Between "Retreat" and "Engagement": Incomplete Revolts and the Operations of Irony in E. L. Doctorow's The Book of Daniel

"His aspect seemed to say: since I cannot do deeds, I will not speak words."

—Benito Cereno, Herman Melville¹

The contentious debate over the political efficacy of the literary forms that emerged after the transition from the Old Left to the New Left² and to the broad spectrum of resistant solidarities housed under "cultural studies" in the United States has been recently resurrected in the series of exchanges between Sean McCann and Michael Szalay allied on the one side and John McClure on the other.³ In their essay "Do You Believe in Magic? Literary Thinking after the New Left," McCann and Szalay argue that the primary legacy of the New Left was "a rising doubtfulness about the perils of excessive rationalism."⁴ According to the authors, the offshoot of the New Left movement was an unfortunate literary culture which "pursued an ostensibly higher politics, one that, in eschewing the established institutions of government and organized forms of dispute and negotiation, often ends up withdrawing not only from traditional politics, but also from the very possibility of orchestrated change."⁵ Positing a sweeping theory about late-twentieth century American literature, the authors contend that the novels of celebrated writers (including Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, and Toni Morrison) deride "progress, enlightenment, and reason; each reveres the unknowable force of mystery; and each suggests that the most appropriate attitude toward mundane political conflict or social tension is the effort to transcend it."⁶ Asserting that such a literature is permeated by a "high-minded irrationalism,"⁷ McCann and Szalay argue that this "dismissal of the formal sphere of political action" and the increasing "denunciation of public debate and political disagreement about the proper aims of the state or the just purposes of law" not only means a retreat from the struggles of lived political life, but it also plays into the hands of the Christian-capitalist state and the New Right.⁸

In his response to McCann and Szalay's article, John McClure vigorously defends post-sixties literature and argues that rather than representing "a betrayal of the progressive project, [it] is shaped by broadly progressive commitments, and is consistent with the progressive project."⁹ Borrowing terms from Giles Deleuze and William Connolly, McClure contends that the post-sixties writers, in fact, belong to "a much looser Left" and they remain part of a "resonance machine" or an "assemblage" committed to looking for ways "of drawing together various social groups with dramatically different creeds, agendas, and styles of struggle."¹⁰ Rather than reading the retreat as the symptom of an enervated politics, McClure argues that refuge taking, as represented in post-sixties literature, "provides room . . . for pausing, resisting, reflecting, experimenting, beginning again. It enables peaceable people and ideas to survive in hostile and apparently hopeless times. But it does not absolve them from responsibility for the work of the world, or weaken their commitment to that work."¹¹

What seems to have been buried in this debate over the political efficacy of the post-sixties aesthetic is the ability and responsibility of literature to complicate ostensibly opposed positions. I wish to contribute to the conversation by suggesting that the role of fiction in such times of crisis is to question the structures of thought underlying the "retreat" and "engagement" camps. I shall employ E. L. Doctorow's The Book of Daniel to suggest how fiction not only muddies the waters of an either or position between retreat and praxis but also stages, by a process of deep ambivalence and a series of complicated endings, the difficulty of articulating either an easy ethics of action or disengagement from the lived sphere of politics. The Book of Daniel exists in a liminal third space from where it launches a nuanced critique of not only the Old and the New Left but of its own immersion in the contemporary moment defined by what Chantal Mouffe calls "an explosion of particularisms."¹² While it is certainly the case that Doctorow's novel does not really tell a story...