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RICHARD POIRIER
Stressing these essential facts about American literature, one has
to confront some of the issues raised by Leslie Fiedler. I want to say
at the outset that
Love and Death in the American Novel
is to my
mind probably the best single book on American fiction ever written,
and it is surely unsurpassed in its definition of Gothicism as a charac–
teristic of that fiction. The book has been most resented for its pur–
ported emphasis on sexual perversity in American literature and in its
use of this as an index to certain historical and cultural tensions. Ac–
tually Fiedler is altogether less daring and less insistent on this aspect
of our literature than was Lawrence in his much earlier study, and
he is in no sense as moralistic about sex as a literary component.
If
Huckleberry Finn were the boy next door, it would probably hurt
him more to call him homoerotic than to call him Faustian, but
Fiedler knows that as applied to fictional characters either designation
is mythic, not accusatory. What he forgets is that either designation is
also destructive of what Huck more particularly offers us in his style
or in his contribution to a novel so full of the struggle for verbal
consciousness. One of the troubles with Fiedler's argument is that it
is often initiated by an emphasis on "character," as if "character"
existed
in
nineteenth-century American fiction in the unfractured form
it usually takes in English fiction of the same period. He can therefore
insist on the significance of certain acts or words as if they refer to
"character" and its psychological structure when more often these
acts and words belong instead to some larger metaphorical significance
in a work to which sexual psychology is merely incidental or irrele–
vant. Huck and Jim lying naked together on the raft are in fact
looking less at each other than at the stars or the river; their nakedness
expresses less about their feelings for each other than about their
assertion of freedom, as necessary for the white boy as for the Negro
slave, from the world of costume, of Style.
Fiedler's work is a brilliant example of mythopoeic criticism
given its fullest exposition three years before
Love and Death in the
American Novel
by Northrop Frye in
Anatomy of Criticism.
In Fied–
ler as in Frye is the assumption that mythopoeic and archetypal con–
structs have some existence more historically and scientifically demon–
strable than the existence of a so-called text. The "text" thus becomes,
as Fiedler is happy to assert, "merely one of the contexts of a piece of
