Word: fiedler
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...Leslie Fiedler spoke at Harvard last summer on the cultural revolution which supposedly occurred in the last decade, claiming that popular culture and non-verbal media explorations are where the true art is at these days and that Tolstoy himself would have been pleased by the power of contemporary communications to link huge numbers of people to a common "creative" impulse...
...Though Fiedler was entertaining, he was, of course being foolish First. Tolstoy's faith in art was based in Christian humanism, in the belief that every man had basic principles which could be appealed to by the sincere and talented artist Fiedler, on the other hand hopes for some mass tribal evolution. And he misread even the processes by which an audience experiences television in order to buttress his argument. Do people care all that deeply about what they see on the tube? If they do aren't they first primed by commercial manipulators who bombard them with verbal publicity...
...Fiedler's presentation (which has also appeared to have some impact in Playboy) was an important one, because it captured the main current of the last decade's apocalyptic cultural hopes. There were so many mass culture possibilities being opened that traditional authorities didn't bother to discriminate the sludge. The middle-class (mainly its sons and daughters) had its acquisitive salad days: bourgeois taste controlled fashion, losing its traditional upward glance because there was no ceiling of standards to aim for--and little moral cohesion behind the theatrical politics...
...Fiedler, Aaron in Titus Andronicus and Othello represent "the paranoia about blacks which Shakespeare shared with the pit," that is, the commoners in the audience. Now Shakespeare and his audience could have spent a lifetime without seeing a black. Only in Hitch cock or Pinter can one develop paranoia over an unseen "stranger." In Othello, black and white are not racist, but imagistic counters. It is Othello who is white in his innocent gullibility and Iago who is black in his "motiveless malignity." Both men are complementary halves, like day and night...
What is really perverse in Fiedler's book is that Shakespeare should be its target. Of all playwrights, it is Shakespeare who healingly knits man and woman, Jew and Gentile, white and black, together in a bright, profound and moving vision of our common humanity. His spirit is as generous as the sea. Perhaps it is this spirit that is Fiedler's "stranger...