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chapter eight The American Inadvertent Epic: The Godfather Copied The epic gives form to a totality of life that is rounded from within; the novel seeks, by giving form, to uncover and construct the concealed totality of life. —Georg Lukacs, The Theory of the Novel Most popular literature tends to be weak on the cognitive and formal levels so that we cannot pretend to ourselves that we relish it because it makes us wiser, subtler, or more delicately responsive to beauty. —Leslie Fiedler, What Was Literature He is Al DeNiro and I am Bobby Pacino. Then I’m Al and he’s Bobby. Recently, visits from Marlon Keitel. Roles assumed daily. We move as rapidly as we can from imitation to parody to the grotesque, the monster versions, contortions, screaming the lines in the exhilarating ridiculosity of our everyday lives. Throw away the movies. Do each other, go directly to the gargoyle faces emitting gargoyle voices. —Frank Lentricchia, Johnny Critelli Writing novels is a dead end, like being a blacksmith. It’s all movies and TV now. —Puzo, The Last Don If there is reason to contrast a best-selling novel such as The Godfather with an elite text such as Ragtime, then surely the novel should be displayed against other best sellers of comparable scope as well. Is there a transhistorical, genre-busting popular category that might contain Puzo’s novel? Leslie Fiedler, long the bad boy of American literary critical paradigm making and popular-elite fiction relations, suggested in The Inadvertent Epic (1979) that “works which long endure win our assent not 229 230 Chapter 8 rationally and logically, like history, philosophy, or science, but viscerally, passionately, like rituals in primitive societies or dreams in our own. They tend, that is to say, to reinforce our wildest paranoid delusions along with our most utopian hopes . . .” (84).1 Fiedler as a psychoanalytic critic of American mythography was most interested in novels “rooted in demonic dreams of race, sex and violence which have long haunted us Americans” (17) across our history, such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Gone with the Wind, and Alex Haley’s Roots, with excursions into Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman and D. W. Griffith’s adaptation in The Birth of a Nation. Fiedler sees readers at these sites licensing themselves “to be driven out of control,” to “return to psychic states which [they] have theoretically abandoned in the name of humanity and reason” (84). The “humanity and reason” thus overturned could comprise, for example, the larger collective body of moral questioning about The Godfather’s view of men and their responsibilities to society and to common law beyond the fierce family position. Such works, then, says Fiedler, do not have to pass the test of being able to “instruct and delight” but rather move through us in “dreams awake” (85). He thus agrees with Doctorow’s assessment about such compelling narratives, that they draw on our atavistic reader’s affiliation. Fiedler broadly outlined his theories about a master American mythos as early as Love and Death in the American Novel (1960) and then spent the next two decades shifting his theses from elite to popular fiction , where the libidinous energies he identified could be more overtly exemplified. The Inadvertent Epic also charted the deep American structures of miscegenation and symbolic color lines in the familial tale in slavery and reconstruction periods as a subject of enduring emotional power and significance. At present, any move in American literature study toward critiquing best sellers or identifying incest and miscegenation as controlling American tropes owes much to Fiedler in Love and Death and The Inadvertent Epic, as well as to a renewed historicism evident in the study of slave narratives and all manner of identity narrative. The Godfather epic reworks the incest and miscegenation in more coded terms on the level of the isolated immigrant family and its mighty fear of assimilation. The novel and subsequent Godfather films bind the family members within a network of personal relations while positing assimilation in America as unacceptable. The Godfather stands for a great, heroic dream of immigration and family, the epic modern subject so notably missing from our twentiethcentury popular classics and sense of ourselves as Americans. Furthermore , if Fiedler is right, we would want such an epic to elide all the difficulties and contradictions of identity and its submersion and affirm the bond of an original, patriarchal culture within the fluidity of the selfmade American life. It is the peculiar...

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