LESLIE FIEDLER
But the figure of the natural man is ambiguous, a dream and a
nightmare at once. The other face of Chingachgook is Injun
Joe,
the killer in the graveyard and the haunter of caves; Nigger
Jim
is also the Babo of Melville's "Benito Cereno," the humble ser–
vant whose name means "papa" holding the razor to his master's
throat; and finally the dark-skinned companion becomes the
"Black Man," which is a traditional American name for the
Devil himself.
The enemy of society on the run toward "freedom" is also
the pariah in flight from his guilt, the guilt of that very flight;
and new phantoms arise to haunt him at every step. American
literature likes to pretend, of course, that its bugaboos are all
finally jokes: the headless horseman a hoax, every manifestation
of the supernatural capable of rational explanation on the last
page-but we are never quite convinced.
Huckleberry Finn,
that
euphoric boys' book, begins with its protagonist holding off at
gun point his father driven half mad by the D.T.'s and ends
(after a lynching, a disinterment, and a series of violent deaths
relieved by such humorous incidents as soaking a dog in kerosene
and setting him on fire) with the revelation of that father's sor–
did death. Nothing is spared; Pap, horrible enough in life, is
found murdered brutally, abandoned to float down the river in
a decaying house scrawled with obscenities. But it is all "humor"
of course, a last desperate attempt to convince us of the inno–
cence of violence, the good clean fun of horror. Our literature
as a whole at times seems a chamber of horrors disguised as an
amusement park "fun house," where we pay to play at terror
and are confronted in the innermost chamber with a series of
inter-reflecting mirrors which present us with a thousand ver–
sions of our own face.
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. No wonder our authors
