SOURCE: "Cutting Both Ways: E. L. Doctorow's Critique of the Left," in South Atlantic Review, Vol. 58, No. 2, May, 1993, pp. 111-25.

[In the following essay, Cooper examines the political concerns of Doctorow's work.]

The experimental, "postmodern" elements in E. L. Doctorow's novels are remarked upon by virtually all his critics. In most of his major novels the narrative voice is self-conscious and calls attention to itself. In his first novel, Welcome to Hard Times (1960), the narrator Blue is writing his story in old ledgers and reflects on his penchant, even obsession, for record keeping and wonders if the truth of events can be captured in words. Daniel Isaacson, the narrator of The Book of Daniel (1971), begins his highly self-conscious story by commenting on his writing instrument (a felt-tip marker), moves back and forth in time, frequently shifts from first- to third-person narrative, and interpolates numerous historical and analytical passages into his memoir. The narrative voice in Ragtime (1975) is flat and detached, a parody of the style used in documentaries or textbooks. This parody is given a twist when near the end of the novel we realize that one of the characters, the now grown Little Boy, is telling the story. In Loon Lake (1980) the reader confronts multiple narrative voices—first-and third-person, computer-generated text, poems, résumés, stream of consciousness—though in the end it turns out all has been composed by the central character, Joe of Paterson.

What makes Doctorow's postmodern narrative experiments noteworthy is that they occur in novels that deal with historical and political topics and characters. The way Doctorow "plays with" historical figures can be disconcerting to many readers who want certainty, who want to know what is "true" and what is invented. In his 1977 essay "False Documents," Doctorow addresses this issue directly. He cites the historical origins of the novel and notes that writers such as Defoe and Cervantes presented their works as "histories," as "false documents." On the other hand, he argues that history is always "composed" and that it "has to be written and re-written from one generation to another" (24). Thus, history and fiction intermingle and always have. Both are ways of making sense out of the world, and as such, both are ideological to a greater extent than many writers would like to admit. As Barbara Foley [in "From U.S.A. to Ragtime" American Literature 50 (1978)] points out when she compares Doctorow to Dos Passos, "Doctorow treats with equal aplomb facts that are 'true' and those that are 'created,' thus calling into question our concept of factuality and, indeed, of history itself" (168). This position, that history is highly subjective, can be disquieting, as Foley notes:

What I ultimately find disturbing about Ragtime—and about many other works of contemporary historical fiction, whether 'apocalyptic' or 'documentary'—is its underlying postulate that whatever coherence emerges from the represented historical world is attributable to the writer's power as teller of his story, with the result that the process of historical reconstruction itself, rather than what is being presented, comes to the fore. (175)

The main targets of Doctorow's destabilizing tactics are usually presumed to be traditional or conservative history and politics. In other words, as a writer associated with liberal or left-wing causes who knows well the history of radical dissent in the United States, Doctorow would target reactionary history to further his own political agenda. In fact, Doctorow does target such American shibboleths as free enterprise, individualism, self-reliance, and patriotism. But what makes Doctorow's fiction more than simply doctrinaire is that his postmodern method also questions the left-wing interpretations of history. Doctorow's liberal questioning of received opinion leads him to examine all such opinion, even the leftist view of history. For him, ossification wherever it is found represents a threat to human values. What I propose to examine is Doctorow's interrogation of the Left in five of his better known novels in an effort to see how his method pushes the reader toward a postmodern politics based on what Doctorow has called "a multiplicity of witness" ("Multiplicity" 184).

The ways in which Doctorow's first novel, Welcome to Hard Times, challenges traditional myths about the American frontier are probably clearer than the ways it questions liberalism. The novel opens and closes with the Bad Man from Bodie destroying the small town of Hard Times in the Dakota Territory. After the town is destroyed the first time, the narrator of the novel and de facto mayor of Hard Times, Blue, works to rebuild and to attract people to the settlement. While the town has many of the character types from traditional westerns—from miners to saloon girls—Doctorow uses them to subvert the usual view of the frontier. Thus, the rugged individualists who are traditionally supposed to have tamed the frontier become greedy, parasitic entrepreneurs dependent on the miners in the hills who are in turn dependent on eastern business interests. Typical of these petty entrepreneurs is a Russian named Zar (a pre-Revolutionary figure, as his name indicates) who sets up a combination saloon and whorehouse. His sole aim is profit, and his capital is a large tent (formerly used for revivals), a quantity of liquor, and three prostitutes. The archetype of the successful pioneer becomes not the farmer, the cowboy, or the miner, but the entrepreneur, and the most profitable entrepreneur is the pimp.

A town based on these values is not a real community. When the mine closes and violence threatens, the town self-destructs. The critique of capitalist values is in the foreground. David S. Gross [in "Tales of Obscene Power," Genre 13 (1980)] has argued that Doctorow "makes his view the basis for a new de-mystified myth, a myth of sleazy self-interest, fear, and macho violence" (136). In other words, Doctorow uses the mythic West to expose the myths of capitalism. Gross shows that because Hard Times is based on entrepreneurial capitalism, it is not a real community. The only thing holding people together in the town is a "cash nexus" that collapses in the face of violence or business failure (134). From this point of view, the novel can be seen as an allegory of the fragmenting, dehumanizing effects of capitalism, a kind of Marxist fable of greed and alienation.

But if the novel incisively looks at the self-destructiveness of a capitalist order, it does not provide any real alternative to that order. Indeed, I would argue that the book presents a profoundly pessimistic view of the possibilities for social change and that it differs greatly from the utopian vision of much classical leftist thought, which is based on the notion that positive change is possible, even inevitable. In Welcome to Hard Times violence and chaos seem an inescapable part of capitalism, but after the apocalypse there is no redemption, no brave new world. Paul Levine [in E. L. Doctorow (1985)] has noted that the vision of history presented in the novel is cyclical rather than progressive (29), and other critics have come to similar conclusions. The impossibility of escaping the deterministic cycles of history is explicitly stated by Blue near the end of his narration as he addresses a hypothetical urban reader:

Do you think, mister, with all that settlement around you that you're freer than me to make your fate? Well I wish I knew yours. Your father's doing is in you, like his father's was in him, and we can never start new, we take on all the burden: the only thing that grows is trouble, the disasters get bigger, that's all. (187)

By denying the possibility of a new start, Blue also denies the promise of the New World and the West, which were settled in the belief that people could start anew. In addition, by putting this view in terms of an inheritance passed from father to son, he seems to suggest a sort of original sin, an innate something in man that progress and reform cannot overcome or erase. Blue has come to this conclusion from his own experience. After the first destruction of Hard Times, he devotes himself to rebuilding the town and making it a true community. When the Bad Man from Bodie returns, he stands up to him. The results of his social commitment are nil. The town is destroyed just the same. He could not get people to transcend their greed or overcome their selfishness and cowardice. The need for human reform and rebirth is clear in the novel, but the possibility of it occurring appears negligible.

It could be argued that in Welcome to Hard Times Doctorow does not despair of all social action, but only the kind of social action in which Blue engages, a boosterism firmly rooted in a capitalist framework. If we look at Doctorow's whole career, however, we will find that a skeptical attitude toward reform and progress is the rule rather than the exception. David Emblidge has argued that a cyclical, antiprogressive view of history runs through Welcome to Hard Times, The Book of Daniel, and Ragtime, Loon Lake and Billy Bathgate could easily be added to his list. In these later books radical and progressive causes are consistently thwarted, partly by capitalist oppression and partly by the human failings of the radicals themselves.

Although The Book of Daniel is based on the trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in the early 1950s, one of the Left's greatest causes célèbres, Doctorow has said he did not "write a documentary novel" but used "what happened to the Rosenbergs as occasion for the book" ("Spirit of Transgression" 46; italics in original). Certainly he uses the novel as an "occasion" to criticize the Cold War hysteria that kills Paul and Rochelle Isaacson, his fictional counterparts of the Rosenbergs. The Isaacsons may be Communists who are critical of the status quo and believe in the need for radical social change, but to think this lower-middle-class couple, leading a very ordinary life in most respects, is a mortal threat to US security is absurd. By having the novel's narrator, the Isaacson' son Daniel, writing during the late 1960s, Doctorow can also use the novel as an occasion to point out the continuing violence and paranoia of the US government. When Daniel participates in the October 1967 march on Washington, he is severely beaten by police, just as his parents were brutalized for their views. The novel also points out the narrowness and commercialization of American culture. In the 1940s when the Isaacsons take Daniel to see and hear Paul Robeson, their bus is viciously attacked by a mob yelling anti-Semitic and racial slurs. In the 1960s Daniel visits Disneyland and critiques the commercialization of history and literature it represents. In his father's generation the folk tradition Robeson celebrates is attacked, and in Daniel's generation it is debased and sentimentalized through commercialization. In neither era is it respected and seriously valued by mainstream American culture.

The Book of Daniel subjects the prevailing culture and power structure to an incisive analysis, but it also questions and critiques the radical tradition. John Clayton [in "Radical Jewish Humanism: The Vision of E. L. Doctorow" (1983)] has called the novel "a work of brilliant cultural criticism, demolishing the American official myth of the Cold War, the sentimental counter-myth of heroic communist resistance, and even the myth of youth revolt of the sixties" (116). Although Doctorow undoubtedly has more sympathy with the radical tradition than Clayton's quotation seems to indicate, he is right in pointing out that Doctorow's analysis extends to those with whom he sympathizes.

Doctorow's use of the Isaacson' son Daniel as narrator is a brilliant device for capturing just the right blend of sympathy and criticism. As the son not just of the Isaacsons but of the radical tradition, Daniel has both the affection and the bitterness of a child of difficult parents. He is aware of the great flaws in his parents but retains a basic affection and respect for them. The fractured form of his narrative mirrors these divisions. He shifts back and forth from third to first person. Highly personal confessions about everything from his feelings toward his parents to sex with his wife are juxtaposed with impersonal analyses of post-World War II history and the radical mentality. As Daniel questions the meaning of his parents' radical activities and their fate, he utilizes academic analysis (he is a PhD candidate at Columbia), but the personal anguish he feels continually breaks through the objective facade. The result is a sympathetic but clear-eyed view of his parents and their politics.

Paul and Rochelle Isaacson emerge not as the heroic martyrs portrayed in leftist propaganda but as people from a particular time and place who adopt Communist ideology but are beset by the ordinary psychological, social, and economic concerns of the petite bourgeoisie and who are overwhelmed by events beyond their control. For Paul, Communist ideology provides the tools to analyze and understand the injustice he sees around him. The attraction is intellectual and idealistic, and Paul endlessly analyzes news events and the media that report events. As Daniel says of his father, "He was tendentious!" (47). For Rochelle, politics are not theoretical or abstract but personal and emotional. Daniel compares his mother's communism to his grandmother's Judaism—both represent "some purchase on the future against the terrible life of the present" (53). The coming of socialism is like the promise of heaven—a reward for those who suffer and keep the faith.

Although very different, Paul's idealism and Rochelle's emotionalism and cynicism are both out of touch with reality, are both extreme attitudes that leave them ill-prepared for their persecution by the government. As Levine has pointed out, their limitations and those of the Left contribute to their destruction:

Guilty of self-deception, both parents become accomplices in their own destruction. This illuminates one of Doctorow's themes: the compulsion of the American Left to implicate itself in its own martyrdom…. So we may say that the Isaacsons are co-conspirators along with the FBI and the Communist Party in their own immolation. (43)

Indeed, when the Isaacsons are arrested, the Communist party disclaims them and only later reclaims them when it sees their potential propaganda value as martyrs. Daniel's parents and their friends see themselves at the heart of a great movement in the vanguard of history, but Daniel comes to see them as marginalized figures whose significance in postwar America is grossly overestimated both by themselves and the US government.

When Daniel meets the New Left in the person of Artie Sternlicht, he encounters someone aware of the failures of the old Left but unaware of his own shortcomings. Artie's critique of the 1940s radicals centers on their participation in the system of American life and their reliance on the Soviet Union. Artie concludes, "The American Communist Party set the Left back fifty years. I think they worked for the FBI" (166). While Artie's analysis has some validity, he seems unaware of his own limitations. He has a general disregard for history—he has a mural on his wall entitled "EVERYTHING THAT CAME BEFORE IS ALL THE SAME" (151). Without some ability to understand the past and make distinctions, the New Left will have difficulty analyzing the present. Also, even though Artie Sternlicht may have contempt for the Isaacsons, like them he believes he is in the vanguard of a great movement. Granted, the antiwar movement of the 1960s enlisted more people and had more effect than the American communism of the 1940s, but Daniel knows from bitter experience the powers of the establishment. When Daniel is beaten and arrested during an antiwar march, his attitude is different from that of the other protesters—he sees their joy in being jailed as naive. Finally, Daniel recognizes the severe limits in the ideological temperament. When he leaves Artie Sternlicht's apartment, he says, "And I went home reacquainted with the merciless radical temperament" (170). Even though the radical's analysis of economic and social phenomena may be correct, the single-minded focus can miss important aspects of reality. As Sam B. Girgus [in "In His Own Voice: E. L. Doctorow's The Book of Daniel" (1988)] has said, "Whatever else Daniel's book achieves, it certainly promulgates an idea that love, liberation and oppression require a discussion that includes more than class warfare and historical materialism" (86).

Both the limits and the value of a radical viewpoint are present in very different ways in Ragtime. Whereas Doctorow uses Daniel's analysis and his flamboyant ironies and narrative tricks to present the radical view in The Book of Daniel, he utilizes a flat, pseudotextbook style filled with implicit ironies and contradictions in Ragtime. The racism and cultural tunnel vision of America at the beginning of the twentieth century is concisely captured in the opening description of the novel: "There were no Negroes. There were no immigrants" (4). Doctorow uses the humorist's method that often served Mark Twain so well: making outrageous or shocking statements in a matter-of-fact voice. Embedded in lists of social data on turn-of-the-century America are sentences such as, "Across America sex and death were barely distinguishable" (5), and "America was a great farting country" (94). Using the textbook language so often employed to create and perpetuate the myths of America, he destroys those myths, especially the myth of America as the melting pot where anyone with determination can succeed.

Doctorow applies this method with devastating effect to such historical figures as J. P. Morgan and Henry Ford. These great capitalists are shown to be greedy, egomaniacal men, but Doctorow's weapons are humor and irony rather than analysis and denunciation. He simply lets each man present his ideas on success and reincarnation—Morgan's based on extensive research, Ford's on a twenty-five-cent pamphlet—and the ironies are manifest. Their philosophies simply justify their own greed and sense of power. Doctorow deals in a similar manner with his purely "fictional" characters. The destruction of Coalhouse Walker's car by Willie Conklin and his eventual destruction by white society are presented matter-of-factly, and this very flatness of presentation highlights the horror of the racism in this society. The only ideological critiques are Emma Goldman's relatively simple statements, such as: "The oppressor is wealth, my friends. Wealth is the oppressor. Coalhouse Walker did not need Red Emma to learn that. He needed only to suffer" (322). Within Ragtime, the reader need only see the suffering to learn Emma Goldman's simple message.

Although Emma Goldman is presented favorably, the possibilities of radical action are clearly questioned. Coalhouse Walker is driven by injustice to take violent, seemingly revolutionary action. His followers feel they belong to an integrated community committed to social justice. During the course of events, "they were so transformed as to speak of themselves collectively as Coalhouse" and to believe they could "do something so terrible bad in this town, no one ever mess with a colored man for fear he belong to Coalhouse" (284-85). But while his followers are turning his cause into a crusade for social justice, Coalhouse sticks to his simple demand for personal justice—the restoration of his car by Willie Conklin. Coalhouse gets his car fixed, but the wider ambitions of his followers are thwarted. He makes a deal to save his followers, a deal they object to because it denies their revolutionary ambitions and focuses on Coalhouse's car. His followers escape to a life of underground, ineffective resistance, while Coalhouse stays to be gunned down by the police. Mother's Younger Brother plays the most exotic revolutionary role, becoming for a while a bomb maker for Emiliano Zapata in Mexico. However, Zapata's revolution fails and Mother's Younger Brother is killed. The triumph of the powers that be can be seen in the fact that the impetus for the resolution of Coalhouse's occupation of the Morgan Library comes from J. P. Morgan himself in a short telegram: "GIVE HIM HIS AUTOMOBILE AND HANG HIM" (331). Despite their appeal and the excitement they create, these revolutionaries stand little chance against capitalist power.

Unlike Coalhouse Walker, Tateh, the Jewish immigrant in the novel, begins as a self-conscious social activist, but the system does not destroy Tateh, it co-opts him. As a Socialist working under horrible conditions in the textile mills of Lawrence, Massachusetts, Tateh is overjoyed when the workers go out on strike. He offers what help he can to the strike committee, but as time passes he becomes more concerned with the fate of his daughter, the only family he has. After police violence turns public opinion against the owner, the strikers win their demands, but Tateh feels alienated from industrial life and the working class by his experience in Lawrence. He realizes that the "victory" of the strikers is largely illusory: "The I.W.W. has won, he said. But what has it won? A few more pennies in wages. Will it now own the mills? No" (149). So Tateh turns his back on his Socialist past and points "his life along the lines of flow of American energy" (153), becoming an entrepreneur, then a movie director, thus realizing the "American dream" by selling it. What makes Doctorow's portrait of Tateh interesting is that even as he seemingly "sells out" his radical past, Tateh remains a likable figure. His motives, particularly his concern for his daughter, are human and understandable. Doctorow has said, "As compassionate as we feel for Tateh and as much as we love him, here's a man who has betrayed his principles and sympathies and gotten ahead that way" ("Spirit of Transgression" 45). Through Tateh, Doctorow shows us the very real and understandable temptations for an intelligent, energetic man to compromise his principles in order to succeed within the system he supposedly opposes.

Although Ragtime provides an incisive, humorous critique of American society from a leftist perspective, it provides little hope of real progress or change. Arthur Saltzman notes, "Little has changed despite all that has occurred in Ragtime; the novel opens with Father making a living from patriotism, and the market still exists when the novel's frame is completed years later. Thus, as in every Doctorow novel, the dominant American mythology remains relatively intact" (99). The American mythology may mask many forms of iniquity and oppression, but it is a powerfully appealing myth. In Ragtime and in other works, Doctorow provides a clever critique of the myth without losing sight of its basic appeal and the problems that appeal causes for radical critics and reformers.

The appeal of the myth of the powerful self-made man is explored in depth in Loon Lake. F. W. Bennett, the original proprietor of the remote Adirondack estate called Loon Lake, has been described as an archetypical capitalist by Gross, as "an allegorical representative of that obscene power of money in capitalism, especially in its imperialist, monopoly stage" (141). Yet the narrator of the novel, Joe of Paterson, comes to identify with Bennett and eventually becomes his adopted son and replicates his life. In pointing out Joe's identification with Bennett, Jochen Barkhausen [in "Determining the True Colors of the Chameleon" (1988)] describes Bennett as a "personal incorporation of the American Dream, of absolute power and freedom and manic energy" (134). Gross's view of Bennett needs to be balanced by Barkhausen's if we are to understand why Joe is fascinated by Bennett. Wealth in America may be obscene power, but to someone like Joe—born poor, forced to live by his wits at a young age—money can become equated with freedom and energy. In some sense, Joe does what Tateh does in Ragtime—he points "his life along the lines of flow of American energy" and the current in those lines is money.

Joe is not alone in this novel when he turns his back on his working class origins. Levine has noted that Joe, Penfield, the poet who is the son of a coal miner, and Clara, Joe's mistress, all flee their backgrounds, and, "[i]n renouncing their respective familial legacies they all reject the ideal of class solidarity for the ideal of individual realization" (73). In the careers of these characters, and of the traitorous union officer Red James, Doctorow illustrates the difficulties of constructing a meaningful, broad-based opposition to American business interests. Not only must such a movement face entrenched, well-financed power, but there is always the temptation for talented, intelligent members of the working class to sell out. The reader can easily see why Joe would want to escape from Paterson or why Penfield would not want to become a coal miner. It is also no surprise that their notions of success—economic and literary—should be based to some extent on the powerful and privileged in their society. Thus, even the clearly articulated plight of their fellow men and women is not always enough to convince working people to subsume their individual desires in the interest of the common good.

All this is not to say that in Loon Lake Doctorow abandons his leftist ideals. In fact, the impersonal, predatory nature of capitalism is made clear whether the businessman is the industrialist Bennett or Sim Hearns, the proprietor of the carnival that Joe works for. What makes this indictment of capitalism and of Bennett interesting is that it is composed by Joe, who in many ways becomes Bennett. Barkhausen sees Joe's criticism of and ambivalence toward Bennett as a "displaced confrontation with himself" (135) and maintains that his story is an indictment of Bennett's life despite Joe's identification with Bennett (136-37). Barkhausen remarks, "No doubt, in reviewing his life Joe comes to the conclusion that the beginning of his career marked the death of the substance of his life" (135). Despite his tremendous financial and political success, Joe comes to realize that he has sacrificed some essential part of his self to achieve it. In his reckoning of his life, he sees that the freedom and power he had wanted are not identical with the freedom and power of wealth symbolized by F. W. Bennett. When Joe returns to Loon Lake after his cross-country flight with Clara, he finds Bennett a distraught, broken man after the death of his wife Lucinda. Bennett had tried and failed to isolate and protect himself with wealth. When writing his book years later, Joe has learned the same lesson after following in Bennett's footsteps—money may isolate, but it is not a real escape from the pains and limitations of life. While making Joe's career and his choices understandable, Doctorow, through his use of Joe as narrator and the ironies that entails, has shown the value of a leftist view and class solidarity through the career of someone who betrayed that solidarity. Ironically, that value is as much emotional and personal as it is social and political—the two strands cannot be separated.

Doctorow's most recent novel, Billy Bathgate (1989), has much in common with Loon Lake. Both novels tell the story of a poor working-class boy who escapes his past to achieve wealth and success. Like Joe of Paterson, Billy Bathgate has a powerful mentor and briefly runs off with his mentor's mistress. Both novels describe the attraction of money and power for a poor young man. The chief difference between the novels is that Joe's mentor is a "legitimate" businessman, whereas Billy's mentor is the notorious gangster Dutch Schultz.

On the surface there may seem a great difference between the polished, sophisticated F. W. Bennett and the violent, uncouth Dutch Schultz, but Doctorow shows us that Schultz thinks of himself as just another businessman. Schultz tells Billy that "the crime business like any other needs the constant attention of the owner to keep it going" and that his business is "a very complex enterprise not only of supply and demand but of subtle executive details and diplomatic skills" (64-65). Even slitting a rival's throat in a barber's chair is described as "a planned business murder as concise and to the point as a Western Union telegram" (106). When Abbadabba Berman, Schultz's top aide, explains to Billy why cooperation and merger seem inevitable among the crime syndicates, he uses the example of railroad companies "cutting each other's throats" (144) before merging and forming monopolies for each section of the country. The gangsters simply make the metaphor literal.

In Billy Bathgate, as in Welcome to Hard Times, Doctorow uses a popular genre, in this case the gangster story, to project and critique the myths of American capitalism. In many ways this indirect, mythic approach is more devastating than the direct presentation of a rich businessman in Loon Lake. Doctorow shows us that the brutal world of the gangsters is not an aberration but the natural outgrowth of a social order based on wealth. Is there much difference between the F. W. Bennett who hires gangsters and industrial spies to protect his profits and to keep his work force in line and the Dutch Schultz who uses his violent outbursts to control his subordinates and to intimidate his rivals in order to keep the money flowing? Are the desires of Dutch and Billy for the luxury, respect, and style that money can buy different from those of most ambitious businessmen? When Billy Bathgate, through luck and pluck, acquires a rich benefactor and begins his rise in the world, he is reenacting a version of the Horatio Alger myth, albeit with many ironic twists. The irony is emphasized for the reader at the beginning because Billy's vision is unironic—he intends to rise in the organization through hard work and loyalty, as if he were a management trainee for GM rather than an errand boy for the mob.

Doctorow's use of the gangster genre and the Horatio Alger myth helps us see the attraction of the very institutions he criticizes. Billy's adolescent view of organized crime is glamorized by the myths and legends surrounding the crime bosses. The popularity of books and movies about gangsters shows the fascination of money and power, no matter how obtained, for ordinary people. For a boy of the streets such as Billy—poor, fatherless, yet ambitious—the pull of the mob is strong. Once again, Doctorow creates a tension between the political critique embedded in his novel and the understandable personal motives of a central character. He acknowledges the great attraction of power based on wealth while at the same time revealing the corrupting force of money.

Paradoxically, Doctorow's novels seem to assert simultaneously the value of political analysis and its limitations. The value of a radical viewpoint is that it can force us to see things in new ways, that it can shake us out of our complacencies. In this sense it is an appropriate subject or motif for fiction. Doctorow has said, "Fiction has no borders, everything is open. You have a limitless possibility of knowing the truth" ("Spirit of Transgression" 47). Doctorow uses a political perspective in his novels to point out the unpleasant truths we would rather ignore. In a sense his novels do what Emma Goldman does in Ragtime—they raise difficult questions for our society.

But because "everything is open," Doctorow does not stop his criticism and analysis at the borders of radical thought. Although sympathetic to the radicals' views, he does not exempt them from scrutiny. In particular, he seems to reject any special utopian claims for socialism or communism. In his novels there are no magical transformations. In fact, the prospects for social change are almost nil at the end of each of his novels. A sort of radical skepticism seems to be at the root of Doctorow's politics. He has said:

But surely the sense we have to have now of twentieth-century political alternatives is the kind of exhaustion of them all…. But certainly everything else has been totally discredited: capitalism, communism, socialism. None of it seems to work. No system, whether it's religious or anti-religious or economic or materialistic, seems to be invulnerable to human venery and greed and insanity. So it seems to me that anyone who likes to think about these things seriously in an effort to find some mediation between individual psychology and large social movements has to be going in the right direction. ("The Writer as Independent Witness" 65)

The point of his fiction then becomes not the elucidation of a principle but the exploration of the always dynamic interaction of the individual and society, of the believer and reality. His interest is less in the symmetry of an ideological position than in how real people with human drives and limitations wrestle with social ideals, sometimes accommodating them and sometimes compromising them.

I have said that the possibility for social change seems slim in most of Doctorow's novels. This statement does not mean that his work is defeatist or cynical. The dynamic between individual characters and their social circumstances is often riveting and lively, and the possibilities for growth are never denied. Doctorow has pointed out that "the radical ideas of one generation make up the orthodoxy of subsequent generations" ("Spirit of Transgression" 44). Perhaps the real point of the novels is that we cannot lose our humanity if we continue to struggle with our relationship to our society with an open, flexible, critical mind.