E. L. Doctorow’s 1971 novel focuses on Daniel Isaacson, the disturbed son of parents executed for giving the secret of the atomic bomb to the USSR. While working on his Ph.D. in the late 1960s, Daniel tries to reconcile what he reads, particularly historical studies, with his own experience in an effort to make sense of his past and present. Still troubled by the deaths of his parents, puzzled at his sister Susan’s attempted suicide, and confused about his dissertation topic, Daniel begins his narrative as a way of establishing the guilt or innocence of his parents. Drawing on a wealth of research materials, Daniel identifies historical patterns and tendencies, describes different types of corporal punishment, and analyzes the distribution and uses of power, only to find that history explains very little. Daniel comes to believe that accepting sanctioned narrative forms and language means accepting complicity with existing power structures. As a result, his narrative wanderings and his subsequent evasion of closure are evidence of a subversive refusal to be co-opted by any discourse that seeks to rationalize and justify his parents’ death.
Daniel even indicts the Left for its own naïveté and its glorification of martyrdom. His father believes almost to the very end that “you cannot put innocent people to death in this country. It can’t be done. The truth will reclaim us” (249). With their faith in the law and their determination to be seen as victims, Daniel’s parents doom themselves through their own self-dramatization. Artie Sternlicht, Doctorow’s fictionalized version of Abbie Hoffman, contends that the American Communists “were into the system . . . they played it [the trial] by their rules. The government’s rules” (150–51). Sternlicht also criticizes the New Left, pointing out that the academic words thrown around “aren’t words. Those are substitutes for being alive. . . . If you want to sit here and beat your meat, all right, but don’t call it revolution” (137). Later, when Daniel meets with others outside the Pentagon to return his draft card, he highlights the impotence of protest: “The pouch is delivered to the Justice Department, the demonstration ends, and nothing seems to have happened except the demonstration” (252).
As the novel progresses, Daniel understands we are not merely helpless victims but willing coconspirators in the maintenance of political and economic power. This insight is especially evident in his analysis of Disneyland, where he points out how works such as Alice in Wonderland and Huck Finn are stripped of their subversive quality and made into palatable commodities. He notes that those enjoying the Mad Hatter’s Teacup Ride have most likely not read Alice in Wonderland and have probably seen the Disney film instead. The same applies to historical re-creation rides such as the Pirates of the Caribbean. This suggests to him that “what is being offered does not suggest the resonance of the original work but is only a sentimental compression of something that is itself already a lie” (288).
He sees here the creation of an “abbreviated shorthand culture” in which “the ideal Disneyland patron . . . responds to a process of symbolic manipulation that offers him his culminating and quintessential sentiment at the moment of a purchase” (289). In such a place, where people participate in being manipulated and co-opted, Daniel recognizes how complicit everyone is in the maintenance of such a system. And, no matter how bleak that message may sound, it is a triumph—albeit a small one—that such a recognition is possible in the heart of Disneyland. It gives hope that the subversive artist can exist within that society yet still stand far enough outside to critique it.
Early in the novel, Susan ridicules Daniel for his lack of commitment to a cause, claiming that “you cop out with this phony cynicism bag that conveniently saves you from doing anything. . . . You’d rather jerk off behind a book” (81). By the end of this novel, Daniel finds that the only liberation is in closing the book—escaping from the forms and language sanctioned by the economic and political system—and entering the world of action, no matter how futile your efforts might be. Although his book does not give readers a guideline about how to change the world, it does avoid the dead ends of academic theorizing, because for Daniel such theorizing ultimately becomes, like Disneyland, “a substitute for experience” (289).
Sources
Fowler, Douglas. Understanding E. L. Doctorow. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992.
Levine, Paul. E. L. Doctorow. London: Methuen, 1985.
Morris, Christopher D. Models of Misrepresentation: On the Fiction of E. L. Doctorow. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1991.
Siegel, Ben, ed. Critical Essays on E. L. Doctorow. New York: G. K. Hall, 2000.
Williams, John. Fiction as False Document: The Reception of E. L. Doctorow in the Postmodern Age. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1996.
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