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"postmodern" age - as much or more attention is being given to the tensions
in American life and though expressed by the Concord Sage as is being given
to their expression in Trilling. Indeed in the decade just ended, the decade
marking the centennial of Emerson's death, in books like B.
L.
Packer's
Emerson's Fall: A New Interpretation oj the Major Essays,
Joseph
L.
Kronick's
American Poetics oj History: From Emerson to the Moderns
and
Richard Poirer's
The Renewal oj Literature: Emersonian Reflections,
we
have encountered a philosopher and literary and cultural theorist who is rel–
evant not merely to the historical moment in which we live but is a partici–
pant in it. Meanwhile, the question ofTrilling's relevance has been raised by
Mark Krupnick in
Lionel Trilling: The Fate oj Cultural Criticism.
The dis–
cussion continues in the studies by Stephen
L.
Tanner and Daniel
T.
O'Hara.
Any comparison of these studies must of course take into account the
strict limitations imposed on Tanner by the format of the Twayne series.
O'Hara, on the other hand, has had the fj'eedom to write the longest, most
detailed explication ofTrilling yet published. Accommodating to the restricted
space allowed him, Tanner has foregone a "systematic explication" of "subtle
variations and detailed qualifications" in the individual writings, and, with the
purpose in mind of illuminating Trilling's "distinctive achievement," has placed
his emphasis on the development of his "central concepts." But a more
significant limitation in Tanner's study is one tl1e author has imposed himself:
an adherence to Trilling's own debatable principle ofliterary inquiry, which
held that "objectivity" originates in "a programmatic prejudice in favor of the
work or the author being studied." He has also kept in mind, Tanner says,
that Trilling was primarily a cultural, not a literary, critic, who, more con–
cerned with the "quality oflife" than "perceptions about literature," asked to
bejudged by this concern.
In
makingjudgment about Trilling, therefore, the
reader errs if he follows the tendency to identify Trilling either with
"ideological or practical politics." Interpl'eting him as a fallen political liberal
has been particularly unfortunate. Trilling, Tanner says, was "distinctly apo–
litical," although he adds that in "his literary and cultural views" he was al–
ways "singularly conservative." Tanner does not say whether or not the
same equation may be made in the case of a writer who, on the one hand,
assumes an apolitical attitude and, on the other, a liberal cultural attitude.
Belying his somewhat oversimplified premise about the relationship of
politics and literature in Trilling's thought and emotion, Tanner presents a
concise evaluation of his writings from
Matthew Arnold
(1939)
to
Sincerity
and Authenticity
(1972)
that takes into careful account the complex
ambivalence in Trilling's mature concept of the relationship of self to society.
But lie problem of oversimplification reappears in Tanner's concluding sum–
mary image of Trilling. Calling him "essentially a conservative - a conserv-
