Trilling Unfinished

This essay offers a close reading of Lionel Trilling’s unfinished second novel, The Journey Abandoned (2008). Drawing on Trilling’s essays and private journals, it considers how The Journey Abandoned’s unfinishedness speaks not only to some of the thematic preoccupations of the novel itself—a story of thwarted literary ambition and wasted creative talent—but also to some of the broader currents in Trilling’s thinking about his own literary ambition, the fate of the novel, and the institutionalization of literary studies at midcentury. If we think of the unfinishedness of The Journey Abandoned as integral rather than accidental to its form, we can begin to see how the text captures something of Trilling’s ambivalence about his relation to literature, an ambivalence that animated his criticism but seems to have ultimately forestalled his fiction.Whether he wished it to or not, unfinishedness became Trilling’s way of dramatizing the tensions and contradictions underwriting his conception of literary value and his sense of himself as a writer.