Leslie Fiedler is one of those literary personalities who has the effect of polarizing his readers. Already his new study of American Western mythology [The Return of the Vanishing American] has agitated the spleen of Kenneth Rexroth, who resents a New York Jew's tampering with the Western myth [see excerpt above]. Whether such romantic antagonism is just (Fiedler lived for many years in Missoula, Montana) isn't important, but it does present the kind of difficulty such a study as this must face. There are many Wests lurking in America's imagination. The imaginative or literary tourist's West is certainly not the Montana resident's. And Fiedler, having been both, knows this….

There is a crucial cultural difference between the romantic and the mythological Wests. The romantic one is historical and its self-image originates in the pragmatic circumstances of the "wild" life with and beyond which it has grown. That image—vaguely conceived as being more free, pure, democratic, hospitable, and natural than that of "Easterners"—is now vestigial because most Westerners are simply Easterners living in the West. There is no longer a "Western" reality because there is no longer a peculiarly Western way of life, only a feeling about one. The mythological West isn't historical; essentially it isn't even American. The cowboy or cavalry Western derives from chivalric romance; the trappings are American, but the substance is European. One of the trappings—the Indian—had, however, both an American and European character. To the American he was a guerrilla, to the European (e.g. Rousseau) a noble symbol of Nature. The fusion of those views created a mythology that simultaneously celebrated our triumph over Nature and manifested our guilt at having thereby profaned it, a mythology therefore representing the very warp and woof of American moral consciousness. Fiedler's book is an attempt to define and analyze this mythic consciousness as it appears in our literature and as it has analogues and origins in the European mind.

Characteristically, Fiedler's persuasiveness comes more from a quality of mind than an accumulation of evidence. This book completes a trilogy exploring the "myths which give a special character to art and life in America." In the first study, Love and Death in the American Novel, he warned that he had attempted "a literary rather than scientific work … a very personal book, in which I attempt to say with my own voice out of my own face … what I have found to be some major meanings of our literature and our culture." Not only is this also true of the present work, but it is a recognition without which its reader cannot proceed. (p. 29)

The very phrase on which his title and thesis turns—i.e. the Vanishing American—comes from a white man's (Edward Curtis) celebrated 19th-century photograph of six Navaho plodding on horseback into a gloomy indistinct canyon. The picture is called "The Vanishing Race," a title more telling than its later variant, "The Vanishing American," because it more clearly implies genocidal guilt. The later phrasing is too witty, ironic, and disengaged, too self-consciously turns the genocidal reality of the West into first a cliché and finally a joke. Having an acute historical understanding, Fiedler is aware of both the clichés and the guilt he has inherited, and in good Freudian fashion (where else can a guilty white man go?) he undertakes to discover, in white, Eastern-made archetypes of the Indian, the inchoate mythic sources of our guilt.

For the Indian, the mythic Indian, is not American at all, as Fiedler shows, but rather a European dream. By the end of the argument the Indian, his elusive Gothic hero, has been so completely absorbed into European archetypal analogues—the Negro, the Jew, the Phallus, the Madman, all that is Byronic, primitive, or outré—that he exists only as an alien mythic category. But Fiedler cannot of course be responsible for the Indian's existential image. He is writing about the dichotomous romantic imagination, the simultaneous impulse to civilization and primitivism. He is studying the transplanted European mind, the Easterner whose Sisyphusian destiny it is to turn all Wests to Easts. The mythic Western, for him, is the Euro-American masculine dream of escape to the primordial garden with a benignly savage male companion, which idyllic liaison is threatened and usually destroyed by women, who want to cultivate the garden, domesticate the man, and emasculate or exorcise the savage.

There is much difficulty in articulating the full complexity of archetypes that have not yet been locked into mythological schemes, as the Greek or Arthurian ones have. Fiedler is trying to construct schemes and categories for Western mythology that will permit its interpretation. Finally, however, these are white European (Jungian, Freudian) categories and ironically emphasize just how completely the white man has erased the Indian's visibility. When one of our most prominent critics can write an imaginative study of the Indian in American literature and never take the Indian point of view seriously, we have an index of the extent to which white reality—no matter how rightly examined—is white reality. And the ease with which Fiedler's Indian changes shape and color explains not only his book's Gothic character and his hero's elusiveness, but also how the Vanishing American, whose return he sees in our current madhouse literature, is largely an invention of the white psyche.

Dionysian energy and imagination make Fiedler's criticism go. The Return of the Vanishing American wants to act as a catalyst for thought rather than as its formalizer, and that is its excitement. Fiedler begins as a philosopher of mythic American literature, defining the Indian myth as an idol of the European mind, establishing basic American mythopoeic categories, locating the origin and history of his subject—the European discovery and Gothicising of the geographic and mythic West…. [Fiedler] assumes the centrality of myth, relying on his own previous work and that of the whole Jungian tradition to justify that assumption. Consequently, the business of the mythologist is to try to see mythic potential in imaginative documents and organize a coherent pattern from them. This method must of course often be more suggestive than conclusive. When, for example, Fiedler wants to show that the racism of American Indian mythology comes from European antecedents, he goes to the cream of that tradition and presents Shakespeare's The Tempest as "a violent attack on the whole Indian race, disguised as a Mystery Play." He is perhaps excessively shrill here, but not so much as to invalidate his argument that Shakespeare images Caliban as a savage Indian monster, as all that the Northern European mind feared and desired…. The point is not that Shakespeare was a racist, but that the mind of an age can be found in its art and that that art in turn feeds the mind of its own and future ages, and that through such evolution cultural mythologies are created. Critical control comes in keeping such subject matter within a dialectical framework.

And it is in the tension between dialectical control and Dionysian insight that a structural ambivalence in Fiedler's argument occurs. He will doubtless be criticized, as he often is, for being too free with analytic method. But (to make sure he can't win). I think that in this book he hasn't been free enough, that his perceptions are constricted by his dialectic. In trying to show the reality of the Indian myth, for example, the first half of his argument has pressured myth into category; the second half is an attempt to work it out of history and back into contemporary American literature and life. But rather than decategorizing, he assumes the voice of prophecy, to not only describe past myths and identify them in the present, but to prescribe their necessary future as well. Myth has become a moral imperative. Which would be all right, but for the fact that its future character, he seems to feel, must be determined by its past; that is, it must somehow find its logical conclusion. Our classic writers, he says, have failed the Western Dream by, in one way or another, diluting it…. [There is a] mythic reality that Fiedler wants only partially to confront—even though he himself has defined it—that the myth of the West came from moral imagination rather than history, and that when the moral imagination changes, as it has done so profoundly in the last hundred years, so too must its archetypes and the mythology which gives them coherence. By subsuming all imagination into myth, Fiedler has supposed a continuous line of imaginative development. (pp. 29-31)

[He] sees a New Western emerging in such writers as John Barth and Ken Kesey. It is, he thinks, based on parody of the Old Western, and is an extension of the archetypal myth he defines. In Barth's desentimentalizing of the Indian Maid (The Sotweed Factor), in Nathanael West and in Cat Ballou turning the Western to farce, most significantly in Kesey's removing the West to a madhouse entente between red man and white against the normal world (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest), he sees the saving evolution of the Western. It is a simultaneous return to and extension of D. H. Lawrence's vision of a New Race in America, the moral paradigm of which is male companionship (as in Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook) rather than the petticoated domestication of the Pocahontas and John Smith affair. Deriving as it does from Thoreau's "waking dream," the Myth of the West becomes for Fiedler something like the Code of the West—a value to be preserved and refurbished…. The mad or psychedelic hero becomes the New Savage, a bastion of resistance to WASPs, the Bourgeois, Kultur, and Castrating Woman. That is probably true enough, but it is scarcely the truth. Being himself a man, a Jew, an artist, and at least a symbolic renegade, Fiedler gives the uncomfortable impression of an apologist riding hobby horses into his univocal mythic sunset. One may be partial to hobby horses, but his are too exclusive and arbitrary and are also masked as scientific conclusions. The madness that he sees as a peculiar extension of the American Western myth is really part of a much larger thing that comes from an Absurdist imagination to be seen in such Europeans as Genet or Peter Weiss. Fiedler's general insight about madness as metaphor is true, but it isn't the logical conclusion of an American mythology; it is an Absurd attempt, not to resaddle old myths but destroy them, exorcise them through ridicule. Madhouse literature is not extending the Myth of the West, but assaulting it, trying to kill, not merely "scotch," that age-old snake of Euro-American moral ignorance.

Were it not locked into its dialectic, Fiedler's moral vision would allow much more for the future of American myth. He stops with our cultural "others"—the Indian, the Negro, the Jew—but he might well have included all who are in need of America's peculiar brand of salvation, the salvation that destroys (Hue: "We had to destroy the city to save it."). He tells us to look for our new Indian bogey in the psychedelic scene, but why not in Vietnam, or China or even on Mars? For implicit in Fiedler's argument is the warning that our mythologies destroy whatever obstructs their manifest destiny. We destroyed the Indians by being stronger, and isn't our real moral danger that we are already stronger than anybody on earth?

Well, one wants always to ride his own hobby horses. So Fiedler will probably not have the last word on this subject, and if he did I suspect he would regard his book as a failure. More importantly, he has found the trail that anyone wanting to go West—i.e., wanting to connect the American imagination's present with its past and future—must follow. And, as usual, he has written true things imaginatively. As usual, his readers and critics will wrangle with him. As usual, that doesn't matter; because no matter how fast and loose one may think him, he has served once more to illuminate remote dimensions of the human imagination's infinitely deep well. (pp. 31-2)