One of the curiosities of literary study today is how thoroughly the titan-critics of the mid-20th century have disappeared. Does any literature graduate student feel he must read The Well-Wrought Urn, The Verbal Icon, The Liberal Imagination, Love and Death in the American Novel, . . .?
A recent essay in The New Yorker helps explain why, and it isn’t flattering to the present. It’s by Louis Menand, and it reviews the work and thought of Lionel Trilling from the explicit perspective of the post-60s generation. For Menand, what characterizes Trilling’s work most of all is its “perilousness” and urgency. Trilling made students think that the choice of Dreiser or James had high stakes, that, in his words, their pairing marked a “dark and bloody crossroads where literature and politics meet.” Menand finds the outlook overblown, “But [Trilling’s] disciples loved the phrase, for it assigned to criticism a mortal mission.”
To Trilling, literary choices signified deep commitments, ideological, moral, and personal ones. Critics routinely thought so at the time, and the form and fate of literary tradition acquired as much drama and investment as did any other cultural happening of the time. Just think how easily Trilling, Fiedler, Irving Howe, and so many others wrote literary criticism at the same time that they produced political commentaries on Stalinism, McCarthyism, anti-communism, and anti-anti-communism.
This draws Menand into a summary characterization: “The Liberal Imagination [Trilling’s 1950 collection] belongs to the age of . . . heroic criticism. It sent literature into battle.”
If that sounds like an honorific, that’s only because of the ellipsis. Here is the parenthesis that Menand places there: “(it feels a little funny just typing the words today).” Funny, that is, to apply “heroic” to “criticism.” To Menand, and to most humanities professors, to assume something heroic about criticism is a bit self-congratulatory and presumptuous, if not arrogant. Indeed, to consider an interpretation of the American novel, for instance, heroic is to verge on all the old forms of cultural imperialism and intolerance.
Menand makes it plain: “I went to graduate school after the 1960s, when the age of heroic criticism was over, and thank God.” What the 60s did, he implies, was bring literature down to the rest of culture, and literary criticism out of the high-stakes zone. Yes, he says, “literature is a report on experience. I just don’t think it’s a privileged report on experience. It is, as Trilling felt in his darker, anthropological moods, simply part of the cultural activity of making meaning.”
There it is, then. It’s all a big meaning-making mix. How you read the final lines of a Keats poem, well, is just how you read a Keats poem. Cleanth Brooks, Paul de Man, and E. D. Hirsch made particular interpretations of “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal” central points in their theories of interpretation. How many people today would hang so much on a literary text?
Menand is satisfied with the development. Back in graduate school, he says, “I didn’t care about the canon, and I didn’t care much about Communism, either.” He likes novels and he wanted to say important things, but the new climate gives “literary criticism a lot less moral work to do.” Does that explain why English departments have grown ever more marginal in the intellectual life of the college campus?
All of this doesn’t mean that literature professors have dropped any moral mission. Instead, they have shifted their moral energies away from literary values and toward sensitive topics of race and sexuality — topics that are more intelligently studied in the social and biological sciences.
