506
LESLIE A. FIEDLER
comfortably aware) that a chief function of literature is to exprea
and in part to create not only theories of time but also attitudes toward
time. Such attitudes constitute, however, a politics as well
as an
esthetics; or, more properly perhaps, a necessary mythological sub–
stratum of politics-as, in fact, the conventional terms reactionary,
conservative, revolutionary indicate: all involving stances toward
the past.
It is with the past, then, that we must start, since the invention
of the past seems to have preceded that of the present and the future;
and since we are gathered in a university at whose heart stands a
libraryl-the latter, like the former, a visible monument to the theory
that a chief responsibility of literature is to preserve and perpetuate the
past. Few universities are explicitly (and none with any real degree
of confidence) dedicated to this venerable goal any longer. The
Great Books idea (which once transformed the University of Chicago
and lives on now in provincial study groups) was perhaps its
last
desperate expression. Yet the shaky continuing existence of the uni–
versities and the building of new college libraries (with matching
Federal funds) remind us not only of that tradition but of
the
literature created in its name: the neo-epic, for instance, all the way
from Dante to Milton; and even the frantically nostalgic Historical
Romance, out of the counting house by Sir Walter Scott.
Obviously, however, literature has a contemporary as well
as
a
traditional function. That is to say, it may
be
dedicated to illuminat–
ing the present and the meaning of the present, which is, after
all,
no more given than the past. Certainly the modern or bourgeois
novel was thus contemporary in the hands of its great inventors,
Richardson, Fielding, Smollett and Sterne; and it became contempor–
ary again-with, as it were, a sigh of relief-when Flaubert, having
plunged deep into the Historical Romance, emerged once more into
the present of Emma Bovary. But the second function of the novel
tends to transform itself into a third: a revolutionary or prophetic or
futurist function; and it is with the latter that I am here concerned.
Especially important for our own time is the sense in which
1 "The New Mutants"
is
a written version of a talk given by Mr. Fiedler
at the Conference on the Idea of The Future held at Rutgers, in June, 1965.
The conference was sponsored by Partisan Review and the Congress for Cultural
Freedom, with the cooperation of Rutgers, The State University.
