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LOVE AND DEATH IN THE AMERICAN NOVEL (603 pp.)-Leslie A. Fiedler-Criterion...
Leslie A. Fiedler, literary critic and professor of English at Montana State University, describes the friendship of Ishmael and Queequeg in Moby Dick as "homoerotic"-a case of "innocent homosexuality." Written in that vein, Love and Death in the American Novel is a tumid, quasi-psychoanalytic study in which Critic Fiedler tries to strip American literature down to a heavily annotated fig leaf. As Fiedler sees it, the fig leaf conceals guilt and impotence, the historical inability of the U.S. novelist to portray mature women or deal with adult hetero sexual relationships...
When they are not, in Fiedler's view, "infuriatingly boyish," the masterworks of U.S. fiction, e.g., Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, The Red Badge of Courage, are sexless. Even in The Scarlet Letter, the "A" might as well stand for anticlimax, for all passion is spent before the novel begins. Instead of depicting love and marriage, the U.S. writer customarily projects a spectral landscape dominated by death, pursuit and flight. The U.S. novel does not derive its power from skill, according to Fiedler, or from its vaunted realism (from Poe to Nathanael West, it is often surreal), but from something...
Castles to Indians. How did U.S. fiction get deflected onto this strange and sometimes morbidly haunted path? Like the good psychological determinist he is, Author Fiedler feels that it all began in the womb of English letters some two centuries ago. Pioneering American novelists had two English models-the sentimental novel of love embodied in Richardson's Clarissa and the gothic novel of crumbling castles and mental phantoms invented by Horace Walpole (The Castle of Otranto). Eventually housewives and what Hawthorne called "female scribblers" took over the sentimental novel; as a romantic fantasy it has paced U.S. bestseller lists...
...Birth of Christ, with The Netherlands Chamber Choir) to Children go Where I Send You (ColPix) in which Songstress Nina Simone belts out the story of the "little-bitty baby was born in Bethlehem." In between are gaudy packages by the industry's perennial carolers : Arthur Fiedler, Fred Waring, Mitch Miller, George Melachrino. Among the more notable Christmas tinsel...