What does this Lionel Trilling Quote mean in relation to the novel 1984?“Any historian of the literature of the modern age will take virtually...

Lionel Trilling, the influential intellectual, wrote in the
preface to his 1965 book Beyond Culture
that

Any historian of
the literature of the modern age will take virtually for granted the adversary intention, the
actually subversive intention, that characterizes modern writing -- he will perceive its clear
purpose of detaching the reader from the habits of thought and feeling that the larger culture
imposes, of giving him a ground and a vantage point from which to judge and condemn, and perhaps
revise, the culture that produces
him.

In other words, according to
Trilling, modern writers tend to oppose and undermine conventional ways of thinking and feeling.
They tend to write in ways that encourage people to think for themselves rather than merely
accepting what they have been taught to think.

Trilling’s comment is
obviously relevant to George Orwell’s novel 1984. Orwell’s book describes a
dystopian society in which people are not at all encouraged to think for themselves. Instead,
they are expected to follow a rigid “Party line” – a brutally enforced way of looking at the
world. Orwell shows the horrors that can result when individual thought is suppressed. Although
Orwell was clearly using his book to mock the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, his novel is
actually a timeless warning about the dangers that result when individual, skeptical, free
thought is suppressed anywhere and at any time. Orwell’s novel is a work of modern writing in
precisely the way Trilling describes. It challenges unoriginal thinking by showing the terrible
results of such closed and inhibited habits of mind.