The most controversial of all the American Myth Critics, and the most important, is Leslie Fiedler …, whose first book, An End to Innocence, Essays on Culture and Politics (1955), was not actually concerned with literary criticism. Two of the pieces, however, did introduce the theories which eventually become the dogma of No! In Thunder (1960), his second collection of previously published essays; Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), his monumental, seminal, sometimes brilliant, sometimes sophomoric study of the American novel from its beginnings to 1959; and Waiting for the End (1964), in which he carried this study through 1963.
The most famous essay in An End to Innocence is "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!" in which Fiedler introduced three of his pet theories: 1) the American classics have failed to deal frankly with "adult heterosexual love"; 2) Moby-Dick, Two Years Before the Mast, Huckleberry Finn, and the Leatherstocking Tales are really boys' books; and 3) each of the above celebrates "the mutual love of a white man and a colored."… It is in this same essay that Fiedler offered the following nebulous definition of what was already a much abused word: "by 'archetype' I mean a coherent pattern of beliefs and feelings so widely shared at a level beneath consciousness that there exists no abstract vocabulary for representing it, and so 'sacred' that unexamined, irrational restraints inhibit any explicit analysis. Such a complex finds a formula or pattern story, which serves both to embody it, and, at first at least, to conceal its full implications." This concealment, which D. H. Lawrence considered characteristic of the American classics, becomes an essential part of the mythic complex which it is the duty of the critic to uncover. Unfortunately, Fiedler became overzealous in his pursuit of hidden meanings, and his theories (e.g., his insistence that "Miscegenation is the secret theme of the Leatherstocking novels, especially of The Last of the Mohicans" … inevitably suffered from his Barnum and Bailey showmanship. (pp. 151-52)
This is a free excerpt of 334 words. There are 1,349 words (approx.
4 pages at 300 words per page) in the full critical essay.
Read the rest of this Criticism with our Fiedler, Leslie A(aron) 1917–: Critical Essay by Arnold L. Goldsmith Access Pass.
