Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self John Cech Leslie Fiedler . Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self. Simon and Schuster, $12.95 cloth, $5.95 paper. Leslie Fiedler's Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self (Simon and Schuster, $12.95 cloth, $5.95 paper) is a particularly relevant book, given the fascinated and, at times, obsessive interest in the monstrous, the alien, the mutant, deformed, and odd —that whole body of strange enigmatic cross-overs from the unconscious, the shadow side of "normal." Fiedler is at his probing, provocative best here, peeling back the layers of rational explanation and defense that are used to cover these powerful and disturbing images of the monster, or, as Fiedler chooses to call the figure in his book, the "freak." The freak can come in a range of symbolic and physical forms, from the imagined creatures of fantasy, myth, or "natural history" to the twisted shapes of actual human beings. Fiedler's point is that freaks speak to our deepest fantasies and fears. They belong to the "secret self" we barely acknowledge when we stare, often with a mixture of wonder and dread, at these real or imagined, nightmarish breaks with order —the order we take for granted in nature, society, or our identities. The monster is the "not us," and yet it is an essential part of our definition of who we are. In its most ancient sense, the monster is "a portent, an omen, a showing forth"; in a sense, it is a demonstration of what is hidden away from view in each of us. For Fiedler, the present study actually began when he was a child, remembering a trip to the side show and watching the Siamese Twins there. As an adult, he gives words to the substance of that intuitive, early connection he made and, he believes, all of us make between the monstrous and ourselves: Confronting them, I could feel the final horror evoked by Freaks stir to life: a kind of vertigo like that experienced by Narcissus when he beheld his image in the reflecting waters and plunged to his death. In joined twins the confusion of the self and the other, substance and shadow, ego and other is more terrifyingly confounded than it is when the child first perceives face to face in the mirror an image moving as he moves, though clearly in another world. In that case, at least there are only two participants, the perceiver and the perceived; but standing before Siamese Twins, the beholder sees them looking not only at each other, but - both at once - at him. And for an instant it may seem to him that he is a third brother, bound to the pair before him by an invisible bond; so that the distinction between audience and exhibit, we and them, normal and Freak, is revealed as an illusion, desperately, perhaps even necessarily, defended, but untenable in the end. Children encounter the monster first in their own dream experience and then later in fairy tales, myth, fantasy, and other popular media such as comic books, television shows, and horror movies. Rather than censor monsters, Fiedler believes that kids are "in need of . . . fantasies to project dreams of revenge on the adult world, and to immunize themselves against the real loss and terror by frightening themselves with what they [know] to be fictions." The monster organizes the chaos of a child's emotions; and, through engaging the monster, he masters or channels his normal psychological "distress." Thus, primal fears of being devoured, for instance, are embodied in the many traditional stories about giants or "in the flesh" by circus fat ladies or side show geeks. The image of the giant has its roots deep in the ancient myths of the cannibalistic father, Saturn or Cronus; and the archetype continues to surface in recent children's books like Arthur Yorinks' and Richard Egielski's Sid and Sol (Farrar, Straus & Giroux $6.95) and Alison Sage's and Gian Calvi's The Ogre's Banquet (Doubleday, $5.95). Both treat the giant humorously, making him more the buffoon, more the victim of self-devouring vanity than...