Monsters Under Glass
Lionel Trilling, Modernism, and Ambivalence
Near the middle of the 1948 essay collection that made him famous Lionel Trilling remarked on the illiberalism of the great authors of his own time, the literary modernists of the first half of the twentieth century. The paradox of liberalism’s embrace of fundamentally hostile art would be a perplexity for Trilling throughout much of his life as a public intellectual.
if on the other hand we name those writers who, by the general consent of the most serious criticism, by consent too of the very class of educated people of which we speak, are to be thought of as the monumental figures of our time, we see that to these writers the liberal ideology has been at best a matter of indifference. Proust, Joyce, Lawrence, Eliot, Yeats, Mann (in his creative work), Kafka, Rilke, Gide—all have their own love of justice and the good life, but in not one of them does it take the form of a love of the ideas and emotions which liberal democracy, as known by our educated class, has declared respectable.1
Thirteen years later he would revisit this theme in the 1961 Partisan Review essay which opens his 1965 collection Beyond Culture. Musing on the pedagogy of modernism in the university, Trilling addresses certain anxieties about disservices done both to students and the work itself by dissection in the seminar room.
I asked them to look into the Abyss, and, both dutifully and gladly, they have looked into the Abyss, and the Abyss has greeted them with the grave courtesy of all objects of serious study, saying: "Interesting, am I not? And exciting, if you consider how deep I am and what dread beasts lie at my bottom. Have it well in mind that a knowledge of me contributes materially to your being whole, or well-rounded, men."
There is a conservative or reactionary formulation of this misgiving, one that I have occasionally found persuasive myself. What does it mean to have an elite that receives as its literary and philosophical education a teaching that is in some sense hostile to the civilization they are to eventually superintend? We already have reason enough to suppose that these ones will fail to represent the interests of the masses, so the argument goes-why then feed them a literature (in our times of fading readership perhaps television or film might stand in) actively hostile to the lifestyles of the multitude? Writing in late middle age Trilling observed the embourgeoisement of the modern literature he regarded so ambivalently.
More and more as the universities liberalize themselves, and turn their benefice imperialistic gaze upon what is called Life Itself, the feeling grows among our educated classes that little can be experienced unless it validated by some established intellectual discipline, with the resu that experience loses much of its personal immediacy for us an becomes part of an accredited societal activity. This is not entire true and I don't want to play the boring academic game of pretending that it is entirely true, that the university mind wilts and wither whatever it touches. I must believe, and I do believe, that the university study of art is capable of confronting the power of a work of art fully and courageously. I even believe that it can discover and disclose power where it has not been felt before. But the university study of art achieves this end chiefly with works of art of an older period. Time has the effect of seeming to quiet the work of art, domesticating it and making it into a classic, which is often another way of saying that it is an object of merely habitual regard. University study of the right sort can reverse this process and restore to the old work its freshness and force can, indeed, disclose unguessed-at power. But with the works of art of our own present age, university study tends to accelerate the process by which the radical and subversive work becomes the classic work, and university study does this in the degree that it is vivacious and responsive and what is called non-academic.
Then there is the other objection, arguably itself a species of conservative argument, but in the last decade or so primarily associated with the political and cultural left. These writers as racists, fascists, illiberals, this work as their products, so the argument goes, represents something like a cancer in remission or a deposit of poison within the body of the culture. It is something that should not be celebrated, should not be read. Instead it should be excised. Needless to say. I probably want to throw Pound into the fire more than I do any other major author of that century, and yet I wouldn't, and don’t think anybody else should either. I wrote a whole series about a poem that is in many places explicitly fascist. My generation or generations have been called prudish and censorious, charged with an undue investment in the politics of art, of culture.2 We are, I agree to a point, and yet I can’t shake the impression that this is somehow more honest than the old approach of regarding the work as safely contained, entirely neutralized within a well-wrought critique.3
Awaking to a deteriorating political world outside the walls of the library or the university, one discovers that the canon is something like a laboratory in a horror film, the works themselves the monsters suspended in glass tubes, inert for now, but always waiting to break out and attack at a suitably cinematic moment. Who can blame the young for wanting to pull the plug? I’ve been guilty of this impulse myself, even if I never bought the most totalizing version of it. If I reject the impulse (and I certainly do) to burn books, it nonetheless seems important to acknowledge their danger, even if doing so can perhaps over-flatter the capability of the reader.
But then, Urizen and Los do always change places.
What is I suppose at issue here is a question of the seriousness with which art is received. I sometimes find myself in agreement with Dave Hickey’s line on Robert Mapplethorpe’s X Portfolio in The Invisible Dragon that some kind of artistic power may be opaque to the appreciator and transparent to the hostile censor.
Simply, it was their rhetorical acuity, their direct enfranchisement of the secular beholder. It was, exactly, their beauty that had lit the charge and, in this area, I think, you have to credit Senator Jesse Helms, who, in his antediluvian innocence, at least saw what was there, understood what Robert was proposing, and took it, correctly. asp direct challenge to everything he believed in.
Something like this sense of danger is what should always be kept when these works are discussed. We owe it to great works to approach them with open eyes, and not to allow over-familiarity to occlude what is right in front of our faces.
Hickey, Dave. The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty. Los Angeles , CA: Art Issues Press, 1993.
Trilling, Lionel. “The Purpose of a Little Magazine” in The Liberal Imagination
Trilling, Lionel. “On The Teaching of Modern Literature.” Essay. In Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning, 3–30. New York, NY, 1965.
The inclusion of Joyce on this list will seem odd to the contemporary reader, who generally receives his project as basically in line with the values of liberal modernity. The older model of reception to Joyce (and Trilling would have been part of the first generation to read Ulysses) regarded him as closer to Pound or the Elliot of the Waste Land than we, who for whatever our many deficits in other domains of learning, probably do have a better understanding of what Joyce was about.
By “my generation” I mean primarily younger millennials and the first part of Gen Z, the ones who came of age before the pandemic.
I am here responding perhaps less to the specific academic culture, which did IE; pitch D.H. Lawrence down a few levels from Trilling’s era for sexism and general fash-adjacency, and more to the general climate of the culture when I was growing up. There really was a sort of complacency around politically extremist work, an attitude that things like fascism were fundamentally of the past and would never trouble us again, that they had been denatured forever in the base of the end of history. Paul Franz remarked the other day that it almost seemed better to come of age in the last fifteen years or so, when some sense of urgency had been restored. Some part of me agrees, another dissents. I hope to write more about this in the future.