Word: fiedler
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Nothing Heroic. Where others have seen only romance, adventure and folksy humor, Fiedler's hawk eye spots paradox, irony and mordant wit. Hence Pocahontas is "our first celebrated traitor to her own race ... a model long in advance of Uncle Tom." Hannah Duston is not the heroic protector of white womanhood and the family but the great castrating mother of all men-a Mary Worth in linsey-woolsey. The tale of Rip Van Winkle is really about booze as a weapon against women. Only Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook make it through Fiedler's gauntlet without lumps. They constitute...
...authentic selves can best be seen, says Fiedler, in a myth-busting novel such as John Barth'g The Sot-Weed Factor, which purports to relate the naked, ribald truth about Pocahontas and John Smith. Fiedler also singles out Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, in which a white man and an Indian struggle against being lobotomized (read "castrated") by Big Nurse in a psycho ward. In these contemporary works the spirit of the Vanishing American returns, enabling the authors to debunk traditional notions of how the West was won. This debunking criticizes...
Frontier Madness. Fiedler makes an interesting distinction between nostalgic evocations of a West long since tamed in a net of superhighways, and the truer, mythological West of rebirth and renewal that is always in the future. "The real opposite of nostalgic," he says, "is psychedelic, the reverse of remembering is hallucinating, which means that, insofar as the New Western is truly New, it, too, must be psychedelic." So the Red Man reappears, bearing his gifts of marijuana and peyote that threaten 20th century values in much the same way as the white man's whisky threatened the Indian...
...with much else in The Return of the Vanishing American, this suggestion demands a skeptical response. For when Fiedler leaves the well-beaten bush of literature and psychology for territory as complex "and mystifying as the human nervous system, he is a tourist who does not speak the language. He has an unfortunate way of composing statements full of adman phrases such as "New Man" and the "West of Here and Now." He has a penchant for over-categorizine and overreaching, as when he calls Marilyn Monroe the pop-culture version of the Indian love goddess, bleached out "under...
...Fiedler does have a knack of presenting provocative material in such a rich context that it rarely fails to stimulate the reader's imagination. He is the antithesis of the cautious academic reading from yellowed lecture notes. In fact, a good case could be made that The Return of the Vanishing American is really a sly anti-Ph.D. thesis...