What Was Literature?
Fiedler, Leslie
WHAT WAS LITERATURE? Leslie Fiedler / Simon and Schuster / $14.95 William H. Nolte If Leslie Fiedler's What Was Literature? were only a little better than it is, it would be unreadable. But as it...
...truth, unless I sadly err, is that he really believes what he writes...
...After chastising the "little groups," the faddists, who sought to "protect" poetry from the masses by turning it into an esoteric form of speech, indecipherable to all but a select few, he reminds us that the other extreme, the one now upheld by Fiedler and those like him, is even worse: On the other hand, let it be far from me to propose the average educated man as an arbiter of 'poetry or any other art...
...Again like the pugnacious professor I memorized Field's "Little Boy Blue," which provided me with much tearful joy between sessions of leap-frog and walking on stilts, but, unlike Mr...
...Served him right, I say, for underestimating the professorial mind, or rather for not comprehending the diabolic effect a long course of English graduate-study has on minds that are much more imaginative than they are sensible...
...What Fiedler borrows from Freud or D.H...
...For reasons he does "not quite understand," Miss Mitchell's "book remains for me even now a test case, harder to come to terms with by far . . . than Uncle Tom's Cabin or The Birth of a Nation or The Clansman itself...
...For all I know, Mencken may have been unjust, but then so too are the gods unjust...
...In the opening chapter of his new Book of Revelations—a chapter he modestly entitles "Who Was Leslie Fiedler...
...Uncle Tom is "female" and hence fair game to the rapist Simon Legree...
...If those generalizations are even less valid than most other generalizations, they nonetheless give pause, they make the reader think for a moment...
...our grave panjandrum protests (again) that he was indeed "quite in earnest" when he wrote his most famous essay, "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey...
...Moreover, he confuses the role of the critic with the object of art he is proposing to criticize...
...Usually he does not care for poetry—and no harm in that—but alas that he has a deep uneasy respect for it...
...You may recall I mentioned Thomas Dixon as one of the primary interests of our deep-down-diving and much-mud-upbringing critic...
...It is a beautiful work of nature, like an eagle or a high sunrise...
...I offer lagniappe...
...The William H. Nolte is C. Wallace Martin Professor of English at the University of South Carolina...
...For example, he proudly admits that he enjoys the TV soaps as well as such cop shows as Baretta, Kojak, and Starsky and Hutch...
...For only if we devise arrangements that are tolerable to the responsible dissidents can we shift our focus from their specific grievances, which are important in principle but marginal in practice, to the schooling received by the great majority of American children, which is and will remain public, but which is not yet nearly as good as it needs to be...
...he still doesn't know quite what to make of them, just what symbolic meanings may be dredged from between their covers...
...Lawrence, his two favorite gurus, or even old class-conscious Karl Marx, he returns new-minted, with new thrills and aberrations, decked out in a motley all his own...
...He is of course as much a snob in one camp as in the other...
...But now Fiedler insists (again: What Was Literature...
...In this latest effort, alas, there is mere clutter and mutter, a standing on tiptoe and a waving of arms, a boiling of old bones, the disconsolate cry of a fanatic trying to peddle his phantasms: I write...
...It shows every weak ness, fault, misdemeanor known to prose fiction, from incredible characterization to careless proofreading, and from pre posterous dialogue to trashy illustrations...
...the reader knows that just beyond the page before him there looms another extravagance in taste or expression, some platitude or truism to make the eyes water and the ears ring, some wild attempt to defend the indefensible or to utter the ineffable...
...he associates it vaguely with "ideals" and a better world, and may quote Longfellow on solemn occasions...
...And what are those texts...
...Having been encouraged (his word, God save the mark...
...They are those infected with "elitist pride," those who prefer "high" literature to "low" literature, those who cling to outmoded Arnoldian notions and sniff disdainfully at the mush being gobbled by the democratic masses...
...in any case they are more than a little vague, not the sort of words that clarify much of anything...
...And thereby either moved ahead or set back, I'm not sure which, American literary criticism by a few thousand years...
...On learning that Fiedler wrote the essay with a straight face, that he was not being consciously perverse, Rahv confessed to being more than a little nonplussed...
...You surely see the drift...
...He has his own perversions of taste or complete nullity, duller than Gongorism...
...Myths and atavistic shapes move to and fro with fearful symmetry...
...But come to terms he must...
...I think Fiedler is obviously correct when he says that the literature which is most nearly universal in its appeal is by its nature antinomian and will therefore reinforce none of the respectable pieties...
...simply refurbishes earlier imaginings) that those who read the essay as a "straight" piece still somehow missed the whole point...
...He asks the critic to throw away his tool kit, or dissecting instruments, and concern himself (somehow or other) more with "myth, fable, archetype, fantasy, magic and wonder...
...get crossed and re-crossed and double-crossed...
...In the second part, entitled "Opening Up the Canon,'' of What is Literature?, Fiedler illustrates his "new" critical philosophy by examining a few texts...
...by the reception of that Ur-fantasy about poor maligned Huck and Jim, Fiedler proceeded, as he put it, to flesh out his "original insights" in the three tomes that followed, the most widely known of which is probably Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), surely one of the most wrong-headed examples of special pleading ever to break wind in the groves of Academe...
...Robinson Jeffers said much the same thing in "Poetry, Gon-gorism and a Thousand Years" when he wrote: "Poetry is not a civilizer, rather the reverse, for great poetry appeals to the most primitive instincts...
...Be that as it may, Mencken does, as Old Walt was wont to say, offer good health to you nevertheless: And now let us jump from Paradise to Gehenna, which is to say, from the three excellent books we have been discussing to the Rev...
...Here, as everywhere else, his problem is that he fails to say anything about distinguishing good literature from bad literature...
...I can recall my lamb-white days, but I am unable to relive them...
...True enough, Philip Rahv, who accepted the article in 1948 for Partisan Review, which Rahv edited at the time, considered the piece an innocent spoof of the humorless professorial criticism that was just beginning to clog the arteries of the learned journals and make reading about literature rather more a task than a pleasure...
...I was exploring new worlds of banality, of vapidity, of melodrama, of tortured wit...
...But at least that book contained a thesis or theme, untenable though it was...
...Furthermore, note the great breadth of the generalizations—white versus nonwhite, myths of idyllic anti-marriages and escapes from "home," civilization versus savagery...
...After that, I must confess, the task became less onerous, and toward the end the very badness of the book began to exercise a nefarious fascination...
...Mindful that famous essays may not be all that famous, I hasten to inform those still sitting in darkness that Fiedler there revealed the homosexual relationship between Huck and Nigger Jim...
...As a child I also read and adored those writers (and various others of greater or lesser renown)— and have no regrets, far from it, for having done so...
...The way to happiness lies through suffer ing...
...So I now look back upon my two hours with Comrades, not with a shudder, but with a glow...
...Fiedler admits that he too was once infected by the elitist error, which led him to deride the works of Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and Eugene Field, as well as Kipling and Robert Service, all of whom had been childhood favorites...
...Mencken wrote the little notice back in 1909 when criticism was still in its primitive stage...
...It is not necessarily a moralizer...
...The first two of those masterpieces, he tells us, have haunted him for years...
...I felt the thrill of the astronomer with his eye glued upon some new and incon ceivable star—of the pathologist face to face with some novel and horrible coccus...
...Besides, who says those writers are all bad, that everything they wrote is bad...
...In his own words: "Once we have made ekstasis rather than instruction and delight our chief evaluative criterion, we will be well on the way to abandoning all formalist, elitist, methodological criticism, and will have started to invent an eclectic, amateur, neo-Romantic, populist one that will enable us to read what was once popular literature not as popular but as literature, even as it enables us to read what was once High Literature not as high but as literature...
...Whole races and national groups—blacks, whites, Anglo-Saxons, Black Panthers, etc., etc.—mill about the yard wondering what the hell it's all about...
...For one thing, it constantly surprises...
...Children have a perfect right to childish predilections...
...Fiedler, the poem no longer moves me to tears...
...Rather than run the risk of misrepresentation I shall let him explain himself: What I actually contended, referring not just to Huckleberry Finn but other American classics like The Leatherstock-ing Tales and Moby Dick, was that, in a society characterized on the conscious level by fear and distrust of what I called then "homoerotic love" ("male bonding" has since become the fashionable euphemism) and by mutual violence between white and nonwhite Americans, there has appeared over and over in books written by white American authors the same myth of an idyllic anti-marriage: a lifelong love, passionate though chaste, and consummated in the wilderness, on a whaling ship or a raft, anywhere but "home," between a white refugee from "civilization" and a dark-skinned "savage," both of them male...
...it is worse, because more constant...
...It will lie embalmed in my memory as a composition unearthly and unique—as a novel without a single redeeming merit...
...Nor is Fiedler a mere fraud, hell-bent on getting his name bruited about in the little world he inhabits—although in all fairness it must be said that no man loves more the sound of his own name, or is more eager to pick a quarrel for the sake of hearing his own voice...
...This particular dance may not be a thing of beauty, but he errs who holds that Fiedler is a mere scrivener, a run-of-the-mill pedagogue, a witless purveyor of other men's more windy notions...
...The first chapters of this intolerably amateurish and stupid quasi-novel wellnigh staggered me, and it was only by tremendous effort that I got through them at all...
...This piety without instinct or judgment is a source of boredom, insincerity and false reputations...
...And who are the villains in black hats...
...In the chapter "From Ethics and Aesthetics to Ecstatics," Fiedler mars what has a semblance of sense by arguing too much for it...
...That means turning our gaze occasionally toward the lofty ideals set forth by Stephen Arons, but keeping our feet firmly on the road paved by Ted Black...
...But let us return to Jeffers, whose sane, clear vision offers such striking contrast to Fiedler's muddled thought and turgid prose...
...Nothing wrong with that...
...Thomas Dixon's Comrades...
...But as it stands—outlandishly discursive, repetitious, strident, so utterly humorless as to be at times funny, egregiously egotistic, and maniacally messianic—it arrests attention, it warrants tribute...
...it is as bad as the delusions of the little groups...
...Symbols glow and then fade in the middle distance...
...it does not necessarily improve one's character...
...No, I am not going to tell you the plot...
...Niggers" haunt the white psyche— and no wonder: they come in all sorts of (symbolic) shapes...
...it does not even teach good manners...
...I take the following review from a collection of Mencken's Smart Set criticism which I edited fifteen years ago, and which is now unhappily out of print...
...at the price of some messiness...
...Uncle Tom's Cabin, Gone With the Wind, the illustrious works of Thomas Dixon, Jr., and Alex Haley's Roots...
...For some reason Fiedler fails to inform us that Dixon was a Baptist preacher as well as a literary artist, a biographical fact that somehow pleases me...
...therefore you're wrong...
...Buy the book and read it yourself...
...I confess that I have never read, and never will read, Dixon's novels, but I have for years known who he was and what sort of novels he wrote, the best known of which were The Leopard's Spots (1902) and The Clansman (1905), later turned into the famous movie The Birth of a Nation...
...Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature, from which much of this tosh was cribbed...
...There are —and I quote and perspire at the same time—"good good niggers" and "bad bad niggers" and "good bad niggers" and . . . but enough...
...Unfortunately, the adjectives he uses in that sentence do less to describe than to pigeon-hole...
...In effect, he proposes that the critic dispense with moral and aesthetic considerations and concentrate on the emotional or ecstatic element of the work of art...
...He is, in fact, one of the least judicious critics, except insofar as he cherishes whatever is "popular," and hence in tune with his populist, egalitarian prejudices...
...Having subjected you, patient reader, to commentary on the Fiedlerian drivel, I must make at least partial amends...
...Genders (ah, the Freudian motif...
...But then Jeffers was talking about poetry, not criticism...
...Ah, they no longer wear black hats, having by now gained respectability...
...When not jousting with windmills, Fiedler is disemboweling straw men...
...So one reads on, wondering if it is possible, as Yeats might have put it, to know the dancer from the dance...
...Nor did he make the supreme mistake of confusing popularity with quality, as Fiedler constantly does—that is, after undergoing the transformation from elitist snob to populist advocate...
...No, not enough...
...The enemies of art must be put to rout...
...Load the cannon...
...He comes close to saying, in other words, -that the critic should concern himself not with criticism but with re-creating the work of art before him...
...Saddle Old Paint and ride...
Vol. 16 • May 1983 • No. 5
