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CULTURE
433
antithesis than anyone that is explicitly stated in any single essay
emerges: the self conceived of as an almost irresistible force, and
society, or culture, conceived of as an almost immovable object. This
antithesis, self and society, is familiar enough, and in
Beyond Culture
it is often put in conventional terms, e.g., society swallowing the individ–
ual in the essay on Freud, or the Faustian individual declaring his free–
dom from society in "On the Teaching of Modem Literature." In fact,
in the majority of the essays, society or culture is seen as inescapable
fate. Still that autonomous self keeps cropping up, like the genie out of
the bottle; and in the book in its totality two master spirits, each with a
new persona and each with a new potency, are at work. Whichever
proves the more potent Mr. Trilling sees-and this is the real
«ubi sunt"
of the book-a failure of the critical intelligence, mind become a "poor
gray thing."
Although I would agree with Mr. Trilling that literary criticism
has become "fatigued," I seriously doubt that mind has become or is
becoming a "poor gray thing" in modem culture; in fact it could
be
argued that it is operating with an unparalleled brilliancy and fecundity.
Neither do I agree with Mr. Trilling on the nature of many of the
ambiguities of the present age (one of the many solaces of the present
day is that each person is free to have his or her own set of ambiguities).
Nevertheless,
Beyond Culture
is an accurate sounding board for one
fascinating, perplexing and baffling aspect of modem American culture,
namely, that it is both, and simultaneously, dynamic and deterministic,
so
much so that one does not know where or how to have it. And one
of the keys to the puzzle is, as in so many things, the contemporary
college and university student.
Mr. Trilling often refers, as do most teacher-critics these days, to his
students, and sometimes with some poignancy:
What my students might reveal of their true feelings to a
younger teacher they will not reveal to me; they will give me
what they conceive to be the proper response to the official
version of terror [i.e., Dostoevsky, Kafka et. al.] I have given
them.
Of
the many ironies in the university world that have come into being
in the nineteen sixties, none is more ironic than the fact that whereas
the big question used to be in the mind of the student: "What does
he
really want?", the key question is now in the mind of the professor:
"What do
they
really think?" Today the American university student is
in a relation to the professoriate, and the academic administration,
