If Huck Finn could have married Jim the slave and, through some literary or genetic miracle, produced an offspring, their love child might have grown up to become Michael Jackson, whose tragic destiny was to try to prove that it really didn't matter if you were young or old, male or female, straight or gay, black or white.

However strange that thought may seem, it is inspired by a stream of literary and cultural criticism once advanced by the provocative Leslie Fiedler, ideas I first encountered in the 1970s around the time that Joe Jackson was whipping his talented children into shape on the streets of that dying steel town, Gary, Indiana.

In a provocative and influential 1948 essay in the Partisan Review titled "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!" Fiedler offered a reinterpretation of classic American literature inspired in part by D.H. Lawrence. Much of that literature -– from "Last of the Mohicans," to "Moby Dick," to "Huckleberry Finn" –- was once misunderstood as the stuff of boyish adventure: the battle against the savage in the forest, the hunt for the monstrous whale, escape down the Mississippi. Fiedler helped expose a darker more interesting side, a symbolic landscape of interracial homoerotic male bonding.

Before you dismiss this as literary psychobabble, consider the examples, so common in the history of American culture, high and low, that they may be invisible. In addition to the child-man, man-child mixed racial bonding of Huck and Jim, Fiedler cites the powerful unions of Hawkeye and Chingachgook, Ishmael and Queequeg, a pattern that can be traced forward to the likes of the Lone Ranger and Tonto, not to mention Batman and Robin.

What these and many other such heroes share is an affinity with the wilderness (even Batman lives in a "cave"), a desire to prosper in a world essentially devoid of the civilizing influence of women, and a revolutionary vision of America as a place where you can re-create yourself, your environment, your experience, and your prospects.

In this sense, America becomes the new-found-land, the new Eden, the pilgrim paradise, an endlessly fertile terrain devoid of constraints and limits, geographical and psychological. The archetypal American hero, then, be he Huck or Hawkeye or Ishmael or Billy Budd, becomes a new Adam, the creator of a new race. 

Remember old Rip Van Winkle? He started the ball rolling, so to speak, in the Catskill Mountains, escaping his shrewish wife and going on a beer binge that puts him to sleep for 20 years. When he woke up, he came to realize that he had slept through the American Revolution! He woke up a new man in a brave new world.

When America achieved its "manifest destiny,: taking up or stealing up all the available land, the territory of American expansion began to be expressed emotionally and symbolically. I'm thinking for example of Ken Kesey's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," in which Randle McMurphy and Chief Bromden rebel against the forces of institutional repression embodied in Nurse Ratched.

So, for a moment, think of Gary, Indiana, as the old world, a dying, patriarchal city where dreams turned to rust and the sky was so brown you could never see the stars.

Now think of Michael Jackson as a perpetual child of the new America, rebelling against the constraints imposed by family, class, and culture. For such a person, the new expansion of territory was expressed through celebrity. With celebrity came untold wealth, the Protestant ethic handed over to King Midas. 

That wealth liberated you, Michael, from a cruel and dominating father and the decay of the old America. It allowed you to create your own "innocent" world, the Neverland of your dreams, where age can be arrested and with it all its withering decay. You are freed to escape all limitations: to shape and re-shape yourself, to minimize the natural signs of race, gender, and age. You are a black man turned into a white anorexic girl, a slave to loneliness and pain killers.

In its original sense, the word "paradise" signified a tiny, enclosed garden, an artificial prison from which no human being, however wealthy or celebrated, could escape. It is within this Edenic setting, populated only by children and enablers, that you can express yourself. But what are you? Child or adult? Innocent or predator? Humanitarian or self-promoter?

Whatever the state of your soul, we know more fully the state of your art. Here too you are terrified by boundaries. You become a male Motown icon, girls screaming at every crotch-grabbing thrust, yet you identify with divas: Diana Ross, Liza Minnelli, and Elizabeth Taylor, all still alive in the wake of your death. And what about the music, that signifying place you create where song meets dance, where sound meets visual, where straight rhythm and blues meets the fabulous decadence of disco.

It is hard to imagine, Michael, that even Leslie Fiedler could have envisioned an American Adam like you. He wrote about "the two" -– the likes of Huck and Jim -– whose stories joined to help us see ourselves in a new way. But you took all that "two-ness" and made it one, a King of Pop ruling over a fandom of young and old, black and white, male and female, straight and gay. Journalist and cultural critics will be trying to figure out for some time to come who you were -– and why.