SEX, SOCIOLOGY AND CRITICISM
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'itous." The author then is in the curious position of excoriating
this Puritanism (I have news for him-it ended long ago) and its
crippling effect on life and literature, and of celebrating the
greatness of the ambiguous literature it produced. He wants his
literature dark and diabolical, and thinks that frustrated sexual
lives and a Puritanical society can produce this, while at the same
time he is always deploring it all and is the champion of mas–
culinity, "genitality," true womanhood, and so on. So while Mr.
Fiedler admits to having "distorted" his masters, in my opinion
he has done something worse: he has oversimplified them.
All of which brings me to my last point. I hope I may
be
pardoned if I speak with some heat. Mr. Fiedler is the foremost
representative, and I think the liveliest and the best, of a school
of "criticism" that has come into being in this country in the last
few years. Properly it is neither criticism nor history nor sociology
nor psychology but is rather a kind of amateur brand of sociology
cum
sex, or, rather, sex
cum
sociology. At a fairly respectable
level it produces such a document as
Love and Death in the
American Novel;
at a low level it produces those intermina:ble
symposia in magazines and books, wherein after reading a few
current novels or poems or watching some television shows the
"critic" gives a full-scale analysis of "the state of American cul–
ture."
It
has produced a critic whom I like to call the self-styled
Archimedean American, the man who has discovered, he thinks,
the Archimedean resting place of complete objectivity. He lives, I
guess, on a space platform, and we shall certainly have to include
one of these types on the first trip to the moon, for if one is not
along to tell all the other Americans on the voyage what they
have seen, then they won't
know
what they have seen, and every–
thing will have been wasted, and we'll have to get all our inform–
ation about the moon from the Russians. His mission in life is to
act as if he were a European making notes on the natives. He
has divided the population of America into two parts: himself
(it's not even "we" anymore) and everybody else. His justice is
untempered by mercy, and as far as I can see, no other American,
except himself, is exempt from his wrathful generalizations; e.g.,
Mr. Fiedler: "... our literature (and life!) [are] so charmingly
and infuriatingly 'boyish'''; "our critics" [no exceptions made]
