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but (unlike the revisionary mind as represented by neo-Marxists, feminists,
deconstructionists,
et
at.)
of "imaginative sympathy." The "master figure"
O'Hara draws on in "creating" Trilling as an exemplary self is the one that
he finds Trilling himself implicitly adopted as his emblem, that of the Wan–
deringJew, who in Trilling's "ironic revision" of the stereotype, O'Hara says,
becomes the "subversive patriarch" of literary ethics. Accommodated to
Trilling's own purposes - which were "ever to dissent from the orthodoxies
of dissent" - the Wandering Jew represents Trilling's "defensive formation"
of a "public persona" derived from the "repressed or unconscious religious
allegory of reading to be discovered in the classic Freudian conception of ego
development." In his "continuing responsiveness to the reality ofloss and
death," Trilling found that "the ego can preserve the imaginative power of
love." Freud, O'Hara says, "was ever Trilling's hero of fate. " The overall
purpose of his experimental reading ofTrilling, he declares (acknowledging
the heavy influence of Harold Bloom) is "to tryout an ethics of criticism
based on aesthetic appreciation of style that would define the essential func–
tion of the writer in the modern world" as Trilling envisions this in such ca–
reers as those of E. M. Forster or, later, Isaac Babel- writers who "serve
as the public figure, however marginal or well connected, for the personal
life." The need for the assertion, or reassertion, of the writer as a public
model is that in the literary realm as we know it today "rapacity and re–
sentment" have "run rampant." O ' Hara hopes "the vision of the Other
traditionally enshrined in literary study, and so rarely practiced now, may
just prove to be subversively efficacious."
In elucidating Trilling's magnanimous vision of the patriarchal Other
O'Hara places more emphasis than any student of Trilling to date on his
"radical ambivalence" about being aJew in America. DefYing Trilling's own
testimony that being aJew was not a basic problem for him, O ' Hara seeks
to buttress his case for a career-long, pervasive influence ofJewishness on
Trilling's quest for identity by "deploying" as a "theoretical category" Sandra
Gilman's study of
Jewish Self-hatred.
At times the influence O'Hara ascribes
to Trilling's Jewish heritage seems extreme, as in his conception ofTrilling's
relation to the image of the Wandering Jew. In a way, O'Hara points out,
this mythical figure was embodied in Trilling's own father, who came to
America from Poland after he "blew some lines at his own bar mitzvah" and
lost his chance for the rabbinate. But O'Hara goes beyond the possibility that
in the image of the Wandering Jew as he witnessed this in his father, Trilling
found a symbol of his own alienation. He contends that Trilling "subtly" de–
rived all of "modern culture from the spirit of his own displaced origins, via
the profoundly repressed ghetto imagery which haunts the margins of all
those 'dark and dubious places' [Trilling's phrase] ofour secularized spiritual-
