Fiedler has long been a lone ranger in those marches where academic respectability merges into individual guru-mongering and self-promotion. And it has been a specialised pleasure to watch the ways in which he handled this dual personality, getting himself skilfully into just the right amount of trouble and ducking back into professional decorum. The respectable academic claims to be amusedly outraged; but he draws secret nutriment from the open lawlessness of one clearly of his own tribe. We cannot quite be dead seems the implicit message of their invitations to visiting professorships and general tendering of academic amenities. More deeply, Fiedler caters to the dream life of the American profession of literary criticism and scholarship by committing with naked hands those vaunting acts of parricide and cultural appropriation which the corporate body can perform only gloved and muffled. For the ignominy of the whole academic study of English literature in America is that it has inherited the English language and the literature in it and that it is not, or only by adoption or declension, its own inheritance. What is Shakespeare to a third generation Italo-American, say, or he to Shakespeare? Nothing, or no more than Goethe or Schiller and in another world so much less than Dante or Verdi except that Shakespeare is the swarming centre and most total exhibition of the damned language that a quirk of history obliges him to use. It is a standing insult. It unmakes the Revolution and deposits the poison of rejected Europe upon the lips and in the mouths of the most inveterately native American.
A caricature of course, but I think also a brooding, latent reality. The response, predictably, has been to assimilate English literary culture by a massive all-out technological assault upon it. By editing, and annotating, compiling and researching, the illusion is created that English literature—and so England itself—is an American invention. America not only destroys the aboriginal American but in fantasy the aboriginal Englishman too. This systematic appropriation is naturally riddled by doubt and insecurity. Hence in many manifestations it is discreet and respectful. Another big biography, another definitive collection of letters. And there is also the sad realisation that what has been so tenderly transported is, out of any context, quite dead and empty.
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