Leslie Fiedler’s Medieval America

Scholars have brought various charges against the myth and symbol school of criticism whose practitioners attempt to identify, through archetypal cultural patterns, a distinctive and homogeneous American experience; yet of these charges, none has seemed so persistent as the claim that the myth and symbol approach is incompatible with a responsible historicism.¹ From Christopher Lasch to Russell Reising, Bruce Kuklick to Donald E. Pease, Jr., Americanists have argued persuasively that the myth and symbol critics were perpetrators of “‘consensus’ history or cold-war criticism” who sought a “common ground, a unified vision, yet ignor[ed] fundamental conflicts and tensions in American culture” (Dickstein 150).² According to this thesis, pioneering myth and symbol practitioners such as Perry Miller and Henry Nash Smith found in American literature and culture less a complex engagement with some of the more divisive issues in American life than a repository of national archetypes (the city on the hill, an errand into the wilderness, a virgin land) that testified to the extraordinary nature of the American character and the American nation. As Pease has recently put it, those postwar critics used literature to imagine a “spectacular counterworld [that] replaced the vexing facts of the real world with invented characters and events that were compatible with collective social hopes and prejudices” (163). That this mythic “counterworld” not only offered an escape from or an imaginative resolution to pressing social problems, but also helped legitimate American imperial violence in the name of a consecrated national mission is perhaps the most tragic insight offered by critics of this interpretive method.

In certain respects the early work of Leslie Fiedler stands apart from that of his fellow myth and symbol critics, not in ideological terms—consider his notorious piece on the Rosenbergs—but rather in his willingness to engage with some of the very categories of difference that Miller, Nash Smith, and other scholars preferred to ignore. Fiedler’s best-known work is a case in point. The prolific Fiedler published many disparate essays and volumes, but his reputation depends on two literary critical works that focus explicitly on issues of race and sexuality: “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey” (1948), what Ross Posnock calls the most influential article on American literature ever published, and the book that followed, Love and Death in the American Novel (1960).³ Those scholarly texts presented the nation with the scandalous thesis that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Moby-Dick (1851), and other classic works of US literature epitomize a gothic “national myth of masculine love” that exists in tension with the official heterosexual narrative of the European novel. As Fiedler explains in “Come Back to the Raft,” “At the focus of emotion, where we are accustomed to find in the world’s great novels some heterosexual passion, be it ‘platonic’ love or adultery, seduction, rape, or long-drawn-out flirtation, we come instead on the fugitive slave and the no-account boy lying side by side on a raft borne by the endless river toward an impossible escape” (145). Far from offering a reassuring myth of national identity, Fiedler confronts Americans with their queer desire for the man of color. Heightening the disturbing implications of that fantasy is its tendency, according to Fiedler, to often end in violence and death.

To be sure, as Robyn Wiegman, Christopher Looby, and other scholars have pointed out, Fiedler’s work on race, sexuality, and American literature often seems to exemplify, not contest, the myth and symbol school’s reluctance to engage with certain historical realities.⁴ Fiedler himself suggests as much at one point in Love and Death when he alludes to the book’s publication during the civil rights era only to dismiss that charged historical moment. From the perspective of the “national mind,” Fiedler writes, myth “comes to seem truer than the reality of headlines. At psychic levels . . . not Little Rock but Hannibal is the place where black and white confront each other” (389). For Fiedler, Mark Twain’s mythologized Hannibal names racial and sexual archetypes far more significant to our understanding of American...