Sinister: One day, I'm going to write a poem or a letter

[P F]

Or is it, *in* a letter?

Valentine's Day - which Billy Bragg once called 'The
14th of February'. Does anyone remember that song? It
was definitely a high point, a very high point, on his
disappointing LP William Bloke.

I do indistinctly remember spending past Valentines
Days walking around provincial squares in rainy dreams
of impossible romance. Funnily enough I have not done
that today. Are my Valentine days over? Did they ever
begin?

It may be a blessing not to receive valentines. In
which case, curse the sender of that electronic
valentine thing I got earlier. At least I was
apparently able to read it.

I have been reading and thinking about Lionel
Trilling, who taught at his alma mater Columbia
University from 1932 and died in 1975, aged 70. His
widow Diana lived till 1996, and wrote copious, or
voluminous, or both varieties of, book reviews till
not so long before her own demise. You can find info
on her on the 'internet'.

re. Trilling, I have been wondering about two things:

1. Why does his writing appeal to me in an age when it
is so 'dated' - so much a voice from the past? Of
course, the beginning of the answer is: *because* it's
a voice from history. I have made some notes on this
phenomenon. I wonder if anyone has anything else to
say about it.

A subsidiary question here is: does non-fictional
writing become 'historical' in a different way from,
or at a different rate from, literary work?

2. Trilling's theory of culture. It is not that easy
to summarize right now, but it seems crucially to
involve the idea that in modernity, the individual
self is, even should be, almost irredeemably
antagonistic to the 'culture' which has formed her -
and of which she is 'inextricably' a part, save that
her antagonism to it seems to produce a certain action
of 'extrication'. For Trilling, the bulk of great
modern literature testifies to this necessary,
honourable antagonism between self and society,
malcontent subject and social world.

Here is a reservation. The basis of the self's
'opposition' to culture, for Trilling, seems often to
be something innate - something irreducibly biological
(as in his 1955 essay 'Freud: Within and Beyond
Culture'), or a relatively abstract faculty of reason
(as in his 1962 essay on Dr Leavis and Sir Charles
Snow). Such forces, for Trilling, are just about the
only imaginable bulwarks against what we might now
call a strong culturalism - a sense that culture goes
'all the way down' and cannot be appealed or battled
against. Yet - this, simply, is my reservation - are
these pure, acultural forces really that convincing as
forces against culture? Can we still muster much faith
in them now? Reason is a fine thing, but we're used by
now to stressing its 'situatedness' in cultural
settings (as in, I think, the essay by Habermas, from
ten years back or so, which is actually called
'Situating Reason' or some such - it's at the start of
a book whose title has escaped me for a while). I
think we have to find a way of thinking beyond the
opposition: constraints of determining culture vs
abilities of unconditioned mind. We might start by
seeking a less monistic conception of culture as such
- for it strikes me that Trilling shares a somewhat
monistic conception of culture and its power over the
individual with (of all people!) Stanley Fish.

What do you think?


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