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Historicizing Fiction and Fictionalizing History: The Case of E. L. Doctorow

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Cushing Strout
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Extract

Histories and novels are old allies, but the alliance is now troubled. The historian C. Vann Woodward told a convention of historians a decade ago that “our kindship is actually much closer to novelists” than to social scientists. Both the novel and history, he pointed out, “sprang from a common parentage of story-telling” and “competed with each other to satisfy the demand for historical understanding.” Over the last two centuries, he maintained, “novelists have been becoming ever more deeply historically conscious.” In the same year in which Woodward's remarks were published another historian, Sigfried Kracauer, struck a different note. The pioneers of the modern novel, Joyce, Proust, and Woolf, he observed, “no longer care to render biographical developments and chronological sequences after the manner of the older novel; on the contrary, they resolutely decompose (fictitious) continuity over time.” Thus modern art has “radically challenged the artistic ideals from which the general historian draws his inspiration—from which he must draw it to establish his genre.” But Kracauer explicitly cautioned against confusing his observations with attempts to “question the faithfulness to reality of the general historian's accounts.” He only drew the conclusion that general, large-scale narrative history as a genre survives only because metaphysical and political interests invite the historian to look at the past “from above” as a whole, instead of looking at it “from below” in the form of analytical specialized histories.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 5 , October 1980 , pp. 423 - 437
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1980

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References

NOTES

1. Woodward, C. Vann, “The Uses of History in Fiction,” Southern Literary Journal, 1, No. 2 (Spring 1969), 58.Google Scholar

2. Kracauer, Sigfried, History: the Last Things Before the Last (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 182–83.Google Scholar

3. White, Hayden, “The Burden of History,” History and Theory, 5, No. 2 (1966), 126CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact,” Clio, 3, No. 3 (1974), 299Google Scholar; “The Fictions of Factual Representation,” The Literature of Fact: Selected Papers from the English Institute (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1976), p. 44.Google Scholar

4. Zavarzadeh, Mas'ud, The Mythopoeic Reality: The Postwar American Nonfiction Novel (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1976), p. 66.Google Scholar

5. Trilling, Lionel, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge; Mass: Harvard Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 134–135Google Scholar. André Le Vot sees the “subversion and destruction of the narrative form” in “post-modern” American fiction in “New Modes of Story-telling: Dismantling Contemporary Fiction,” Les Américanistes: New French Critics on Modern American Fiction (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1978), p. 117.Google Scholar

6. Eliot, George, “Leaves from a Note-Book: Historic Imagination,” Essays of George Eliot, ed. Pinney, Thomas (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1963), pp. 446–47.Google Scholar

7. See Raskin, Jonah, “Life After Death: The Sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg,” Ramparts, 12 (11 1973), 37–41.Google Scholar

8. West, Rebecca, The New Meaning of Treason (New York: Viking Press, 1964), pp. 281–82.Google Scholar

9. Weinstein, Allen, “The Hiss and Rosenberg Files,” The New Republic 174, No. 7 (02 14, 1976), 21Google Scholar. Cf. Stern, Sol and Radosh, Ronald, “The Hidden Rosenberg Case,” The New Republic, 180, No. 25 (06 23, 1979), 13–25Google Scholar; it finds Julius guilty and Ethel innocent.

10. Meeropol, Robert and Meeropol, Michael, We Are Your Sons: The Legacy of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1975), p. 352nGoogle Scholar., and letter of Julius to Ethel, April 13, 1952, p. 131.

11. Quoted by Nizer, Louis, The Implosion Conspiracy (Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett Crest Books, 1974), p. 469.Google Scholar

12. Warshow, Robert, “The ‘Idealism’ of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg,” The Immediate Experience (New York: Doubleday, 1962), p. 80Google Scholar, and Fiedler, Leslie, An End to Innocence (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), pp. 41–43.Google Scholar

13. Doctorow, E. L., The Book of Daniel (New York: Random House, 1971), p. 119.Google Scholar

14. Parrish, Michael E., “Cold War Justice: The Supreme Court and the Rosenbergs,” American Historical Review, 82, No. 4 (10 1977), 805–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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16. Scholes, Robert and Kellog, Robert, The Nature of Narrative (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 88–90.Google Scholar

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18. Schulz, Max F., Black Humor Fiction of the Sixties: A Pluralistic Definition of Man and His World (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1973), p. 87.Google Scholar

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20. Quoted from a New York Times interview, July 11,1975, by Foley, , “From U.S.A. to Ragtime,” p. 99.Google Scholar

21. Ibid., p. 97.

22. Quoted in ibid., pp. 102, 104. Foley confuses Doctorow's “creative” fictionalizing of history with Collingwood's theory of the historical imagination in The Idea of History. But he explicitly says that the historian's “business is not to invent anything, it is to discover something.” Collingwood, R. G., The Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1946), p. 251Google Scholar. For Collingwood historical truth is a matter of coherence with evidence, not of creation.

23. White, Hayden V., “The Politics of Contemporary Philosophy of History,” Clio, 3, No. 1 (1973), 44.Google Scholar

24. Agee, James and Evans, Walker, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (New York: Ballantine, 1966), p. 217. Orig. pub. 1941.Google Scholar

25. Ibid., p. 11.

26. Ibid., p. 218.

27. Doctorow, E. L., Ragtime (New York: Random House, 1974), p. 153.Google Scholar

28. Ibid., pp. 9, 267.

29. Ibid., p. 5.

30. Ibid., p. 233.

31. Ibid., p. 29.

32. Ibid., pp. 111, 113.

33. Ibid., p. 259.

34. Ibid., p. 205.

35. Ibid., p. 270.

36. Foley, , “From U.S.A. to Ragtime,” p. 94.Google Scholar

37. Ibid., pp. 96–97.

38. Quoted in ibid., p. 104.