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Leslie Fiedler, author of
Fiedler on the Roof: Essays on Literature and Jewish Identity and the acclaimed
Love and Death in the American Novel, is back with
Tyranny of the Normal, a set of nine essays written during the previous quarter century that explore his iconoclastic views on the whole notion of normality--and by extrapolation political correctness--that plagues our modern discourse. This is not your typical view of the world. "Deep within the under-mind of all of us there persists a desire to murder the disabled," he avers in one essay; in another he argues that the inevitable ambivalence we all feel over the birth of a child (love and hate) but are afraid to own up to, could be mitigated if we "reinstitute some form of permitted ritualized 'abuse' of the young." Still, his goal is less to shock and titillate than it is to point out that by pretending we no longer fear those things that are different, a tendency that is part and parcel of the human condition, we are only making matters worse.
From Publishers Weekly
Combative, opinionated, sometimes belabored, these thought-provoking original essays confirm Fiedler's reputation as an intellectual maverick, an erudite critic, an irrepressible explorer of humanity's darkest impulses. Two pieces deal with images of "dirty old men" in Chaucer, Dickens, Nabokov, Mann, Shakespeare, Goethe, in plays, movies and dirty jokes?images that, in Fiedler's reckoning, crystallize an ancient, mythologically reinforced taboo against sexuality in the elderly. In another essay, he argues that almost all of us are subconsciously driven to search for "a myth system which will permit the ritualized slaughter of some human beings," whether via abortion, infanticide, child abuse or capital punishment. Elsewhere, he lambastes the 1960s and '70s counterculture as a revolt against reason and establishment medicine. Fiedler often goes out on a limb, as when, citing Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and H.G. Wells's The Island of Dr. Moreau, he contends that our unconscious resentment of the medical profession, and fear of pain and death, cause most people to refuse to become organ-transplant donors, or when he likens teratacide, the killing of "monstrously malformed" neonates such as the Thalidomide babies of the 1960s, to the Nazis' extermination of dwarfs and other "useless people."
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
