Love And Death In The American Novel Pdf

[Steven]

Thereare, first of all, some things to be said in favor of Mr. Fiedler and his book. He has read widely, writes entertainingly (except for the irritating abuse of the exclamation point!), and is obviously an intelligent man. Moreover, his book is an ambitious attempt to come to grips with the problematical theme of love in the American novel. It contains useful information about many minor novels, tries to relate the American novel to contemporary developments in Europe, and has some stimulating things to say about the gothic aspects of our fiction. Then why is this such a depressingly bad job of criticism?

The orthodox Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost has yielded in art and the popular imagination to the baroque trinity, derived ultimately from Venus, Vulcan, and Cupid, and still, despite the new names of Mary, Joseph, and Jesus, what it always was: an archetypal representation of cuckold, mother, and son, the last degradation of fatherhood.

Huckleberry Finn is essentially a book about a marginal American type, who only wants to stay alive; but who does not find this very easy to do, being assailed on one side by forces of violence, which begrudge him the little he asks, and on the other, by forces of benevolence, which insist that he ask for more. Against the modesty and singleness of his purpose, everything else is measured and weighed: religion, the social order, other men.

2 I have quoted the passage from Uncle Tom's Cabin exactly as it appears in Fiedler's book, complete with his ellipses and his six textual errors. Mr. Fiedler failed to note that the last paragraph he quoted is from a new chapter and occurs some hours later.

Our great novelists, though experts on indignity and assault, on loneliness and terror, tend to avoid treating the passionate encounter of a man and a woman, which we expect at the center of a novel. Indeed, they rather shy away from permitting in their fictions the presence of any full-fledged, mature women, giving us instead monsters of virtue or bitchery, symbols of the rejection or fear of sexuality.

Fiedler was born in Newark, New Jersey, to Jewish parents Lillian and Jacob Fiedler. "Eliezar Aaron" was his original Hebrew name. In his early years, he developed a strong connection to his grandparents.[3] He attended South Side High School[4] before majoring in English at New York University.[5] After that, he attended the University of Wisconsin, from where he obtained both his M.A. in 1939, and his Ph.D. in 1941. Between 1942 and 1946 he served as a Japanese interpreter and military cryptologist in the U.S. Naval Reserve.[citation needed]

After World War II, Fiedler continued doing research at Harvard University. He taught at many universities both abroad and in the United States. He taught at the University of Montana (then Montana State University) from 1941 to 1965.[6] In 1964, he began teaching at the University at Buffalo (UB) where he remained until his retirement.[7][8] He was offered a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard by the Rockefeller Foundation.[9]

In the 1990s, Fiedler's output decreased and new material was sporadic, but he received many honors in this period. In 1994, Fiedler received the Hubbell Medal for his lifetime contribution to the study of literature.[citation needed]

In April 1995, there was a celebration conference and performance in his honor called "Fiedlerfest" at the Center for the Arts at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Several famous writers such as Allen Ginsberg, Camille Paglia and Ishmael Reed paid homage to him and his works.[11] Although some sources wrongly attribute different dates,[12] the series of conferences took place at the Center for the Arts at the University of Buffalo from April 29 through April 30, 1995.[13][14] [15] Considered one of the most influential figures in 20th century American cultural thought, Fiedler is the author of over 40 works, some of which have been used in many courses in American universities. The conference originated from an idea that Fiedler's friend and colleague Bruce Jackson had in 1994. The idea was that the University of Buffalo should do something to celebrate their best-known professor and literary critic while he was still alive. They asked Fiedler to name the key speakers of the conference and he selected three people he admired: Camille Paglia, Allen Ginsberg, and Ishmael Reed. The university funded the event, which also had the participation of a master Daejaeng player related to one of the Korean students in the English Department, who played in Fiedler's honor.[16] The art theorist, feminist academic and critic Camille Paglia performed on Saturday night. On Sunday afternoon, at 4 pm, it was the turn of beatnik poet Allen Ginsberg to perform. Ginsberg was an old friend of Fiedler's and had written the poem "Uptown" about Fiedler's children after their arrival in New York, coming from Missoula, MT to start a band.[17] He read his poems while playing a small hand-pumped harmonium from India. He was later followed by the Daejaeng performance. American poet, songwriter, novelist, playwright and essayist Ishmael Reed was the last to perform. The celebration culminated with a reception in the Center for the Arts Atrium at UB.[18]

Fiedler was married to Margaret Ann Shipley from 1939 until their 1972 divorce.[19] In 1973, he married Sally Andersen; they remained married until his death.[20] Fiedler had six children and two stepchildren.[21]

In a collection of essays published in 1955 under the title An End to Innocence, Leslie Fiedler introduced a complex theme which he examines here in full scale: that the American novel differs most radically from its European ancestor and counterpart in the failure of our major novelists to deal with adult heterosexuality and their consequent obsession with death, incest and innocent homosexuality. His approach is Freudian- Jungian and Marxist to the extent that he has made use of the theory that class structure deeply influences, if it does not determine, the obsessive concerns of a literature. He begins with an examination of the concept of courtly love --- the introduction of the worship of women in a patriarchal society- and he traces the sources of the 18th century convention of sentimental love best exemplified in Richardson's novel Clarissa. In dealing with the American novel from 1789 to 1959 -- from Charles Brockden Brown to Faulkner-Fiedler demonstrates, through a method which is psychological and sociological, that American fiction has been a literature of sexual suppression -- ""our literature is a gothic fiction, nonrealistic and negative, sadist and melodramatic, a literature of darkness and the grotesque in a land of light and affirmation"". At length he attempts to show how Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter, Melville in Moby Dick and Mark Twain in Huckleberry Finn came to terms with the Faustian theme they could not evade and created a literature ""of the first excellence"". Obviously there is much in this book that will be disputed if the entire theme is not attacked. But whether he is discussing writers as diverse as Dreiser, Truman Capote or Herman Wouk, Fiedler brilliantly and convincingly illustrates the fact that ""American authors have shyed away from permitting in their fiction the presence of any full-fledged mature women, giving us instead monsters of virtue or bitchery, symbols of the rejection or fear of sexuality.

Sula is the story of a place called the Bottom and two families there, families with daughters, Nel Wright and Sula Peace. They are the twin poles of the novel, two vastly different women bonded by friendship and separated by kin, personality, and circumstance. Nel and Sula live in a Black neighborhood in the hills above a rural white town in Ohio, a neighborhood called the Bottom. Nel comes from what is recognizably the Black middle class, in custom if not in income, a stable family ruled by her mother Helene, an aggressive matriarch who shows the protectiveness common to parents who have come from nothing and fear watching their children return to it. Sula, though, lives with her mother and grandmother, avatars of two warring generations whose relationship and lives are haunted by the scandals that will in turn engulf Sula too. Sula does not so much come from a broken home as one that never was fully assembled in the first place, her mother and grandmother locked in a perpetual cold war. Nel and Sula find each other as teenagers, and Morrison expertly portrays the fierce and complicated friendship of teenaged girls. Naturally, Helene despises Sula; naturally, this only makes Nel love her more.

Shadrack stood at the foot of the hospital steps watching the heads of trees tossing ruefully but harmlessly, since their trunks were rooted too deeply in the earth to threaten him. Only the walks made him uneasy. He shifted his weight, wondering how he could get to the gate without stepping on the concrete. While plotting his course - where he would have to leap, where to skirt a clump of bushes - a loud guffaw startled him. Two men were going up the steps. Then he noticed that there were many people about, and that he was just now seeing them, or else they had just materialized. They were thin slips, like paper dolls floating down the walks. Some were seated in chairs with wheels, propelled by other paper figures from behind. All seemed to be smoking, and their arms and legs curved in the breeze. A good high wind would pull them up and away and they would land perhaps among the tops of the trees.

Here we see the destabilizing terror of returning to the mundane stuff of normal life, stepping out into the reality that does not seem real, seeing with virgin and wincing eyes the world of physical things that becomes, in hospitalization, the most distant of abstractions. Shadrack is, in some sense, a classic literary madman, yet his portrayal is subtle and profoundly unaffected. Shadrack is rude and drunk and paranoid and wild, but he does not suffer from psychosis, which too many writers of fiction seem to think of as the only expression of mental illness. Shadrack does not cut his matted hair, but he keeps his run-down shack in immaculate condition. He lives outside of the polite norms of his community but as a fisherman is a reliable part of its economy. He is unpredictable but in a predictable way, and the people in the Bottom adapt to his rhythms and cycles, effectively making him a part of the scenery - an act of compassion that ensures that no one will ever give him the kind of help he requires.

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