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PARTISAN REVIEW
luxury of "an idea in modula tion ." In
T he Midd le of the Journey,
the liberal Laskell is seen by the impress ive Maxim as the last of a
dying breed , even compli cit in its own extincti on . ("The supreme act of
the humanistic critical intelli gence-it perceives the cogency of th e
argument and acquiesces in the fact of its own extinction .") But the
death senten ce has turned out to be p remature. "Th e idea in modul a–
tion " h elped sp are American intell ectuals as a class from the insid ious–
ness of Stalinism .
It
lOok the sophisti cated left-w ing Eu ropeans much
longer to learn the lesson , and it is a ques tion wh ether they h ave full y
learned it ye t.
What is the source of " the idea in modul a tion " in
Th e Midd le of
the Journ ey?
Chace accura tely notes th at " the novel turns, in its
complexity, upon dea th . Dea th imitates, conditions and g ives ch aracter
to all of its main events. The peopl e in the novel approach death in
man y different ways, and in their encounter with it in vite understand–
ing of their selves. Death delineates and judges them. T hus it stands
central lO everything, subsuming politi cs as it su bsumes all o ther
phenomena, but do ing so with suppl eness and n ever with the morbi d–
ity on e might imagin e it possessing."
Trilling saw a certain kind of politi cal asp irati on , h aving its
proven ance in the Enli ghtenment and findin g its contemporary
apotheosis in Stalinist " radi calism " as an a ttemp t to den y the condi–
tioned ch aracter of existence (our finitude, our mortality) in a dream,
or worse, a doctrine of utopian fulfillment.
It
is not hard to choose th e
side of wisdom if the po lar ities are finitude and infinity, mortality a nd
immortality. In a century wracked and di sgraced by politi cal abso lu–
tisms that have arrogated the religious dream of infinite poss ibility and
immortality, the view of m an as conditi on ed is a no bl e view. T he
trouble arises when the po lar ities exclude alterna ti ves . Dea th may be a
premature p ersp ecti ve. The young grow old and di e, but they are no t
onl y entitl ed lO the illusion that th ey will li ve forever, such an illusion
may inspire the will to p roduce, to achi eve, even to transcend . Indeed it
is precisely the encounter, the confli ct between the will to achieve (and
even transcend ) on the one side, and the limiting, thwarting conditions
o f existence on the o ther, that makes for the sense of tragedy.
If
one
must surrender to conditions (as one inevitabl y must), the tes t of
h eroism , o f courage is in the cap acit y one h as lO p ersist aga inst those
conditions and the grace with whi ch one fin all y su bmits lO them.
This persp ecti ve on the youthful radi cal dream o f transcendence
should not, however, be confl a ted with Sta linism-though youthfu l
radicalism, persisting unmodified in o ld age, may sys tema ti ze and
