Duke University Press Twentieth Century Literature

The Politics of Polyphony: The Fiction of E. L.
Doctorow
Author(s): John G. Parks
Source: Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 37, No. 4 (Winter, 1991), pp. 454-463
Published by: Duke University Press
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The Politics of Polyphony:
The Fiction of E. L. Doctorow
JOHN G. PARKS
"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 wor
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, a
well as his loss of faith in the direction of history, Georg Lukacs, in hi
work The Historical Novel, observes that history for the writer become
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 compe
with life on equal terms, showing the universal in the particular. The
alternatives are either to cleave to the particular . . . or to abando
history altogether and construct pure fictions which reflect in a
emotional or metaphysical way the discords of contemporary exper
ence" (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 fi
which abandons or neglects the social and political dimension
feature, instead, what Doctorow calls the "entrepreneurial sel
developing his own poetics of engagement, Doctorow seeks a
that is both politically relevant and aesthetically compl
interesting. By blurring the distinctions between fact and fi
454
POLYPHONY IN E. L. DOCTOROW
Doctorow's fiction seeks to disclose and to challenge the

enshrined or institutionalized discursive practices. The
fiction is thus the locus of battle, as it were, for freedom. It
or rather, the process or event where the "regimes of
Michael Foucault says, may be challenged. The task of na
disrupt or dismantle the prevailing "regimes of truth," inc
repressive effects. Doctorow's ultimate political enterprise
the power of the regime from monopolizing the compositi
from establishing a monological control over culture.
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. Th
according to Bakhtin, is what prose can do best in an age of competi
languages. In Doctorow, dialogue or polyphonic fiction is bot
disruptive or even subversive of regimes of power, and restorative o
neglected or forgotten or unheard voices in the culture. It is this tw
aim of disruption and restoration that characterizes Doctorow's
own polyphonic fiction as it seeks to engage what he calls th
"progression of metaphors" (Trenner, 26) that constitute our civil
tion.
It is perhaps inevitable that a writer whose fiction is engaged

imaginative historical revisioning would be criticized for being
"political novelist," especially by those whose politics differ fro
Doctorow's. Carol Iannone, for example, writing in Commentary
criticizes Doctorow's fiction for having "the ideological attitudes of t
Left, attitudes that pervade and, finally, compromise everything he
written" (53). Similarly, Joseph Epstein puts Doctorow's fiction in w
writers he labels as "adversarial" and virtually anti-American. T
Epstein, Doctorow's novel The Book of Daniel is rigged for politi
purposes. Agreeing with Epstein, Robert Alter, in an essay on "t
American Political Novel" in the New York Times Book Review, argues t
recent American political fiction falls into two categories-serio
novels which see politics as farcical and which reflect the author's ra
and commercial novels which are basically conventional fictiona
documentaries, such as novels by Allen Drury. To Alter, The Book
Daniel fails to make "nice discriminations and complex judgmen
because of its pervasive sense of oppression. But such facile criticism
Susan Lorsch, among others, argues, misconstrues the central iss
and strategies of a novel like The Book of Daniel.
455
TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE
Doctorow sees himself as a novelist first and foremost, and

being labeled a "political novelist." While his fiction shows his
for justice, his passion is quite unprogrammatic. Indeed, he is
of grand political schemes and knows that "no system, wh
religious or anti-religious or economic or nationalistic, seems i
able to human venery and greed and insanity" (Trenner, 65). It
useful to see Doctorow's fiction as illustrating what Foucault de
a "battle among discourses through discourses" and of wha
calls "heteroglossia." As Geoffrey Harpham argues, it is b
Doctorow's fiction as developing "from a critique of the coerci
of the textual and ideological regime to a celebration of the po
imaginative freedom" (82). While all of Doctorow's novels, in
degrees, engage in the demythologizing of American history,
The Book of Daniel, Ragtime, and Loon Lake are arguably
"political" books and thus clearly reveal his fictional pr
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 Kiinstlerroman-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.
456
As Doctorow has said, his novel is not about the Rose

rather about the idea of the Rosenbergs. The novel is not a
attempt to prove the innocence of convicted conspirato
would have it-but a polyphonic reopening of the case-a
or perhaps better, a "re-speaking," in the context of the New
late 1960s, of the crucial issues connected with the trial of the
Rosenbergs in the early 1950s. The ordeal that Daniel undergoes as
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 he
attempted suicide in a Howard Johnson's toilet, to a confrontation wit
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
457
parents' betrayer. But Mindish's advanced senility prevents Da

hearing the truth about his parents. Daniel's quest ends in a
and uncertainty, but not in futility, for the electric ener
narrative has "resisted"-an electrical and political term-cl
circuit which leads to death. Avoiding the traps of deadly repet
of meaningless sequence, Daniel composes a book implic
reader in acts of participation and witness.
If The Book of Daniel is a tragedy of history, Ragtime (1
comedy of history. While many people die in the book
nevertheless in a marriage symbolizing some new and rich pos
for America's future, after its innocence is lost. If the narrative
Book of Daniel challenges the monologic power of the regime w
polyphonic quality, the narrative of Ragtime is a virtual ca
occasion for the reigning of the "jolly relativity" of all things. R
a text which resists organicism through the interplay of multip
historical and fictive. The novel approaches what Roland Barth
"plural text," a text that calls the reader not merely to con
meaning but rather to produce it.
Like The Book of Daniel, Ragtime continues Doctorow's eng
with the problems of historical repetition and endless sequence,
time during the first two decades of the twentieth centu
Progressive Era. As the little boy of the WASP family say
evident to him that the world composed and recompose
constantly in an endless process of dissatisfaction" (135).
explores the changing compositions of history-replicat
changes-and the possibilities of moral growth in history. O
historical personages in the book, Henry Ford, who made histo
his assembly-line techniques ("He had caused a machine to
itself endlessly," 155), is reputed to have declared that "histor
or less bunk," a view Doctorow's novel seeks to challenge
prophetic vision of social justice.
In contrast to the intensity of the narrative of The Book of Dan
narrative of Ragtime is energetic, sprightly, and easy to read, g
to criticisms of the novel as shallow and superficial. But the b
not intend to be a dense study of character. Its pastiche qualit
to challenge conventional notions of plot. Its idiosyncratic blen
fact and fiction intends to challenge the privileged status of h
discourse. It is a text that illustrates Doctorow's ideas of h
spelled out in the "False Documents" essay: "There is no history
as it is composed.... That is why history has to be written and r
from one generation to another. The art of composition can n
458
(Trenner, 24). The novel is not so much about the ragtim

how we view that era, and how we might compose and
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 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 somethi
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 sens
moreover, the novel is a product of a warning read back into histo
after a terrible catastrophe-in this case World War I, the ending
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
459
reincarnation. But such historical narcissism is doomed to failure.

Obsessed with rebirth, Morgan, Ford, and Houdini see history
wholly in terms of the self, an immature and infantile philosoph
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 resume 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, 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
460
hears, denying and forsaking his own voice, if, indeed, he eve
His text thus is a heteroglossic one, which reflects the mult
that shape, if not determine, human identity and constit
selfhood. Joe's life is a paradox-while he appears shre
self-reliant, his survival and success stem from his ability
somebody else. In an interview Doctorow commented on
Lake suggests the act of self-composition on the part of Joe.
that we all compose ourselves from other people in our ex
think Joe's ability to jump around in voice and shift in t
almost an impersonator as he writes these recollections of ev
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 psycholo-
gized ego written in the confessional mode so abundant in the 1970s
and 1980s.
Loon Lake suggests a definition of culture as an encoded he

system. Such a system tells and shows us what to want and how to ob
it. In the novel the figure of F. W. Bennett is the hero of t
system-he is what everybody wants; he embodies the dream. He
his power is much more than material; it is spiritual, for he, in effec
the father-creator of our dreams, a godlike role. It is one of the ma
jobs of the hero to find out whose son he is and then to live out
heritage. All of America's sons are orphans, only winning or earn
our fathers through a process of adoption. The father-hero is
self-made man, and the son creates himself in his image. To choose
as his life's trajectory is to strive for a kind of immortality, which is
promise of every hero system. But what are the costs of following
a code-for the individual as well as for the society? That is the m
question Loon Lake raises for the reader.
Loon Lake, stylistically and thematically, consists of a cluster
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 critic
passage from youth to adult, Joe ends with a curriculum vitae,
summary of a life that was a replication of another. But the real trage
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 failur
and hence his tragedy, is much greater. Like Robin, of Nathanie
Hawthorne's tale "My Kinsman, Major Molineux," Joe's life is an
allegory of the repetitive failure of American history-at heart a failu
461
of perception. Our choices at critical moments cut us off from

history and lead us to duplicate false and empty options, ones
our own. At one point, when Joe is working in Bennett's fact
the din of production echoes in his mind, Joe discovers "an in
philosophical problem: I didn't know at any moment what I he
what was happening or what had already happened" (164).
reader the verdict of Joe's composition is that Joe's life is
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
principal 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.
WORKS CITED
Alter, Robert. "The American Political Novel." New York Times Book Review,
August 10, 1980, 3, 26-27.
Collingwood, R. G. An Autobiography. London: Oxford UP, 1939.
Doctorow, E. L. The Book of Daniel. New York: New American Library, 1971.
. Ragtime. New York: Bantam, 1975.
__ . Loon Lake. New York: Random House, 1980.
Epstein, Joseph. "A Conspiracy of Silence." Harper's, November 1977, 77-92.
Harpham, Geoffrey Gait. "E. L. Doctorow and the Technology of Narrative."
PMLA, 100 (1) January 1985, 81-95.
lannone, Carol. "E. L. Doctorow's 'Jewish' Radicalism." Commentary, March
1986, 53-56.
Jameson, Fredric. "Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism."
New Left Review, 146 (July-August, 1984), 68-71.
Lodge, David. The Novelist at the Crossroads and Other Essays on Fiction and
Criticism. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1971.
Lorsch, Susan E. "Doctorow's The Book of Daniel as Kiinstlerroman: The Politics of
Art." Papers on Language and Literature, 18 (4) Winter 1983, 384-97.
Lukacs, Georg. The Historical Novel. Trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell.
London: Merlin Press, 1962.
462
Miller, J. Hillis. Poets of Reality. New York: Atheneum, 1974.

Tanner, Tony. City of Words: American Fiction 1950-1970. New York:
Row, 1971.
Thompson, William Irwin. At the Edge of History. New York: Harpe
Books, 1971.
Trenner, Richard, ed. E. L. Doctorow: Essays and Conversations. Princeton:
Ontario Review Press, 1983.
463

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The Politics of Polyphony: The Fiction of E. L.

"The chief business of twentieth-century philosophy," R. G.

Doctorow's fiction seeks to disclose and to challenge the

It is perhaps inevitable that a writer whose fiction is engaged

Doctorow sees himself as a novelist first and foremost, and

As Doctorow has said, his novel is not about the Rose

parents' betrayer. But Mindish's advanced senility prevents Da

(Trenner, 24). The novel is not so much about the ragtim

reincarnation. But such historical narcissism is doomed to failure.

Loon Lake suggests a definition of culture as an encoded he

of perception. Our choices at critical moments cut us off from

Miller, J. Hillis. Poets of Reality. New York: Atheneum, 1974.

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