Mr. Trilling, Theodore Dreiser (and Life in the U.S.)

The literary reputation of Theodore Dreiser has suffered a slow but steady decline in recent years, curiously paralleling the decline of radical sentiment among American intellectuals. One of the critics who has been most effective in depreciating Dreiser has been Lionel Trilling, author of The Liberal Imagination. A critic with a highly organized if not always explicit ideological bent, Trilling has apparently felt Dreiser to be a threat to his liberal equanimity and has several times returned to attacks upon him. These attacks, which are of more than literary interest, seem to me symptoms of what troubles the liberal intellectual in the America of the 1950’s. I propose to discuss Trilling’s comments on Dreiser not primarily in literary terms but rather in the social terms that are his fundamental, if unacknowledged, interest.

“Whatever the virtues of Dreiser may be,” writes Trilling, “he could not report the social fact with the kind of accuracy it needs.” This judgment, I shall try to show, is perverse, but it is also opaque: for what kind of accuracy does the social fact need? Mr. Trilling does not say. More important, however, is the fact that in making this judgment he has forsaken the canons of art for those of sociology. And on that ground Dreiser stands very firmly. A literary critic would have every right to complain about Dreiser’s structural clumsiness, his little-noted sentimentality, his preposterous “chemisms,” his tendency to stress chance factors while committed to a philosophy of remorseless determinism. Such objections are significant in a judgment of Dreiser’s work. Yet, there still remains a magnificent fulfillment of precisely what Trilling says is necessary for the novel in its classic intention.

These requirements Trilling states as follows:

“Cervantes sets for the novel the problem of appearance and reality; and the shifting and conflict of social classes becomes the field of the problem of knowledge, of how we know and of how reliable our knowledge is, which at that very moment of history is vexing the philosophers and scientists. And the poverty of the Don suggests that the novel is born with the appearance of money as a social element—money the great sol. vent of the social fabric of the old society, the great generator of illusion”

“… Money is the medium that for good or bad, makes for a fluent society. It does not make for an equal society but for one in which there is a constant shifting of classes, a frequent change in the personnel of the dominant class … Money, snobbery, the ideal of status, these become in themselves the objects of phantasy, the support of phantasies of love, freedom, charm, power, as in Madame Bovary, whose heroine is the sister, at a three centuries’ remove, of Don Quixote.”

If these are the elements of fictio...