The Annotated Fig Leaf

LOVE AND DEATH IN THE AMERICAN NOVEL (603 pp.)--Leslie A. Fiedler--Criterion ($8.50).

Leslie A. Fiedler, literary critic and professor of English at Montana State University, describes the friendship of Ishmael and Queequeg in Moby Dick as "homoerotic"--a case of "innocent homosexuality." Written in that vein, Love and Death in the American Novel is a tumid, quasi-psychoanalytic study in which Critic Fiedler tries to strip American literature down to a heavily annotated fig leaf. As Fiedler sees it, the fig leaf conceals guilt and impotence, the historical inability of the U.S. novelist to portray mature women or deal with adult hetero sexual relationships.

When they are not, in Fiedler's view, "infuriatingly boyish," the masterworks of U.S. fiction, e.g., Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, The Red Badge of Courage, are sexless. Even in The Scarlet Letter, the "A" might as well stand for anticlimax, for all passion is spent before the novel begins. Instead of depicting love and marriage, the U.S. writer customarily projects a spectral landscape dominated by death, pursuit and flight. The U.S. novel does not derive its power from skill, according to Fiedler, or from its vaunted realism (from Poe to Nathanael West, it is often surreal), but from something like Jung's "collective unconscious."

Castles to Indians. How did U.S. fiction get deflected onto this strange and sometimes morbidly haunted path? Like the good psychological determinist he is, Author Fiedler feels that it all began in the womb of English letters some two centuries ago. Pioneering American novelists had two English models--the sentimental novel of love embodied in Richardson's Clarissa and the gothic novel of crumbling castles and mental phantoms invented by Horace Walpole (The Castle of Otranto). Eventually housewives and what Hawthorne called "female scribblers" took over the sentimental novel; as a romantic fantasy it has paced U.S. bestseller lists ever since. When Charles Brockden Brown, a graceless but serious 18th century writer, replaced Italian ruins with the American wilderness and aristocratic doom with Indian gore--in such novels as Edgar Huntly--the gothic novel became the favored mode of major U.S. novelists from Melville to Faulkner.

The decline of the sentimental love nov el is a sizable calamity in Fiedler's eyes. In Continental terms, the aristocratic Lovelace's siege of Clarissa's stoutly preserved virginity was a class struggle of courtly manners v. the rising middle class. Transferred to the democratic U.S., it became a puritan's version of the war between the sexes. Woman stood for Virtue, Man for Vice. Having struck down the paternal authority of prince and prelate, the immigrant-rebel found that the voice of conscience, convention and society sounded strangely feminine. The divine right of kings had been swapped for the divine Tightness of Mother.

Little Eva to Lolita. The reaction of the U.S. male novelist, says Fiedler, was a flight to Nature--away from the responsibility of marriage and family, back to primal innocence. Thus the typical U.S. fictional hero escapes to the virgin forest (Fenimore Cooper) or the South Seas (Melville) or on hunting and fishing trips (Hemingway). Yet Nature is studded with violence, the idyls are scarcely innocent: "Huckleberry Finn, that euphoric boys' book, begins with its protagonist holding off at gun point his father driven half mad by the D.T.s and ends (after a lynching, a disinterment, and a series of violent deaths relieved by such humorous incidents as soaking a dog in kerosene and setting him on fire) with the revelation of that father's sordid death."

Far from sordid, and yet passing strange, are the friendships these "men without women" achieve--Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook, Ishmael and Queequeg, Huck Finn and Nigger Jim. Similar friendships are found in the male Hemingway world--for instance, between Jake and Bill in The Sun Also Rises. These relationships are probably not even "homo-erotic," as Fiedler claims; yet they are often tinged with the love-hate ambiguity of the white man's encounter with the Indian and the Negro. Oddly enough, these relationships are counterpointed by a series of Fair Maiden v. Dark Lady situations (notably in Hawthorne). The hero is torn between the good blonde and the evil brunette, propriety and passion. In the 20th century the good blonde has become "a hopeless and unmitigated bitch." In The Great Gatsby she is Daisy, the golden girl who humiliates the hero with a "voice full of money"; in The Sun Also Rises, she is Brett, the sterile sexual adventuress; in Sanctuary she is Temple Drake, the man-devouring nymphomaniac. The ultimate gothic horror is the Child Bitch, Lolita, perverse twin to the 19th century's Angel Child, Little Eva.

Faust to Oedipus. The gothic hero dabbles in monstrous sex substitutes from necrophilia to incest, but his ultimate blasphemy is to sign a Faustian pact with the Devil. "I baptize thee not in the name of the Father, but in the name of the Devil," howls Ahab deliriously as his magic harpoon is tempered in barbarians' blood. "To sell one's soul is to deny the Fall," argues Fiedler, "to want to be as God." Ahab, the quintessential gothic hero, is Faust. And Faust's ally, Mephistopheles, would probably emerge (in Fiedler's Freudian idiom) as a poor devil with an Oedipus complex about God the Father.

Critic Fiedler's Freudian couch, like any bed of dogma, is Procrustean. What doesn't fit is cut to size. Love and Death is full of the maimed and the missing, from Henry James to Edith Wharton, Sinclair Lewis to John Dos Passes. It never seems to occur to Fiedler that a novel survives on its literary merits, not its myths, and on its stories, not its symbols. While his nonstop psychologizing is at times brilliant and rarely a bore, the head shrinker's touch is a trifle grotesque. In sum, Fiedler produces a gallery of shrunken heads--deliberately reducing the stature of most of the American writers he discusses--and then peevishly complains that they lack size.

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