THE MEANING OF A LITERARY IDEA – LIONEL TRILLING

            Trilling’s “The Meaning of a Literary Idea”; or the Essay as Argument: Why the Research should be Abolished

            A study of a part of something can never be as interesting as a study of the whole to which the part belongs. Yet the Humanities has fragmented into so many divergent and divested parts that an emergent, whole picture is now easy to miss. The “art for art’s sake” attitude is in part responsible, for it denies the literary work its ideas, while “ art for art’s sake” is an ideology, not an idea. In “ The Meaning of a Literary Idea,” Trilling explains: “whether we deal with syllogisms or poems, we deal with dialectic – with, that is, a developing series of statements”. In other words, what we have come to call, “creative literature”, is no different in form than what we must now call “non-creative literature,” though of course there is no such thing: there is only one literature, all of its creative, and while literature may consist of various genres, such as fiction and non-fiction, poetry and drama, the impulse to further split non-fiction into creative or non-creative fiction can only have its source in funding disputes arising from the splitting of the discipline – for it can’t possibly have anything to do with reading, writing, or critical thinking.

            That is true because, as Trilling says, “The most elementary thing to observe is that literature is of its nature involved with ideas because it deals with man in society, which is to say that it deals with formulations, valuations, and decisions, some of them implicit, others explicit”.

Ideas are organic; ideology is manufactured. Ideas are malleable; ideology is rigid. “ideology is not the product of thought; it is the habit or the ritual of showing respect for certain formulas to which, for various reasons having to do with emotional safety, we have very strong ties of whose meaning and consequences in actuality we have no clear understanding”. And so in ideology, Trilling explains, we lose sight of this wholeness: “…..an intimate relationship between literature and ideas, for in our culture ideas tend to deteriorate into ideology”. If “Trilling could say that “Poetry is heuristic medium ……a communication of knowledge”, then why do we feel compelled to divorce essays (personal or any other kind or name the latest textbook has invented) from research papers? The very idea of the research paper is essay turned ideology. We must either abolish the research paper or watch literature continue its slow demise toward extinction, an extinction of ideas.