482
PARTISAN REVIEW
which the object itself is the model and the artist [the artist as critic] the per–
sonal example"? Having referred in
Sincerity and Authenticity
to Sartre's
La
Nausee,
in which "the protagonist Roquentin, at the end of his dairy of queasy
despair, permits himself to entertain a single hope ... that he may write a
story which will be 'beautiful and hard as steel and make people ashamed of
their existence' ," Trilling adds: "The authentic work of art instructs us in our
inauthenticity and adjures us to overcome it." It is not farfetched to ubstitute
"criticism" for "art" in this imperative declaration of the triumph of the doc–
trine of authenticity over the doctrine of impersonnality, a doctrine Trilling
associates with a calculated "devaluation of sincerity" in the relationship of
artist and society. Implied in the creation of a persona by the artist - this be–
ing a stage, so to speak, in the movement toward the authentic relation be–
tween the artist and society - is the idea that this relation can occur only
when the artist opposes to society an uncompromising, integral selfhood. But
Trilling, who had in his essay on Jane Austen's
Mansfield Park
in
The Op–
posing Self
first perceived the terror of the selfs seeking to transcend
sincerity in an unmitigated desire for authenticity, offers his adjuration to au–
thenticity in his comment on La Nausee through the ironic vision of a
carefully mediated and, in the best sense of the term, humane, selfhood that
resisted the apocalypse of authenticity in the name of civilization.
Summarizing the basic "motive and work" of Trilling, O'Hara dubs
Trilling a "critic of critics," the opposer of the opposers, and "unmasker" of
the "unmasked." In this role "he wrote himself into American literature as its
subversive patriarch, whose texts were ironically structured as object
lessons, parables for all pharisees and radicals." But we may not be content
to believe that O'Hara's elaborate unmasking of Trilling, although it is a
challenging and significant effort to effect a mediation between an unmasker
£l·om the mid-century generation and the unmaskers of the end-of-the-cen–
tury generation, has in the image of the subversive patriarch revealed the
face behind the face of Lionel Trilling. This face remains hidden in the com–
plex and troubled body of his critical writings, comprising as they do the story
ofTrilling's long encounter with the mystery of mind, self, and history as this
presented itself to an American intellectual in the twentieth century.
LEWIS P. SIMPSON
