One cannot help asking just whom Fiedler was trying to put on when he wrote ["Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey"]—just as the same question needs to be asked with each ensuing volume of his studies in "literary anthropology," as Fiedler has frequently referred to his work. There has always been an element of absurdity or shock in Fiedler's work, and at times it is impossible not to wonder if Fiedler takes his own work seriously. (p. 133)

Reading over Fiedler's collected literary criticism, from An End of Innocence in 1955 to his … The Return of the Vanishing American in 1968, one cannot help being upset by the great number of generalizations, repetitions, and strained conclusions which so often have marred his frequently brilliant commentaries on American fiction. Yet, one cannot help thinking that Fiedler, as critic of the hip school of American criticism, and as guru of thousands of undergraduate English majors (and their younger instructors), deserves whatever following he has managed to build up for himself. It is not perhaps so much what Fielder is saying that offends the other, shall I say, more traditional critic as much as his method: a frontal attack based on shock, entertainment (especially valuable it seems to me in a day when criticism takes itself far too seriously), and the destruction of shibboleths and prejudices we should have rid ourselves of years, if not generations, ago. The result has been that Fiedler's criticism remains for the most part highly readable and almost uniformly fresh—whether one agrees with what he says or not. One wonders if some critics have not even been a little jealous of Fiedler's quasi-underground fame. (pp. 133-34)

Clearly, Fiedler's criticism shows a number of obsessions, and he does use the word "myth" far too frequently. One hates to guess what a word count of Fiedler's collected writings would reveal about the use of this word. Much of this confusion is also due to two essays on the use of myth criticism itself included in No! in Thunder after their earlier publication in quarterlies, coupled with a much more generalized use of the word in the rest of his essays in this volume and the others. In the first of these, "In the Beginning Was the Word: Logos or Mythos?," Fiedler seems to be reacting more against the "a poem should not mean, but be!" school than actually attempting to set up viable criteria for myth criticism in poetry. The weakness of the essay is also due to the fact that Fiedler has shown himself essentially a critic of the novel rather than of poetry and poetics, and what he says of the use of myth in poetry frequently seems inconsistent with his mythological approach to fiction. (p. 135)

It is perhaps best to look at the end of Fiedler's essay first—it is here where a bridge can be built between poetry and and fiction. The last sentence reads, "In the beginning was mythos, and each new beginning must be drawn from that inexhaustible source." Fiedler believes that each generation, each age, will temper the myths of the past to meet its own needs, and each generation will create new myths relevant for its specific age. Fiedler is concerned with the element of distortion, getting too far away from the original myth…. The fault with our own age has been one of fear which has led to an emphasis not on mythos (poetry) but logos (philosophy and science.) This in turn has led to the critic who studies the poem in a scientific rather than in a mythological way. Poetry, Fiedler tells us, "is historically the mediator between logos and mythos." The critic who uses depth psychology to interpret the myths of the past, and the ways in which they have been altered or profaned, is only doing as Freud who claimed "to translate out of Sophocles and Shakespeare what had always been there…." (pp. 135-36)

"Archetype and Signature: A Study of the Relationship Between Biography and Poetry" is a remarkable essay for what it does—attempt to convince the critic that the biography of the poet may shed valuable information on the interpretation of a poem. The misunderstanding by the critics is simply their insistence on taking Fiedler at face value—in this case Fiedler's overemphasis to build a strong case for his thesis. (Fiedler's work so frequently approaches the superlative that one would think that by now the critics would be catching on.) Then, too, the critic is put off by Fiedler's usual pompous opening. (p. 137)

Fiedler has learned the high art of literary charlatanism; in his criticism, he uses only those examples which will support his own theses, and all other facts are conveniently left out. (pp. 138-39)

Fiedler's definitions for archetype and signature … are fairly straightforward and, if left at that alone, would no doubt be acceptable to many critics. The confusion results, however, when Fiedler implies the need for an almost unique "signature" on the part of each poet—each writer. In short, he places too much emphasis on the poet's attempt to make his signature individually his own, i.e., by suggesting that the poet, once he has achieved fame, need not be concerned with poetry any longer at all but instead more concerned with making his own life into a myth. (pp. 139-40)

Ultimately—and I feel this is the crux of the problem with Fiedler—everything becomes a myth, and what started as a serious attempt to define mythos and its relationship to poetry … has grown into a gigantic tumor which Fiedler has used not as an appendage of literature but as literature itself—especially in his other writings. In his … The Return of the Vanishing American (1968), there is hardly a page, even a paragraph, where the word "myth" does not appear. The book itself is referred to as "an effort to define the myths which give special character to art and life in America,…" and Fiedler begins his analysis by such statements as: "the geography of the United States is mythological"; "a mythicized North, South, East, and West"; "it is the presence of the Indian which defines the mythological West"; and "Certainly the same myth that moved poets to verses moved Columbus to action." Nowhere in his entire career has Fiedler scraped so hard, searched so painstakingly to make us believe that the four myths he has found are, indeed, the actual myths that make up the American character. (p. 141)

One wonders what Fiedler would do if he did not upset his fellow critics—if no one paid any attention to him? That, of course, would not be easy to do, as Fiedler well realizes, yet one cannot help wondering if Fiedler, from the occasional asides he has made, isn't the prankster who is having the last word on his own books (and certainly the most fun) simply by the kinds of critical comments they draw. (p. 142)

It would be greatly oversimplifying the issue, however, to believe that Fiedler is simply playing the role of the American critics' bad boy. His recent run in with the law and the essay "On Being Busted at Fifty" show how sensitive he can be. Rather, I believe the explanation can be found in an essay called "My Credo."… In this essay Fiedler says that "the role of the critic resembles that of the poet"—that literary criticism is work which is just as serious as the work of the poet or the novelist. "The critic is least likely to be the victim of pride and more likely to be thought such a victim when he first opposes majority taste with a new claim." This sentence reads as a prophetic statement of what Fiedler was to become, once he had found his own signature and stamped it indelibly on his own critical works. (pp. 142-43)

Fiedler's critical writings have never been mere charts and tables. Rather, they are critical evaluations—often farfetched, often illogical, often strained, often brilliant—but always marked indelibly with his own eccentric signature, a signature which tells us over and over again that just as the poet and the novelist has his own myths to live, so does the critic too; that just as the artist becomes the scapegoat of his society, so too the critic may become the scapegoat of his own fellow critics. In the beginning there was mythos, Fiedler wants us to believe, and myths are only, after all, the signature that the critic as artist gives to his work and his life. (p. 143)