The Devil Gets His Due, page 3
Ultimately, Fiedler’s criticism has a subversive goal. His target was (and, I would argue, remains even more so for us today) the politics of the hegemonic discourse of and in the West, the traditions that over the course of history translated, acted out, and thus reified and reinforced the hegemony of the “universally valid standards,” the “attitudes and values created” by history. For Fiedler the critical struggle was first and foremost over beliefs, which he judged as the outcome of a historical process fueled primarily by class hierarchy. In the light of this it is profitable to recall French political philosopher Etienne Balibar’s note that “a hierarchy of communal references is hegemony within the ideology,”12 by which, of course, he meant the dominant ideology. The struggle involves identity, including class identity, on the basis of this historical process and as a result of it.
In this perspective what one needs to load in his critical baggage is first of all a thorough knowledge of the previous (critical) traditions and the history they belonged to, especially the most influential in the institutions of culture such as universities, literary journals, popular magazines, the cultural sections of newspapers and, I would contend, publishing houses. That is the reason why Fiedler continuously engaged various critical traditions, whether that of D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature, the rare and not very memorable criticism by Mark Twain, the “self-declared Marxists” identified by Granville Hicks, the populism of DeVoto and Parrington, the antifascist American Renaissance of F. O. Matthiessen, the New Critics, Structuralism, Deconstruction or the trajectories of Partisan Review. Likewise, the idea of dealing with hugely popular works or figures such as Rambo and Buffalo Bill and linking them to the Leatherstocking Tales and the Western genre does not mean to put these works on the same level of the aesthetic scale as, say, Dante, T. S. Eliot or, as Fiedler put it in “Encounter with Death,” “the essentially religious” poetry of James Agee’s posthumous Death in the Family (203). It means to challenge the ideology of reality that is enacted especially in the private mind, the one space that, as Fiedler points out in “New England and the Invention of the South,” is only apparently private, whose effect reverberates in the public sphere across gender, class, race or, for that matter, religion, as well as across continents.* It means to ask younger critics, as Norman Podhoretz was in the fifties, to refuse the comfort zone of the “ideas and attitudes” of the previous generations of critics as Fiedler asked him to do in “A Fortyish View.” It means to be critically avant-garde. In his “Postscript to The Name of the Rose” Umberto Eco explained Fiedler’s intent when he pretended to align on the same aesthetic ladder high literature and “junk scorned by the critics,” otherwise known as pop literature:
We all know that he [Fiedler] is too keen of a critic to believe these things. He simply wants to break down the barrier that has been erected between art and enjoyability. He feels that today reaching a vast public and capturing its dreams perhaps means acting as the avant-garde, and he still leaves us free to say that capturing readers’ dreams does not necessarily mean encouraging escape: it can also mean haunting them.”13
This is precisely what Fiedler meant when he invited his fellow scholars and teachers to give the Devil his due! He wanted to return to the literary and popular arts their subversive dimension by asking the apparently easy and indeed quite difficult question of why we like what we like, why certain truly awful books and pop artifacts appeal to vast, national and transnational masses alike, what is hidden underneath the mythopoeic power of these works, what fuels such a power. Although he kept insisting on the need to satisfy our all too obvious animal side, our emotions, he sustained his argument with the reasoning mind of the Cartesian tradition. After all, what is to like in a novel like William Faulkner’s Sanctuary, whose credo Fiedler defined as “women are completely impervious to evil” and to which female readers too respond despite (or because of?) the unspeakable indignity of the numerous rapes inflicted on Temple Drake? (153). And how do we explain the fact that of all novels it was Sanctuary to save the career of such a gifted writer and sell more than any of his previous ones at the onset of the Great Depression? Or, to update this a little, what is so appealing about a criminal such as Tony Soprano, his “famiglia,” and their conduct and “lifestyle”? This is what Fiedler is after when he gives the Devil his due. He is avant-garde and hunts the audience’s values, attitudes and standards. For if the values, the attitudes and the standards of the dominant traditions are “created” by history, then challenging these values, attitudes and standards means to confront both them and their history. Leslie Fiedler means to challenge, from the standpoint of intellectual work, the literary anthropology and the historical narratives that produced them, to create not a counter critical tradition, “the anti-tradition of traditionlessness” of Whitman and Twain (139). Fiedler means to attempt to change radically the hegemonic tradition, to envision and begin to forge a new traditionalism upon which to rebuild humanism in place of the classist liberal humanism that is centered on bourgeois individualism of Protestant heritage and the Universalist messianic theology of Christianity.
Fiedler’s goal was NOT to enlarge that center to make room for previously exploited and marginalized groups as many among those groups eventually did.14 He wanted to move the axis of hegemony toward a plural center that did away on the one hand with the historical violence of monotheistic universalism, in this case Christian universalism, on the other with what historian Warren I. Sussman called “the modal psychological type” of the American middle class,15 the one whose “positive values” are “duty and hard work, heroism and honor . . . home, school and church, which is to say, bourgeois domesticity and Christian humanism” that according to Fiedler Mark Twain tears apart with “the universal solvent of laughter” in Huckleberry Finn (74). It is this kind of humanism that in Fiedler’s view presents as “liberalism” what really is “a smug, conservative sort of optimism” and as “radicalism” what really is a “religious point of view” (200). This evaluation seems to echo Karl Polanyi’s thesis according to which with the great transformation of the twentieth century political economy entered human consciousness and the realm of the universal assuming at once the form of progress and damnation. It was this social environment that fueled the first generation of immigrants in the twentieth century to substitute “Success-America” for their original dream once “the first easy vision of stepping from shipboard to belongingness had failed,” the one that, as Fiedler writes in “The Return of James Branch Cabell,” built “the bourgeois world of compromise and accommodation, but with the best sellers that celebrated its values,” which, once again, explains why it is important to read bestsellers and give their inherent Devil his due (184, 244).
To be sure, Fiedler did not attack work. After all, he worked hard since early in his life and continued to do so until his very last day, writing and teaching. And there was nothing that Fiedler loved more than his home in Buffalo. His target was the crystallization of the classist and messianic narrative that is intolerant, if not altogether inimical, of different cultures and that reified those values to cleanse, enslave, exploit and exclude the groups that originally inhabited the future political entity called the United States of America and others on whose shoulders the country was built, while at the same time posing those values as the founding values of the narrative of the home of the free and the resilient individual (preferably white and male). That is to say, in the name of liberal democracy as we have historically and theoretically experienced and known it and, of course, private (NOT personal) property. It is the divisive, hierarchical politics of this narrative that produced a country “divided against itself” as Huckleberry Finn is, even structurally, which is what makes it the sacred holy book of America and explains why it is on the raft, away from the community of “sivilization,” that one is able to imagine “a kind of love compatible with freedom” after he has managed to “establish a community of two, temporary and foredoomed perhaps, but providing for as long as it lasts a model for the reconciliation of blacks and whites in an America otherwise ethnically divided against itself” (73). It is hardly a coincidence, I think, that reflecting in strict sociopolitical terms on the Vietnam War, the watershed of modern American history and, according to Leo Marx,16 of post–World War II American literary criticism and intellectual political debate, Fiedler made the crucial assertion that “we endure the pangs of a society that has outlived a value system whose mythological foundation remains firm” (250).
War, the twin brother (the gender is not an option) of violence and synonym of death and destruction, of both physical and social ties, highlights a historical gap between society and its value system with his mythological foundations. War functions exactly as the “love compatible with freedom” of Huckleberry Finn in “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in,” where love highlights on the one hand the heteronormativity of the nation’s laws—the one element that Hannah Arendt argued produces the space where human relationships and social ties are experienced17—“our laws on homosexuality and the context of prejudice they objectify,” and on the other hand collective loneliness, “that compelling anxiety, which every foreigner notes, that we may not be loved, that we are loved for our possessions and not our selves, that we are really—alone” (52). Fiedler establishes a link between violence and lack of social ties on the one hand, and the politics of possessions and the narrative of identity that underwrite them on the other. As he unveils these myths, he attempts to pose, if not the foundation, at least the question of a humanism capable of sustaining a politics of sharing for a “love compatible with freedom” rather than with killing, indifference and exploitation.
On the basis of these theoretical presuppositions—unity of vision of culture and the human experience, universal singularity, equality as the basis of difference, public dimension of writing and the mode of being a critic, oppositional re-framing of politics and intellectual work, historical perspective, interconnectedness of the various levels of interpretations—one can read Fiedler’s criticism as work at the service of what James Cox called “a democratic freedom.”18 Fiedler’s criticism is a civic and civilizing effort to promote a humanism able to recuperate history to a different project than the one that brings back history as memory in the form of guilt toward the formerly oppressed. For such a project, what better symbol and metaphor than the Devil—New England’s synonym for enslaved labor and deprived humanity in the cotton fields as well as in the kitchen and the bedroom—to begin again? It is only too apt and, as I hope I have been able to show, not a coincidence that Fiedler’s critical career began in the Devil’s home, Dante’s Inferno, right where the informed imagination challenges the limits of knowledge, of the physical world and man’s place in it. To look backward at a criticism based on these critical presuppositions and give the Devil his due may as well be a way out of the crisis of literary criticism. At the same time, such a criticism may also reveal itself as a valid tool to (re)fashion what we desperately need right now right here—and what is literature, the art of telling stories and singing songs, most urgent duty and responsibility (first of all toward itself) in these days of dying “from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli” as the Marine Corps hymn has it, quite tellingly. That is to say, reintroducing an idea and an actual possibility of a humanism that says yes to the politics of sharing affirmed in “the mulatto culture that is America’s gift to itself and the rest of the world,” and “No! In Thunder” as Melville’s line adopted by Fiedler for one of his books reads, to the hate embedded in the empty rhetoric of freedom and God at the service of our criminal, shameful, arrogant “and futile wars” (303). That’s the truth of The Devil Gets His Due. That’s Amore.
Burlington, NC
Labor Day 2007
NOTES
1.See Terry Eagleton, After Theory (London: Allen Lane, 2003). The Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown University is one exception, as it is the work of Janet Zandy, alone as editor or author, and with Robert Coles. See Janet Zandy, Hands: Physical Labor, Class, and Cultural Work (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers U.P., 2004); Janet Zandy, ed., What We Hold in Common: An Introduction to Working-Class Studies (New York: The Feminist Press at the CUNY, 2001); Janet Zandy, ed., Liberating Memory: Our Work and Our Working-Class Consciousness (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers U.P., 1995); Janet Zandy, ed., Calling Home: Working-Class Women’s Writings; An Anthology (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers U.P., 1990); Janet Zandy and Nicholas Coles, eds., American Working-Class Literature: An Anthology (New York: Oxford U.P., 2007).
2.Ross Posnock, “Innocents at Home,” in Book Forum (Summer 2003), 6.
3.Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton U.P., 2001).
4.At the moment of his death Fiedler was working on an introductory piece for a volume of D. H. Lawrence’s works. He last worked on this piece on January 23, 2003, six days before his death. The article focused on Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature. Fiedler begins by calling that little book “the best critical work ever written by anyone, even Americans. Moreover, no one ever since has surpassed Lawrence’s book, though one American at least, F. O. Matthiessen, has come close.”
5.Leslie Fiedler, The Devil Gets His Due: The Uncollected Essays, ed. and with an introduction by Samuele F. S. Pardini (Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 2008), 312. All following parenthetical page numbers refer to this collection.
6.See Johannes Willem Bertens, The Idea of the Postmodern: A History (London: Routledge, 1995); Alan Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: U. of North Carolina P., 1987).
7.See New Directions 1944, ed. by James Laughlin (Norfolk, CT: New Directions), xi.
8.Leslie Fiedler, What Was Literature? Class Culture and Mass Society (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), 17.
9.Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1981), 9.
10.Leslie Fiedler, “Introducing Cesare Pavese,” in No! In Thunder: Essays on Myth and Literature (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960), 148.
11.Leslie Fiedler, Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), 36.
12.Etienne Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx, transl. by Chris Turner (London: Verso, 195o), 45.
13.Umberto Eco, Postscript to The Name of the Rose, transl. by William Weaver (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), 72.
14.See Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998).
15.Warren I. Sussman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 81.
16.Leo Marx, “Believing in America,” Boston Review (December 2003/January 2004).
17.Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics, ed. and with an introduction by J. Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2006).
18.James M. Cox, “Celebrating Leslie Fiedler,” in Leslie Fiedler and American Culture, ed. by Steven G. Kellman and Irving Malin (Newark: U. of Delaware P., 1999), 151.
*For the record, by the time of the writing of this article Fiedler was severely limited in his physical movements and well-being by Parkinson’s disease.
*As I write, the news report that a small town south of Belgrade, an area heavily bombed by American and NATO military jets less than ten years ago, recently erected a statue of Rocky Balboa in the central public square. If this is for me somehow in the range of the amusing and the conceivable, I must confess that I was stunned when I learned that a Hamas-controlled television channel picked Mickey Mouse’s character for a program aimed at the anti-Israeli indoctrination of Palestinian children. God works in mysterious ways. Apparently, so does Satan.
Toward an Amateur Criticism
Looking back over my own brief critical practice, I find that it has been rather consistently based on presuppositions fashionably called “obscurantist.” Though not always consciously, I have been searching for strategies to oppose that “scientific criticism whose methods are mining, digging or just plain grubbing,” and which assumes that the work of art is essentially a social function or a function of language, amenable to analysis in terms of the currently honorific vocabularies of various sciences. Though I should hate to call myself a Romantic, I am opposed to the dogged anti-Romanticism of much contemporary criticism which leads to a contempt for the imagination, and is often grounded in a kind of lumpen-nominalism that would grant only a second-class “reality” to works of art. The discrepancy between the metaphors typical to the creative mind and those typical to the critical mind in our world (and this is true often in the single individual who practices both as poet and critic) indicate a quietly desperate cleavage. I propose a mode of criticism more congruous with the sort of literature we admire, a criticism as wary of bureaucratization, as respectful to the mythic and mysterious, as dedicated to a language at once idiosyncratic and humane as, say, Moby Dick or the novels of Kafka.
