Books: Leslie Fiedler's Monster Party

FREAKS by Leslie Fiedler; Simon & Schuster; 367pages; $12.95

A Peter De Vries character once described a literary intellectual as the sort who put his audience into a bathysphere and took them down three feet. He could not have met Leslie Fiedler, who, along with Norman Mailer, is one of the most daring skinny-dippers in U.S. literary and social criticism. Throughout a long career that includes some brilliant fiction (Nude Croquet, 1969), Fiedler has boldly led his readers down whirlpools of the national subconscious. In Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), he argued that the country's literature was obsessed with death and therefore incapable of developing mature heterosexual themes. Such matey relationships as Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook, Ishmael and Queequeg and Huck Finn and Jim, said Fiedler, were bonded by an innocent and idealized homosexual sentiment. He never said these heroes were homosexuals, though he did use "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!" as the titillating title of his essay.

Critics of the critic suggested that Fiedler was playing to the crowd with a limited script based on pop Freud and Jungian stereotypes. His enthusiasm for discovering mythic power in such popular arts as movies and comic books was not appreciated by the guardians of high culture. Yet Fiedler outflanked them by describing himself as a hybrid of chutzpah (Yiddish for nerve or gall) and pudeur (French for modesty or reserve).

This itself was an act of inspired chutzpah that cast Fiedler as a cultural freak, an outsider and kinsman to all the Chingachgooks and Queequegs whose "otherness" defines white America. Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self is a natural extension of Fiedler's concern with the "other." Only now he confronts not society's but nature's own outsiders. He would prefer a term less offensive than freaks, though he defends it against such euphemisms as mistakes of nature and phenomènes on the grounds that they "lack the resonance necessary to represent the sense of quasi-religious awe which we experience first and most strongly as children: face to face with fellow humans more marginal than the poorest sharecroppers or black convicts on a Mississippi chain gang."

At its most obvious, the book is a natural history of dwarfs, giants, hermaphrodites, Siamese twins, mutants, the monstrously fat, the grotesquely thin, dog-faced boys and zoophagous geeks. But the richly illustrated work is in fact a combination sideshow, meditation on human nature and medical textbook of the sort that librarians once kept locked away with scandalous volumes like Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis.