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PARTISAN REVIEW
TRILLING IN THE TRADITION
LIONEL TRILLING. By
Stephen
L.
Tanner.
Twayne Publishers.
$19.95.
LIONEL TRILLING: THE WORK OF LIBERATION.
By Daniel
T.
O'Hara. University of Wisconsin Press.
$17.50.
Although at the time of his death in
1975
one did not doubt that
Lionel Trilling would be memorialized in the loose canon ofAmerican writers
represented by the Twayne United States Authors series, there was reason
to suppose that "postmodern" cultural revisionism would soon post him as just
another academic irrelevancy. Yet, while he has been condemned as a turn–
coat Thirties Marxist, who later employed a corrupt Freudianism to support
a "sterile humanism," Trilling's pertinence to American intellectual history–
or, to put this another way , to the history of American intellectualism - has
remained alive in the last two decades of the century. The reason may not
be too far to seek. More than his older and more famous contemporary, Ed–
mund Wilson - more indeed than any American intellectual since Ralph
Waldo Emerson - Trilling directly embodies, both in his life and his writings,
the fundamental tension in American culture: the humanistic moral drama,
the dramatic dialectic, of mind, self, and history.
As
in the case of the Emer–
sonian representation of this drama, however, the Trilling representation in–
volves us in the drama only to the degree our poetic or imaginative capacity
continues to respond to it; and now, it has become apparent, this capacity
may be lapsing.
The names of the most cogent exemplars of capable response, Emer–
son and Trilling, are at present invoked far less often than the names of
Martin Heidegger, Paul de Man,jacques Den-ida, Roland Bartl1es, and other
European philosophers and literary theorists. Hardcore American defenders
of the humanistic manner of thought and feeling charge that the European
intellectuals have influenced American critics to undertake a systematic and
remorseless deconstruction of what is deemed for various reasons to be an
established conspiratorial interpretation of mind, self, and history in American
culture. Meanwhile, it is ironically apparent that at the beginning of the last
decade of this century - the first decade, some would have it, of a totally
