ALH Online Review, Series X 1. Amanda Anderson, Bleak Liberalism (Chicago: ... next to Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebo
ALH Online Review, Series X 1
Amanda Anderson, Bleak Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 171 pp. Reviewed by Ross Posnock, Columbia University “Not an ideology; it simply is ideology” is how Amanda Anderson tartly summarizes liberalism as viewed by the “Left academy,” which uses it to define—negatively— “many theoretical positions in the humanities” (19). “The axiomatic view on the left is that liberals are conservative” (24). Optimistically apologetic for the autonomous subject and free-market capitalism while blind to its own propagation of inequality, liberalism has for decades been the indispensable punching bag of both leftist antihumanism (including poststructuralism and Foucault) and critiques of Enlightenment modernity (Frankfurt School). And of course, for different reasons, the Republican right shares this animus and, in stridently celebrating global homo economicus, now feasts on the remains of the humbled Democratic party, until recently the proud exponent of neoliberalism at home and abroad. This sobering climate for liberalism within and without the academy might give pause to a rescue attempt, but Anderson’s shrewd strategy is to embrace the darkness—the “darker phases” she calls them—the “bleakness” of her oxymoronic title. Bleak liberals, says Anderson, range from de Tocqueville to Judith Shklar and Habermas, with Arendt and Niebuhr among those in between. By “bleak liberalism” she means something more precise: a twentiethcentury interbellum, war, and Cold War movement (though with nineteenth-century roots in J. S. Mill and L. T. Hobhouse)—a self-critical, transformative, and responsive mode of thought that does not shy from recognizing the limits of rationalism or the “corruptibility of procedure” or the violence and destruction of political struggle. This movement emerges “bleak, chastened, and invested in complex aesthetic expression of its aims and experiential depth” (20). Rather than an anomaly, bleak liberalism emerges as a heightened expression of “persistent features of liberal thinking” too often ignored; so that Mill’s pessimism, for example or “similar fatalistic turns or odd obsessions in other” bleak liberals like Isaiah Berlin or Lionel Trilling are left unexplored (2). Anderson’s effort to rehabilitate turns on a sensible premise: “if liberalism is a term and concept assumed always to signal ideological manipulation or blindness, it becomes impossible to recognize the lived reality of liberal thinking and liberal commitments within historical moments or, more precisely, impossible to recognize them as other than false consciousness or a ruse of power” (100). A well-known Victorianist, Anderson, not surprisingly, devotes her longest chapter, “Liberalism in the Age of High Realism,” to an excellent account of novels by Dickens, Eliot, and Trollope, and gives another impressive chapter over to “Revisiting the Political Novel” which takes up how “social problem novels” (a precursor to the novel of ideas) by Dickens and Gaskell and
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Online Review, Series X 2 ALH Forster explore the limits of politics and represent argumentation—“deliberative debate”—as a formal mode via strategies described by such narratologists as Chatman and Phelan. Perhaps the chief reason this book is being reviewed here is Anderson’s pursuit of bleak liberalism in the work of Lionel Trilling and Ralph Ellison. In one chapter she pairs Trilling with Adorno’s “bleak radicalism,” and in another sets Ellison’s Invisible Man next to Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. Both novelists express postwar disenchantment in books that respond to disappointment in communist politics by moving beyond bitterness and cynicism and fashioning “distinctive literary experiments” that confound the debates between realism (Lukács) and modernism (Adorno.) Expressing a “liberal aesthetic”—by which Anderson means one that is unsatisfied with realism as the sole mode of representation—these novels “insist on a productively unresolved tension between forms of critical detachment and lived commitments to ethico-political ideals” (141). For all its modernist shape-shifting, its protean allusiveness, and stylistic heterogeneity, Invisible Man has “at its core a profound orientation toward liberal principles”—democratic proceduralism, sincerity, diversity—but which the novel portrays through their negation, by demystifying them. Granting Ellison’s inveterate riddling, his famous “joking” and troping, does not, Anderson concludes, diminish the “force or power of Ellison’s liberalism” which she ultimately dubs as “blues” rather than “bleak,” given his imperative “to work through” and “transcend, as the blues transcend,” collective and personal pain (128). While the Ellison/Lessing pairing is new, the account of Ellison is not, though he indeed exemplifies “bleak liberalism.” More striking is how Anderson links Trilling and Ellison through their shared upholding of “complexity” in the face of various forms of reductionism, whether embodied in Ellison’s rebuttal of Irving Howe’s charge of insufficient “blackness” or Trilling’s distaste for the literary left’s elevation of Dreiser at the expense of Henry James. These are two touchstone moments of postwar US cultural history. The chapter on Trilling and Adorno has the potential to break new ground. Both turn, after World War II, to the aesthetic (particularly European modernism) as a redemptive locus and write in “response to catastrophe.” But by omitting any mention of the crucial Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), Anderson’s discussion lacks texture and depth. Adorno’s famous book, (co-authored in dialogue with Max Horkheimer) begs comparison with Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination (1950). In his oft-quoted preface to that volume of essays, Trilling’s “response to catastrophe” encompasses two political and cultural disasters: implicitly, Stalinism and, explicitly, the managerial rationality that he finds enervating Enlightenment liberalism. Liberalism “tends to select the emotions and qualities that are most susceptible of organization”; hence it “drifts
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toward a denial of the emotions and the imagination,” of “contingency and possibility,” thus betraying its “great primal” “vision of a general enlargement and freedom.” He calls this liberalism’s “characteristic paradox.” Trilling means his book title as an oxymoron. Three years earlier, Adorno had in effect fused together the implicit (fascist) and explicit (liberal) themes of Trilling’s thinking with shocking results: “the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity,” begins Dialectic of Enlightenment. In the “present collapse of bourgeois civilization” created by the Nazi genocide we are witnessing not the repudiation of enlightenment but its ”tireless self-destruction”; the “germ of regression” it had always contained has turned malignant, crippling its capacity for self-reflection: “Enlightenment is totalitarian.” With this shattering verdict, emerges the traumatic equation that is latent in Trilling’s “characteristic paradox.” Trilling likely did not know of Adorno’s book and its demonic doubling of his own thinking; it was published by a tiny firm in Amsterdam. It is a work of self-described “fragments,” written in “guilt” and “complicity,” feelings that would never leave Adorno (who had prudently adopted his Corsican mother’s name, dropping his German Jewish father’s). In his final work, Negative Dialectics, he writes: “it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living—especially whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living.” I emphasize Adorno’s survivor guilt because it is another—bleaker—version of a connection to Trilling. What Anderson emphasizes as the “existential” or “lived commitment to ideas” could be said to have animated both men: for the German, the pressure of exile and anguish shaped his choice of fractured literary forms, as he composes his two war books, the Dialectic and Minima Moralia (1951), in fragment and aphorism respectively. Trilling’s lived relation to his ideas is more elusive and has everything to do with what Anderson early on, in passing, calls his “fatalistic turns or odd obsessions.” Although alert to these she does not explore them. Which is a missed opportunity, especially since, in recent years, key works on Trilling have substantially enlarged our sense of his odd, fatalistic psyche and its distinctive, even deforming impact on his literary achievement. It turns out that Trilling’s famous high seriousness, his fastidious and magisterial style, was public armor; his private journal, passages of which Diana Trilling unveiled in her 1993 memoir, complicated the story. He is full of self-loathing about being an intellectual, a mere critic, and professor, and he envied novelists like Hemingway whose creativity was entangled with freedom to enjoy “instinctual gratification” (Diana’s demure phrase). This self-tormenting tension in Trilling and its consequences have been well discussed by Adam Phillips and Edward
Online Review, Series X 4 ALH Mendelson, among others. Had Anderson availed herself of this work, she might have made vivid just how bleak was his liberalism. Hiding in plain sight in his essays are quirky moments of confession, freely confessed ambivalence, inhibitions, and envies. As if cueing us in on how to read him, Trilling once said that “to think in cultural terms is to consider human expressions not only in their overt existence and avowed intention, but in, as it were, their secret life, taking cognizance of the desires and impulses which lie behind the open formulation.” This struggle both to confront and suppress the “secret life” informs his remarkably candid confrontation with his “uneasiness” about teaching high modernism, a literature he finds “shockingly personal." Such books “really ought to be encountered in solitude, even in secrecy.” The extremity of Kafka, Conrad, Dostoevsky, Lawrence, Freud, and Nietzsche involves, for Trilling in “On the Teaching of Modern Literature,” keeping in one’s “conscious forefront“ of thought not simply freeing oneself from the middle class (Thomas Mann’s goal), but “the idea of losing oneself up to the point of self-destruction, of surrendering oneself to experience without regard to self-interest or conventional morality, of escaping wholly from societal bonds.” That surrender embodied in and demanded by modernist work commanded Trilling’s awe and unease, for the courage of these geniuses mocked his own caution, even uncomfortably reminding him perhaps of the liberalism he critiqued—its “denial of the emotions and the imagination.” Something of this denial informs the professional role he inhabits and loathes—what in his journal he calls “my intense disgust with my official and public self” as fastidious dignified academic. Denial is evident as well in Trilling’s own self-stunting as a critic, the fact that he never wrote essays on these unnerving literary modernists (the exception proving the rule being a long book review of Joyce in his letters). He tacitly chose secrecy and solitude. In a sense, the cautious limited liberalism Trilling famously buried in 1950 somehow kept haunting him, imparting a special bleakness as a self-lacerating identity that resembled nothing so much as Odysseus tying himself to the mast to survive the seductions of the sirens. This Homeric allegory of the self as sacrifice to itself, civilization as renunciation, is the most famous passage of Dialectic of Enlightenment.
