Community and Apostrophe in the Novels of E. L. Doctorow

Reading is read as community.

Garrett Stewart

How do we account for the critical neglect of E. L. Doctorow relative to his contemporaries? Doctorow's novels have always been marginalized within the canon of postmodern American fiction. That is to say, their publication was never greeted with the exuberant fanfare enjoyed by Thomas Pynchon, they were never believed to possess the historical prescience of Don DeLillo, and they were never met by the moral outrage that clings so lovingly to Philip Roth. Surely the explanation for this has everything to do with the books themselves, and in particular with Doctorow's literary commitment to a way of living that survives only in the organic substance of community. On that score, Doctorow's books are almost uniformly devoted to a social vision all but outmoded by literary if not political and economic history. Unlike Pynchon, DeLillo, Roth, and so many others for whom the novel was to grasp at the sublime totality and slippery machinations of its postmodern present, Doctorow seems, at least on outward appearances, to embrace a brand of historical fiction more like the naturalism of Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, or John Steinbeck. For Doctorow, like those much older writers, the novel serves as a discursive microcosm in which the human beasts weather out the forces of social contradiction.

Perhaps all of this approaches what Fredric Jameson had in mind when he argued that Doctorow's "books are nourished with history in the more traditional sense and seem, so far, to stake out successive generational moments in the 'epic' of American history, between which they alternate," but only insofar as American history was at that time, in 1991, deemed accessible exclusively through "pop images and simulacra of that history, which itself remains forever out of reach."¹ For Jameson, an inborn traditionalism consigns the work of Doctorow to either romance or melancholia or to mutely ironic pastiche. According to this influential line of argument, and because of the books' easily politicized subject matter, Doctorow must therefore be "the epic poet of the disappearance of the American radical past," a venerable storyteller who nostalgically recalls the militants and the liberals as mere factions of a lifeworld now totally suppressed.² Of course, this argument is not original to Jameson, insofar as it harmonizes almost perfectly with Linda Hutcheon's equally well-known reading, published two years earlier, in which she describes Doctorow as an exemplary case of "historiographic metafiction" and argues that Doctorow's novels are, in contrast to the modernist sincerity on which they draw, ultimately the stuff of postmodern irony. "Parodying Dos Passos's historicity," she claims with an echo of Nietzsche, "Doctorow both uses and abuses it."³ While Jameson and Hutcheon both contributed massively to the fortunes of Doctorow's fiction, I cannot help but think that they were both too quick in identifying him with the cultural logic and historical milieu into and against which he was writing and that the academic conversation about Doctorow, which peaked in the early 1990s, followed their lead.⁴ With this essay, I propose a reading that might help finesse this critical line. Specifically, I submit that Doctorow's aesthetic achievement is to create a distinctive sense of communal being presented not with irony but with ample sincerity, which serves as the animating force behind a body of work that tracks the evolution of community through its many variations, its historical and geographical contexts, and its political significances in late-capitalist America. I want to demonstrate that, to the very end, Doctorow retained a fully historicized commitment not to the past but to new forms of life whose predicate is communal and whose possibility has been enshrined by a literature that anticipates its historical renewal. That is one reason why we should appreciate Doctorow's books as so much more than mere artifacts of a postmodern culture we might or might not still inhabit.

Despite the rearview quality of Doctorow's novels—a necessary consequence of their realization as historical fiction—we nevertheless catch multiple glimpses of forward-facing luminosity, and sometimes in...