 | | a culture's hum and buzz of implication. I mean the whole evanescent context in which its explicit statements are made. It is that part of a culture which is made up of half-uttered or unuttered or unutterable expressions of value. They are hinted at by small actions, sometimes by the arts of dress or decoration, sometimes by tone, gesture, emphasis, or rhythm, sometimes by the words that are used with a special frequency or a special meaning. They make the part of culture which is not art, or religion, or morals, or politics, and yet it relates to all these highly formulated departments of culture.
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These fine nuances and gradations of social behavior as elaborately detailed in the texts about which Trilling wrote and lectured, defined his task as a literary critic, and they remained his primary concern when he frequently ventured beyond literature into the broader, more inclusive realm of cultural criticism. In Trilling's hands, the text becomes an occasion for moral discrimination both by author and reader. But while the text is thus saved from reductionistic formalism (remember the hegemony of the Anglo-Catholic New Criticism through much of Trilling's career), it remains oddly confined to matters of social propriety and individual worth. Trilling was never really a political critic as would be more rigorously understood by a Georg Lukaás or a Terry Eagleton: his early departure from Marxism toward a self-critical form of liberalism marks his work as a long series of struggles between the modern conscience, informed as it is by the dark knowledge of the cultural super-ego, and the exigent stuff of modern history.
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How clear this becomes in
Sincerity and Authenticity
(1972), a true work of the center, in which the blandishments of authentic personal experience are finally rejected in favor of the admittedly old-fashioned concept of the sincere self whose personal truth is achieved through a public role. It is no accident that authenticity is aligned in the book's last chapter to a seminal work of Postmodern theory, Foucault's
Madness and Civilization
. Against the profoundly misguided view "that madness is liberation and authenticity," "each one of us a Christ," the refined Trilling, without the slightest irony, celebrates the real Christ's richly social career "of undertaking to intercede, of being a sacrifice, of reasoning with rabbis, of making sermons, of have disciples, of going to weddings and to funerals."
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Such Christian usages are rare in Trilling, but then again, Jewish references in his criticism are equally rare. On one revealing and
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