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deepest hearts, to conduct with the mad just such a dialogue as
their predecessors learned long ago to conduct with the aboriginal
dwellers in the actual Western wilderness. It
is
easy to forget, but
essential to remember, that the shadowy creatures
living
scarcely
imaginable
lives
in
the forests of
Virginia
once seemed as threaten–
ing
to all that good Europeans believed as the acid-head or the
borderline
schizophrenic
on the Lower East Side now seems to all
that good
Americans
have come to believe
in its
place.
That last sentence (the last
in
the book)
rings
hollow
with its
careful
parallelisms and balances and
its
ponderous
instructive
tone;
it's
often
the slow-curve
artists
who show you a lot of arm, and the rhetorical
windup
makes you wonder
if
Fiedler really trusts
his
stuff here. When
critics begin
to tell
writers
what
is incumbent
on them,
something
is
wrong.
A program for redeeming and pereptuating a myth seems odd com–
ing from someone who stakes so much on myth as the articulation of
unconfessed
assumptions and desires. Surely the last thing that can pre–
serve the mythic force of American or any other literature is a calculated
artistic regimen for
making
new cultural cases do the work of old ones.
Fiedler is like the dean of a newly established college I once worked at,
who appointed a committee to
invent
some "traditions" for the place;
it's
one thing for Fiedler to say that "The 'New Race' which Lawrence
foresaw (and toward which, with or without benefit of literature, we are
moving at an astonishing rate) demands a New Myth," but quite an–
other for him to legislate, more or less in cold blood, what that myth
shall be.
A literary anthropologist should be the first to insist that a kind of
literature doesn't lose its mythic force just because it's not being written,
right now, somewhere down the street. It's admirable of Fiedler to be
concerned about the New Savages and to insist that we have literary
commerce - intercourse, he might say - with them; but of course we'll
do that anyway, not in order to preserve "the essential myth of America"
(even if Fiedler is right about what that is) but because they are real
people, interesting and disturbing ones who may help us understand
the present and what it could lead to and whose experience matters
because it is human experience. In the process of imagining their lives
we indeed may find some affinity to our best imaginings of Indians, the
alien others who challenge us to consider alternative histories and new
selves in the present; but serious art always effects alteration of conscious–
ness, and it needn't be
about
alteration of consciousness in Fiedler's sense
to do its job.
Fiedler's idea of myth is dangerous to his anthropological intentions:
