The Liberal Imagination (New York Review Books Classics) | 
 enlarge | Author: Lionel Trilling
Creator: Louis Menand
Publisher: NYRB Classics
Category: Book
List Price: $15.95
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Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 80641
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.2 x 0.8
ISBN: 1590172833
Dewey Decimal Number: 814.52
EAN: 9781590172834
ASIN: 1590172833
Publication Date: September 23, 2008
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Product Description
The Liberal Imagination is one of the most admired and influential works of criticism of the last century, a work that is not only a masterpiece of literary criticism but an important statement about politics and society. Published in 1950, one of the chillier moments of the Cold War, Trilling’s essays examine the promise —and limits—of liberalism, challenging the complacency of a naive liberal belief in rationality, progress, and the panaceas of economics and other social sciences, and asserting in their stead the irreducible complexity of human motivation and the tragic inevitability of tragedy. Only the imagination, Trilling argues, can give us access and insight into these realms and only the imagination can ground a reflective and considered, rather than programmatic and dogmatic, liberalism.
Writing with acute intelligence about classics like Huckleberry Finn and the novels of Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald, but also on such varied matters as the Kinsey Report and money in the American imagination, Trilling presents a model of the critic as both part of and apart from his society, a defender of the reflective life that, in our ever more rationalized world, seems ever more necessary—and ever more remote.
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Anachronistic. And what does Freud have to do with liberalism? November 12, 2008
1 out of 6 found this review helpful
This book wasn't really designed for me, and I wonder whether it was designed for anyone born a quarter-century after it was written. If you read the Louis Menand introduction after you've read the book -- which was my approach -- you'll be puzzled that The Liberal Imagination is apparently anti-Stalinist. If it's pro- or anti-anything, it's pro-Freud. Those of us with a scientific temperament, living as we do under the watchful gaze of Karl Popper, roll our eyes at the first mention of the Austrian psychoanalyst.
But we're openminded folks, and we're eager to learn that Freud, like Marx, has been filtered too many times through popular media. Sadly, if this is what we want, then Lionel Trilling's Liberal Imagination is not the book we want to turn to.
Instead we get chunks like so, on the subject of Freud's interpretation of dreams:
'Freud showed, too, how the mind, in one of its parts, could work without logic, yet not without that directing purpose, that control ofintent from which, perhaps it might be said, logic springs. For the unconscious mind works without the syntactical conjunctions which are logic's essence. It recognizes no because, no therefore, no but; such ideas as similarity, agreement, and community are expressed in dreams imagistically by compressing the elements into a unity. The unconscious mind in its struggle with the conscious always turns from the general to the concrete and finds the tangible trifle more congenial than the large abstraction. Freud discovered in the very organization of the mind those mechanisms by which art makes its effects, such devices as the condensations of meanings and the displacement of accent.'
The writing there is almost so boring that I can't pay attention to how empty the content is. All I see in the content is that Freud locates the roots of art in the logic of dreams. It's not at all clear why Freud was responsible for this: surely people before Freud realized that dreams are often illogical and, in their own way, magical. What does Freud add to this? In Beyond The Pleasure Principle, Freud writes that dreams are a way of conquering our fears; or, as Trilling puts it,
'The dream, that is, is the effort to reconstruct the bad situation in order that the failure to meet it may be recouped; in these dreams there is no obscured intent to evade but only an attempt to meet the situation, to make a new effort of control.'
Is there any good reason to think that this is what dreams "mean"? Is there any reason to think dreams mean anything whatsoever? On this topic, I like Peter Medawar's jab at Arthur Koestler:
'[Writes Koestler,] `There is no need to emphasize, in this century of Freud and Jung, that the logic of the dream ... derives from the magic type of causation found in primitive societies and the fantasies of childhood.' But those who enjoy slopping around in the amniotic fluid should pause for a moment to entertain ... the idea that the content of dreams may be totally devoid of `meaning'. There should be no need to emphasize, in this century of radio sets and electronic devices, that many dreams may ... convey no information whatsoever: that they may just be noise."'
I could multiply without end the examples of Trilling's love for Freud. They all sound anachronistic and faux-scientific -- as, for instance, when Trilling quotes (in "Art and Neurosis") a "Dr. Bergler" to the effect that "there is a particular neurosis of writers, baed on an oral masochism which makes them the enemy of the respectable world...". It is hard to read this today without laughing.
What has all of this to do with liberalism? My best guess is that Trilling is addressing the same point that Saul Bellow made in his Nobel Prize speech: that the artist is in constant revolt against the ideologue. The ideologue dwells in abstractions, whereas the artist lives in the details. In a world where we've become numbers on a government's or a corporation's hard drive, some literary theorists would assert that the age of the individual man is over. Bellow would insist that the novel -- based as it is around characters painted to perfection -- is our last stand against the age of anonymity. Trilling seems to be making the same points, only with substantially less clarity. This lack of clarity isn't especially surprising, since Trilling seems to venerate the dream at the expense of the essay.
Finally, Trilling deals in epigrams which I think are supposed to sound profound, but which instead elicit one "Oh, come on" per page. E.g., his claim in "Manners, Morals, and the Novel" that "The characteristic work of the novel is to record the illusion that snobbery generates and to try to penetrate to the truth which, as the novel assumes, lies hidden beneath all the false appearances." That's it, huh?
I suppose that if you want a particular picture of intellectual life among the anti-communist left in the 1950's, this book is for you. If not, there are better ways to spend your time.
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