biD
THOMAS R. EDWAR DS
It is only a dream, perhaps, this vision of love and reconciliation
between the races whose actual history is oppression and hate ; but it
is a dream we do not willingly surrender, our dearest myth , sustained
by the faith Thoreau himself expresses at the end of the chapter ill
which he recounts the legend of Henry and Wawatam: "But in my
dream ideal justice was at length done ... and I was unspeakably
soothed and rejoiced ... because in dreams we never deceive our–
selves, nor are deceived. . . . Our truest life is when we are in
dreams awake."
"Dream" is a perilous metaphor, and Thoreau's ambiguous last sentence
comes awkwardly into Fiedler's context: do we find our truest life when
we conduct our waking selves in accordance with the justice we learn in
dreams, or when we extend dreaming into waking life, treating it
as if it
zl'ere
a place of justice rather than the unjust place reason and feeling
report it to be? One hopes the fonner, but without being sure that
Fiedler always sees it that way - the vision is "our dearest d ream" all
right, but how dear and soothing and rejoiceful ca n it be to the Indians,
or to the Negroes , whom Fiedler irritatingly keeps treating as Indians in
disguise? The book has an epigraph from Levi-Strauss, stressing his com–
passionate concern [or the dying people he has worked \\·ilh and (by
implication ) insisting on the integrity of their styles of
or.~anizing
their
experience, whose validity and dignity is indeppndent of our usuallv
patronizing and distorting ways of apprehending them. Fiedler knows
this, and certainly he has respect and compassion for the Indians. but
his anthropology requires that they mostly be fi gures of
our
myths, crea–
tures of our guilts and dre<lms, whose mythic status as psychic redeemers
is only made possible by an actual history of genocidal horror. One
wonders how the acidheads and borderline schizophrenics [pel about
becoming the mythic matter o[ the New ,,,,pstl' l'll - is
that
thp best wav
to take their experience seriously?
In short. I don't think that Fil'dler's \\'a:' of treating myth is as
easily transfl'rable into prescriptive program as he wants it to be. His
methods do damage not just to literature, by breaking up whole works
to salvage the "authentic" fragment, but to
\iff'.
making it only a kind of
materia mythica
to be arranged and manipulated without entering very
deeply into the particular experiences that compose it. He doesn't mean
to do this, and his career is a deser\'ed and salutary rebuke to those who
would insulate art from its human motives and consequences; but
The
R eturn of the Vanishing American.
for all its admirable intentions and
its achieved pleasUI'es and illuminat ions. is [inally bad mf'dicine.
Thomas R. Edwards
