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Saturday, July 16, 2005
Trilling’s Taste, An Instance
David Markson, on trying to find someone to direct his master’s thesis on Under the Volcano:
As a matter of fact I had to wander around the English department knocking on doors looking for someone to approve the project. I remember Lionel Trilling’s dismissal in particular: “What is all this drunkenness all about?” My whole object was to explain just that, obviously, but I decided to find less of a current to buck. Finally William York Tindall gave me a go-ahead.
I’ve written here before about the problem of seemingly inexplicable aesthetic judgments. You can’t explain Trilling’s failure to appreciate a work of such abundant genius as easily as the apparent motivation of the National Association of Scholar’s litany recited by Valentine Cunningham in his “Theory, What Theory?” article: “modernism” and “Chomsky” being among the hieratic keywords infesting the academy in today’s society (25-26). Szyslak’s well-known rejoinder to Simpson captures what is wrong there: “A car-hole!” (2F21) (I should note that Cunningham doesn’t exactly approve of the list.)
The Trilling case is more complex. If only very few readers can appreciate contemporary works which will later be acknowledged to be important, great, what have you, perhaps it is then maximally rational to choose books at random to champion. Though you can’t know for sure what’s going to be judged valuable, you do know that your own taste, constructed as it is by petrifying norms, is no reliable guide. But the value-judgments of the future are built on your own labor, complicating the matter even more.
Freedom is the recognition of the necessity of being wrong, of course, so pecca fortiter would be another worthy approach. Disputing the social construction of certain epistemological claims is one thing; who is willing to dispute the construction of evaluation? How relevant is evaluation to contemporary literary studies? John Ellis’s contribution to the volume has some remarks about on the subject, and I hope to conclude my posts about the book with some comments on them and on how I imagine a volume like Theory’s Empire might fare in the classroom.
Comments
Trilling wrote a story called something like “Of What Time, Of What Place” which was supposedly about the young Allen Ginsberg. In NYC (and SF) the Sixties were already happening during the Forties.
Jack Kerouac also went to Columbia, on a football scholarship.
Trilling published “Of This Time, Of That Place” a few months before Ginsberg arrived as a freshman at Columbia. Kerouac was recruited as a football player but didn’t get along with the legendary coach, Lou Little, and dropped off the team after the first year. He never graduated. But both students got Trilling’s attention, and in his journals, published after his death, they (along with Hemingway) come to represent the creative life of adventure and transgression that he dreamed of for himself but could never quite pursue.
The main thing to be said about taste is that it’s personal and irreplaceable, even though it’s partly formed by the times. It may indeed go badly wrong, especially as critics grow older and less nimble, and can’t really identify with newer literary currents. With the best critics, like Wilson, Trilling, or Leavis, taste is something so consistent that it comes to represent a whole worldview. You can reject it or disagree with it but it makes its claims as a unfied outlook on literature and life, right or wrong. Rejecting it can be another way of learning from it and find your own path.
So Trilling predicted Ginsberg? Who says that literary criticism is not a science?
And he couldn’t find this mystery and adventure in Lowry? The difference in skill between these writers seems immeasurable from this vantage-point (a difference not explainable by psychopharmacology--recall Auden).
Yes, Trilling did predict Ginsberg but, interestingly, not in his literary criticism but in a story. And stories were what he eventually found he could not go on writing, much to his dismay.
I thought Edmund Wilson’s stories were fun. Which major writer was it with the lovely pubes? I forget.
See, that’s what happens when critics write fiction. It’s read as criticism anyway.