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FREEDOMWAYS                 
FIRST QUARTER 1973 

to rouse the faithful from their esoteric brooding over America's lost innocence. Under the goading of a literary criticism crusading for old values, restored virtue, and lily-white bliss, the real world gave way to unoffending fantasies. Style replaced seriousness, form reigned supreme while content became suspect. In the mythical world of white middle-class snobbery God became an upper-class Episcopalian.

Certain consequences were inevitable. Reality would become even more estranged from the themes of fiction and life would be depicted devoid of any idea that even suggested social criticism. Man's lot became strictly a personal ordeal. In due course, the world depicted in modern American fiction bore little resemblance to anything familiar. There would be little reference to the hard world of poverty, exploitation, social neglect; little reference to the corrupting greed of a powerful monied class; little reference to their subverting Constitutional ideals with a capitalist ethos; little reference to the unusually punitive oppression of blacks in the South and across the nation. Such sociological aberrations had no place in American fiction if it were to play a proper role in our developing imperial culture. The literary establishment recognized its role in the scheme of things.

I am not suggesting a conspiracy. Indeed, for the most part it was probably collusion based more on misguided patriotism and shared chauvinist notions about America's manifest destiny than any clandestine boardroom collaboration. The results, however, have been the same. For instance, under the sway of genteel criticism, mainstream literature has helped to foster the myth that the boundaries of civilization ended at the borders of Europe and America. What lay beyond were gradations of savagery as practiced by "natives," "Indians," "Asiatics." On the other hand, one could search mainstream literature from the turn of the century through the fifties and find scarcely any reference to the existence of black people on the American landscape.

The exception of course was the Southern white writer whose portrayal of blacks in fiction betrayed the inhumanity at the center of his art. Even Faulkner's ability was distorted by the pervasive racism of his redneck traditionalism. But as expected, far from challenging his fictive assumptions about the "nature" of the black man's character, genteel criticism praised his Dilseys as though they were among the finest bricks in the edifice of his talent. Minor writers were even less bridled in expressing their racial pathology. The African captive

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