Connor Shanley

The following article is an analysis of selections from The Liberal Imagination by Lionel Trilling, a collection of critical essays ranging from literature to psychology.  The numbers indicate a separation between the different essays being analyzed.

1. “The Function of the Little Magazine” is an essay explaining how little magazines are the things in modern day culture which preserve our literature.  This is because these magazines write for a small audience.  This allows these magazines not to have to worry about offending people as much because their audience is more targeted.  “…There exists a great gulf between our educated class and the best of our literature.”  The reason Trilling makes this statement is because he believes the literature of his time has no energy or imagination.  This leads to bad political ideals, and these ideals should be blamed on the education system.

The literature of today has picked up a bit more energy and imagination than before.  One of the main reasons Trilling says literature is declining is because it has no political drive; it no longer inspires people.  There have been people since Trilling’s time who have inspired people with literature.  Glen Beck managed to basically start a whole new political party (The Tea Party) based off his writings.  It is true there aren’t as many great authors to move people as there used to be, but society today does have more access to great literature than people of Trilling’s time.  Society today has more conflict within modern day literature, which is a good thing: it inspires people to think more.

2. In the “Huckleberry Finn” essay, Trilling discusses how a boy views truth.  “No one, as he (Mark Twain) well knew, sets a higher value on truth than a boy.”  Trilling then goes on to explain truth to a young boy is the most important thing.  This is because truth is always affiliated with fairness.  A young boy will therefore not trust adults; a young boy believes adults lie all the time.  Because they believe this, it makes it okay to lie to adults because they are liars.

This is a true statement; this is why Mark Twain chose to write Huckleberry Finn through the perspective of a young boy.  It is how Mark Twain is able to make political statements.  A boy will not hold back the truth because he wishes to express all of it.  The truth is so important all of the truth must be expressed in the novel from the view of a boy.  This means nothing should be held back, because truth must be fully understood.

3. In “The Sense of the Past,” Trilling states Shakespeare “is contemporaneous only if we know how much a man of his own age he was….”  This statement is saying Shakespeare must be taken in context.  No literary work can be understood out of context.  One must understand times in which a literary work was written in order to understand its importance.

Context truly does shape a literary work.  What might be considered daring or cutting edge today might be mediocre and mundane tomorrow.  In order to understand how great something is one must understand the circumstances and times in which it was written.  Any literary work, even the Bible for example, taken out of context can be misused and misinterpreted.  For full understanding of a work, context is extremely important.

4. In “F. Scott Fitzgerald,” Trilling states Fitzgerald uses the ideal voice of the novelist in The Great Gatsby.  Trilling believes the reason Fitzgerald’s use of language is so perfect is because of the emotion you feel with the characters.  The language he uses adds a deepness and tone to each character.  Fitzgerald has just the right amount of fact telling with emotional connection.

This truly is the ideal novelist voice.  It is what grabs one in and makes one connected with the characters.  If one does not connect with the characters, then the novel has no point, but if there is only the emotion of the characters then plot becomes rather dull.  There must be a perfect mix; Fitzgerald masters this mix.  It is often the subtlety of the language he uses that creates that mix.  He uses soft words enough to make one connected but not overbearing with long dramatic description.

5. In “The Immortality Ode,” Trilling states “Criticism … must be concerned with the poem itself.”  What he is saying is a poem should not be judged on details it may have left out.  A poem should be judged only for the content in the poem, not the factuality behind it.  With the first statement he rejects the view of criticizing poems based on the belief they in some way must be rooted in fact.

When Trilling then analyzes the poem, he contradicts himself and uses that same view.  He brings in the idea a poem creates its own reality, therefore a poem cannot just be judged upon words but it must also be judged upon the world it creates.  A poem may be based in reality, but it doesn’t need to be.  A poem creates its own world with its own meaning.  This world a poem creates can be criticized though, and should be for it is a part of the poem.

6. “Manners, Morals, and the Novel” is another Trilling essay that deals with context.  Just as with “The Sense of the Past,” when one analyzes a literary work one must know the culture from which it came.  Culture is extremely important in how one must interpret the work.  A novel follows characters from a culture; in order to understand how characters interact with each, one must understand the culture.  “The novel is a perpetual quest for reality, the field of its research being always the social world, the material of its analysis being always manners as the indication of a man’s soul.”  Every literary work creates its own reality.

In the novel that reality is drawn from real culture.  This is why a novel is a “perpetual quest for reality,” because a novel seeks to show some reality through the culture it represents.  Novelists, even when writing science-fiction, will always bring aspects of their reality or their idea of reality in their novels.  Novels must always convey the culture the novel takes place in, which is why it is a quest.  The novelist must find the reality in which he wishes to set his novel and the reality he wishes to convey.