“Dreiser and James: with that juxtaposition we are immediately at the dark and bloody crossroads where literature and politics meet.”
Lionel Trilling, “Reality in America”[1]
Despite the array of “turns” currently underway in literary studies—aesthetic, affective, transnational, new material, and ecological, to name some of the more prominent examples—one will not find a “turn to politics.” None is needed, of course, because literature and politics, to use a toned-down version of Trilling’s image, often intersect. In fact, since the 1980s, thinking about “the politics of literature” has come to seem something of a methodological requirement, hence why some have criticized the more aesthetic-oriented turns and approaches such as surface reading for not being sufficiently “political.”[2] But from what, exactly, are such approaches allegedly turning? And if politics should remain within the purview of literary scholars (as I firmly believe it should), in what ways and to what ends should it be examined? Put another way: do our current methods capture the full reality of political life?
It is here that revisiting the work of Lionel Trilling can be useful since his careful distinctions and unabashed assertions about the role of literature in a liberal democracy can at the very least help defamiliarize our own approaches to literature and politics. Yet there are also signs that his methodological framework might be poised for a timely revival. One of Trilling’s major laments in The Liberal Imagination (1950) was the way that mid-century critics, influenced by V. L. Parrington’s earlier work, had become suspicious of any writer—say, a Henry James—whose literary style exhibited any trace of artistic aloofness or unconcern with pressing social issues—or “reality,” as Trilling termed it. “In the American metaphysic,” Trilling wrote, “reality is always material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant” (13). A Henry James was therefore not only out of place, but patently irresponsible. For Trilling, such an approach to literature was informed by ardent, though largely unexplored and unarticulated, ideals, and left little room for what he called “ideas,” or what might be better described as “moral and philosophical complexity.” “[I]n the liberal criticism which descends from Parrington,” he asserted, “ideals consort happily with reality and they urge us to deal impatiently with ideas—a ‘cherished goal’ forbids that we stop to consider how we reach it, or if we may not destroy it in trying to reach it the wrong way” (21). He thus ends The Liberal Imagination with an essay titled “The Meaning of a Literary Idea” in which he examines how “literature, by its very nature, is involved with ideas” (282) and therefore shares striking affinities with philosophy. His hope was that literature would help with “putting under some degree of pressure the liberal ideas and assumptions of the present time” (xvi), not to critique them out of existence, but so American political society would be more self-aware and deliberate about the ideas it embraced. Normative commitments, after all, are part of reality, too.
Much has changed, of course, since Trilling wrote The Liberal Imagination, but the critical world he described may sound eerily familiar. Few literary scholars today would resort to an image as histrionic as a “dark and bloody crossroads” to characterize the relationship between literature and politics, but a similarly palpable sense of urgency about how our work bears on collective life continues to animate the discipline. Meanwhile, critical approaches that emphasize aesthetics or formalism have become the new Henry James, irresponsible in their turn away from what really matters while ascendant interests in thing theory, new materialism, and embodiment suggest a continued metaphysical preoccupation with “reality as material reality.” And the enduring omnipresence of ideological critique often seems driven more by what Trilling called “ideals” than by ideas. As Rita Felski recently put it, “the authority of critique is often conveyed implicitly—not through propositions and theses but via inflexions of manner and mood, timbre and tone.”[3] Almost a century since Parrington published Main Currents in American Thought, elements of his framework still seem very much with us.
In fact, Parrington’s guiding metaphor of collective life—the current—has much in common with the assumptions that underlie ideological critique. As Trilling argued, the image of “the current” implied a uniformity that was largely nonexistent. “A culture,” he wrote, “is not a flow, nor even a confluence; the form of its existence is struggle, or at least debate—it is nothing if not dialectic” (9). Today—where, as one prominent literary scholar puts it, “politics is inseparable from critique”[4]—we risk a similar simplification, for critique presumes that the political world is largely monolithic and consensus-driven, hence the need for literary scholars to uncover and highlight instances of either complicity or dissent in a struggle that is always inherently Manichean.[5] But political life, especially in a democracy, has always been fundamentally defined by disagreement and strife and its struggles have been far more complex and multi-layered than the dualistic framework of critique often allows us to see. Individuals simply do not agree on matters of profound moral and collective import, which is why, for Trilling, the crossroads between literature and politics were associated, even if metaphorically, with darkness and blood.
Recognizing a more complex political reality does not mean abandoning critique. But it does require literary scholars to pry apart “politics” and “critique” somewhat so that we can begin to cultivate a more sustained and nuanced relationship with the ideas that animate our collective life and foster more productive dialogue with other disciplines. In his recent call for literary scholars to move beyond form, an interest largely internal to literary studies, Michael Clune argues that we “should explore the resource that has always interested people beyond our field: literary ideas.”[6] Clune does not mention Trilling, but it is hard not to hear the echo of that distant critic, who in “The Meaning of a Literary Idea” called for a similar critical reorientation and who even suggested “that the very form of a literary work . . . is itself an idea” (283). Perhaps the evolution of literary criticism is more cyclical than linear.
Nevertheless, there have been intellectual developments since Trilling’s time that have gone largely unexplored by literary critics: namely, the transformation of political liberalism in the work of philosophers such as John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, Martha Nussbaum, Alessandro Ferrara, and others. By casting aside, or outright ignoring, their work (and the liberal tradition as a whole), literary scholars have left a vast trove of ideas about the intersections between political and moral experience, ideas that could open up profound new possibilities for the study of literature and politics, virtually unexamined. We may not need a turn to politics, but a turn to liberalism seems well overdue. Attending to the liberal tradition, however, requires that we understand morality not in the dualistic sense of a hegemonic discourse that requires critique, but as an inescapable element of human reality necessary for reconciling the competing perspectives and deeply held, but often-divergent, beliefs that individuals inevitably hold—which, after all, is what politics fundamentally is.[7] Yet just because morality is a part of human reality does not mean it is “real” in the sense of “hard,” “resistant,” or “unpleasant,” something to be wielded as a weapon against one’s antagonists. Rather, it entails the ideas that give shape to human life but whose content, interrelations, and implications always remain somewhat indistinct. “The moral realm,” as Dworkin recently described it, “is the realm of argument, not brute, raw fact,” making morality, at its core, “an interpretive enterprise.”[8]
Such an enterprise should be familiar territory for literary critics, particularly since literature, as Trilling reminds us, “is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty” (xxi)—or what we might simply call “the moral life.” A revitalized approach to literature and politics must not simply invoke, but take more adequate stock of the ideas—equality, liberty, justice, for starters—that, both political and moral by nature, animate individual and collective existence by informing our often-hazy and underarticulated conceptions of the right and the good. How these ideas fit together and play out in our daily lived experience is rife with all the complexity and difficulty Trilling mentions, and thus requires adept interpreters willing to dive into obscurity and darkness—the very atmosphere that has always pervaded the crossroads between literature and politics.
