BOOKS
view, most favorably with th at modern celebrant of the tyrant dream
of society and the absurdly autonomous imagination, Franz Kafka. In
what is clearly a self-criticism as well as a criticism of "our time,"
Trilling impotently concludes, "Our judgment of Hawthorne may
have to be that he is not for us today, and perhaps not even tomor–
row." He is, in Nietzsche's phrase, Trilling pointedly adds, "one of the
spirits of yesterday - and the day after tomorrow." In the final analy–
sis Trilling is asserting that his subversive patriarch Nathanie l
Hawthorne is so subversive that he cannot even be heard now. In–
stead, as Nietzsche contends about himself in
Ecce Homo,
thi s
Hawthorne must be born posthumously, in the mind of some ideal
reader of the utopian future, which the untimely critic of the present
despa iringly projects as his specular supplement. This ideal reader is
the reflective offspring of the disintegrating mirror-stage of his latest
critical essay in cultural despair.
477
Obviously we do not here meet Trilling the nostalgic humanist Tanner
portrays, but a Trilling who, entering on the last decade of his life, misreads
Hawthorne's character for the sake of inventing a figure of heroic displace–
ment to mirror his own desperate sense of historical displacement. Placing the
passage just quoted in the context of O'Hara's exhaustive, passionate, apoc–
alyptic appraisal of Trilling, we can hardly fail to realize O'Hara's engage–
ment with Trilling involves a quest for personal salvation. O'Hara is, to be
sure, frank about this. Having prepared an essay in which he "blasted"
Trilling for his "revisions" of Freud in
The Liberal Imagination, Beyond Cul–
ture,
and
Sincerity and Authenticity,
O 'Hara turned later, he says (as he
apparently had not done before), to the crucial collection of essays,
The Op–
posing Self,
and to Trilling's fiction . "Surprisingly" he "felt restored to imagi–
native health and energy," having discovered, as he had not earlier, Trilling's
"generally magnanimous style of mind in dealing with his experiences, his
own abilities and limitations, [and] those of his intellectual opponents." Decid–
ing that "I owed him one," O'Hara decided to make amends by transforming
the essay on Freud into a book on Trilling.
A contribution to the Wisconsin Project on American Writers, edited by
Frank Lentricchia - one of the endless revisionary projects now going on in
the area ofAmerican literary studies, shortly to attain at least an initial syn–
thesis in the new
Cambridge History oj American Literature
-
O 'Hara's pay–
ment of his debt to Trilling takes the form of an "experiment in reading," the
intention of which is to read
all
ofTrilling's writings as one work, and in doing
so "to create" the exemplary image of a mind that, when confronted by the
achievement of another mind , was capable not of "resentful critique alone"
