6. Leslie Fiedler¹

[The key for Fiedler citations is: El: An End to Innocence (1971 [1948-51); LD: Love and Death in the American Novel (1984 [1960,19661); NT: No! in Thunder (1960); and WL: What Was Literature? (1982). For passages repeated from earlier books to later ones, I try to give all sources. I removed some italicizing that didn't seem to the point for my summary (e.g. = emphasis deleted). I agree with Fiedler that any summarizing is apt to lose his “cadences” and thus a “part of the real significance” (letter to me). But he was “pleased to see”  that my chapter had managed to preserve “much” of his “own style”.]

    Though he might seem too inimitable and quixotic to he a prototype, Leslie Fiedler has decisively contributed to shaping the role of the critic in American letters. He is “convinced” that “criticism” "must not die, being a human response as ancient and essential as the story and song that prompt it” (WL 127). And he has accomplished much in his campaign to see that it won't die, as he reminds us: he “helped to create” a “new cultural climate"; he “made American literature seem more interesting and amusing” than it had in “most academic accounts"; he “provided the basis for a new understanding of our classic books and of our culture in general"; and so on (LD 8; WL 34; El ix). He “announces every new insight boldly,” not “trying to speak” “objectively," but “writing in pure rage and love” “what at any moment" he “passionately believes" (WL 73; NT xivf; El xiii). Yet he “likes to think" he "registers” through his “particular sensibility the plight of a whole group,” and to “see" his “own ironies and dissents as a necessary part of an overall pattern" (El xiii, 93). In retrospect, he is “pleased to discover how often I managed to tell what still seems” “the truth about my world and myself as a liberal, intellectual, writer, American, and Jew” (El xiii).

     At no time, however, did he pretend to be a conventional authority or infallible interpreter of literature. For him, “the experience of a work of art” is “unique and untranslatable; to suggest that one has captured it in analysis is" to “falsify and mislead" (LD 10). “The best criticism can hope to do is to set the work in as many illuminating contexts as possible," to “locate the work" where it "exists in all its ambiguity and plenitude." To set the “object" "in all its relevant contexts” is “the never-completed communal task of criticism."

     “The “text” is merely" the “lexical or verbal" "context,” “no more or less important than the sociological, psychological, historical, anthropological, or generic." Hence, Fiedler strove to “emphasize the neglected depth-psychological," “anthropological,” "sociological, and formal" “contexts of American fiction.” This move earned him the stature of a “theoretical critic” at a time when very few scholars were seeking it. He himself warned that pure “theorizing" “threatens to leave literature and its appropriate delights for the sake of amateur philosophising" (Hirsch is an egregious example)  and preferred to proceed by “embedding” “full-scale readings” and “analyses" “in a context of more general theoretical explications” (NT 295; LD 9f).

     His broad contextual method allowed him to function as a "general critic of society,” critiquing “cultural” and "political events" in “the American scene" and attempting at times to “write a thumbnail moral history of our time” (NT x; El xiv, 28), Indeed, the major work he addresses, whatever texts are cited, is none other than America itself, a place where “literature” can "influence “real life” more than such life influences it" (LD 31).² [2. Illustrations include literary images of sentimental love and of the incorruptibly naive child (LD 31, si; El 253, 259).] Though he may treat America as a literary creation of novelists and philosophers,³ [3.This doctrine was asserted in 1952 for “Montana,” but the “Chateaubriand” and “Rousseau” version had long since yielded to “the sentimentalized Frontier novel” (El 131; 164)]. he may have done as much as they to make it so. He has expounded the treatment of America, by its own authors and by Europeans, in literary and fictional terms few cultural historians of the nation can henceforth safely ignore.

     One benefit of "telling the truth" not just “about literature,” but “about the indignities and rewards of being" “an "American" (LD 16), is that Fiedler himself can join the prospective protagonists of literary America. His criticism has overtones of an “autobiography" portraying his “sentimental education" (NT xiv). His arguments are often clinched with anecdotes from his own life, ⁴] [4 For instance, the low status of the “critic” is revealed by how Fiedler had his “house” "snatched away” by “a local “scholar'" in 1953 (WL 60). Or, his wide-ranging, generalizing essay about the “Negro” describes most of the few blacks he knew closely as a child (NT 245ff).], as if he were living out a modern allegory. He seems as much at home in the worlds of Huck Finn and lshmael as in those of Twain and Melville -- a critic-stowaway to "America," “the land for which we can only set out” (NT 152). This fate well befits a would-be author forced to turn critic by the distaste of “editors” for his “fiction and verse," consoling himself that “literary criticism" is “a form of literature," and Love and Death is a “gothic novel" (NT 295; LD 8). His comment that the greatest creations of authors like Poe and Fitzgerald were themselves (El 177ff; LD 424) might be applied to him too, though whereas their careers fell under the motto “nothing succeeds like failure” (El 174f; LD 427; WL 31), I later suggest (p. 96) that his own may be tending to illustrate the converse.

     He considers himself “primarily a literary person,” a reader of private and public life as if it were a text, using "a sensibility trained by the newer critical methods" (El xivf). He offered “a “close reading” of recent events” and “pledged" "to give certain political documents" "the same careful scrutiny we have learned to practice on the shorter poems of John Donne" ⁵ [5. “Donne” and “newer criticism” here, as well as “close reading” in the previous quote, are signposts for the “New Critics" whose influence on Fiedler and his 1941 dissertation will be discussed in a moment.]; but also to "approach poems" “with the sense that they matter quite as much to the self and the world" as political events like “the suspension of atomic testing" (El xv; NT xvf). He professes "no expert knowledge in political matters” and himself “an indifferent researcher,” although here, as often, he is adjusting his image to elude scholarly clichés (his research is extensive, however offhandedly presented). His claim upon the attention of his audience is his “deep” “involvement" (El xv). His “interest in works of art is dictated by a moral passion,” and his “personal myth” is "The Intellectual Life as Moral Combat" (El xiv; NT 6; cf. LD 16).⁶ [6. This sense of “moral” applies only to the artistic function and “the moral effect of literary art" (cf. p. 81f); it is quite distinct from that of commonplace middle-class or Puritan morality, which may even foster “full-blown self conscious evil” and “lynchings” (NT 277; El 82). Conflicts between the two kinds of morality are often suggested (El 154, 196; LD 95, 425; WL 39f, 42, 50 122).]

     “To fulfill its essential moral obligation,” “serious fiction” "must be negative" (NT 6f, e.d.). Hence, Fiedler expropriates, for his "last word" in "literary theory," as of 1960 (also in the 1971 edition of NT), the slogan "No! in thunder," originally coined by Melville for Hawthorne's art (NT 296, 8; LD 505). “Insofar as a work of art is, as art, successful, it performs a negative critical function” (NT 7). Artists can “achieve" in a work "a coherence, a unity, a balance, a satisfaction of conflicting impulses” "they cannot achieve in love, family relations, politics.” “Literature” is "the record of those elusive moments at which life is alone fully itself, fulfilled in consciousness and form" (LD 15f). The "intolerable inadequacy” of “radically imperfect human activities” is “revealed” when they are "represented in a perfectly articulated form” (NT 7). Even (or especially) in its “most magnificent portrayal,” "the image of man in art" expresses “failure.” “Telling the truth” is opening a "vision of an eternal gap between imagined order and actual chaos” (NT 11). “Having endured a vision of the meaninglessness of existence," “the negativist” "affirms the void” and “renders the absurdity which he perceives" (NT 20). To “abjure negativism” is to “sacrifice truth and art" and be not a “serious artist,” but a “purveyor of commodity fiction” who “perishes as he pleases" (NT 20, 10f). To "pursue" "the positive means stylistic suicide" amid "unearned euphoria,” “shapeless piety," “sentimental self-indulgence,” “maudlin falsity” " “heavy-handed symbolism," and similar “failures” (NT 19f).

     Fiedler suggests that “censors” attack “serious fiction" not because of its "dirtiness, " but because of this “negative” quality (NT 60. He recalls that “literary criticism" "was born of conflict, out of an attempt to dissuade those who would control or ban poetry as socially and morally dangerous” (WL 39). “Literature asserts,” if “anything," “the impossibility of unqualified assertion, the ambiguity of all moral imperatives” (WL 129) (a notion de Man pursues for different reasons). “On its deeper, more mythological levels,” “literature” owes its “most nearly universal appeal" to being “fundamentally antinomian” and “reinforcing no respectable pieties of any kind," “no matter what its superficial ideology." This function is necessary because “the burden of any system of morality becomes finally irksome even to its most sincere advocates, since it necessarily denies, represses, suffocates certain undying primal impulses” that “need somehow to be expressed” (WL 50) (compare Iser's view, p. 144).

     Over the years, Fiedler's progress reminds one of a self-consuming artefact, a titanic Kronos-critic gaining sustenance partly by devouring earlier versions of himself. One such version, namely as a leftist promoter of “radical politics,” was soon attenuated and disclaimed as an effect first of “pressure from friends on the Left” and later of “nostalgia for a lost revolution and my own lost youth” (NT ix; WL 147). He asks to be considered “by temperament apolitical," “politics" being “the opium of the liberals” (NT ixf). He “smiles” over “attempts at social realism" "in Europe today," and over literary portrayals of “the Class Struggle" in “American “realism" of “the “thirties" (NT 198). He uncouples the “author’s politics" from the reader’s “passionate” “response"; and (as just shown in his treatment of negativity) “superficial ideology” from the “antinomian" message (WL 133, 129; cf. WL 195).

      He was already on the backswing when he published his first book. In that array of “polemical” “essays," he explains that “the typical initiation into the intellectual community” included “a brief bout of membership in the Communist party, fellow-travelling,” or “collaboration" with people of such creeds (El xiv, 67f; cf. El 107).⁷ [7. He also claims he went “radical" in “a desire to be delivered from the disabilities of being a Jew," and from a hope that “in the Marxist scheme of remaking society,” he could “win" “ftccdorn rather than buy it at the expense of somebody else" (NT 248).

"In those days, anyone with guts and brains" went that way (NT 164). The “Communist" “movement" “established itself in the intellectual community as an acceptable variant of the liberal-humanistic tradition” and a "test of political decency" in a time of “moral dissatisfaction” (El 70; NT 165).

      But by “1954," Fiedler saw in “Communism" only “the rationalization and defense of that which Russia and its agents do for the sake of expansion or self-defense” (El 59f). Along with “the main body of liberals," he “recognized" the “Soviet Union” “as a symbol of social evil," and certified that “the human spirit is offended and maimed wherever Communist governments exist” (El 67, 71). He even pronounced his own condemnations of Hiss and the Rosenhergs, though for “motives" “too complex to set before an ordinary juryman” (El 6). He assailed Ethel Rosenberg's “painfully pretentious” attempts at "literary” "style" in her letters (El 40ff), but never suggested it as valid grounds for capital punishment. For an instant, though, I felt oddly reminded of his legalistic dictum that, for their sloppiness” and “submission to the decay of language," “pseudo-" or “anti-stylists" “stand condemned in the court of high art for flagrant immorality of form" (NT 4) -- whereupon they might presumably be shot with an aesthetic cannon.

      "Marxist critics" were still lauded for having taught Fiedler that “the class relations of a culture help determine the shape of its deepest communal fantasies, the obsessive concerns of its literature” (LD 14), although the Freudian drift is already getting the upper hand in this formulation. Even so, “Marxism" is blamed for the “quasi-religious messianism" of the “proletarian novel" that “projected violence" as a "method of deliverance" (LD 481f). When Fiedler later becomes an emphatic populist, he thinks to charge “Marxists" with “elitism in the arts" and Marx himself with having been a “genteel academic" (WL 27, 100).

   “Marxist aesthetics as developed by “Marcuse" and “the Frankfurt school" (discussed in Chs. 9, 11), are dismissed as a “paranoid “conspiracy” theory" (WL 101). This move is justified, in the grand Fiedlerian manner, with a personal anecdote (how an article of his got attacked) to show how “boards of directors” in publishing and broadcasting" “detest and fear" “horror and porn"; they merely "seek to provide" “what they surmise the mass audience wants." But this claim overlooks his own earlier thesis (noted above)  that censors are really trying to suppress negativity -- which is precisely Marcuse's argument, and Jameson's too.

      Another early Fiedler was devoted to aesthetic and formal issues. He admired Matthew Arnold and the New Criticism, writing his dissertation on John Donne (NT x; WL 146, 88). He praised works for being "precisely imaged or richly phrased," and for attaining through their “richness and difficulty of involution” ”reaches of meaning unavailable, to perspicuity” (NT 66, 29). He rejoiced in discovering “oppositions," “antinomies," "contradictions," “paradoxes," “reversals,” “ambiguity,” “ambivalence," and "multivalence" (NT 32, 35, 50f, 102, 41, 39, 74, 129, 86, 98, 101). "Irony," “detachment," and "complexity” were hailed as bulwarks against "confession," “sentimentality," “self-pity," and “nostalgia" (NT 5 5; El 178, 180, 206f).

      The "total effect” of an "intricately constructed and immensely complex work" can make it "the most deeply moving" of its kind, though Fiedler once worried that a “complex” work may not attain “success” and “fame," or only if “simplified in the folk mind” (LD 414, 490, 263ff). “Our better novelists" are “un-popular" or else “misread” and “admired for the wrong reasons,” since "the mass audience has stubbornly refused to catch up” even with “the techniques" of the "'twenties” (El 200; NT 5). This lag might be an advantage if the “work of art can be wrecked" upon its own “popularities" (NT 104). Later, though, Fiedler sides with "mass audience” enough to disdain “modernism" himself, as will be shown below.

      Yet already in his early books, Fiedler was not at case among the “embattled highbrows" he saw in the “New Critics” (NT 134). He distrusted "formalism"“ for its "gentility, over-elaboration, and the sentimentalizing of detached insight” (El 185). For such a “critic," the work is “at best a skillful and sophisticated arrangement of words, a pleasantly intricate web of sensibility, which is judged good or bad in terms of how complex and various, though finally unified, in its abstract pattern” (LD 155).

      Even while Fiedler averred that “a work of art is on one level about the problems of its own composition," he castigated "the notion” of the “work” being absolutely self-contained, a discrete set of mutually interrelated references," as a "reductio ad absurdum” if not “a dangerous full-blown aesthetic position" (NT 48, 313). That notion is "even apparently applicable only to a lyric of the most absolute purity" (NT 314). The “formalists’ “extreme nominalist definition of a work of art" is “metaphysically reprehensible” (NT 311). Hence, even the New Critical “reforms in pedagogy” were conceded merely a “small usefulness” alongside having failed to “explain great novels of our own tradition” and "inhibited" "new experiments" “in poetry" (WL 71; cf. NT 316). Most recently, “New Criticism” is belabored for “proto-fascist” if not “fascist politics" (WL 42, 70; cf. NT 187) -- though Fiedler, we saw, freely waves aside his own erstwhile “politics.”

      A more enduring version of Fiedler is the critic of "myths" and “archetypes." Indeed, he ranks with Frye as an archetypal proponent of this method and even draws from it a means of evaluation (NT 324). For Fiedler, the “archetype” is defined as an “immemorial pattern of response to the human situation in its most permanent aspects"; or as an “archaic and persisting cluster of image and emotion which at once defines and attempts to solve what is most permanent in the human predicament” (NT 319, 301). It “belongs to the infra- or meta-personal,” “to the Community at its deepest, preconscious levels of acceptance” (NT 319). This "pattern of beliefs and feelings" is “so widely shared at a level beneath consciousness that there exists no abstract vocabulary for representing it" (El 146). It “finds a formula or pattern story” to “embody it” and “conceal its full implications" about some "aspect of our psycho-social fantasy life” (El 146; WL 15f).

      A related concept -- Fiedler can't quite make up his mind how far it's the same -- is “myth” or "mythos."⁸ [8. On one occasion, “Archetype" is substituted more or less as an equivalent for "myth" when the latter "becomes increasingly ambiguous” (NT 318; cf. WL 129f). On another, “Archetype” is judged "too modern and abstract to encompass the total richness of mythos,” forcing Fiedler to “call mythos by its poor, prostituted cognate, myth" (NT 302). On yet another, “mythos” is "defined” “as the Archetype without Signature” (NT 304).] Borrowing his remark on Pavese, we might picture Fiedler as “proceeding from speculation on myth to a general theory of literature” (NT 147). He finds in “mythos" both “an immediate intuition of being, pure quality without the predicate of existence,” the "intuited” here equalling "the archetypes”; and a “mediator between the community and the individual, the person and his fate, the given and the achieved” (NT 301f). The “archetypal meaning" of a “myth" is “independent of any individual's conscious exploitation of it" (NT 49). Its “unity underlies the diversity of our acquired cultures" (NT 142) (there, Frye would agree). "Even in the most sophisticated communities, mythos survives below the margin of consciousness," "since all power" “must come from below reason" (NT 300). The “ancient Greek Myths” “preserve for us the assurance" “that what is done below is done above, what is done here and now is done forever, what is repeated in time subsists unbroken in eternity" (NT 302).

      "Literature" “comes into existence at the moment” “the Archetype” is given a “Signature”': “the sum total of individualizing factors in a work, the sign of the Persona or Personality through which an Archetype is rendered” (NT 319). The great artist" must be “capable” “at once of realizing utterly the archetypal implications of his material and of formally embodying it in a lucid and unmistakable Signature" (NT 327). “When myth is uncertainly becoming literature," “the poet is conceived of passively, as a mere vehicle" for “the Muse,” that is, for “the unconscious, collective source of the Archetypes" (NT 325). “But very soon the poet" “assumes a more individualized life-style, the lived Signature," thereby making the first forays out of collectivity toward personality" (NT 325fi. “The mass mind” “composes” an “image to punish the poet for detaching himself from the collective id” -- thus the “Alienated Artist" we still visualize today (NT 325f). "Poetry is historically the mediator between mythos and logos, the attempt to find a rationale for the pre-rational” (NT 300). “We experience the controlling perceptions of poetry as poetry” as “closer to mythos than to logos" (NT 301). “Philosophy” and “its heir,” “science," are “representatives” of “logos” and think “there is no mode" except this (NT 300). The “hubris of science" is to "deny poetry which alone could become its conscience."“ Fiedler arrives at a “series” of formulas: “the Marvelous as Marvelous is mythos; the Marvelous as Credible, poetry; the Credible as Credible, philosophy and science; the Credible as Marvelous,” “rhetoric, journalism, kitsch” (NT 303). “Much contemporary criticism has cut itself off from this insight” (NT 324).

      Fiedler consistently attributes the “power” and value of literature to its “Mythopoetic” qualities. ⁹ [9 See LD 62, 84, 156, 174, 191, 273, 474; WL 36, 125, 198, 217, 231; NT 324. Even Freud is awarded “mythopoctic power” (NT 308), which might explain why his reputation among literary critics has outdistanced that among psychologists.] “The mythic work” can have “instant acclaim,” whereas "great analytic or poetic works" “often have to wait long for their popularity" (LD 187). "A work of literature” “does not finally depend for its force and conviction on “truth” of action, character, or detail, but upon how much daemonic energy of the myth survives its rationalization” (NT 147).¹⁰ [10 This view is assigned to Cesare Pavese (NT 147), with whom Fiedier showed extraordinary empathy, expostulating Pavese's ideas in ways that seem to capture his own as well.] Yet though “consideration of the archetypal content of works” is "essential" to “evaluation" (NT 324), no simple equation or causality is implied here. On the one hand, “mythopoetic power” is “independent of formal excellence” and may be found in works that are woefully inadequate by conventional literary standards” (WL 36, 165) -- a key factor in Fiedler's later outlook. In Uncle Tom's Cabin, the "most mythically resonant tableaus” are “usually the “worst” written," “yet so magically moving" as to “transcend” “the criteria of taste" (WL 165).

      On the other hand, using myth or archetype does not guarantee successful literature. If used self-consciously, a “myth” may be “degraded, profaned" (NT 49). “Archetypes” can enter a "fallen form" as “inherited and scarcely understood structures,” “platitudes,” “type characters, “ "'popular” stock plots,” or “stereotypes” (NT 328, 274; WL 130, 141, 151; LD 166, 226, 310, 400, 420). “Subliterature” may subsist on “a shoddy, and cheaply popular evocation of archetypal themes”; or “comic strips” on “obsolescent” and “embalmed” “archetypes" (NT 80, 288).

      Evidently, “myth" can get "secularized into “entertainment" or deployed as a machine” “to lend the semblance of metaphysical depth to a half-imagined story," to "do the work of imagination, invention, and coherence” (NT 306, 107). The “anti-artist” “composes parables, pseudo-myths, to express not wonder and terror but sentimental reassurance" (NT 11). To "redeem” "debased popular archetypes,” "the writer” may "re-render” them “for serious purposes” “through complex and subtle signatures"; or “ironically manipulate the shreds and patches of outlived mythologies'; or “invent a private myth system of his own"; or pursue his own "personality, past his particular foibles and eccentricities, to his unconscious core, where he becomes one with us all” (NT 328f).¹¹ [11 This argument serves to justify the use of “depth analysis, as defined by Freud, and, particularly by Jung,” and, somewhat oddly, to advocate “the biographical approach” (NT 329).] But these tactics bring hazards: “plot" may “founder under the burden of overt explication"; “the popular audience" may be lost; "highbrow reworkings" may merely signal that the "archetypes” “are dying”; and so on (NT 328f, El 136).

      Another pervasive and controlling theoretical framework in Fiedler's writings, and the one that brings him the closest he comes to jargonizing, is “psychoanalysis,” touted as “the science of our age” (NT 308). “Depth psychology” offers “a way of binding together our fractured world, of uniting literature and non-literature without the reduction of the poem” (NT 323, e.d.). "Psychoanalysis” as a theory of the mind has been part of our culture for nearly half a century'; by now, “the procedures of pre-Freudian critics” are “hopelessly outdated” (NT 224; 311). Fiedler appropriated “much of his basic vocabulary" from “orthodox Freudianism and Jungian revisionism” (LD 14). In recent work, he still professes himself a “vestigial” “Freudian,” “believing that character is destiny"; and an ”anti-Jungian Jungian,” holding that “archetypes are not eternal but socially determined” --- a trace of the “vestigial Marxist" (WL 17).

       Fiedler's version of Freud is less orthodox than Holland's, though more so than Frye's, Bleich's, Bloom's, or Jauss's. Jung's “further allegorization” is admitted, whereby “what Freud took to be final facts” are reconsidered to be “only symbols of a deeper-lurking reality” (NT 308). Such a step is congenial to the literary critic because “the poetic overtones of the archetype,” the source of the power of literature, are not "threatened” (NT 309). But Fiedler is too committed to the “bleak stoicisrn,” “despair," and “tragic view of man” in Freudian thought to accept the “expurgation” of Freud into “a bourgeois prophet of social adjustment" for the “ideal image of society” (NT 224f, 310). The “revisionists" like Karen Horney with their “optimism” and “rationality” are rebuked for offering platitudes” that “society cannot live by" (NT 310) (but Bernard Paris sees tehm very differently, Ch. 12).

      Fiedler's own depth-psychological depiction of literary experience wavers between hope and pessimism. “Psychic levels” form the centre “from which works of art proceed and to which they seek to return” (LD 389). “All art, high, low or middling, of wide mythic appeal provides on the first encounter" an “unearned instant gratification" “necessary to our psychic well-being” (WL 138, e.d.). This event, he feels, is inadequately described by “anal Aristotle's" “catharsis,” “Thoreau's” “in dreams awake,” and “Freud's" “regression in the service of the ego.” More “intriguing" is the conception of “a descent into, a harrowing of Hell,” “a recourse to the dark powers in quest of salvation: a way out of the secular limbo, " the “least-common-denominator consensus reality enforced in the name of sanity and virtue" (WL 1380. Through its “release of the repressed," “popular literature" makes us “more at home with” “the darker, more perilous aspects of our own psyches” (WL 49f)

       Yet this process “triggers another primeval response: the fear of the unconscious and its tyranny," and thus of “the art which simultaneously releases and neutralizes its darker aspects” (WL 42). “Censorship” can then raise the “contention that art is incitement rather than therapy, reinforcing whatever a given era considers socially undesirable or morally reprehensible.” This account gives the ,.negativity" previously judged to motivate “censors" (NT 6) a twist back toward narrower moralistic issues -- a loss, in my view, fixating the artist on a certain mode of negating, much as Holland does within his lighter-hearted model.

        Even more than Frye, Fiedler expounds literary phenomena in terms of "dreams."¹² [12. Compare NT 11, 30, 37, 61f, 84, 106, 123ff, 129, 139, 158; LD 26, 29, 59, 95, 128, 155, 157, 183, 224, 356, 393, 396, 399, 491.] Writing itself is repeatedly portrayed as a dreaming process.¹³ [13 Compare El 147; NT 84, 139; LD 157, 183, 276, 393, 396, 399, 491; WL 152, 175.] “In literature,” we learn, “myth and dream are made flesh” (NT 232; cf. LD 192). A main grouping of themes in these dreams includes “innocence,” “purity," “virginity,” and “remitted” “guilt” (NT 123ff, 158; LD 393, 274, 327, 353). Yet as befits Fiedler's propensity for the “darker aspects,” the “nightmare” is invoked still more often than the dream. ¹⁴ [14. Compare NT 10, 14, 37, 55, 57, 123ff, 130, 132f., LD 26, 52, 98, 127, 155, 164, 244, 260, 280, 314, 353f, 364, 369, 373, 375, 379, 393, 399, 435, 438, 493, 497; WL 16, 50, 160, 168, 194, 204f, 209, 222, 235, 245]. Besides the usual “ancestral and infantile fears,” such as “rejection, paralysis, castration, and death,” these “nightmares” feature the suffering and revenge of groups downtrodden by white male Americans: the Indians, the Blacks, and the women. ¹⁵ [15. Compare LD 26, 128, 369, 373, 375, 399, 435; WL 16, 168, 194, 204f, 209, 222, 235. This revenge most often takes the form of murder or rape.] The “American dream" of "innocence" and “purity” reverts to a “nightmare" of “guilt” and "evil" (NT 123f; LD 393; cf. LD 287, 315).

       Fiedler also invokes the allegorical trio of ego, superego, and id (or libido), his own secret motto apparently being "Where Superego or Ego was, Id shall be” -- the reversal of Freud's “demythifying" dictum, "Where Id was, Ego shall be” (WL 37).¹⁶ [16. Freud is called a "defender-betrayer of myths," presumably because he "mythicized reason," yet “demythicized” by “rationalizing” a “figure of poetry” and by bringing myths to the awareness of the ego (WL 37; NT 307; cf NT 299, 309) ] “Depth psychology” is hailed as the "theology"“ of the “Psychic Breakthrough, the Re-emergence of the Id” (NT 256). Our “age" is “characterized by the consciousness of the unconscious and by the resolve to propitiate and honour that dark force." The “major revolution” in the literature of “the mid-eighteenth century," inspired by Rousseau and encouraging “Pantheism, Deism, Sturm und Drang, Sentimentalism, Romanticism, etc.," is thought to make a “god” of the “id” in place of the “superego" previously “deified” "for more than seventeen hundred years.”

      The “novel marks the entrance of the libido onto the stage of European art" (LD 44). “The popular mind” "demands” a “villain” as a “dark projection of id or superego to be symbolically defeated” (LD 100, 198). But the id gets to be a hero as well. “The Good Bad Boy of Western culture" “represents the id subverting tired ego ideals, not in terror or anarchy" (as had been done via the "symbols of the gothic"), “but in horseplay, pranks, and irreverent jests” (LD 272, 131). "Lean Bean,” “Huck," and “Nigger Jim" are all taken as “id-figures"; at one point Fiedler associates the "id" with “the symbolic Negro" at large (LD 174, 279; NT 239f). Perhaps Fiedler's skepticisrn about an eventual union of his racially divided society (e.g. WL 231f) matches his conviction that “profound and aboriginal" “forces in our life” “work against" conceiving “the relationship of instinct and ego," "black” and “white," as a "marriage of equals" (LD 368).¹⁷ [17. “The rapid mobility of American social life” is said to make this "marriage” seem plausible (NT 368); but the “mobility” projected by American literature comes more from running away from society.]

      A similar allegorizing pervades Fiedler's vision of family relationships. He offers an “archetypal metaphor" for the various aspects of authorship: “the personal element” is “the Son, the conscious-communal the Father, and the unconscious-communal the Mother” (NT 321).¹⁸ [18, Making the woman represent the “unconscious" (also LD 57, 339) implies that females read literature with more orientation toward the mythic or the id, but Fiedler portrays them doing just the opposite, as we'll find later (p. 92f). He regards the “family romance" in Jungian terms: “the desire for incest with the mother symbolizes the desire to remain a child, to be unborn'; “the murder of the father signifies the rejection of fatherhood, of adult responsibility" (NT 308f). Alternately, Melville's vision sees “mother and father” as poles of “a fundamental conflict” between “two principles, called variously earth and heaven, nature and spirit, id and superego” (LD 423). Or, "the battle with the dragon can be interpreted" as “an attack of the son against the father" as well as "the victory of light over storm and darkness," “a combat with the Devil or with God," or “an assault on the irrational in nature and an attempt to resolve the world's mysteries by liquidating them" (LD 384f).

       More specifically, family roles figure in analysing literary characterization. As in Frye, "the “despised Father” is perpetually cast as "enemy,” "villain, “Evil," and so on (WL 227; LD 56, 100, 120, 463; NT 91, 272), “The beloved Mother" is more ambivalent: for the "boy” she is “the secret enemy, to be evaded even as she is loved, because she is "wholly committed to respectable codes of piety and success" (LD 212f, 352). The boy's Oedipal feelings are offered as the “secret" motive for the persistent fascination with “incest" as a literary theme; ¹⁹ [19. Compare LD 87, 98, 104, 111f, 120, 122, 125, 232, 241, 243, 338, 348, 414, 418f, 423.] the "bride" as “sister” is the “first surrogate for the mother" (LD 56; cf. Frye, AC 200). Remarkably “many early novels end with the discovery by the hero that the mistress for whom he has sighed is his sister" (LD 56; cf. AC 101). But the incest taboo may sometimes have been just a notoriously presentable pretext for the novelist to debar sexual union from the plot line without seeming merely prudish.

      Central to Fiedler's overall conception is the role of the third family member, the child, whose awareness stands for that of both writers and readers of literature. "A work of art is successful insofar as it can recapture for us the ‘state of grace’ which as children we live" (NT 147) (another insight where Pavese matches Fiedler). "Normally, the vividly experienced moments on which a poet feeds throughout his career belong to childhood and adolescence,” “before the natural scene has lost its primal magic” (NT 75). Especially in “twentieth century fiction," "writers" “depend” on “the child's fresh vision as a true vision, a model of the artist's vision itself” (NT 276). From “the joy of innocence,” the child undergoes "initiation" as "a fall through knowledge to maturity," and as “the start of moral life” amid "full-blown, self-conscious evil” (NT 281, 277). “The confrontation of adult corruption and childish perception remains a contemporary subject, though we no longer believe in the redemption of our guilt by the innocence of the child" (NT 277). Thus, “the child character," originally "made compulsory by restrictions of gentility and fear of sex," becomes a means to “confront rather than evade experience” (LD 345).²⁰ [20. The “Primal Scene” is of course a case in point (LD 345; NT 284), though Fiedler gives it by no means the universal function Holland does (DY 110f).]

      Authorship is portrayed in accord with Fiedler's already demonstrated tendencies to personalize and psychoanalyze. On the personalizing side, Fiedler vows “it is impossible to draw a line between the work a poet writes and the work he lives” (NT 317f).²¹ [21. Contrast this assertion with: "only the most despicable of our contemporaries confuse the value of a man's collected works with that of his life"; or “the biographical fact" “does not finally matter” (NT xv, 29)]. ]If “a pattern of social behaviour can be quite as much a symbol as a word," then a “symbolics" should be able to "analyze" both “poem" and “poet's life” in the same “terms” (NT 318). Indeed, "the poet's life" “with his work" “makes up his total meaning"; and "a sense” of that "life" “will raise" “to higher power" “the larger meanings” in “a whole body of work" (NT 317). “A work of art is a history," "a record of the scruples and hesitations of its maker” (NT 47). By offering “the connective link between the poem on the page and most of its rewarding contexts," “biography” can counteract “the endemic disease of our era": "the failure to connect" (NT 317).

      In this spirit, certain passages are deemed to represent the author's own sentiments,” “fantasies,” “memories" of “childhood” and “home life,” and so on (LD 99; NT 30; WL 241; LD 226). Characters are taken as “images” or "disguised portraits” of the author's own self (LD 498, 115, 252). “Melville and Pierre are symbolically one" (LD 455). “Tom Sawyer” and “Mark Twain are alternative sketches of the same character" (LD 284). “Kenyon” is “Hawthorne's mouthpiece" (LD 418). “Quentin Cornpson” “represents the conscience of Faulkner himself” (LD 414). And so on. Or, characters are construed as figures of the artist" at large, in such roles as “questing lover," “outsider,” “pariah,” and “taboo wanderer" (LD 114f, 239, 469, 360f). Poe and Fitzgerald fashioned their own lives to reveal the “alienated artist” becoming a “drunken” “failure" -- welcomed by an audience seeking a “conventional public myth" (LD 424, 426ff; El 126f, 176ff; NT 326; WL 3f)

     On the psychoanalyzing side, Fiedler focuses on the author as a "personality, inferred or discovered," so that “biographical information" serves “the understanding" of “ego elements" (NT 317, 321, e.d.). Since, as we found, writing is compared to dreaming, the author draws from the “unconscious” or “half-conscious" mind (LD 52, 435, 451; WL 137f; cf. LD 63, 241; NT 299, 329); Characters can be formed by a “splitting," particularly of “the author's ambivalent self, like our surrogates in REM sleep,” as befits “the divided state of the psyche in modern life” (WL 133, 200; NT 90; LD 91f, 218, 336, 384, 386f).

      Special notice goes to the author's “obsessions," which may be “harmful to art," but may also, if “mastered” and “transcended," render a work the “most convincing and moving” (WL 179, 182, 184; NT 26ff, 30, 54, 58, 76, 100, 115, 118, 149f, 278, 129, 150, 143, 132). However, an author's “syndrome" may make the treatment of a “theme” “too personal and pathological to shed much light" on its “general meaning" “in American literature and life” (LD 416). The “works" may be merely “symptoms rather than achievements” (LD 423). A “portrait" may “fail to become mythic" if it “arises not out of the part” of the author's “unconscious continuous with the collective unconscious, but out of repressed resentments, very private and personal” (LD 170).

      Still, for the “community,” the author has the psychic function of an avatar” for an ancient, "almost universal" “archetype" harking back to “Orpheus" and "Euripides” (LD 426; WL 29). The "exclusion and scourging" of “the artist" is “the psychodrama of us all,” "played out in earnest” (EL 127). As noted in the treatment of “signature” and “archetype,” “the community foresees” in the "poet" who “invents" “personal consciousness" “its own imminent fall from the unity and peace of preconscious communal life, and they condemn him” (LD 426). Moreover, “the artist as outcast or outsider” offers a “surrogate for all in himself that the common reader secretly regrets having to reject in name of morality and success” (LD 425). An "artist” who "enacts rejected values” and is “abused” for it can "free the community from the burden of its repressed longings and secret guilt" (LD 426).²² [22 Or, an “alienated writer” can “objectify” the “unconfessed universal fear” of a community such as the “Americans that they “may not be loved,” may be “rejected, refused” (El 150f).] This account makes the author an “ego destroyed by the representatives of the id." Yet an author voicing the “unconscious” and the myth” should have an "id” role; and one crying "No!” in thunder!” resembles the super-ego.

      Within the archetypal and depth-psychological orientations outlined so far, Fiedler pursues his “desire to define what is peculiarly American in our books” (LD 11).²³ [23 His sense is acute enough to tell if a book's failure is due to being "too little concerned with the experience of America" or “a little too American” (LD 490, 494). Europe, in contrast, makes him confused and ambivalent (cf. El 124, 32, 113; LD 272, vs. El 114, 164).] Since "Americans” “believe that what we dream rather than what we are is our essential truth”, such concerns are “not mere matters of historical interest or literary relevance"; “they affect the lives we lead from day to day and influence the writers in whom the consciousness of our plight is given clarity and form” (El 172; LD 120. Moreover, “the essential fact of literature in our age" is "its inevitable “Americanization," “as mass culture advances and the old systems of evaluation go down” (El 210). The "achievement of the American novel” is "to have posed” “the question”: "can the lonely individual, unsustained by tradition in an atomized society, achieve a poetry adult and complicated enough to be the consciousness of its age?” (El 210).

   The “native tradition of symbolism” was “born of the profound contradictions of our national life and sustained by the inheritance from Puritanism of a typical (even allegorical) way of regarding the sensible world -- not as ultimate reality, but as a system of signs to he deciphered” (LD 29) (cf. Chs. 13, 14). “Perhaps in America alone the emergence of a tragic literature is still possible” (El 127). “Only where the sense of the inevitability of man's failure does not cancel out the realization of the splendor of his vision” and vice versa “can tragedy be touched” (El 128). "If he can resist the vulgar temptation to turn a quick profit” with a "best-selling parody of hope, and the snobbish temptation to burnish chic versions of elegant despair," "the American writer” “has, after all, a real function" (El 128). "If it is a use he is after and not a reward, there is no better place for the artist than America." Whatever the moral fiber of the nation,²⁴ [24, As remarked in Note 6, "moral” has two very different meanings for Fiedler, one for society and one for the artist (and himself. The second is probably intended when he extols America as “a nation” “continuing to act on a plane where moral judgment” and “real protest” are “still conceivable” (El 33f). This morality is not broken, but camouflaged, by the "duplicity" of American literature (El 172; LD 11, 15, 228, 288, 386, 504), it is the peculiar trait of American novels” to seem "not primitive, but innocent, unfallen in a disturbing way, almost juvenile" (LD 24). The "credo of original innocence” arose to confound the Puritan one of “original sin" (LD 184, 27). This confrontation made “the ambiguity of innocence” a central “theme of the deepest American mind" (El 197). Portrayals of Americans as "mythically innocent” or “innocent by definition and forever" (e.g., in the works of Henry James) cannot overcome the dualism whereby “natural innocence” “corresponds" to “natural depravity" (LD 312, 308, 454). Americans are cast out of "the garden of illusion": “the age of innocence is dead,” taking with it “the lapsed American dream of innocent success” (El 24; LD 315).

      "Writers” may indeed profit from "believing in hell" when “the official guardians of morality do not" (LD 30). The negativity Fiedler prizes in art may be manifested in blasphemy, a deliberate affront to the doctrine of innocence (cf. NT 13; LD 30, 336, 432, 504). An author who does not believe in hell or sin is prone to fail in his art -- a judgment passed on Stevenson, Cooper, and Poe (NT 89; LD 185, 430).

      In a tribute to "the critical importance of childhood experiences" (WL 46), Fiedler adjudges America to be "a society whose values are largely set in boyhood” (NT 14). "All Americans like to think of themselves as young" (WL 65). "The myth” of "boyhood” fosters “the regressiveness, in a technical sense, of American life, its implacable nostaligia for the infantile, at once wrong-headed and somehow admirable" (El 144). “America's vision of itself” is “the Good Bad Boy," a “crude and unruly" “roughneck," but “sexually pure" and “endowed by his creator with an instinctive sense of what is right” (LD 270; NT 265).

      "Great works of American fiction” therefore convey the viewpoint of “a preadolescent," the "novelist" “compulsively" “returning to a limited world of experience, usually associated with his childhood" (LD 24). Such a "world" is “accustomed to regarding the relations between the sexes in terms of the tie that binds mother to son" (LD 271). So "all American boys belong to mother,” and to “betray" her is "the unforgivable sin” (NT 263; LD 270). The literary “fate of the American male” is “his fall from potency and his return to the maternal embrace just before death" (LD 239). Or, he is "a delinquent boy” to he "reformed and restored to the Garden by the love of a good woman” (LD 270, 240). “Growing up is for the male not inheriting the super-ego position, but shifting it to a wife, i.e., a mother of his own choice” (NT 265; cf. NT 82; LD 275, 400).

      One of Fiedler's gloomier generalizations is that “there is no real sexuality in American life and therefore there cannot very well be any in American art" (LD 30). At least, “the American psyche finds” no “satisfactory” “heterosexual solution between man and woman” “worthy of standing in our fiction for the healing of the breach between conscious and unconscious, reason and impulse, society and nature” (LD 339). Instead, fiction circles around “impotence," “sadist aggression,” “innocent homosexuality, and unconsummated incest” (LD 345f, 348). The “utterly sublimated homoerotic passion,” with its “subversion of home and marriage,” was a special success, even “considered “safe” reading for children” (WL 186). “The love of males” fills “the sentimental centre of our novels" and boasts “a general superiority” "over the ignoble lust of man for women” LD 368f).²⁵[25. A “crush, idolized in innocent homosexual adoration” can commit only "treachery" by “heterosexual” acts, “the discovery” of which ranks alongside “the stumbling on the primal scene, mother and father caught in the sexual act,” as the “major crises of pre-adolescent emotional life” around” which “our literature” “compulsively” “circles” (LD 345).] Splendid examples are Moby Dick, “perhaps the greatest love story in our fiction," its “innocent homosexuality" offering "Platonism without sodomy “; and Huckleberry Finn, “turning from society to nature” so as “to avoid the facts of wooing, marriage, and child-bearing” (LD 370, 375, 25; cf. LD 349).

      In “the dark vision of the American,” this “embarrassment before love” parallels an “obsession with violence” (LD 28). “The withdrawal of sexual passion from art leads to an increase of horror,” "sadism,” and "Masochism” (LD 262). Upon “the suppression of sex” follows the endless “attempt to convince us of the innocence of violence, the good clean fun of horror” (LD 27). Where “taboo" makes “delinquency” “the declaration of maleness," “sexuality” is diverted into aggression” (LD 270; NT 264). “Rape" unites the two and has “always been a staple of American popular fiction” (WL 183). Against the older mythical “rape from above" by “gods and heroes,” the “uniquely American version" was “rape from below" by a “repressed race,” mainly “Indian” and “Afro-American” (WL 184, 186f, 168, 190, 194, 203ff, 209, 222; NT 240; LD 14, 412). Over and over, American writers convey and exploit the fear of “miscegenation” (LD 207ff, 220, 368, 411; WL 16, 153f, 156, 183, 186f, 189, 233; El 147). Such themes can feed “the self-righteous sadism” in “the barbarous depths of the white Gentile heart" and fabricate a pretext for “vigilante justice” and “lynch law" (WL 188ff, 235; NT 240) -- just the conclusion suggested by Millett as well (SX 402ff).

      In such an American “symbolic world,” where “sex and death become one" (LD 296), the antifeminism and the “misogynist canon” (WL 157) also diagnosed by Millett (Ch. 18) are predictable enough. “All Americans,” Fiedler avers, “including girls and women," "at levels deeper than ideology, perceive white women as the enemy” representing “everything that must be escaped in order to be free” (WL 152f). However, this feeling was only one side of a dualism or schizophrenia," again noted by Millett, which typecasted the female as both "angelic and diabolic” (LD 314). In an earlier trend, the “woman” was “idealized” and “glorified” as “fundamentally pure," even “divine" (LD 79f, 67). The “Sentimental Love Religion” rendered her a “savior,” her “virginity” a “mystique,” and “marriage” with her a “salvation” (LD 444, 77, 84, 132, 218, 255, 47f). “Sentimental archetypes” “made it almost impossible to portray adult sexual passion or a fully passionate woman" (LD 217, 291). Instead, the “heroine" is “a monster of virtue,” “a dull and embarrassing figure," “pale,” “dovelike,” humble, long-suffering" (LD 75, 221).

       In a later trend, probably fuelled by real women's refusal to act out such a part or to salute “the bourgeois redefinition of all morality in terms of sexual purity,” “novelists" "symbolized” “the rejection and fear of sexuality" by creating “monsters" of “bitchery” (LD 71, 221, 24). “To marry" was no longer to attain salvation, but “to accept complicity, to recognize one's participation in universal guilt” (El 188). This “ambivalence toward women" as either "goddesses or bitches" impelled "American writers" to devise “the pattern of female Dark and Light': "the passionate brunette and the sinless blonde” (LD 314, 200f; cf. LD 218, 296, 300ff, 309f, 417) (compare Wellek and Warren). An “ethnic" "polarity” was translated into a “moral” one (LD 301). Finally, even the “blonde" became a “gold-digger" and “vampire,” a “symbol of sexual aggression as cannibalism” (LD 325).

      Fiedler himself did not always avoid taking sides in the “class war is between the sexes” (LD 90). He may have been guided by "simple machismo” to esteem the “myth” behind "masculine” sentimentality" over “the equally valid archetype” behind "feminine” pathos" (WL 150). Also, he became a partisan in “the struggle of High Art and low," "perceived as a battle of the sexes” (WL 29). He was fond of Hawthorne's epithet about the “horde of damned female scribblers" (WL 29, 155; LD 83, 91, 104f, 127, 225, 249). He depicted their authorship both as “a critical moment in the emancipation of women" and as a “kidnapping” that produced “anti-literature: bourgeois, timid,” “banal,” “not quite literate,” sometimes “ungrammatical' (LD 83, 92f, 97, 101, 105, 95).²⁶ [26. Actually, the form “I have wrote” used by Harriet Beecher Stowe (LD 95) is dialectal and still current among some groups, though not in the “dialect spoken by a handful of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants in a few Eastern Seaboard cities” and “brainwashed” into “recent immigrants” like Fiedler (WL 69). “Grammatical errors” are also charged against James Jones and his characters (El 187), but not against Mark Twain or his.]  “After its capture by women," the “tradition” of the novel traded “forthrightness and vigour” for “the more delicate nuances of sensibility” that suited the “tenderness or squeamishness of the lady authors” (LD 85, 476, 261). "Young ladies" were also “the most light-headed of all novel-readers” (LD 117). So “our best fictionists" -- a list of males comes here - - 'felt it necessary to struggle for their integrity and their livelihoods" “against” the “female audience (female in sensibility whatever the nominal sex of the readers who composed it)" (LD 93). Fielding already had to  “rescue prose fiction from bourgeois ladies”; and in modern times, “the subject matter of popular ladies” fiction" is precisely not what Fiedler expects to find in a major novel (LD 167, 364) (nor does Iser, IR 284).

      Throughout his career, Fiedler has espoused the view that "American literature is distinguished by the number of dangerous and disturbing books in its canon -- and American scholarship by its ability to conceal this fact” (LD 11). He feels it his job “to redeem our great books from the commentaries on them.” He contravenes the “optimism” that, “since decline of orthodox Puritanism," “has become the chief effective religion" in “American" “society” (LD 27). He prefers the “direction" of the Puritan “heritage" he labels “tragic Humanism,” ²⁷ [27. The other two descendants are pictured as: the “orthodoxy” or “hysterical evangelism” that rejects learning and scholarship and intelligence” and “fears” “art" and “sex”; and the “sentimental liberalism” that “respects learning” and “promotes rationalism” and “bland cosmic optimism” (LD 430ff). These two are more widespread than "tragic Humanism” and to some degree its targets for attack], for which “it is the function of art not to console or sustain, much less to entertain, but to disturb by telling a truth which is always unwelcome" (LD 430, 432). Fiedler's general postulate of “negativism” as the “moral obligation” of art is thus brought home as the “obligation" of “the American author,” who must “project" "the blackness of life” and “the dark vision of America" -- the “obsession with violence," the “embarrassment before love,” "the hope on the surface and the terror beneath" (NT 6f; LD 502f, 432, 28).

     In its “flight from the physical data of the actual world, in search of a (sexless and dim) Ideal," “our fiction” tends to be a “gothic fiction, non-realistic and negative, sadist and melodramatic-a literature of darkness and the grotesque in a land of light and affirmation” (LD 29). “In Gothicism, the American novelist not only finds opportunities to render inward experience symbolically," but also ways of mythicizing the brutality and terror endemic to our life” (LD 503). “The America novel” is hence “pre-eminently a novel of terror,” the “passion which could fill the vacuum left by the failure of love" (LD 26, 104). "It is the gothic form that has been most fruitful in the hands of our best writers”: “symbolically understood” in “metaphors for a terror psychological, social, and metaphysical” (LD 28).

      Having been originally a “European genre," the gothic was nativized for “America” – “a world which had left behind the terror of Europe not for” “innocence," but for “new” "guilts associated with the rape of nature and exploitation of dark-skinned people” (LD 31). What had been “an enlightened attack on a debased ruling class or entrenched superstition" became a “Calvinist exposé of natural human corruption” (LD 160). “Nature and not society becomes the symbol of evil” and “the life of the unconscious” appears “destructive” (LD 160f). “The European gothic identified blackness with the superego and was therefore revolutionary'; “the American gothic” “identified evil with the id and was therefore conservative,” "whatever the intent of its authors.” Typical themes of American gothic include “flirtation with death," “the diabolic bargain,” “incest,” and the figures of the “redskin" and “black man," defensively mythicized from victims into evil powers.²⁸ [28. See LD 14, 26, 197, 435f, 442f, and the references in Note 15. A need to distract attention from the white man's “rape of nature” (LD 31, 360) was presumably one motive.]

      The “gloom of tragic vision” (Melville called it “blackness ten times black”) could animate the gothic writer to his “greatest work” (LD 444, 27, 185, 299). Conversely, an author who “abandons” “the gothic mode” with “its negative message” and “blasphemy” can lose “his truest self” (LD 504). “The Faustian implications” of the writer's “enterprise” encourage the creation of “Faustian characters" that “satisfy the dimly perceived need of many Americans to have their national existence projected in terms of a compact with the Devil" (LD 433; cf. LD 68, 134, 217, 421, 428, 433, 446-57, 461, 471). “Yet even treated as symbols, the machinery and decor of the gothic" “seem vulgar and contrived,” leading toward “abstract morality,” “shoddy theater," “the rhetoric” of the cheapest” “melodrama,” and the “theatrical debasement of the pure Faustian cry of terror” (LD 28, 421; cf. LD 466).

      A “tragic note" is needed to "redeem" “gothic effects from triviality” (LD 445). “In our most enduring books, the cheapjack machinery of the gothic novel is called on to represent the hidden blackness of the human soul and human society" (LD 27). “The gothic mode is essentially a form of parody, a way of assailing clichés by exaggerating them to the limits of grotesqueness” (LD 421; cf. LD 394f). This tactic makes it possible that the “diabolic stance can be passed off as an amusing sham" whose “bugaboos are all finally jokes," though “we are never quite convinced” (LD 504, 26; cf. LD 142, 423).

      Beside melodrama, another danger for the gothic is the “sentimentalism” which it displaced and to which it threatens to revert (LD 433, 436, 438, 445, 454, 479). Unlike “the gothic rebel," who “revolts against the will of God,” “the sentimental populist” “dissents in happy innocence” (LD 441). Within “the anti-intellectualism of the sentimental code,” “simple feeling is closer to God's truth than educated intelligence,” and “tears" are “the truest testimony of faith” (LD 79, 86; cf. NT 257, 260, 268, 293). The distaste of critics for sentimentality as a regressive and displaced emotionalism (Ch. 2) was once shared by Fiedler: “sentimentalism" "proved almost everywhere a blight," and its “influence” a "calamity" in which “truth" was “yielded up," “the reality-principle” “sold out,” and “pristine purity” "compromised” (LD 75, 466, 458, 445, e.d.).

       In “the American novel,” “the sensationalism of anti-bourgeois. sentimentality” was joined by “the smugness of liberal gentility," whose “fear of sex" impelled it to “confuse civilization and bowdlerization” (LD 124, 344, 81; cf. LD 163, 199, 445; NT 271). This outlook was not “capable” of “tragic ambivalence,"²⁹ [29 “Tragic ambivalence” is later identified as a “honorific in the New Critic's cant" (WL 148, 150). But it designates something Fiedler still expects of literature, under a more Freudian label ("the darker, more perilous aspects of our own psyches," etc., WL 50).], “radical protest,” “irony,” or “detachment," and “denied the ultimate reality of the demonic" (LF 199; El 180; LD 195). Instead, the “sentimental” author offered "stereotypes," “melodrama,” "travesties,” and “reassuring pseudo-myths” (LD 325, 466, 483; NT 168; LD 104; NT 11).

      If “sentimentality" undercuts “the reality-principle," then the proper "counterbalance” for “exposing” its “self-delusions” ought to be "realism” (LD 458, 229; NT 13; cf. LF 479f). But Fiedler is an equally staunch foe of this literary trend. The “obligation to negativism, which the sentimental genres cannot fulfil," is "converted” by “realism" to "mere pamphleteering” (LD 503). It is an “entrapment" to "believe that a work of art is equal to its raw materials'; and “a thoroughly absurd idea” that “the truth of a work of art is capable of documentary proof” (El 196; LD 164; cf. LD 188; NT 132).

      “Realism" and "Naturalism" did "perform in the beginning the essential function of art, the negative one of provocation and scandal," by "denying" the “liberal view of man" as “the product" of “a rationally ordered and rationally explicable universe” (NT 13). Yet they became “a triumphant orthodoxy,” and soon a “game” of "pretending to create documents rather than poetry” by deploying a “falsely scientific writing which sought to replace imagination with sociology” (NT 13f; LD 486). Besides, "sentimentality” was "smuggled” in anyhow, along with "political propaganda" and “heavy-handed symbolism” (NT 14, 185). Fiedler is certain that “our fiction is essentially and at its best non-realistic, anti-realistic"; “the classic American fictionists” “instinctively realized" that “literary truth is not synonymous with fact” (LD 28, 486). “Recent writers" also find that “literary modes based on reason and superficial observation must falsify" contemporary "themes," such as “modern war and the twentieth-century city” (LD 479).

      Of course, Fiedler has his own “cemeteries to defend” in this matter (to borrow his phrase, NT xiii). A myth critic has a vested interest in proclaiming that even in a "realistic'" “age,” “not the real but the mythic prompts our feelings and actions" (NT 158). The “archetypal" "survives” beyond “the objective “realism” of a social observer," however much “the theory of “realism” or “naturalism” denies” it (WL 167; NT 320). A work "triumphs" by “mythicizing" and “liberating" from “the implicit judgment of realism" (LD 380). In addition, “realism" and “fact” are adverse to the “dream," another centre of Fiedlerian theory, as we saw (cf. LD 260; NT 11; El 176).

       “For many years," Fiedler “sought to reconcile" “the contradictory ideals” of a “hierarchical culture" and a “classless society" (WL 146). His division of culture among “high," “middle," and "low" “brows" (an anatomical metaphor for the size of the brain inside, I suppose) fitted the class structure only approximately. The link between "middlebrow” and “middle-class" (NT 216; LD 225, 431, 477; WL 59) cannot be absolute. After all, Fiedler himself, though middle-class, is a "highbrow," maybe higher than American authors like the “half-educated" Whitman, or the "ignorant” and “self-educated” "Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Pound" (El 173; NT 157) -- he is a truly elevated “intellectual," a Fiedler on the roof of the intellect. ]³⁰ [30. Compare NT 217; El 68. The "liberal-intellectual” “supported trade unionism, social security, and the rights” of “minorities"; thought "the recognition of the Soviet Union" “a “progressive” step"; and took "the Loyalist side” in “the Spanish civil War” (EL 68).]

      The "'middlebrows," being “puritan," “righteous," "sentimental," "not-quite enlightened,” seemed, "even more” than the "lowbrows," "the real enemies culture"“ (LD 431, 500, 162; NT 168, 218; WL 146). A further subdivision separated "lower” from “upper" “middlebrows, the latter being more “genteel" (LD 243, 249, 257, 260f, 289, 485) (raising their eyebrows when they are constantly offended may have stretched the brow permanently?). Though “pretending to honour" “standards," the “middlebrows" would prefer “stereotypes," “pretentious kitsch,” and "melodrama" (WL 146; NT 3 5 2, 274, 168). Hence, "middlebrow" was taken to be the opposite of “serious” (LD 340, 477, 496).

      Recently, Fiedler professes to hardly “remember that I once used such terms in deadly earnest" (WL 146). Whereas his membership in the class of “intellectuals” formerly put him in a group "notoriously set apart from the general public," “living" “by different values and speaking a different language," he now seeks "a sense of at-oneness" with “the majority audience I was long taught to despise” (El 6, 68; WL 231). Gone is his assurance that "the mature writer must write" not for the "mass" nor "the “average reader," but for “the ideal understander” "once called the “gentle reader"“ (El 209). The "unfortunate distinction" of “High literature and low" or of “literature proper and sub- or para-literature" is now spurned in favour of a division into “minority" and "majority literature" (WL 13). This numerical terminology moves the advantage to the other side, striking a special chord when Fiedler exposes how far his role as "a writer” “is inextricably involved with making money" (WL 23); if nothing else, the “majority critic” will sell more of his own books. “

      One of Fiedler's favoured mottos has been: "nothing fails like success” (El 175; NT 202, 297). Now, he seems destined to illustrate it. Having met his ambition to "open communication with an audience, to exist for others" -- maybe even "to be great, to be known"“ -- he is dismayed to encounter himself, the erstwhile “enfant terrible”, at the heart of the same academy he once stormed (cf. WL 23, 202, 6Off). He is now a "'seminal” critic,” however much his "books" were “scorned” in “academic and literary reviews” (WL 18). So he feels a "need to get through or around the official critics to my proper audience" that loves “popular authors" but “never reads anything labeled “criticism" (WL 19). He still longs to “speak to” “the mass audience,” not to “our eavesdropping colleagues" (WL 140). Having been "utterly mistaken" in "predicting" that "the mass audience" would “grow closer to the elite” (WL 80), he counsels, like Mr. Pickwick, to shout with the largest crowd.

       He proposes "to take the first steps" himself “toward creating a new kind of criticism” to “confront” and “deal with” both “popular” and “high arts" “in a style consonant with a sensibility” of the “popular” (WL 115). He hopes he had “long been moving in the direction of such criticism, though without quite knowing what I was doing.” Now, he “chooses to try to become in full awareness that to which I have all along inadvertently tended: a pop critic learning” "to speak the language of popular literature" (WL 141; cf. WL 15).

      He insists that popular literature excels in doing just what he always said literature should -- reworking myths and dreams, tapping the collective unconscious, releasing the id, subverting social conformity, and so on. Like Pavese, he sustains a “democratic faith that a “colloquy with the masses” might be opened on the level of myth” (NT 142). “Low literature," “whether in pre-print, print, or post-print form, aspires to return to pure myth" (WL 129) -- a formulation that cannily subsumes other mass media. “In popular” “art forms,” such as “freak shows" (an old Fiedler favourite ludicrously out of date now), the “archetypes which inform printed texts are" "made flesh” (WL 36; cf. NT 232). “Hack" authors have “easy access to their own unconscious where it impinges on the collective unconscious of their time” (WL 1370. "Trash, rooted like our dreams and nightmares in shared myth and fantasy, touches us all at a place where we have never been psychically sundered each from each” (WL 140). “Popular literature" makes us more at home with, in tune with, the darker, more perilous aspects of our own psyches, otherwise confessed only in nightmares" (WL 50). “All art which remains popular” "makes possible” “the release of the repressed,” of “undying primal impulses. “ “Popular theater or comic books” are “works of art” “subversive of all unequivocal allegiances, all orthodoxies” (WL 41).

       Such theses echo Fiedler's earlier studies while giving added emphasis to popular art. This continuity might be a cagey move to show he's a supremely qualified one for the role of “pop critic." Consider his syllogism. “The critic who desires to do” “justice” to “low literature” “in a way which emphasizes its resemblance to rather than its differences from high literature must be first of all a myth critic" (WL 129). And not just any of the “many “myth critics" “in this century” will do -- only the “particular kind" who “use the term” “as I do; and since “none” of the others do, we are left with exactly one fully  legitimised candidate for the job. To safeguard his position, Fiedler might use a variant of the classic Freudian defense against dissenters by arguing that whoever shuns the themes of popular art as “abhorrent to civility and humanity” -- such as “cannibalism," "incest, the lust to rape and be raped" -- joins the “moralists" “eager to deny their own unconscious impulses to lawlessness” (WL 41f). Fiedler aims this reproach at social reformers, do-gooders, and commissars, as well as presbyters and priests” who promote “mythocide" and “censorship,” rather than at his fellow “critics," who generally remain "silent” on the whole issue (WL 39f, 42, 44). But the reproach is ready should the latter break their silence for the wrong side.

       On the other hand, Fiedler needs to project a radical break with his previous policies if his “new kind of criticism" is to seem genuinely new. Some tacks here are easy gestures, as when he drops his “pretentious middle initial” (WL 14)..31 [31. It's my middle initial too, and I don't see why it's pretentious unless we stitch it in red onto our shirtfronts as a literary allusion. However, he thinks the initial is a typical gesture of "academics" and "minor business executives" (letter); he still uses it in his signature, though his secretary types his name just below without it. It stands for “Aaron,” his “priestly name, an indication of caste."] Also fairly undramatic is his change of terminology, as when he now says “song and story” instead of “literature,” (WL 14, 42, 58, 84, 109, 113ff, 120, 127ff, 13f) and “mass” or “majority audience" in place of such locutions as “the wide audience capable of only the grossest responses,” or “the gum-chewing, popcorn-consuming hordes of the remotest hinterlands” (LD 475, 478).

      A more obtrusive tack is to assail his most programmatic early work ("No! in Thunder,” “Archetype and Signature,” etc.) as “pretentious,” “insufferably arrogant," and "unforgivably solemn and heavy-handed," really only a “put-on, a joke" (WL 14, 37; cf. NT X). ³² [32 Or rather, they do not have enough jokes. Fiedler “likes to think” of himself “as one of the few critics willing to make jokes" (letter).] He laments his "concessions to pedantry" and complains he was “brainwashed” into "elitist attitudes” and "pride" (WL 18, 61, 88, 121, 86) (though I can scarcely imagine anybody being harder to brainwash than he). With cordial venom, he remarks on “the grim rigor" of “proper literary criticism," the "patient documentation and mindless accumulation of fact which characterizes academic ‘research’ at its deadliest,” and "the "recherché vocabulary of semiotics, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and deconstructionism" (WL 124, 119).³³ [33 Lacanian psychoanalysis, which makes language an extended metaphor for every aspect of mental life, only vaguely resembles Fiedler's equation of text and life (El xv; NT xvf) (compare the surveys in Lemaire 1977, and Ragland-Sullivan 1986). Deconstruction seems more directly anticipated at times: the "Arfist as Patcher"; “the poem” “lives cannibalistically amid the ruins of other fables and rhetorics"; “all such oppositions are dangerous” (NT 60, 130, 258).] ThoughI don’t see these failings in his own early works, his might arguably be among the “modern or bourgeois criticism” which “judges literature” and “distinguishes” between “high and low," and which "has outlived its usefulness" (WL 52).

      A still more incisive tack is his “passionate apology" (WL 21) for popular literature in the face of its inadequacy by traditional criteria. “Pop” makes "aesthetic” and “ethical” “standards” “irrelevant” (WL 122). We cannot expect “elegance of structure” or “distinguished style,” aspects to which the “majority audience is” “as indifferent” as it is to “verisimilitude of plot and character” (WL 13 20. “Ordinary readers do not demand that their protagonists be psychologically credible, or indeed that they have any “inwardness” at all.” In pop works, the “actions” of the “characters” “take place in a realm where probability and rationality are no longer relevant.” “Gifted oneiric writers” may have “no understanding of human nature or of the functionings of society." “They are likely to prove trivial and banal, even pathological and perverse." "Nor does it matter,” since “they move us viscerally rather than cerebrally.” As if to clinch the point, he demonstratively bathes in the “mild vices” -- being “sentimental, philistine,” and “ingenuous" -- he once “hoped" he'd never "come nearer” to after having been “taught to eschew" them by “modernism” (WL 141, 92; NT 163).

      Fiedler's new “advocacy" calls for “an approach to literature” whereby critics can “speak for ourselves,” not "in the name of some impersonal tradition,” to “the mass audience" (WL 139f). This project will “ease” an “intolerable” “classroom situation” and “join together the sundered larger community” (WL 140). Both “popular literature” and “High Literature” will be “read” simply "as literature" (WL 140; cf. WL 11 5, 129, 138). A key step is that we "if not quite abandon, at least drastically downgrade both ethics and aesthetics in favor of “estatics" (WL 139). With “ekstasis” -- “ecstasy or rapture or transport, a profound alteration of consciousness in which the normal limits of flesh and spirit seem to dissolve” --- “rather than instruction and delight” as “our chief evaluative criterion, we can abandon all formalist, elitist, methodological criticism" in favour of an “eclectic, amateur, neo-Romantic, populist one" (WL 140). “We will find ourselves speaking less of theme and purport, structure and texture, signified and signifier, metaphor and metonymy, and more of myth, fable, archetype, fantasy, magic, and wonder.” (And thereby sounding more like Leslie Fiedler.) The "newest critics” will “set literature in the broadest possible contexts," including “history and biography, sociology and psychology" (WL 115), just what Fiedler advised in Love and Death (p. 770.

      “In order to survive," we are told, “criticism must avoid the creeping professionalism endemic in our post-industrial world by eschewing jargon, the hermetic codes which secular hierophants use to exclude the uninitiated," and “speak with the authority not of experimental science or systematic philosophy," but of "a colloquial demotic poetry, vulgar enough to fear neither humour nor pathos" (WL 115). Whoever salutes this goal might be troubled to imagine the mass audience trying to read such a passage studded with an erudite vocabulary more like an “artificial tongue” than “the language of the people” (cf. WL 68). To appreciate What Was Literature?, the masses are liable to need some background in classical Greek literature, and a smattering of Latin, Hebrew, Yiddish, German, and especially French (the idiom of “troubled elitists', WL 15). Plus of course a fair grounding in world literature, and in the theories of Freud and Jung.

      In fact, the most qualified audience for the book would be recruited from those like Fiedler, whose “high regard" for popular literature came “after having passed through an initiation into the world of elitist standards" (WL 212). This "readership” would be mostly “teachers and students,” who encountered "literature" primarily in “departments of English” (WL 63, 58). Some of us there, I for one, discovered that intense and extended experiences with “high art” had not narrowed our taste, but expanded our awareness and receptivity for all art and culture.

     Still, Fiedler is obviously not satisfied with the academic audience, who already read his books. Yet even his pleas for a mass audience do not stop him from warding off several readerships. “Elitists” are barred for fostering a “canon" that grew “more self-consciously exclusive, more self-righteously narrow" (WL 61). Advocates of an “elitism” “stood on its head," who accept only “majority art” and “ban" "minority art" are likewise rebuked (WL 116f).. “Solid middle-class citizens” won't do, insofar as they are "terrified" by “all manifestations of antinomian or dionysiac impulses” (WL 48). Foes of “pornography” are counted out too, if all “forms of subliterature” that “have most pleased the mass audience” can be regarded as “pornography" (WL 48, 133ff). “Revolutionary blacks and radical feminists” are also out, since they not only oppose porn, but refuse to celebrate Fiedler's favorites, Uncle Tom's Cabin and Huckleberry Finn, and don't relish hints that women “like being raped," especially black slaves by white masters (WL 208, 48, 42, 225). What remains, at least until Fiedler can write criticism in genuinely popular language, appears to be an audience of Fiedlerian readers waiting to hail the newest wave of Fiedlerian critics.

      Suppose the battle is won, and “majority criticism” and “ecstatics" become the order of the day. What tasks does the critic have then? One might be to “open up the canon," whose list of accredited works Fiedler had once accepted on the authority of D. H. Lawrence and F.O. Mathiessen (WL 143, 27 145ff; NT 161; LD 14, 181). The authors were all “WASP males'; not “a single book by a woman," and “No Negroes Allowed" (WL 147; LD 398). But as Fiedler now owns, “the very notion of a “canon” has been called into question by the rise of mass culture” (WL 146). A merely revised canon with a few works of popular literature “smuggled" in would bring no advance, being in essence what we already have (WL 123, 147, 238). Fiedler seems rather to intend a complete openness toward “all art, high, low, or middling” (WL 138; cf. WL 115, 129, 140). “Majority poetry," for instance, is said to include song “lyrics,” “graffiti inscribed in public toilets, children's game chants, and greeting card verse” (WL 85). Moreover, since "all popular art” is “distinguished” by its “ability to move from one medium to another without loss of intensity or alteration of meaning,” the majority critic will be dealing with “movies, radio, and TV" as well (WL 177f). If “in popular art, books are as independent of their authors as of their medium” (WL 178), authorship will receive less consideration than it traditionally has, aside from the usual salute to “mythopoetic powers” (WL 36, 125, 198, 217, 231).

      Despite this breadth and tolerance, modernism at least seems marked for the heave-ho, along with the "aesthetical” criteria" it “defined” (WL 149). For Fiedler, “modernism in poetry has reached a dead end, and the attempts of the so-called post-modernists to escape its limitations are doomed to failure as long as they continue to pursue originality" (WL 93). “Modernist writers" are blamed for the “split in literature” between "serious books” and “best sellers" – “an especially unforgivable error for American writers" (WL 64). They “produce" only for “libraries" and "write as if for exegesis,” “addressing merely themselves and their post-modernist critics,” who "address only each other” (WL 64, 106, e.d.). "Art novels" "are no longer viable models for living fiction" (WL 64). “Modernist taste" sins by “tolerating" “the most extreme incoherence, provided it is hightoned, learnedly allusive and obtrusive enough to put off the ordinary reader” (WL 90).

       Such denunciations of modernism not because it isn't classical but because it isn't folksy enough almost bring Fiedler near the utterly unexpected company of the cultural watchdogs of Stalin and Hitler (cf. WL 117, 150; LD 484; El 204), though they would of course repress much pop art he favours and imprison the authors. Of course, Fiedler sincerely disavows the intent to “ban” “the high in favour of the low” or to "restrict the full freedom of literature” (WL 129); but he delivers, arguments that could serve such a cause. Ultimately, his campaign against the “brainwashings" of modernism" and "elitism” threatens to engender another “paranoid “conspiracy” theory,” the inverse of the one he blamed on “left-wing academics" (WL 61, 88, 121, 20, 101).

      The favoured "forms of sub-literature" are recognized by their "having most troubled elitist critics” through “sentimentality," "horror," “hard-core pornography,” and “low comedy" (WL 133f). These works fulfil “the essential function of literature to release in us unnatural impulses -- including the need from time to time to go out of our heads -- which we otherwise repress or sublimate for the sake of law and order, civilization, sweet reason" (WL 136). "We seek" “privileged insanity" in “mythic art" (WL 137). "The pleasures of pop train us to indulge impulses which morality and mental hygiene warn us are dangerous." Indeed, as I already quoted, “all four" “forms of sub-literature “can be regarded as pornography, since they titillate by infringing deeply revered taboos" (WL 133f). -- this too fitting Fiedler's older theses that great American works were “dirty books,” and that “the line between “pornography” and respectable literature has blurred" (LD 77, 85, 29).

      However, Fiedler has not taken the step we find in Holland and Paris of viewing his own theory as partly an artefact of his particular personality. He certainly seems to match the Freudian pattern of ambivalence, with one side of his personality forbidding the pleasure of the other. He consistently assumes that the normal response to emotion is to repress it; and that pleasure is typically linked with inflicting or receiving pain. ³⁴ [34. Hence the references to "sadism” and “masochism” (LD 29, 262, 328, 346, 502; WL 190, 203, 209) -- emotions of which he is "ashamed" (WL 231). Such “shame” is blamed on the influence of elitist criticism" (WL 121, 13f)]. Yet this internal division, or at least its intensity, might stem from a conflict between his populisrn and his peculiar elitist and modernist training (cf. WL 91f, 141).

      His chapter on Roots is vastly instructive in this regard. As a demonstration of “ecstatics,” it would be a flop. Only in the penultimate paragraph can Fiedler manage to admit that Roots “moves me deeply,” “because” "it takes me into a world of primordial images” (WL 231). Even then, he “confesses" himself “still enough of a vestigial elitist to be ashamed of my own vulnerability” "to so gross an appeal" to his “sentimental and sadomasochistic" response. As if to forestall that confession, he spends most of his 19-page chapter changing the subject over to things he feels more comfortable with: authors versus editors, other books (above all Uncle Tom's Cabin), and other authors (Stowe, Henson, Dixon, Wolfe, Yerby, Reed, Wright, Malcolm X). The approximately four pages where he really talks about Roots  bristle with barbs and slurs. The book is “pitifully naive,” “awkwardly structured," and “ineptly written,” presenting "shameless" “kitsch,” “stereotypes," “banality of ideas,” “palpable absurdity," and “perverse lust in violence," plus "sexist" and “inverted racist" characters (WL 219f, 223ff, 2270. Haley, the author, is an “Uncle Tom,” “a “good good nigger,'" "a professional Negro,"“ "bland," “squeamish," “reticent about sex," “timid” in “politics,” and “committed to monogamy and bourgeois values" (WL 211, 223, 227, 225, 219). To avoid joining the “hysterical rightists" that “raised" their “voices” “against Roots," Fiedler craftily borrows most of these comments from leftist radicals and, yes, the “elitists" and “highbrows" he elsewhere disdains (WL 219, 223). The only favourable opinion, James Baldwin's, is at once rebutted with views from Baldwin's earlier work and that of Richard Wright (WL 220), both accredited highbrow black writers.

      Fiedler contradicts himself in his frenzy of “vestigial elitism. " He concedes Haley's “mythopoetic power," but allows him only one “even approximately mythic character” (WL 231, 224). After noting the book's “universal acclaim,” its “astonishing popularity" with “the majority audience,” Fiedler suddenly declares Haley's “audience” "chiefly white” by citing statistics on “letters he got in response to the Reader's Digest version" -- worthless evidence, since that periodical is the “secular bible of white Middle America" (WL 217, 225f). Moreover, Fiedler's long-standing thesis about the irrelevance of historical truth to art (e.g., in his attack on realism and naturalism) collides with his drive (another tactic of “elite critics,” WL 229) to establish, on the authority of “'anthropologists," that Haley has “flagrantly falsified the record" or was “taken in by a notably unreliable” “historian” (WL 2240. “How pointless” "the debate about the historical veracity of Haley's book!” is the nervous refrain; “it scarcely matters how true to scholarship or the living 4kfricans” perception of their past'; “it matters little how selective and skewed" (WL 228, 224, 227). Yet before we agree, we are warned that “the question of historical truth cannot be avoided altogether'; after all, Haley and some of his “admirers" take the "fiction" for “fact" (WL 229f, 223, cf. WL 216). Why it should matter so much that the book is not “documented history" is hard to see, since “even scholarly, “objective” historians disagree about what happened in those irrecoverable times” (WL 226, 230).

      To top it all off, Fiedler harps upon Haley's use of “ghost-writers,” "editors,” and “collaborators," and brings up the "highbrow" and "modernist" view that this “matter" is "a dirty little secret" (WL 211, 217, 226, 216). He leaves it open whether Haley was legally guilty of "plagiarism” (a crime of which "Mrs. Stowe" is cleared, WL 218, 228f), but reminds us that it is “in law a punishable offense" and for "the popular audience a betrayal of trust" (WL 213). Fiedler ought not to think so, since Wolfe, Fitzgerald, and Caldwell relied on editors -- even he shared an editor with "Leon Edel and Saul Bellow” (WL 215f). Besides, he says "popular” books are independent of their authors (WL 178). Yet at the announcement that “a black American” “succeeded for the first time in modifying the mythology of black-white relations in the United States for the majority audience,” we are told to "never mind" (i.e., keep in mind) “his white editors, ghost- and scriptwriters” (WL 229).

       Fiedler "rereads the last page" of Roots and is "left with a sense of at-oneness not just with the majority audience," “but with much in myself I was long afraid to confront" (WL 231). But his chapter rather suggest how afraid he may still be; and how far he responds like the elitists, not like the masses. Why does his intended "redemption” of Roots turn into a proof that it is “a prefabricated piece of commodity schlock" (WL 212)? Various motives might be imagined: his elitism being not so "vestigial" after all; his envy of the book's popularity and sales, including in its life as a film; his aversion to the “Home as Heaven" myth it “celebrates"; its “blessing by the PTA"; its rivalry with his beloved books by Stowe and Mitchell; its failure, right down to the "Happy Ending," to project the dark vision he demands of American novels; its author's “Christian" and “bourgeois values"; and so on (cf. WL 216f, 212, 220, 224, 223, 225).

      Perhaps the strongest motive is far simpler: it doesn't belong to Fiedler's childhood as do the pop books he genuinely reveres (cf. WL 85, 87, 141, 151, 164f 212). He might try his hand on a really recent mass art form, such as music videos, some of which, even finely crafted ones like Duran Duran's Save a Prayer or  Spandau Ballet’s Gold, have been seen and loved by millions of Americans who were never deeply touched by Twain or Stowe, the "literary father” and “mother" “to us all” (WL is dedicated to “Sam and Hattie”!).

       Perhaps too, Fiedler can abjure elitism more easily than pessimism. His works generally agree with “most of our present-day writers," who “feel that there are deeper perceptions of man's plight" than “optimism" can attain, even that of "a Rousseau” (El 197fi. Throughout his critical sojourns, Fiedler uncovers the darker side, even in the most light-hearted scenes; and if it isn't dark enough, he is apt to misprize the work. Despite its “Happy Ending,” Roots at least has its share of violence, lust, rape, and miscegenation, staples in Fiedler's recipe for proper American fiction. A real acid test for his "estatics" would be to deliver an unreservedly favourable critique of some smash hit with an relentlessly optimistic ideology, like Jonathan Livingston Seagull (which he despises, WL 78, 126). For indulging in ”ecstatic" writing, Fiedler once called Kerouac a “schoolgirl" and a "coward" (NT 4). Now, even a transmogrified Fiedler, the friend of the people, is tough to visualize in transports of happiness about the issues he has always felt drawn to address.

    Or, a general rather than merely personal impasse may be the blocking agent: that so far, the actual function of the “majority critic” is unclear. “Low literature at its most. authentic” is "loved by majority audience generation after generation, without ever having been embraced by the minority one" or by the latter's “literary critics" (WL 122, 200; cf. LD 41, 43, 72; WL 55). Why should the blessing of reformed highbrows he wanted now? If the “manipulation of popular taste” by "the masters of the media"“ is just a “paranoid" "theory” of "left-wing academics" (WL 101), then best-sellers must be what “the mass audience wants," and hence good by definition. The pop critic can only add a voice to the general acclaim, and perhaps spoil the fun by doing so. If the “story which long endures and pleases many does so with the “vulgar” satisfactions of terror, sexual titillation and the release of tears" (WL 210), what happens when the story is certified and commanded by critics and teachers? Might it not seem monotonous and pointless to an approved voyeurism free to stare and find nothing worth seeing? Fiedler senses “a need on the part of the majority to believe that what they read by preference is in some sense taboo" (WL 99), but overlooks the prospect that his project might violate that need.

       The job of the “majority critic," we hear, is to "awaken" the "true archetype" that “sleeps" "in every stereotype” (WL 141f); but Fiedler performs no such office for Roots. In fact, has he not himself insisted on "the invisible character of the true archetype,” its “explicit analysis" being “inhibited" by "unexamined, irrational restraints" (El 146)? "The myth, by definition, cannot be conscious, and the moment we take pains to know it, it is degraded, profaned" (NT 49). “Our errors arise from too much knowledge of what the archetypal is rather than too little” (NT 306). "Bodies of story of whose mythic basis we have become fully aware" constitute “mythology" and “die as myth” (WL 130).

       Fiedler concedes he has "helped turn living myth into dying mythology, if not archetype into stereotype" (WL 131). But he's still “convinced that there is a chance to raise such material to consciousness without utterly falsifying it': “the critic who does so" must “write literature about literature, fiction about fictions, myth about myth." We must not seek "the methodological rigor of the sciences,” nor "attempt" "to prove or disprove, construct or deconstruct anything, but to compel an assent, scarcely distinguishable from wonder, like the songs or stories which are their immediate occasion." Perhaps Fiedler can now become the author he has longed to be “since he was seven years old” and finally join the company of “our most eminent novelists,” who “first flirted with, then rejected, the temptations of High Art" (WL 14, 68). Yet his examples of this “anti-method,” Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy and Tolstoi's What is Art? (cf. WL 116f, 131), are rare and difficult displays of immense talent, far beyond the reach of a whole profession of pop critics or an entire majority audience.

       Still, Fiedler's goal probably requires a criticism that moves not between high and low art, but between high and low awareness. The works won't do the job by themselves, though some seem to help more than others; what criticism can contribute is so far poorly shown, as Fiedler rightly says; and freedom in responding is undoubtedly the key. But a totally different gallery of signals will be needed, whether or not the profession of critics we now have can ever master or transmit them to the mass audience. Fiedler irreverently gives his “motto" as “often wrong, but never in doubt" (WL 22).³⁶ [36. Fiedler told me this motto is a “joke” I shouldn't take in “deadly earnest”; but it's no less apt for being funny. I asked him if scholars or teachers who are “never in doubt” about what a work or author means might discourage ordinary readers from enjoying literature. He replied that “it is always good for a teacher to seem utterly committed,” as were those “from whom I learned the most,” "whether or not I shared their belief.”  What I remember from school is a troop of self-righteous pedants.] Long ago, he professed the serious aim of “creating” “the difficult pleasure possible only to one recognizing a truth which involves a personal humiliation or a surrender of values long held" (NT xiv). He also opined that “real seriousness” and "actual greatness" are "approached” by a “writer” denouncing the “cause that is dearest to him” as “imperfectly conceived" and “bound to be betrayed” by “its leading spokesmen” (NT 9). Now, he may have the opportunity to prove all this upon himself. As yet, his struggle hangs in the balance, despite his manifest sincerity and commitment to the populist cause. Perhaps his ambivalence arises from his uncertainty about what the brave new world looks like and how we can recognize it if we approach it. La lutte continue.

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