In Times Like These

Yes, the news is horrible and frightening. In her op-ed column today Gail Collins writes “On the one hand you had Garrison Keillor and Matt Lauer getting canned for sexual harassment. On the other there’s the president of the United States circulating a picture of a Muslim beating up a statue of the Blessed Virgin. About which the presidential spokeswoman said, “Whether it’s a real video the threat is real.” And I haven’t even gotten to the tax bill. Or North Korea. Good grief.” And just a little while ago a notification appeared on my iPhone that Trump had wearied of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and was going to replace him with Pompeo. The Republican majority in an attempt to show its muscles is prepared to pass anything, an accomplishment they have incapable of for the 10 months of the administration. All they have achieved is the confirmation of Neil Gorsuch in an appointment they Republicans unconstitutionally stole from President Obama. This is a government in chaos, in a sharply fractured nation that is headed by a weak and psychologically damaged narcissist with absolutely no regard for anything or anybody beyond his own ego needs and a Congress that is prepared to bully its way to legislation regardless of the moral cost. The times are, indeed, out of joint, and I fear that there is no attempt by anyone in power to set them right.
     And so I am reading still and again Lionel Trilling. I read a great many novels for a complex of reasons that I hope to address in more extended form in my retirement that begins in two weeks, and Trilling’s criticism always comforts and provokes me! In “Manners, Moral, and the Novel” Trilling writes “” . . . that the moral passions are even more willful and imperious and impatient than the self-seeking passions. All history is at one in telling us that their tendency is to be not only liberating but also restrictive.”  I think that what Trilling means here is that the moral passions, the advocacy for progressive social conditions, the reports meant to report and provoke indignation at the bad conditions, even the moral indignations that I expressed above, might only serve the self-gratification of the middle class of which I am, alas, a member. Trilling asks whether instances of moral indignation, “which has been said to be the favorite emotion of the middle class, may be in itself an exquisite pleasure.” Decrying social conditions offers a certain pleasure in being morally correct! To indulge our moral indignation enhances our self-image. Trilling suggests that the novel ought to deal with what he terms moral realism rather than moral activism, the awareness of the multiplicity of manners in society and an awareness of the dangers of the moral life itself as an egotistic indulgence and willful blindness to reality. In a sense the novel assumes the stance of curious observer.
     But I wonder if such a call inspires a sort of quietism and movement away from political (and social) activism. Trilling’s seems to propose an advocacy for intensive self-examination rather than a call for present action. The achievement of a heightened consciousness seems to be his goal rather than a call for an active social movement that might campaign for greater freedoms to a greater number of social groups and individuals within those various social fabric of the United States. Of course, the former—heightened consciousness--doesn’t necessarily exclude the latter—political action--nor vice-versa, but in this essay at least Trilling doesn’t seem to advocate for the necessity for engagement in both self-meditation and social activism. Almost thirty years I argued in Anonymous Toil that the critique of the radical novel by critics associated with such journals as Partisan Review and Commentary (yes, both journals publishing Jewish writers such as Lionel Trilling) supported as the hallmark of literature those ‘realist’ narratives that focused on the development of personal consciousness by singular effort of the individual without regard to the material conditions. Nick Carraway’s growth does not condemn Gatsby. In my work I suggested that the radical novel argued that consciousness arose from the immersion of the individual in material conditions and that consciousness was a product of an immersion in the social: the difference in focus between say, Ira Wolfert’s Tucker’s People and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby; or of Ishma in Fielding Burke’s Call Home the Heart compared to the character in Mailer’s Barbary Shore who says “It is the need to study . . . to ride out the storm . . .to advance to the front of any revolutionary wave, for we alone shall have the experience and the insight so vital for the period.” Trilling knew that literature—art—could change society, but in this essay, he seems to assume a power that already depends on the intellectual power that reads novels. In times such as these I despair . . .