LESLIE FIEDLER
lern for American novelists has been the adaptation of nontragic
forms to tragic ends. How could the dark vision of the American
-his obsession with violence and his embarrassment before love
-be expressed in the sentimental novel of analysis as developed
by Samuel Richardson or the historical romance as practiced by
Sir Walter Scott? These subgenres of fiction, invented to satisfy
the emotional needs of a merchant class in search of dignity or a
Tory squirearchy consumed by nostalgia, could only by the most
desperate expedients be tailored to fit American necessities.
Throughout their writing lives, such writers as Charles Brockden
Brown and James Fenimore Cooper devoted (with varying de–
grees of self-consciousness) all their ingenuity to this task, yet
neither Brown nor Cooper finally proved capable of achieving
high art; and the literary types invented by both have fallen
since into the hands of mere entertainers-that is, novelists able
and willing to attempt anything
except
the projection of the dark
vision of America we have been describing. The Fielding novel,
on the other hand, the pseudo-Shakespearean "comic epic" with
its broad canvas, its emphasis upon reversals and recognitions,
and its robust masculine sentimentality, turned out, oddly
enough, to have no relevance to the American scene; in the
United States it has remained an exotic, eternally being discover–
ed by the widest audience and raised to best-sellerdom in its
latest imported fOIID, but seldom home-produced for home con–
sumption.
It is the gothic fonn that has been most fruitful in the hands
of our best writers: the gothic
symbolically
understood, its ma–
chinery and decor translated into metaphors for a terror psycho–
logical, social, and metaphysical. Yet even treated as symbols,
the machinery and decor of the gothic have continued to seem
vulgar and contrived; symbolic gothicism threatens always to
dis–
solve into its components, abstract morality and shoddy theater.
A recurrent problem of our fiction has been the need of our
