190
LIONEL
TRILLlN&
toward self-definition and self-affirmation. Such an ideal makes a
demand upon society for its satisfaction: it is a political fact.
What I have called the spirituality of modern literature can
scarcely be immune from irony, and the less so as we see
it
ad–
vancing in the easy comprehension of increasing numbers of people,
to the point of its becoming, through the medium of the stage and
the cinema, the stuff of popular entertainment- how can irony
be
withheld from an accredited subversiveness, an established moral
radicalism, a respectable violence, an entertaining spirituality?
But
although the anomalies of the culture of the educated middle class
do indeed justify an adversary response, and perhaps a weightier
one than that of irony, yet a response that is nothing but adversary
will not
be
adequate.
We often hear
it
said nowadays, usually by psychoanalysts and
by writers oriented toward psychoanalysis, that the very existence of
civilization is threatened unless society can give credence to the
principle of pleasure and learn how to implement it. We under–
stand what is meant, that repressiveness and oppression will be lessened
if the principle of pleasure is established in our social arrangements,
and we readily assent. Yet secretly we know that the formula does
not satisfy the condition it addresses itself to--it leaves out of ac–
count those psychic energies which press beyond the pleasure principle
and even deny it.
It is possible to say that-whether for good or for bad-we
confront a mutation in culture by which an old established propor–
tion between the pleasure-seeking instincts and the ego instincts is
being altered in favor of the latter.9
If
we follow Freud through the
9. I said something to this effect when, in
"On
The Modern Element of Modern
Literature"
(Partisan Review,
January-February 1961), I commented on the
stat
WI
of tragedy in our culture. I ventured the opinion that the tragic mode
is not available to us-this was not, I said, a mark of our spiritual inferiority
-becaWie we do not think of the degradation or downfall of the protagonist
as a deplorable event: what he loses in the worldly way we judge to be
well lost for the sake of the reality and truth, the ultimate self-realization,
which we understand tragedy to bring. I based my generalization on our
response to the fate of Kurtz in
Heart of Darkness
and Aschenbach in
Death In Venice.
Lionel Abel, in the brilliant chapter on tragedy in his
Metatheatre,
says that a tragedy-a real tragedy, of which Mr. Abel believes
there are only a very few-must have for its protagonist a "daemon," that is
