| Unlike a prevalent nineteenth-century Arnoldian perspective that saw culture as the perfection of a common legacy, Lionel Trilling's passionate, allusive quarrel with culture came as he pitted the autonomous self against a culture that he increasingly characterized as homogenous and repressive. His work presented a self that thrived best "in perception and judgment... beyond culture," which he defined comprehensively as a people's art, socio-economic organization, customs, thought and beliefs but which he more often identified with "bland tyranny, " seductive thought, "the ugly actualities of rule," shibboleths and a denial of complexity. Despite his own intentions to cultivate consciousness, sensibility and a loyal opposition, Trilling's self remains unaffiliated with culture.;More recent cultural pioneers, such as Marshall Sahlins, Jane Tompkins, and Michel Foucault, offer ways to account for cultural diversity, historical specificity and change, but in Trilling's account, culture emerges as a rhetorical construct, repressive, abstract, universal, rarefied, unable to engage permutations of consensus and discord.;Trilling harbored doubts about his own intellectual "diffidence," doubts akin to those he found in the Russian writer Isaac Babel, a man "with spectacles on his nose and autumn in his heart." Against these doubts he counterposes an aesthetic based on Joycean epiphany, which he describes as "the shock of story." But Trilling's aesthetic frays as he confronts a culture that he sees as valorizing collective epiphany, first the hyper-rationalistic utopian schemes of the 1930s and later the hyper-egotistical concerns of the 1960s. Trilling constructs shifting liberal, nineteenth-century, and humanistic "selves" that rest on rhetorical assertions of stoic fortitude and chameleon empathy rather than the texts to which he alludes. I trace his interactions with colleagues in the pages of The Partisan Review and in dialogue with the cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz. While relying on the Uniform Edition of the Works of Lionel Trilling, I also gloss several uncollected essays and earlier versions of the collected essays, including those on Rudyard Kipling, Robert Frost and "The Repressive Impulse.". |
