SOURCE: "The Politics of Polyphony: The Fiction of E. L. Doctorow," in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 37, No. 4, Winter, 1991, pp. 454-63.

[In the following essay, Parks applies recent critical theory to a study of the political and historical elements of Doctorow's fiction.]

"The chief business of twentieth-century philosophy," R. G. Collingwood remarks in his Autobiography, "is to reckon with twentieth-century history." In the fifty years since Collingwood wrote those words that "reckoning" with history has become increasingly problematic, especially when considering the situation of the contemporary writer. Describing the writer's alienation from history in the modern period, as well as his loss of faith in the direction of history, Georg Lukàcs, in his work The Historical Novel, observes that history for the writer becomes either "a collection and reproduction of interesting facts about the past" or "a chaos to be ordered as one likes" (176,181). More recently, Philip Roth and David Lodge describe a similar division among recent writers, who have largely abandoned the social and political realm for the exploration of the self. As Lodge puts it: "Art can no longer compete with life on equal terms, showing the universal in the particular. The alternatives are either to cleave to the particular … or to abandon history altogether and construct pure fictions which reflect in an emotional or metaphysical way the discords of contemporary experience" (33). As Tony Tanner puts it, this "means that novelists have lost faith in the idea that the individual can ever realize himself in contemporary social territories" (297).

E. L. Doctorow is critical of the fiction of the private life, a fiction which abandons or neglects the social and political dimensions to feature, instead, what Doctorow calls the "entrepreneurial self." In developing his own poetics of engagement, Doctorow seeks a fiction that is both politically relevant and aesthetically complex and interesting. By blurring the distinctions between fact and fiction, Doctorow's fiction seeks to disclose and to challenge the hegemony of enshrined or institutionalized discursive practices. The narrative of fiction is thus the locus of battle, as it were, for freedom. It is the place, or rather, the process or event where the "regimes of power," as Michael Foucault says, may be challenged. The task of narrative is to disrupt or dismantle the prevailing "regimes of truth," including their repressive effects. Doctorow's ultimate political enterprise is to prevent the power of the regime from monopolizing the compositions of truth, from establishing a monological control over culture. A monologic culture is authoritarian and absolutistic and denies the existence and validity of the "other," of "difference." Culture is best seen as polyphonic, as a heteroglossic dialogue or conversation, to use terms from Mikhail Bakhtin and Kenneth Burke, which allows for the speaking and hearing of the many voices which constitute it. This, according to Bakhtin, is what prose can do best in an age of competing languages. In Doctorow, dialogue or polyphonic fiction is both disruptive or even subversive of regimes of power, and restorative of neglected or forgotten or unheard voices in the culture. It is this twin aim of disruption and restoration that characterizes Doctorow's own polyphonic fiction as it seeks to engage what he calls the "progression of metaphors" (Trenner, [Richard, ed. Doctorow: Essays and Conversations (1983)] 26) that constitute our civilization.

It is perhaps inevitable that a writer whose fiction is engaged in imaginative historical revisioning would be criticized for being a "political novelist," especially by those whose politics differ from Doctorow's. Carol Iannone, for example, writing in Commentary, criticizes Doctorow's fiction for having "the ideological attitudes of the Left, attitudes that pervade and, finally, compromise everything he has written" (53). Similarly, Joseph Epstein puts Doctorow's fiction in with writers he labels as "adversarial" and virtually anti-American. To Epstein, Doctorow's novel The Book of Daniel is rigged for political purposes. Agreeing with Epstein, Robert Alter, in an essay on "the American Political Novel" in the New York Times Book Review, argues that recent American political fiction falls into two categories—serious novels which see politics as farcical and which reflect the author's rage, and commercial novels which are basically conventional fictional documentaries, such as novels by Allen Drury. To Alter, The Book of Daniel fails to make "nice discriminations and complex judgments" because of its pervasive sense of oppression. But such facile criticism, as Susan Lorsch, among others, argues, misconstrues the central issues and strategies of a novel like The Book of Daniel.

Doctorow sees himself as a novelist first and foremost, and rejects being labeled a "political novelist." While his fiction shows his passion for justice, his passion is quite unprogrammatic. Indeed, he is suspicious of grand political schemes and knows that "no system, whether it's religious or anti-religious or economic or nationalistic, seems invulnerable to human venery and greed and insanity" (Trenner, 65). It is more useful to see Doctorow's fiction as illustrating what Foucault describes as a "battle among discourses through discourses" and of what Bakhtin calls "heteroglossia." As Geoffrey Harpham argues [in "E. L. Doctorow and the Technology of Narrative"(PMLA, 100 January 1985)] it is best to see Doctorow's fiction as developing "from a critique of the coercive power of the textual and ideological regime to a celebration of the powers of imaginative freedom"(82). While all of Doctorow's novels, in varying degrees, engage in the demythologizing of American history, the novels The Book of Daniel, Ragtime, and Loon Lake are arguably his most "political" books and thus clearly reveal his fictional project of disruption and restoration.

The Book of Daniel (1971) is many stories in one. It is a Bildungsroman—the story of Daniel Isaacson's struggle for manhood. It is a Künstlerroman—the story of a writer discovering his identity and his fundamental conflict with his society. It is the story of and by a survivor—a boy whose parents were executed for treason struggles for a narrative that will reconnect him to history. It is a revenge story—a son's obligation somehow to redeem his father's and mother's murder. And it is a story of a history graduate student searching for a topic for his dissertation. Daniel would avoid real history by writing it. But the radicalism of the late 1960s propels Daniel out of the stacks and into the streets, where Daniel must compose a book which avoids conceiving history as a series of repetitions and duplications or as an endless sequence of events. Because he inherits not a legacy of power but of powerlessness, Daniel, in responding to the historical summons of his time, must seize control of the narrative, and his resultant book is both a self-composition and an act of cultural hermeneutics. Daniel's narrative, his composition, as Harpham suggests, is an epistemology; it is how we know (85-86). For Daniel, telling leads to knowing. But knowing what? That reality is a function of power and the institutionalized discourses which constitute it. And that power must be challenged by a narrative which combines analysis and the ability to make truthful connections. Hence, Daniel's rather dissynchronous procedure—a calculated use of discontinuity. Like Hemingway's Jacob Barnes, Doctorow's Daniel must find a way to recompose history after a great wounding.

As Doctorow has said, his novel is not about the Rosenbergs but rather about the idea of the Rosenbergs. The novel is not a fictionalized attempt to prove the innocence of convicted conspirators—as Epstein would have it—but a polyphonic reopening of the case—a "re-hearing," or perhaps better, a "re-speaking," in the context of the New Left of the late 1960s, of the crucial issues connected with the trial of the Rosenbergs in the early 1950s. The ordeal that Daniel undergoes as a native son is America's as well, for the fate of both is interconnected. The genius of the narrative strategy is that it enables Doctorow to explore his themes in multiple contexts—the contexts of the New Left radicalism of the late 1960s, the Old Left radicalism of the 1930s, which faced attack during the virulent anti-communist hysteria of the Cold War of the 1950s, and the even larger context of biblical prophecy in the novel's allusion to the prophet Daniel and his struggle with exile and persecution. Thus, as children of executed parents, Daniel and his younger sister, Susan, must contend with a legacy of loss, of failure, of rejection. They must find some way of connecting the so-called "generation gap" between the two radicalisms, of ending their own exiles, and of rejoining American history.

Daniel sees that the story cannot be told in a straightforward, linear, chronological manner. Only a deconstructed narrative can destabilize the hegemony of official history enough to open up new possibilities for interpretation. Thus, Daniel's "book" is a virtual pastiche of genres—family stories, autobiography, essays, excerpts from newspapers and trial transcripts, letters, conflicting historical analysis, dissertation, biblical quotations—and abrupt shifts from first-to third-person points of view. The actual time of the novel covers less than a year, from Memorial Day in 1967 to the spring of 1968, when Columbia University is closed down by radical demonstrators and Daniel is forced to leave the library. Spatially, the novel moves from Massachusetts to New York to Washington D.C. to Disneyland on the west coast and back to New York.

Daniel's journey takes him from Susan's hospital room, after her attempted suicide in a Howard Johnson's toilet, to a confrontation with Artie Sternlicht, the New Left radical who wants to overthrow the country with images, and whose rejection of Susan's plan to memorialize her parents leads to her death (from a "failure of analysis"). It is significant, and not a little ironic, that Daniel's final interrogation occurs at Disneyland, which William Irwin Thompson calls "the edge of history," where history is essentially false and commodified. It is in Tomorrowland that Daniel at last confronts his parents' betrayer. But Mindish's advanced senility prevents Daniel from hearing the truth about his parents. Daniel's quest ends in ambiguity and uncertainty, but not in futility, for the electric energy of his narrative has "resisted"—an electrical and political term—closing the circuit which leads to death. Avoiding the traps of deadly repetition and of meaningless sequence, Daniel composes a book implicating the reader in acts of participation and witness.

If The Book of Daniel is a tragedy of history, Ragtime (1975) is a comedy of history. While many people die in the book, it ends nevertheless in a marriage symbolizing some new and rich possibilities for America's future, after its innocence is lost. If the narrative of The Book of Daniel challenges the monologic power of the regime with its polyphonic quality, the narrative of Ragtime is a virtual carnival, an occasion for the reigning of the "jolly relativity" of all things. Ragtime is a text which resists organicism through the interplay of multiple voices, historical and fictive. The novel approaches what Roland Barthes calls a "plural text," a text that calls the reader not merely to consume the meaning but rather to produce it.

Like The Book of Daniel, Ragtime continues Doctorow's engagement with the problems of historical repetition and endless sequence, but this time during the first two decades of the twentieth century, the Progressive Era. As the little boy of the WASP family says: "It was evident to him that the world composed and recomposed itself constantly in an endless process of dissatisfaction" (135). The novel explores the changing compositions of history—replications and changes—and the possibilities of moral growth in history. One of the historical personages in the book, Henry Ford, who made history with his assembly-line techniques ("He had caused a machine to replicate itself endlessly," 155), is reputed to have declared that "history is more or less bunk," a view Doctorow's novel seeks to challenge with a prophetic vision of social justice.

In contrast to the intensity of the narrative of The Book of Daniel, the narrative of Ragtime is energetic, sprightly, and easy to read, giving rise to criticisms of the novel as shallow and superficial. But the book does not intend to be a dense study of character. Its pastiche quality intends to challenge conventional notions of plot. Its idiosyncratic blending of fact and fiction intends to challenge the privileged status of historical discourse. It is a text that illustrates Doctorow's ideas of history as spelled out in the "False Documents" essay: "There is no history except as it is composed…. That is why history has to be written and rewritten from one generation to another. The art of composition can never end" (Trenner, 24). The novel is not so much about the ragtime era as about how we view that era, and how we might compose and recompose it. For Fredric Jameson this narrative pastiche is evidence of the postmodern loss of the historical referent—a loss of connection between the writer's and reader's now and the past, and hence, a "crisis in historicity." The historical subject remains out of reach to us, problematizing interpretation. For this reason, Jameson [in "Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism." New Left Review, 146(July-August, 1984)] sees Doctorow as "the epic poet of the disappearance of the American radical tradition"(68-71).

In any event, the ever-changing narrative surface of Ragtime is part of the "meaning" of a book concerned with changes. As the little boy learns from Grandfather's stories from Ovid: "the forms of life were volatile and … everything in the world could as easily be something else" (132-33). The book, we learn in the last pages of the novel, is the tale of the little boy grown up; it is his composition. In a real sense, moreover, the novel is a product of a warning read back into history after a terrible catastrophe—in this case World War I, the ending of American innocence and the real entry of America into the twentieth century. The little boy tells Houdini to "Warn the Duke" at the end of Chapter I, a warning which, of course, cannot be given and, hence, cannot be heeded. But as a composing artist, it is a gesture of freedom and historical consciousness that needs to be made. The boy's composition is a challenge to a view of history that forecloses the imagination and moral freedom.

As a contemporary historical romance, the novel is a syncopation of a number of oppositions and tensions: degeneration and regeneration, static forms and volatile images, repetition and change, history and fantasy, self and other, rich and poor, white and black, WASP and immigrant, narcissism and self-divestment, journeys outward and journeys inward, departures and arrivals. These tensions are exhibited in the chance intermingling of three fictive families and various historical personages. As a result of their failed quests—Father's quest for new explorations, Coalhouse Walker's quest for racial justice, Tateh's quest for economic justice—only one of the fathers and one of the mothers survive the tumult of the era, and manage to direct their lives along the currents of American energy and generate a new history.

What is at stake in the novel is a view of history that resists the temptations of myth, a view that accepts moral responsibility. Most of the characters of the book are engaged in various forms of escape, like Houdini's relentless pursuit of the ultimate escape. J. P. Morgan and Henry Ford deny historical responsibility through their belief in reincarnation. But such historical narcissism is doomed to failure. Obsessed with rebirth, Morgan, Ford, and Houdini see history almost wholly in terms of the self, an immature and infantile philosophy of history, one that is static and degenerate. But the Morgan-Ford-Houdini philosophy of escape endures, as the narrator says: "Today, nearly fifty years since his death, the audience for escapes is even larger"(8).

Reality, history, will not be pinned down. History refuses to succumb to the impositions of the human ego. Dreiser turns his chair all night "seeking the proper alignment" (30). Admiral Peary does not locate the exact spot of the North Pole: "On a watery planet the sliding sea refused to be fixed" (90). Only a novel like a motion picture can hope to catch the experience of history. Such is Ragtime.

Loon Lake (1980), published at the beginning of the Reagan era in national politics, is another contribution to that ongoing conversation in American culture on the moral and spiritual perils of success. Set in the 1930s, the novel is the story of the rise of a working-class boy to the pinnacle of wealth and power. As such, the work echoes earlier treatments of this theme—Dos Passos, Dreiser, Horatio Alger, and, of course, The Great Gatsby. The story of Joe of Paterson, like Gatsby's, is the story of how a son's choice of a father creates both an identity and a destiny. The novel is Joe's autobiographical grappling with that choice. In a tense moment of betrayal and accusation, Joe "finds his voice" and seizes control of his narrative in the action that also seals his fate.

Loon Lake, another polyphonic text to challenge the monologic powers of the regime, continues Doctorow's development of innovative narrative strategies. The novel is a demonstration of what Doctorow calls a "discontinuous narrative, with deferred resolutions, and … the throwing of multiple voices that turn out to be the work of one narrator" (Trenner, 39,41). Its shifts in scene, tense, and voice, along with interjections of poetry and computer biographies in the form of the résumé or curriculum vitae, give the effect of a cinematic montage, or what Harpham, among others, calls a "bricolage" (90). The overall effect of the narrative suggests destabilized genre forms, which reflect the hermeneutic predicament of the narrator.

In an early essay on the fiction of Henry James, T. S. Eliot comments that "the 'real hero' of James's novels is 'a collectivity'" (Miller, [in Poets of Reality (1974)] 137). This notion of the collective character is relevant to understanding the nature of the narrator/narration in Loon Lake. The ultimate master of Loon Lake, as well as the master of his text, is a master impersonator, a chameleon. He is the sum total of the voices he hears, denying and forsaking his own voice, if, indeed, he ever knew it. His text thus is a heteroglossic one, which reflects the multiple voices that shape, if not determine, human identity and constitute human selfhood. Joe's life is a paradox—while he appears shrewd and self-reliant, his survival and success stem from his ability to become somebody else. In an interview Doctorow commented on Joe: "Loon Lake suggests the act of self-composition on the part of Joe. It suggests that we all compose ourselves from other people in our experience. I think Joe's ability to jump around in voice and shift in time and be almost an impersonator as he writes these recollections of everyone else is a kind of ironic awareness of his inner failure to find out who he is." Hence, Doctorow's "collective hero" allows for a more socially and politically engaged fiction than a fiction focusing upon the psychologized ego written in the confessional mode so abundant in the 1970s and 1980s.

Loon Lake suggests a definition of culture as an encoded hero system. Such a system tells and shows us what to want and how to obtain it. In the novel the figure of F. W. Bennett is the hero of the system—he is what everybody wants; he embodies the dream. Hence, his power is much more than material; it is spiritual, for he, in effect, is the father-creator of our dreams, a godlike role. It is one of the main jobs of the hero to find out whose son he is and then to live out that heritage. All of America's sons are orphans, only winning or earning our fathers through a process of adoption. The father-hero is the self-made man, and the son creates himself in his image. To choose this as his life's trajectory is to strive for a kind of immortality, which is the promise of every hero system. But what are the costs of following such a code—for the individual as well as for the society? That is the major question Loon Lake raises for the reader.

Loon Lake, stylistically and thematically, consists of a cluster of impersonations. Like its narrator it is always pretending to be something else, until the pretense becomes reality. Its mix of genres defamiliarizes the reader so that one shares in the sense of doubt and uncertainty regarding the narrator's sense of self. Showing his critical passage from youth to adult, Joe ends with a curriculum vitae, a summary of a life that was a replication of another. But the real tragedy is more than the personal spiritual failure of a man who betrayed his poetic heart to reach the pinnacle of the American system. Joe's failure, and hence his tragedy, is much greater. Like Robin, of Nathaniel Hawthorne's tale "My Kinsman, Major Molineux," Joe's life is an allegory of the repetitive failure of American history—at heart a failure of perception. Our choices at critical moments cut us off from our true history and lead us to duplicate false and empty options, ones not truly our own. At one point, when Joe is working in Bennett's factory, and the din of production echoes in his mind, Joe discovers "an interesting philosophical problem: I didn't know at any moment what I heard was what was happening or what had already happened" (164). For the reader the verdict of Joe's composition is that Joe's life is another version of "what had already happened."

Doctorow's novels, like Hawthorne's, are in the tradition of the historical romance which seeks to bring about social and moral changes. For Doctorow, as for such critics as Michel Foucault and Edward Said, discourse is worldly; power resides in discourse which is subject to change and has real world effects. Doctorow, as an artist, is committed to challenging the power of the regime with the power of freedom. The principle arena of that engagement is in discourse, in narrative, the range of discursive practices with their cluster of rules and codes which govern writing and thinking. The goal is to disclose and challenge the hegemony of enshrined or institutionalized discursive practices in order to make available new possibilities of thought and action. Doctorow's fiction shows a willingness to take risks, to counter the tendency of a culture to monopolize the compositions of truth with polyphonic and heteroglossic narratives.