether
the breach is as complete as Mr. Phillips says it is. His description,
it seems to me, so far as it bears upon the situation of the moment,
upon the situation as it presents itself to the practitioner of literature,
needs no modification. But if we consider the matter in a more
extended perspective, in the long view of the cultural historian, it
must occur to us to speculate---even at the risk of being "hygienic"
-whether the perverse and morbid idealism of modern literature
is not to be thought of as being precisely political, whether it does
not express a demand which in its own way is rational and positive
and which may have to be taken into eventual account by a
rational and positive politics.
If
we do ask this question, we will be ready to remind our–
selves that the devaluation of the pleasure principle, or, as perhaps
we ought to put it, the imagination of going
beyond the pleasure
8. "What Happened in the 30's,"
Commentary,
September 1962.
