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JOHN HENRY RALE I GH
an example of a popular habit of thought in recent literary
criticism. What it really represents is a simplification of late nine–
teenth-century or early twentieth-century European ideas.
In
his
Preface Mr. Fiedler ennumerates his masters: C. S. Lewis
(in
the
Allegory of Love ) ,
Marx, Freud, (plus a tincture of Jung), and
D. H. Lawrence. But the influence of the first three is really
nominal. As for C. S. Lewis, there is an interesting but historically
dubious discussion of Courtly Love in the early part of Mr. Fiedler's
book. (Mr. Fiedler admits that he borrows freely and transmutes
easily the ideas of any of these people) . What comes from Lewis,
who was studying an allegorical literature, is Mr. Fiedler's habit
of allegorizing a non-allegorical literature.
In
Mr. Fiedler's mind
no character in a novel stands by himself; he always points to
something else, either sexual, sociological, or mythical. Clarissa
and Lovelace are "male principle and the female, savior and
devil, aristocracy and bourgeoisie, but they are also the head and
the heart- what we would now call super-ego and (in somewhat
expurgated form) id." Similarly, history becomes the evolution
of literary archetypes; thus Lovelace finally becomes converted
into "the masturbatory fantasy figure of bourgeois ladies."
The influences of Freud and Marx seem only of the vaguest
order. As far as I can see, Freud means terminology, principally
"id," "ego," and "super-ego," which are used very loosely and with
none of the sense of their provisional character and their complex–
ity as in Freud himself who kept changing his mind about the
meaning of each term and was always tentative in his use of them.
All that is left of Marx is a few references to "class," but this gets
confused with the "brow" game that Mr. Fiedler plays. And this
compounds confusion more.
In
the first place Marx's "class" was
an economic designation and was based upon a class system which
generally prevailed in Europe in the nineteenth century.
It
does
not exist in that form in Europe any more and never existed, in
Marx's sense, in this country, which has been largely middle class,
with an upper stratum that was a plutocracy rather than an aristo–
cracy and a lower stratum that was poor and oppressed but was not
a proletariat
in
the European sense.
In
F. Scott Fitzgerald's words:
"Americans, while willing, even eager, to be serfs, have always been
obstinate about being peasantry." The "brow" designation, while
