Freud and Faust in American Letters:

...What makes fiction interesting for him, nevertheless, and what explains its power for the ordinary reader, is the evidence of archetypal and mythopoetic forces at work...

...Ahab...

...It has been most conspicuous in Fiedler’s own wide scattering of essays, reviews and lectures, but — qualified and mixed with other elements—it has found expression in the work of Richard Chase, Newton Arvin...

...Huck resolves to go to hell rather than restore a slave to his rightful owner...

...Though this huge book employs psychoanalysis in such an extreme way, Fiedler does not discuss problems of methodology at all...

...These archetypes go through an endless minuet...

...It will be a road back to consciousness, to history, to meaningful political and moral ideas —elements conspicuously missing in this book but not necessarily alien to it, and certainly not alien to the spirit of the intelligent, dedicated man who wrote it...

...Jackson, Lincoln...

...Unable to face up to archetypal Woman, American males denied woman’s true nature...

...Nor is it related to the kinds of moral, religious and political decisions which present readers of these American classics have to make...

...But for those 600 pages it hammers away insistently, unreservedly, at the same few themes which made the brief essays so provocative...

...The natural man of the American forests is described as an id figure, even when like Natty Bumppo—who is specifically cited as being loyal to the id—he is totally inhibited sexually...

...The confusion in Fiedler’s use of psychoanalytic terminology and his failure to relate inner to outer experience makes it difficult to judge or even understand one of the central themes of Fiedler’s book, “the dimly perceived need of many Americans to have their national existence projected in terms of a compact with the devil...

...or the End of Jean Jacques Rousseau...

...Now we see that Fiedler is not free, that he is not joking, that he believes with a terrible seriousness that these are the only really important questions where American literature and psyche are concerned...

...Fiedler is as suspicious of writers as the psychoanalyst Edmund Bergler...

...Although D. H. Lawrence, in Studies in Classic American Literature, also had some very arbitrary things to say about the hidden hypocrisies of the American psyche, this did not prevent Lawrence from a very rich appreciation of the way in which the American literary imagination responded to the world outside...

...There is not even the most passing reference to Presidents Washington...

...Fiedler, on the other hand, has almost as little to say as Parrington about the style, the rhythm, the form of the novels he is discussing, and the relation of this form to meaning...

...Fiedler even anthropomorphizes the id—which Freud himself calls “a chaos, a cauldron of seething excitement”—and makes it capable of being “offended...

...This is what American literature is about...

...He only loves the sound of trees...

...We do not read American novels to understand better the realities of love and death as consciously experienced by actual human beings...

...Writers split women into incomplete imagoes of women, light and dark, the untouchable snow maiden and the dusky, dangerous enchantress...

...The archetypal figures are not real characters and the society in which they move is not a real society...

...We read novels to see what kind of archetypal expression may be given thwarted and perverted love instincts in the imagination of writers who are mostly “castrated peepers,” “genital cripples, helpless and fascinated before the fact of genital love...

...Nor is it death in action, as Hemingway tries to observe and record it...

...Read in quarterly reviews along with essays of quite a different kind, or in his own volume, An End to Innocence, which contained articles on such subjects as Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs and celebrating the Passover in Rome, Fiedler’s literary essays seemed amusing free forays on the part of a man with very wide interests...

...But the death in his title is not the death existentialists talk about, the death that lies ahead of all of us as individuals...

...R. W. B. Lewis, Henry Nash Smith...

...Fiedler begins his study with a fascinating analysis of these forces at work in the European predecessors of the American novel, and especially in Richardson’s Clarissa...

...He seemed to be impudently testing both literature and psychoanalysis by bringing them into the boldest kind of conjunction...

...Fiedler devotes only a few paragraphs to the major war novels...

...The women, in revenge, symbolically castrated the men...

...Reviewed by Robert Gorham Davis Professor of English Literature, Columbia University MAKING GOOD ON the threats and promises with which he has enlivened the American literary scene for so many years, Leslie Fiedler has come through with a vast, brilliant, sustained, derivative and obsessive book...

...It should mark the end of an era, or at least the end of the road, for the particular kind of archetypal, mythic interpretation of American literature which began in 1924 with D. H. Lawrences Studies in Classic American Literature, and which has flourished in the decade and a half since the war...

...Sometimes they hide the truth from themselves...

...Fiedler seems intellectually more at home in Europe than America...

...Charles Olson, Edward Dahlberg and many others...

...We think that we will scream if we hear once again, at least in literary connections, id, superego, genital, archetype, symbolic castration...

...Fiedler prefers Richardson to Fielding because of Richardson’s tragic sense, his depth of analysis, his ability to bring the whole natures of man and woman into living dialectic...

...At times literary history seems simply a record of the different forms taken by our genital inadequacies...

...This Faustian bargain he finds at the center of our three greatest works of the literary imagination — works which are also, however, testaments of spiritual suicide...

...The same few cards get shuffled and reshuffled over and over again...

...It is one more form of evasion or displacement...

...Wilson or Franklin D. Roosevelt, though some of them seemed like father figures to their followers, and some of them faced maturely the anguish of having to make fateful decisions when good and evil were inextricably mixed...

...Lionel Trilling...

...The role of Indians and Negroes in America is to supply dark-skinned id figures for our national fantasies, to be both the object and cause of our national sadism and unacknowledged guilt...

...Fiedler’s title, of course, justifies a restriction of subject matter...

...Our addiction to violence is explained by the fact that “the death of love left a vacuum at the affective heart of the American novel into which there rushed the love of death...

...At times he seems an orthodox Jungian in the historic role he assigns to the mysterious hereditary archetypes...

...meeting, separating, changing places...

...So was his essay, “Montana...

...Though Fiedler is more psychological than they are, his perspective is quite as limited and his judgments as negative and restrictive...

...In reference to Freud and Jung, whose names appear in the introduction only, Fiedler says, “Only my awareness of how syncretically I have yoked together and how cavalierly I have transformed my borrowings prevents my making more specific acknowledgments...

...America is a nation of Rip Van Winkles, Natty Bumppos, Ishmaels, fleeing toward nature, childhood, homo-eroticism...

...Death for him is the death instinct, sadism...

...And though this has not been true in earlier writings, he seems here to treat political action in a conventionally psychoanalytic way...

...Fiedler’s “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey,” which sent so many temperatures shooting up when it first appeared in Partisan Review in 1948, was 10 pages long...

...Fiedler, of course, understands thoroughly the inadequacy of Parrington’s critical-realist view of literature...

...Its rich exemplification ranges from Provencal poetry to Marjorie Morningstar, from the Greek New Comedy to J. D. Salinger’s “For Esme — with Love and Squalor...

...Not only do they fail, but we know in advance that they must fail...

...In his essay on Moby Dick there is an enthusiastic account of the climactic action of the book, which he takes to be not only symbolic but a vivid re-imagining of the experience of chasing a real whale in a real ocean...

...Fiedler has no interest at all in the novel as a direct reflection or critical account of social circumstance...

...They flirted in their imaginations with the enchantress and then married the snow maiden...

...Lawrence also quotes generously, because he likes Melville’s prose...

...The external physical realities of the American continent — its plains, mountains and cities—become significant only as they symbolize the mother or the flight from her...

...The psyche is full of complexities and “dark deceits” anywhere at any time, but in America, officially self-deceived about its innocence and idealism, the ambivalent psyche gets plenty of cooperation...

...He has gone as far as he can in the opposite direction from that taken by Vernon L. Parrington in Main Currents in American Thought or Granville Hicks in The Great Tradition...

...Political history is completely ignored...

...Love and Death in the American Novel is 600 pages long...

...The relation of this hell to the mother-son situation described in most of the rest of the book is not made clear...

...Hester and Dimmesdale alike symbolically inscribe themselves as the Black Man’s followers...

...They are fantasms, shadows cast on the blank walls of a writer’s mind by the operations of the inherited archetypes...

...At about the 300th page we begin to feel stifled...

...Of war as a social phenomenon or as enforced self-testing under extreme circumstances he says almost nothing...

...These early sections of Love and Death in the American Novel, with their freshly inventive references to Diderot, Rousseau, Goethe, Marquis de Sade and many others, are perhaps its best part...

...It is all explained in the first two chapters of Geoffrey Gorer’s The American People, the chapters entitled “Europe and the Rejected Father,” and “Mother-Land...

...Though literary criticism is becoming more historically and socially conscious again, it must not ignore what depth psychology has taught us about the unconscious mechanisms which are partly responsible for imaginative creativity...

...We read major and minor works alike to see just how the characters evade the demands of adult sexuality, and how the authors evade acknowledging that evasion has occurred...

...Having denied the authority of so many fathers, the fatherland, the King, the Pope and the bishops, the revolutionary, democratic Americans found that they had destroyed the authority of fatherhood itself...

...Often quite incompatible Jungian and Freudian terms appear in the very same sentence...

...But in his reaction Fiedler has plunged into a closed world of greater unreality where we are cut off both from meaningful social history and from individual history...

...It is hard to believe that Fiedler takes psychoanalytic thought itself very seriously...

...Duplicity is the most notable, perhaps the essential characteristic of American novelists...

...At other times they are spoken of as “debased,” not significantly different from cliches...

...Similarly, there is free play with the Jungian concepts of the archetype and the shadow...

...Fiedler’s book is likely to turn many readers against psychoanalytic terminology, not so much because he uses these terms dogmatically and narrowly, but because he seems so arbitrary and casual and inconsistent in his use of them...

...Fiedler is quite consciously reacting against the social criticism of the ’20s and ’30s...

...Or they fled women entirely...

...This is a pity...

...It is regrettable that Fiedler, instead of spending so much time on the figure of the Richardsonian seducer, had not worked out this Faustian concept more articulately, in the light not only of hypothetical unconscious forces, about which so much is said, but also in the light of the changing development of ideas, beliefs and social situations in America...

...Though Jung says that anima in a man must be feminine, since it is an expression of his own femininity and of the feminine archetypes in his collective unconscious, Fiedler identifies as Huck Finn’s anima the adult Negro Jim...

...Sometimes the archetypes are treated as permanent psychic dispositions which can be denied only at the price of hysteria or madness...

...Fiedler describes the incest-motif in romantic literature as “a giveaway of the Oedipal aspects of all eighteenth-century thought,” and says of the 1930s: “What is called politics was essentially apocalyptics: a commitment to the notion of revolution which is essentially a dedication to horror...

...Politics is referred not to history or to the necessities of its own peculiar laws and principles, but to the dynamics of the family romance...

...Gothic terror, the Freudian thanatos...

...It is a highly organized work in deep temporal perspective...

...We want to break out of this cave or hot-house or womb, or whatever it is, and get back again to the ego, to consciousness, to reality, to a perceived world...

...sometimes they simply hide it from their readers or put it in a cipher which only initiates can decode...

...It is as if we were having astronomy explained to us by someone who was at once a Ptolemaic and a Copernican...

...Perhaps this will make another book for Fiedler...

...It leaves out the imagination, the psyche, and the relative autonomy of a successfully structured work of art...

...In The Great Tradition, Hicks measured American writers and found them all wanting by the test of an ideal Marxist insight into history and the class struggle—an insight which they could not conceivably have attained in their particular historical circumstances...

...He finds all of them unable to depict convincingly the consummation in marriage of a mature and un-innocent man’s love for a whole and passionate woman...

...Once we have shifted to the new world and exchanged castles for forests, papal inquisitors for red Indians, the development seems at once more monotonous and less coherent...

...Some confusion results, especially as separate terms are often used in ways which are inconsistent with the meanings which the appropriate psychoanalysts themselves give them...

...Leslie Fiedler measures American writers and finds them all wanting by the test of an ideal genital sexuality...

...having entered into some unspeakable pact with Fedallah, strikes from hell’s heart at the whale...

...he talks as much, however, about the superego, which the Jungians never mention...

...He outdoes the Marxist critics in exposing their protective rationalizations, their blindnesses, their corruptions of consciousness...

...They are what give a work of the imagination emotional force and meaning...

...Family authority and the superego functions passed over to the women, and men were condemned to eternal boyhood, eternal sonship...