Tyranny of the Normal - Hardcover

Fiedler, Leslie

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1567920039 ISBN 13: 9781567920031

Publisher: David R. Godine, Publisher, 1996

Synopsis

This is a bold new collection of essays from Leslie Fiedler, one of America's most brilliant literary and social critics. Wound together by the common thread of bioethics, they encompass such issues as abortion, the removal of life support (or as Fiedler says, "permitting the imperfect to die"), the role that doctors play in our society, the trend back to herbal medicine, and how we confront (or try not to confront) old age and Eros.

Fiedler speaks of bioethics not as a health-care professional, but as a passionate, well-informed amateur. A literary critic, he brings particular breadth to the topic, using it as a window through which to examine the mythology of abnormality in our society. His examples are culled from history, from personal experience, and from those works that have most penetrated our culture, our attitudes, even our collective subconscious: whether acknowledged literary classics (Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the works of Dickens and Shakespeare) or more popular entertainments, such and Ken Kesey's "youth novel" One Flew Over the Cukoo's Nest and the enormously successful television shows Marcus Welby, M.D. and E.R.

As in his earlier book, the bestselling Freaks, Fiedler's concern here is with the Other, the individual who does not fit within society s parameters of "normalcy" and so becomes the Outsider - even as that individual uncomfortably challenges many of our cherished assumptions about our capacities for civilization and tolerance. Frequently controversial, at times infuriating, these essays will anger parties on all sides of these debates. But they will also appeal to anyone who appreciates the unorthodox insights of an inquisitive and voracious mind.

About this title

Review:

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 Kirkus Reviews:

Entertaining and invigorating essays by one of our most challenging critics of literature and culture. Academic critics normally swim in ``schools of thought,'' a pleasant phrase that often masks abject groupthink. Fiedler--a poet, novelist, essayist, and professor of literature at SUNY Buffalo--swims alone. Indeed, he identifies with people who are abnormal. In this book, his 25th, he continues to explore ideas spun off of Freaks (1978), his study of sideshow performers. Such people embody for us, he argues, not only the primordial fear of that which is abnormal and alien, but also (and more deeply) our secret recognition of what is monstrous and freakish in ourselves. Hence the immense popularity of The Elephant Man. In this spirit Fiedler examines the ethics of organ transplants, the culturally defined images of doctors and nurses, the relationship between literature and child abuse, and the cultural meanings of New Age spirituality, impotence, and deformity. Fiedler has a special knack for demystifying the imagery of popular culture. Commenting on Coming Home, Jane Fonda's hit movie about a disabled Vietnam veteran, he brushes aside its veneer of sanctimonious politics to suggest less attractive reasons for its popularity: What moved audiences, especially women, ``were certain genuinely mythic elements, long familiar in women's literature, and quite unrelated to leftist politics. First is the fantasy of making it with a cripple: a variant of the Beauty and the Beast archetype . . . The second is a variant of the Cinderella archetype (classically formulated in Jane Eyre . . . ) in which the heroine gets the prince only after he is maimed.'' Fiedler is famous for his curmudgeonly viewpoints, and this collection will not disappoint his readers. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: David R. Godine, Publisher
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 1567920039
• ISBN 13: 9781567920031
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 155