The Trilling wars

A pretty vicious intellectual spat is erupting around the legacy of one of Fair Alma’s all-time all-stars: literary critic and arch-New York intellectual Lionel Trilling. The casus belli is this essay in the New Yorker, in which Harvard critic Louis Menand embarks on a grueling journey of contextualization: Trilling not only has to be understood through his borderline-crippling sense of self-doubt, Menand argues, but as a thinker inhabiting a certain cultural role that simply doesn’t exist today: that of the “heroic critic,” or the public intellectual willing to do his culture’s heavy lifting, so to speak. Reasonable enough argument, especially since the essay gave some fascinating background on the city’s intellectual climate in the ’40s and ’50s and some relatively shocking details about Columbia’s Butler-era office politics.

But there were passages like these that certainly raised an eyebrow:

And that is what he did. He became an apostle of acquiescence, of what he called “the refusal to be great.” It was a position that had always appealed to him; it’s one of the things he admired about Forster. But now he seemed convinced that every social and personal pathology, from revolutionary violence to narcissism, comes from the refusal to accept that life is conditioned—by the capacities we inherit, by the circumstances we are born into, by the people whose desires conflict with ours, by death. 

Really, now? My expose to Trilling is limited, but the idea that he was hounded into intellectual submission by the spectre of postmodernism (”life is conditioned,” after all) struck me as a little off. And it struck New Republic literary editor Leon Weisletier—who, like Menand, actually took classes with Trilling while studying for a graduate English degree at Columbia—as downright insulting.

His piece in this week’s New Republic is one of the most unsparing intellectual counterattacks I’ve ever read. Wieseltier argues that Trilling is only an anachronism if you’re as morally shallow as Menand—if you believe that, in light of the ”we are what we are” strain of American postmodernism (Rorty, etc.) criticism no longer has the responsibility of diving into the intellectual trenches. To shrug off Trilling, in Wieseltier’s mind, is to resign ourselves to “whateverism,” a point carried home in what must be one of the few chill-inducing sentences in recent criticism:

 His experience in the faculty lounge has taught Menand that “all push becomes pull someday.” All that is left for an intellectual to do is to understand the scene and to make it. There are no causes, there are only careers. But I swear I see pain and confusion and dread almost everywhere. Locally and globally, these are sordid times. Sweet, earnest, smart David Foster Wallace, who was his generation’s model of the consecration to seriousness, just hanged himself. And we should chill? “It makes it seem as though a lot is at stake in getting books right”: nobody will ever become a critic because they want to write sentences like that.

At a conference a couple of weeks ago, Menand said that the only reason he pursued for his Ph.D. at Columbia was to study under Lionel Trilling. So it’ll be interesting to read his response to Wieseltier’s piece, if only to see a so-far fascinating debate on the legacy of a Columbia great continue. Of course, on Wiesletier’s end, it would be constructive to get some explication of exactly what is at stake; indeed, whether it’s possible to even argue that there’s anything at stake without accepting the oppressive “artistic tastes=political results” equation that Trilling apparently abhorred. And it would be great to see this dovetail into a larger diagnosis of criticism in general, especially when “heroic critics” seem to be popping up everywhere nowadays, for better and for worse (Slavoj Zizek and Joseph Massad comes to mind here, actually …). Could be a not-too-vaguely important disputation, with much of the world going to shit and all. So: gentlemen?