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PARTISAN REVIEW
literary critic of the age. In the stroke of an essay, he could send Milton's
stock spiraling downward, consign Shelley to the ash heap, and lift John
Donne's poetry from virtual obscurity to the subject of countless doc–
toral dissertations . Indeed, Leslie Fiedler, one of the symposium partici–
pants, had written such a thesis about Donne before he got down to the
main business of finding archetypal patterns of male bonding and
homoeroticism in American literature. Eliot, in short, was It. Now, for
better or worse, it is Oprah, an afternoon talk-show Czarina, who can
send any book she singles out for special attention soaring onto the best–
seller list. (But she's out of the Oprah Club now, at least on a regular
basis.) Wally Lamb has been a beneficiary of her influence, as has the
more deserving Toni Morrison. But my point remains the same: fifty
years after earnest intellectuals once debated about the state of Ameri–
can culture, that culture has largely forgotten who these voices were and
why what they argued about remains important.
In a sad reminiscence occasioned by the publication of a new collection
of essays by Lionel Trilling, Cynthia Ozick observes-correctly, I fear–
that most graduate students no longer recognize Trilling's name, much less
the title of his most famous book,
The Liberal Imagination.
They can, of
course, spell Foucault's name correctly, and go on to tell you more than
anybody would want to know about how to "interrogate" a text until it
loses all connection to anything resembling the human spirit or imagina–
tion. These last items were, of course, Trilling's specialty, a way of read–
ing that required close attention to the nuances of style and the subtle
shifts of an author's sensibility. Now, I am to ld, theoreticians on the cut–
ting edge concentrate on quite other matters: "voices" that have long been
silenced by racism, sexism, homophobia, cultural imperialism, or the
ubiquitous commodification of the cultural marketplace. As Ozick put it,
in a no-nonsense tone that combines exasperation with literary scolding:
The study of literature no longer strives for what Trilling (in lan–
guage that might invite scoffing) dared to call "moral realism."
Criticism of life is not seen to be the business of criticism. The
demarcations of high culture have given way to the obliteration of
boundaries. The figure has given way to the performer.
Granted, there were fierce debates among those who participated in
the
1952
Partisan Review
symposium, but these contretemps had the
singular advantage of being conducted in plain-speaking English. Little
did Trilling imagine that the new opportunities afforded by the new
American affluence in general and the GI Bill in particular would lead to
a generation of critics more notable for their tin ears and dreary pre-
