Leslie Fiedler's Medieval America

Abstract

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.

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