Criticism and Society

Of all the great English-language literary critics of the last century, it was probably Lionel Trilling who wrote most extensively on the question of why literature matters to society. In F. R. Leavis’s work this theme is implicitly treated in his close attention to literary texts; but Trilling’s criticism is more explicit in its examination of the relations between the self and society as they are mediated through the reading and writing of literature. As Adam Kirsch rightly points out, Trilling did not devote himself to explicating the work of difficult modernists. For all his writing on the significance of modernism to society, his attention turned more often to the great nineteenth-century writers. In the nineteenth-century novel he saw represented most powerfully the human self ’s simultaneous resistance to and yielding to society, and abstract concepts being scrutinised and developed by their placement in a testing actuality. This dialectical structure informs Trilling’s best-known critical concept, namely ‘moral realism’, and its relation to ‘the liberal imagination’. For Trilling, the liberal mind is one that favours difficulty, complexity, possibility, variousness; and yet it is also susceptible to a grand and aloof disposition towards moral coerciveness. The liberal mind is apt shut itself away from those difficult conditions of reality which compel it to question itself and develop fruitfully towards the recognition of new moral distinctions.

The quality of ‘moral realism’ acknowledges this danger; it enables novelists to represent idealism being tested by an ‘appropriate actuality’.¹ ‘Appropriate’ here means, I think, those conditions of life which highlight the possibility of ‘ambiguity’ and ‘error’ in any idea without at the same time diminishing its ‘pride’ and ‘beauty’.² These terms come from Trilling’s essay ‘The Princess Casamassima’, in which he argues that James’s ‘moral realism’ derived from his capacity to ‘love’ his characters. The word ‘love’ here alerts us to Trilling’s abiding concern with the shaping of ideas by emotions. Morality and politics, for Trilling, cannot be considered independently from emotions, which is one reason why imaginative literature is so important for our understanding of society. Kirsch is useful and persuasive when he considers this feature of Trilling’s writing, as he does for much of his finely appreciative study. And yet it does not lie at the heart of his understanding of why Trilling ‘matters’ to us today. I will first briefly try to summarise the main points of Kirsch’s argument, not only to show what is illuminating in them but also as a means of explaining why I find disappointing his central contention about the worth of Trilling’s criticism.

Kirsch begins by addressing the very pertinent question of whether Trilling’s high valuation of the moral importance of literature can be so relevant to contemporary society, where literature does not hold so central a place in the cultural discourse as it did in the middle of the twentieth century. He suggests that Trilling’s value for us now lies in our sight of the intelligence and passionate equanimity which he brings to his criticism. That is to say, as readers, we thrill to the activity of Trilling’s self responding to the literature with which he engages: we respond to him as a writer rather than simply as a critic. With some persuasiveness, Kirsch argues – with recourse to Trilling’s diaries – that Trilling did not view his relative failure as a novelist with the degree of regret certain critics have imputed to him, and that he did not see literary criticism as a dismal minor relation to creative writing. Nevertheless, Kirsch holds, Trilling’s efforts as a novelist helped him to understand some of the difficulties which novelists face in representing societies, and by writing primarily non-fictional critical prose Trilling preserved himself from assuming an isolated, adversarial position towards society, as many major American novelists of the era did.

Kirsch proceeds to argue that Trilling’s thoughts on the liberal imagination should not be read as a symptom...