Leslie A. Fiedler
THE NEW
MUTANTS
A
realization that the legitimate functions of literature are
bewilderingly, almost inexhaustibly various has always exhilarated poets
and dismayed critics. And critics, therefore, have sought age after age
to legislate limits to literature-legitimizing certain of its functions and
disavowing others-in hope of insuring to themselves the exhilaration
of which they have felt unjustly deprived, and providing for poets the
dismay which the critics at least have thought good for them.
Such shifting and exclusive emphasis is not, however, purely the
product of critical malice, or even of critical principle. Somehow
every period is, to begin with, especially aware of certain functions
of literature and especially oblivious to others: endowed with a
special sensitivity and a complementary obtuseness, which, indeed,
give to that period its characteristic flavor and feel. So, for instance,
the Augustan Era is marked by sensitivity in regard to the uses of
diction, obtuseness in regard to those of imagery.
What the peculiar obtuseness of the present age may be I find it
difficult to say (being its victim as well as its recorder), perhaps
toward the didactic or certain modes of the sentimental. I am reason–
ably sure, however, that our period is acutely aware of the sense
in which literature if not invents, at least collaborates in the invention
of time. The beginnings of that awareness go back certainly to the
beginnings of the Renaissance, to Humanism as a self-conscious move–
ment; though a critical development occurred toward the end of the
eighteenth century with the dawning of the Age of Revolution. And
we may have reached a second critical point right now.
At any rate, we have long been aware
(in
the last decades un-
