[Fiedler] is nothing if not brilliant, even at the cost of adopting postures that betray and attitudes that pall. His enormous knowingness about literature and patent intelligence are laid waste, it seems to me, by the stance to which he has of late given himself. His prose, in which the phrase now invariably goes beyond the content, is more vehement than virulent, needlessly vehement at times because excessive to the subject, and better adapted to the sheer display of superficially "daring" notions than to any true commitment to ideas or rigorous concern with them. Again, in [Waiting for the End], he is long on generalizations, most of them dubious in the extreme, and short on evidence. Once more we are belabored with the race-sex thesis ("the dream of a great love between white and colored men"), which is tied in with the contention that repressed and/or sublimated homosexuality is the inner secret of the American novel. Such notions are too prankishly childish to be worth serious examination. Fiedler has merely added a literary gloss and a homosexual twist to what are in essence the stereotypes of the popular folklore of the menace of miscegenation. No wonder his pages teem with terms like "stereotype" and "counter-stereotype," not to mention "myth" and "archetype," of which he never tires. (When his essay "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey," since become notorious, was printed in Partisan Review some fifteen years ago, the editors of that magazine thought of it as a talented young man's jeu d'esprit, a spoof on academic solemnity, not at all as the weighty contribution to the understanding of American letters that Fiedler, who is still pushing its proposition as hard as he can, apparently takes it to be.) Moreover, in this new book Fiedler's tone is irritatingly jeering, even in discussing such superior literary artists as Faulkner and Hemingway; it is not exactly that he is tactless as that he is virtually allergic to tact. And in Waiting for the End he above all gives free rein to his worst impulse—that of shocking or scandalizing the reader and playing the enfant terrible at any price.
Yet in our present social and cultural stalemate he who plays the enfant terrible among us typically turns out to be no genuine rebel or heretic or prophet, even if he has the look of one; on the contrary, he is someone who characteristically expects to pay no penalty for his escapades but rather to be hugely rewarded for them. And with good reason too, for there is more diversion in him than dissidence, more impudence than courage. After all, if he violates or mocks national pieties, like sexual prohibitions and inhibitions, they are on the point of breakup anyhow. To be explicit about sex nowadays, even about its most scabrously technical detail, is like walking through an open door. When it comes, however, to orthodoxies still firmly held, as in the political sphere for instance, our enfant terrible either keeps mum or indulges in idle utopian fancies more amusing than threatening. Clearly, the stance of the bad boy has proved to be quite profitable of late, making for an easy climb to celebrity status…. To judge by the welcoming and pleased reviews that Waiting for the End has received in some of our mass-circulation periodicals, Fiedler, if he fails to curb his appetite for histrionic blatancy of statement, will soon be officially certified by the publicity-media as the perennial bad boy of literary criticism.
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