Weighty Matters: Why Trilling Matters, by Adam Kirsch. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011, 185 pp., $24.00 hardbound

• Published in: Academic questions 2013-06, Vol.26 (2), p.220-228
• Main Author: Iannone, Carol
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 20th century; Acculturation; Anthologies; Arnold, Matthew (1822-1888); Attitudes; Austen, Jane (1775-1817); British & Irish literature; College students; Cultural identity; Education; Educational Games; Educational Philosophy; English literature; Essays; Ethics; Higher Education; Imagination; Judgment; Lawrence, D H (1885-1930); Literary criticism; Literature; Novels; Politics; Review Essay; Socialization; Trilling, Lionel (1905-1975); University Presses; Young Adults
• ISSN: 0895-4852; 1936-4709
• DOI: 10.1007/s12129-013-9357-4

In a virtual canonization of the primal and nonethical, as Trilling sees it, modern literature seeks liberation not just from middle-class life but from society itself, and even more from our human condition, as he phrases it in The Experience of Literature.5 Further, Trilling is open about his own agreement with the harsh and disparaging view of ordinary existence that he maintained modern literature repudiatedof the dullness, the passivity, the acquiescence in which we live most of our lives,6 again, from The Experience of Literature, and of the awful boredom and slow corruption of respectable life that is depicted by such writers as Andr Gide.7 When Trilling observes in modern literature a bitter line of hostility to civilization itself, he does not flinch from elaborating in detail: its order achieved at the cost of extravagant personal repression, either that of coercion or that of acquiescence; its repose otiose; its tolerance either flaccid or capricious; its material comfort corrupt and corrupting; its taste a manifestation either of timidity or of pride; its rationality attained only at the price of energy and passion.8 In a particularly startling, even puzzling passage in this essay, Trilling relishes the suggestion in modern literature of losing oneself to the point of self-destruction, of surrendering oneself to experience without regard to self-interest or conventional morality, of escaping wholly from the societal bonds, as a temptation to a certain kind of fulfillment.9 Thus, in Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness, Trilling calls the station agent Kurtzwho undergoes a 5Lionel Trilling, The Experience of Literature: A Reader with Commentaries (New York: Holt, Reinhardt, and Winston, 1967), 326. Trilling insists that we do not take this to be a defeat, rather a kind of terrible rebirth: at his latter end the artist knows a reality that he had until now refused to admit to consciousness.11 The essay on Mansfield Park was written some years before On the Teaching of Modern Literature, but its along these lines that we might place Trillings disdain for Fanny Price. Since so much of the modern sensibility has been cultivated to favor the rebel, the subversive, the outcast, the stranger, the voluptuary, the sensualist, the anti-hero in general as it came to be called, such a traditionally virtuous and unironically presented heroine as Fanny Price can look to a modern reader to be not good, but goody-goody, overtly virtuous and consciously virtuous, as