Lionel Trilling Quotes

Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal.

Literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.

Where misunderstanding serves others as an advantage, one is helpless to make oneself understood

In the most secret heart of every intellectual ... there lies hidden ... the hope of power, the desire to bring his ideas to reality by imposing them on his fellow man.

We who are liberal and progressive know that the poor are our equals in every sense except that of being equal to us.

Insanity is a direct and appropriate response to the coercive inauthenticity of society ... it is an act, expressing the intention of the insane person to meet and overcome to coercive situation; and whether or not it succeed in this intention, it is at least an act of criticism which exposes the true nature of society

We lived our lives as if life was forever. To live one’s life without a sense of time is to squander it.

I see no reason in morality, why literature should not have as one of its intentions the arousing of thoughts of lust. It is one of the effects, perhaps one of the functions of literature to arouse desire, and I can discover no grounds for saying that sexual pleasure should not be among the objects of desire which literature presents to us, along with heroism, virtue, peace, death, food, wisdom, God, etc.

In any genre it may happen that the first great example contains the whole potentiality of the genre. It has been said that all philosophy is a footnote to Plato. It can be said that all prose fiction is a variation on the theme of Don Quixote.

We live, understandably enough, with the sense of urgency; our clock, like Baudelaire’s, has had the hands removed and bears the legend, “It is later than you think.” But with us it is always a little too late for mind, yet never too late for honest stupidity; always a little too late for understanding, never too late for righteous, bewildered wrath; always too late for thought, never too late for naïve moralizing. We seem to like to condemn our finest but not our worst qualities by pitting them against the exigency of time.

Our culture tends "to regard the mere energy of impulse as being in every mental and moral way equivalent and even superior to defined intention." Instead we should consider "an idea that once was salient in western culture: the idea of "making a life", by which was meant conceiving human existence, one's own or another's, as if it were a work of art upon which one might pass judgment.... This desire to fashion, to shape, a self and a life has all but gone from a contemporary culture whose emphasis, paradoxically enough, is so much on self.

The pretense, the fiction (for it is scarcely more than that) of an attack on the books of chivalry is kept up throughout; but as the story develops and deepens beyond the author's expectations as well as those of the reader, Don Quixote becomes nothing less than a novelistic treatment of the essential nature of human life and man's greatest metaphysical problem: that of illusion and reality. It is a problem as old as Plato-and a good deal older- and as new as Jean-Paul Sartre. It is one that, as Lionel Trilling has rightly observed, has always been the serious novelist's chief concern. In this light, there can no longer be any question as to Don Quixote's "madness" in the ordinary acceptation of that term. In Waldo Frank's finely expressive phrase, he is "a man possessed, not a madman.

Some paradox of our nature leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go in to make them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion.

At the behest of the criterion of authenticity, much that was once thought to make up the very fabric of culture has come to seem of little account, mere fantasy or ritual, or downright falsification. Conversely, much that culture traditionally condemned and sought to exclude is accorded a considerable moral authority by reason of the authenticity claimed for it, for example, disorder, violence, unreason.

Nowadays our sense of history is being destroyed by the nature of our history - our memory is short and it grows shorter under the rapidity of the assault of events. What once occupied all our minds and filled the musty meeting halls with the awareness of heroism and destiny has now become chiefly a matter for the historical scholar.

By most people the 'sense of reality' is understood to be the submission to events and indeed illusion is often salvation.

It is hard to believe that the declaration of antifascism is nowadays any more a mark of sufficient grace in a writer than a declaration against disease would be in a physician or a declaration against accidents would be in a locomotive engineer. The admirable intention in itself is not enough and criticism begins and does not end when the intention is declared.

Man… is an inextricable tangle of culture and biology. And not being simple, he is not simply good; he has… a kind of hell within him from which rise everlastingly the impulses which threaten his civilization. He has the faculty of imagining for himself more in the way of pleasure and satisfaction than he can possibly achieve. Everything that he gains he pays for in more than equal coin; compromise and the compounding with defeat constitute his best way of getting through the world. His best qualities are the result of a struggle whose outcome is tragic. Yet he is a creature of love…

. . . it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation. This does not mean, of course, that there is no impulse to conservatism or to reaction. Such impulses are certainly very strong, perhaps even stronger than most of us know. But the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated and some ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.

Academic time moves quickly. A college year is not really a year, lacking as it does three months. And it is endlessly divided into units which, at their beginning, appear larger than they are — terms, half terms, months, weeks. And the ultimate unit, the hour, is not really an hour, lacking as it does ten minutes.

Orwell clung with a kind of wry, grim pride to the old ways of the last class that had ruled the old order. He must sometimes have wondered how it came about that he should be praising sportsmanship and gentlemanliness and dutifulness and physical courage. He seems to have thought, and very likely he was right, that they might come in handy as revolutionary virtues.

A specter haunts our culture — it is that people will eventually be unable to say, “They fell in love and married,” let alone understand the language of Romeo and Juliet, but will as a matter of course say, "Their libidinal impulses being reciprocal, they activated their individual erotic drives and integrated them within the same frame of reference.” ‘Now this is not the language of abstract thought or of any kind of thought. It is the language of non-thought. But it is the language which is developing from the peculiar status which we in our culture have given to abstract thought. There can be no doubt whatever that it constitutes a threat to the emotions and thus to life itself. ‘The specter of what this sort of language suggests has haunted us since the end of the eighteenth century. When he speaks of the mind being violated by an idea, Mr. Eliot, like the Romantics, is simply voicing his horror at the prospect of life being intellectualized out of all spontaneity and reality.

consistent affection for his characters is what sets Tolstoy apart. Flaubert is equally “objective,” he says, but “Flaubert’s objectivity is charged with irritability and Tolstoy’s with affection. For Flaubert everyone and everything is somehow at fault. For Tolstoy everyone and everything has a saving grace.” “By loving people without cause, he discovered indubitable causes for loving them.” It would be hard to find a more succinct description of the chief work of the Holy Spirit in the human heart.

At the present moment, art cannot be said to make exigent demands upon the audience. That segment of our culture which is at all responsive to contemporary art is wholly permeable by it. The situation no longer obtains in which the experience of a contemporary work begins in resistance and proceeds by relatively slow stages to a comprehending or submissive admiration. The artist now can make scarcely anything which will prove really exigent to the audience, which will outrage its habitual sensibility. The audience likes or does not like, is pleased or not pleased—the faculty of ‘taste’ has re-established itself at the centre of the experience of art.

The aspects of society that humanism most exalts are justice and continuity. That is why humanism is always being presented with a contradiction. For when it speaks of justice it holds that the human condition is absolute; yet when it speaks of continuity it implies that society is not absolute but pragmatic and even anomalous. Its intelligence dictates the removal of all that is anomalous; yet its ideal of social continuity is validated by its perception that the effort to destroy anomaly out of hand will probably bring new and even worse anomalies, the nature of man being what it is. "Let justice be done though the heavens fall" is balanced by awareness of the likelihood that after the heavens have fallen justice will not ever be done again. Hence the humanistic belief, often delusive, that society can change itself gradually by taking thought and revising sensibility. Hence too the humanistic valuation, possibly overvaluation, of discourse and letters.

It is the exceptional novelist today who would say of himself, as Henry James did, that he ‘loved the story as story’, by which James meant the story apart from any overt ideational intention it might have, simply as, like any primitive tale, it brings into play what he called ‘the blessed faculty of wonder’. Already in James’s day, narration as a means by which the reader was held spellbound, as the old phrase put it, had come under suspicion. And the dubiety grew to the point where Walter Benjamin could say some three decades ago that the art of story-telling was moribund. T. S. Eliot’s famous earlier statement, that the novel had reached its end with Flaubert and James, would seem to be not literally true; the novel does seem to persist in some sort of life. But we cannot fail to see how uneasy it is with the narrative mode, which once made its vital principle, and how its practitioners seek by one device or another to evade or obscure or palliate the act of telling.

The characteristic error of the middle-class intellectual of modern times is his tendency to abstractness and absoluteness, his reluctance to connect idea with fact, especially with personal fact. I cannot recall that Orwell ever related his criticism of the intelligentsia to the implications of Keep the Aspidistra Flying, but he might have done so, for the prototypical act of the modern intellectual is his abstracting himself from the life of the family. It is an act that has something about it of ritual thaumaturgy—at the beginning of our intellectual careers we are like nothing so much as those young members of Indian tribes who have had a vision or a dream which gives them power on condition that they withdraw from the ordinary life of the tribe. By intellectuality we are freed from the thralldom to the familial commonplace, from the materiality and concreteness by which it exists, the hardness of the cash and the hardness of getting it, the inelegance and intractability of family things. It gives us power over intangibles and imponderables, such as Beauty and Justice, and it permits us to escape the cosmic ridicule which in our youth we suppose is inevitably directed at those who take seriously the small concerns of the material quotidian world, which we know to be inadequate and doomed by the very fact that it is so absurdly conditioned—by things, habits, local and temporary customs, and the foolish errors and solemn absurdities of the men of the past.

Glück does not write confessionally about madness, suicide, and incest, as though these extreme experiences were a poet’s only access to reality. But she also does not reject the ideal of extremity; she merely denies that it has to be lived in order to be written about. She insists that it is not the content of experience which allows it to rise to the grandeur of myth, but the intensity the artist brings to it. If Glück is “against sincerity,” she is completely enthralled by authenticity, in just the sense that Lionel Trilling intended: an “extreme . . . exercise of personal will.” Her work is a tour de force of this kind of will.

Or again, exegesis of The Waste Land often reads remarkably like the psychoanalytic interpretation of a dream, yet we know that Eliot’s methods were prepared for him not by Freud but by other poets.

But there is a vital difference between them which Charles Lamb saw so clearly in his defense of the sanity of true genius: “The ... poet dreams being awake. He is not possessed by his subject but he has dominion over it.” That is the whole difference: the poet is in command of his fantasy, while it is exactly the mark of the neurotic that he is possessed by his fantasy.

Freud showed, too, how the mind, in one of its parts, could work without logic, yet not without that directing purpose, that control of intent from which, perhaps it might be said, logic springs. For the unconscious mind works without the syntactical conjunctions which are logic’s essence.

Hoffendahl is, in the effect he has upon others, not unlike what is told of Bakunin himself in his greatest days, when he could enthrall with his passion even those who could not understand the language he spoke in. But it is possible that James also had the famous Johann Most in mind. Most figured in the London press in 1881 when he was tried because his newspaper, Freiheit, exulted in the assassination of the Czar.

That gesture was intended as, in itself, a political act. And the editors were not simply proposing that modernist art and literature could be appreciated regardless of one’s politics; they were committed to explaining why an appreciation for modernism was consistent with political progressivism.

The Partisan case was advanced as well by Trilling’s insistence that what commends modernist writing to progressive readers is, precisely, the challenge it often makes to progressive belief: “The contemporary authors we most wish to read and most wish to admire for their literary qualities demand of us a great agility and ingenuity in coping with their antagonism to our social and political ideals.

Even in The Liberal Imagination, a book with a clear polemical purpose, ambivalence about the educative value of literature lurks in the background of many of the essays.

In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.

It is the wide sense of the word that is nowadays forced upon us, for clearly it is no longer possible to think of politics except as the politics of culture, the organization of human life toward some end or other, toward the modification of sentiments, which is to say the quality of human life.

Eager souls, mystics and revolutionaries, may propose to refashion the world in accordance with their dreams; but evil remains, and so long as it lurks in the secret places of the heart, utopia is only the shadow of a dream. And so while the Concord thinkers were proclaiming man to be the indubitable child of God, Hawthorne was critically examining the question of evil as it appeared in the light of his own experience. It was the central fascinating problem of his intellectual life, and in pursuit of a solution he probed curiously into the hidden, furtive recesses of the soul.” Parrington’s disapproval of the enterprise is unmistakable.

But by liberal critics James is traditionally put to the ultimate question: of what use, of what actual political use, are his gifts and their intention?

Dreiser’s literary faults, it gives us to understand, are essentially social and political virtues.

The nature of the falsehood seems to lie in this—that Anderson’s affirmation of life by love, passion, and freedom had, paradoxically enough, the effect of quite negating life, making it gray, empty, and devoid of meaning. We are quite used to hearing that this is what excessive intellection can do; we are not so often warned that emotion, if it is of a certain kind, can be similarly destructive. Yet when feeling is understood as an answer, a therapeutic, when it becomes a sort of critical tool and is conceived of as excluding other activities of life, it can indeed make the world abstract and empty.

John Jay Chapman said of Emerson that, great as he was, a visitor from Mars would learn less about life on earth from him than from Italian opera, for the opera at least suggested that there were two sexes.

A liberal is someone who believes that the right economic system, the right political reforms, the right curriculum, the right psychotherapy, and the right moral posture will do away with unfairness, snobbery, resentment, prejudice, tragic conflict, and neurosis. A liberal is a person who thinks that there is a straight road to health and happiness.

The paradox is that liberalism is concerned with the emotions above all else, as proof of which the word happiness stands at the very center of its thought, but in its effort to establish the emotions, or certain among them, in some sort of freedom, liberalism somehow tends to deny them in their full possibility.

James and Whitman are unlike not in quality but in kind, and in their very opposition they serve to complement each other. But the difference between James and Dreiser is not of kind, for both men addressed themselves to virtually the same social and moral fact. The difference here is one of quality, and perhaps nothing is more typical of American liberalism than the way it has responded to the respective qualities of the two men.

The liberal judgment of Dreiser and James goes back of politics, goes back to the cultural assumptions that make politics. We are still haunted by a kind of political fear of the intellect which Tocqueville observed in us more than a century ago.

For a key perception of the book is that most human beings are not ideologues; intellectual coherence is not a notable feature of their politics. People’s political views may be rigid but they are not necessarily rigorous. They tend to derive from, or to be reflections of, some mixture of sentiment, custom, and moral aspiration.

Unless we insist that politics is imagination and mind,” as he puts it in the essay on Partisan Review, “we will learn that imagination and mind are politics, and of a kind we will not like.

It was his notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood.

No liberal critic asks the question of Dreiser whether his moral preoccupations are going to be useful in confronting the disasters that threaten us.

In the 1970s, the literary critic Lionel Trilling mused that the authentic self, though best left undefined, was most likely the 'distinction between an inner true self and an outer false self'. The internet has created a strict line between these selves, where we understand our extrinsic self to be one crouching inside our smartphone and our intrinsic self to be hiding at home on the sofa. But it is not enough to have these separate selves; it is inauthentic to present one self online and another at home. And so we attempt to break down these boundaries through endless sharing, turning ourselves inside out for the consumption of others. Sharing has become how we socialise.

...perhaps we have never been more than vocal and perhaps soon we can hope to be no more than thoughtful...

The great (American-definition) liberal Lionel Trilling wrote in 1948 that “we must be aware of the dangers that lie in our most generous wishes,” because “when once we have made our fellowmen the objects of our enlightened interest [we] go on to make them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion.”18 Every mother knows the dangers. And when she loves the beloved for the beloved’s own sake, she resists them.

We must be aware of the dangers which lie in our most generous wishes,” Lionel Trilling once wrote. “Some paradox of our nature leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion.”)

exigent

Six Quotes to Get You Through Any Senior Exam. Use Them Wisely”:8 Indian summer is like a woman, ripe, hotly passionate but fickle. —Grace Metalious Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal. —Lionel Trilling I think my favorite weapon is a twenty-dollar bill. —Raymond Chandler The statement credited to Grace

[Chesterfield] introduced an ethical question that Americans continue to grapple with: Is it okay to say one thing while believing another? Or to put it another way: What's more important, honesty or politeness? Lionel Trilling, the literary critic, picked up on this question in 1972 when he published /Sincerity and Authenticity/, in which he defines two distinct terms that he believed Americans had conflated. He describes sincerity as the "congruence between avowal and actual feeling." A sincere work is literature is one in which the author seeks to convey exactly what she's thinking-- your comfort be damned. Authenticity, meanwhile, is a matter of personal integrity: you know what you're being authentic, even if other people don't. It's a virtue that puts little stock in what other people think and instead emphasizes determination and self-awareness. Using this parlance, Chesterfield urged his son to be authentic but never sincere. He wanted his son to be purposeful when he chose to imitate someone. "I would much rather have the assent of your reason to my advice than the submission of your will to my authority. This, I will persuade myself, will happen," he wrote Phillip. He hoped that Phillip would learn to calibrate his behavior in service of his goals. But sincerity, for Chesterfield, was for chumps. He instructed his son to never share his true feelings or thoughts, to never appear vulnerable or emotional. There is no need for sincerity if you have no self to begin with. And Chesterfield had no self, only a resume.

At least at the beginning of our intellectual careers we are like nothing so much as those young members of Indian tribes who have had a vision or a dream which confers power in exchange for the withdrawal from ordinary life of the tribe. Or we are like the adventuring youngest son who is kind to some creature on his travels and receives in reward a magical object. By intellectuality we are freed from the commonplace, from the materiality and concreteness by which it exists, the hardness of the cash and the hardness of getting it, the inelegance and intractibility of family things. It gives us power over intangibles, such as Beauty and Justice, and it permits us to escape the cosmic ridicule which in our youth we suppose is inevitably directed at those who take seriously the small concerns of this world, which we know to be inadequate and doomed by the very fact that it is so absurdly conditioned -- by things, habits, local and temporary customs, and the foolish errors and solemn absurdities of the men of the past.