Love and Cringe
In the American Novel: Irony and Sentimentality
Two writers I admire very much have recently invoked Leslie Fiedler’s 1960 study Love and Death in the American Novel as a useful—even necessary—interlocutory text for thinking about literature and culture today. So I dug my copy out and am reading it, more thoroughly than when I first swept through it to get the gist of Fiedler’s ideas.
Both Brandon Taylor and Christian Lorentzen call upon Fiedler as a way to think about sentimentality, a cultural mood which they regard as increasingly dominant, particularly among the young. In Taylor’s interpretation, the best window for viewing this ascent of sentimentality is TikTok, “where true cringe (and therefore sentiment) lives.” He continues with a lovely bit of phenomenological rapture:
It is possible for me to browse Twitter and not feel the squirming reality of human perception. It’s possible for me to browse Instagram and experience nothing but aesthetic lift. The slick, grooved communion with the algorithm. But the human creature is in evidence in every TikTok. We see them in their home doing silly, mechanized actions for, what, love, for what, attention, for what, acceptance? One can’t help but notice how pitiful and therefore how beautiful humans are when one looks at TikTok.
Lorentzen is more than a bit nonplussed by this renaissance of cringe, but he also adds to the cultural typology, pairing it with its incestuous twin the gothic, and contrasting it with its wiser (or just more jaded?) uncle irony. Lorentzen questions what is missing in literature when the surrounding culture is deficient in irony, linking it to the shift among “the most ambitious anglophone writers from the systems novel to autofiction.”
Lorentzen’s brief reading of these two genres is insightful, and his diagnosis is (appropriately) ambivalent. In other words, there’s a lot to unpack in his tentative hope that, as novelists adjust to what is hopefully a new stage of political history, they will start to question the shallowness and immaturity of their reliance on the gothic and the sentimental modes to capture and respond to the zeitgeist.
But I would instead like to return to Fiedler and think for a moment about his diagnosis of what is missing in “the American novel.” As Taylor points out, Fiedler wrote at a time when men like him (by 1960, even or especially Jewish men) arrogated to themselves “the sweeping gesture of summing [an entire culture] up” within the analysis of a handful (in Fiedler’s case, several handfuls) of texts. “The American novel” was a comprehensible term of analysis within the academy because it was understood to be a single current; anything that seemed to branch off from or to amalgamate “the American novel” with other traditions or with materials from outside that current was not so much excluded as invisible.
That is not our contemporary picture of American literary history; rather than a single sinuous surge across time, “American literature” looks more like a map made and made over by bickering cartographers, unable to agree on borders or even scale, preferring different nomenclatures and vying for space. Yet amidst this boisterousness, Taylor observes that there remains something compelling about Fiedler’s analysis: “It just felt true. It’s hard to sum up in a way that does the whole thing justice.” Fiedler seems to have struck upon something primal or fundamental in American culture that transcends—or subtends—its variety. It is hard to articulate that something pithily, as Taylor notes, but it doesn’t, I think, have that much to do with irony or with its lack in American novels, at least not directly. And similarly, it cannot be explained fully by noticing and categorizing the sentimentality present in American culture.
To put things a different way, Fiedler did not—as Lorentzen and Taylor do—approach his subject directly by means of generic categories: sentimental, gothic, ironic, etc. He was not so much interested in properly naming the American malady as he is in isolating the bacillus that causes it. His great achievement was to identify a couple of psychosexual paradigms which are the raw material which American writers have channeled into the forms—themselves imported—of the gothic and the sentimental, and which they have on very rare occasions been able to sublate into irony.
According to Fiedler, the first paradigm is in a way a mere screen for the second, a kind of oblique compensatory gesture. Fiedler points to the very many pairs of men in classic American literature who find in one another and in the wilderness a kind of psychic balm and refuge; this pair always consists of one white man and one non-white man. Daringly for 1960 (or for 1948, when I think he published his first essay broaching this theory), Fiedler acknowledged and refused to euphemize or diminish the homoerotic dimension of this paradigm.
Beneath this pattern of the “dusky male lover” and the wilderness, however, lies a more encompassing aversion—the aversion of the American novelist (man and woman) to the confusions and power of heterosexual love, particularly heterosexual love outside of and possibly in defiance of the institution of marriage. American novelists, Fiedler argues, will do just about anything—kill off a character, reveal that a pair of lovers are secretly brother and sister (thus blocking the possibility of marriage and sexual consummation), or just send the man fleeing into the wilds—to avoid tackling even a priggishly tame love plot, much less a seduction plot.
That is all I want to write about this idea for the moment, but I plan to continue working through it in our next installment, considering how well or how poorly it fits recent literary trends—particularly the turn to autofiction that provokes Lorentzen’s skepticism—and why I think there’s much to be gained from pursuing Fiedler’s insight into the present.