BOOKS
477
But there is another tendency in contemporary criticism to which
Trilling's achievement impliciLly speaks: the tendency
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deconstruct
and disassemble works of literature in order
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discover the linguistic
elements of which they are composed. This view of literature rests
upon a radical skepticism, if not nihilism, about meaning and reality
that Trilling would undoubtedly have experienced as adversarial.
Trilling himself, as we have seen, had an abundant capacity for
skepticism. It is simply that skepticism never completely defined his
intelligence, which remained rooted in convictions about virtue,
character, and truth that it had no interest in deconstructing. Trilling's
skeptical intelligence served a critical humanism that he questioned
only to test and strengthen.
The early chapters of Chace's book deal with Trilling's uneasy,
ambivalent relation to his being a Jew. Chace reminds us that Trilling
was always sensitive
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the "conditioned" nature of existence and that
Jewishness was one of the conditions of existence, which he apparently
sought
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escape or transcend, though he confessed that he owed
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his
Jewishness his imagination of society. Chace subordinates the theme of
Jewishness to what he considers
to
be a paradox of Trilling's work.
Though Trilling always insisted upon the inescapability of condi–
tions, his own manner is usually transcendental and abstract. Trilling
was a
clerc
in Julien Benda's sense of the word, a man "who speak[s] to
the world in a transcendent manner," even if his message is opposed to
abstraction, system, and the unconditioned view of things. Trilling's
ambivalence towards Jewishness, however, remains a troubling and
interesting question, which Chace does not adequately address, again
because he is distant from the experience.
Trilling was only one of a number of New York Jewish intellectu–
als who needed to liberate themselves from the parochialism of the
world in which they grew up. That world is given to us uncritically in
stories by sentimental Yiddish writers.
It
is given to us critically,
though with affection, by Alfred Kazin in
Walker in the City.
I don't
know much about the particular circumstances of Trilling's early life,
so I may be wrong to extrapolate from what I know of the lives of other
writers of Trilling's generation and of my own experience. The world
of our fathers may have valued intellectual ambition, but it did not
provide adequate conditions to foster either the intellect or the creative
imagination . (I am not referring simply to the obstacle of anti–
Semitism that lay in the path of the Jewish intellectuals of Trilling's
generation.)
It
is, of course, true that a writer may later find in the
circumstances of his early life the subject of his art, as Joyce did in the
