Liliana Pop

 

 

E. L. Doctorow’s Sixth Sense

 

 

This paper tries to unravel some of the relationships established between fiction and reality, history and fiction in one novel by E. L. Doctorow, The Book of Daniel (1971). This is a book that appeared in the United States three decades ago. It has a title that promises Biblical dimensions.

The name of Daniel, in the Old Testament, is the main character of the prophetic book called “The Book of Daniel”. According to the Dictionary of the Bible[1], tradition mixed the author of this work and its hero, so that the usage has it that we speak, as Matthew does, of the prophet Daniel. According to the Gospel[2], he is an Israelite of noble origin, belonging to the tribe of Judas, and living in Babylon at the time of the Exile, from 606 to 538. Like other young people of his standing at the court of the Babylonian king, he is called to court in order to receive an education that should render him fit for service to the king. Like his comrades, he receives a Babylonian name. The king has dreams that he knows to be significant, but cannot even remember what they are. Therefore Daniel is asked to tell and interpret them. He does it successfully a couple of times, but in the end the visions get so frightening that he refuses to interpret them, and postpones them for a later time.

This is the background of the Biblical story of Daniel. What we get in Doctorow’s novel is an event in the recent history of the United States.

E. L. Doctorow writes in a period that is quite flourishing for the Jewish American writers who became famous after the Second World War. It is the generation of prominent names in poetry, like Delmore Schwartz, Theodore Roethke, the drama of Arthur Miller, but above all, and most forcefully, the novel, through Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, E. L. Doctorow.[3] All these authors had modernist inclinations in the 1930s, and they all shifted in the 40s to an interest in history, developing what Philip Rahv called ‘the sixth sense’: the preoccupation with history, the historic consciousness. All of them wanted to experiment how a novel could be written after the trauma of the war and what it did to the Jews.

The consequences of the Second World War on American soil include, among other things, the Cold War, which started because of the panic that the red danger might get extended. As we are well aware such moments are ideal for political profiteers. In the United States the arch-representative of this situation was Senator McCarthy. It was the propitious moment that made Senator McCarthy start his witch-hunt, a period of persecution for intellectuals, given that most of them had left-wing inclinations. The fear exploited by McCarthy was that the Russians might steal the atomic bomb and that, in this way, the political world supremacy of the United States would be undermined, or even destroyed. Fear of betrayal breeds betrayal. In 1950, on the wave of such feelings, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are accused of espionage for the Russians, with the purpose of getting the secret of the atomic bomb, and their trial starts. As Daniel Hoffman[4] shows, the accusation, whether true or false, was responsible for a true paranoia in the States. If the Rosenbergs were guilty and had sold the atomic secret to the Russians, then the country was indeed in great international danger. If they were not guilty, then the country was not the land of freedom and justice that it was thought to be. In spite of this paranoia what followed a few years later was shocking to the whole world. In 1953, to the general disbelief and revolt, after President Eisenhower came to power, he did not sign their pardon and the Rosenbergs were executed for espionage, by electrocution. This is the factual, historical event from which Doctorow starts his novel, The Book of Daniel. In the book, the characters bear changed names – as in the Bible story -, they are Paul and Rochelle Isaacson, so their names are as emblematic as possible. Moreover, Rochelle, as we find out from her mother’s half-crazed testimony, recorded by her grandson, was too proud to be content with her own name, Rachel, thus changing it. The couple has two children, a girl and a boy, Susan and Daniel. This is the Daniel who will try to put the story together and make sense of it, after he reaches adulthood. Meanwhile, the children themselves, after their parents’ execution, are adopted, and their names are changed to Lewin.

We could say the book answers a double obsession. On the one hand, that of the postmodern fiction with history; on the other hand, the obsession of American fiction with its recent, cold war history. The Rosenberg case itself, was the subject of more than one novel (e.g., The Public Burning, 1977, by Robert Coover)[5].

Although more recently the case has made its way into history textbooks[6], the cha­racters chosen by Doctorow as heroes for his novels are not the main characters of the ‘grand narrative’ which is history. They are, in the spirit of the Old-Testament Daniel, as defined by the Daniel in the novel, “a definitely minor figure (figures), possibly apocriphal.”

Daniel-Rosenberg-Isaacson-Lewin, in his adulthood, invests his whole energy, knowledge and life in his attempt to reconstruct what had happened to his parents when he was only a child. He also tries to put their personal tragedy in the world context. The reader finds out, little by little, that the young Daniel is a doctoral student, that he studies the history of the cold war. The novel is, to a great extent, made up of his essays on history, his personal research notes on torture, betrayal and tyranny. The country of his choice for this, – the sore spot towards which Daniel feels drawn – is Russia, land of his forefathers, but also land of Doctorow’s own forefathers. Russia, in its more recent, frightening embodiment, The Soviet Union, and its Stalinist history, is also part of Daniel’s research. Not that we can really tell what these historical essays are about as we read them, this being more of a hindsight effect of clarification. Besides these ingredients, that will not make up a doctoral dissertation (Daniel is even thinking of including his innocent wife’s input to get to a shape), Daniel/Doctorow includes, ironically, many others that will make up a novel. There are in this fiction with the fiction hallucinating moments taken from American history and literature (hellish and incongruous references to Poe’s biography, for instance), medical matters, elements of physics about the void, about electricity; reflections on Socrates’ murder; reflections on the murder of Jesus Christ, which are as many obsessions with the execution of his parents. There are letters of the characters, which are later commented on, and deconstructed, interviews with personalities who express their point of view regarding the case. There are even novels that are mentioned and almost summarized, written under the inspiration of the case. The novel takes a shape as “a sequence of analyses”, as Daniel puts it, in one of his disjointed, fragmentary statements. It is, therefore, a construct that Daniel discourses on. He rejects the fallacy of the linear narration, but he also sees its fascination. He is aware, to paraphrase him, that it is monstrous to put events on a string… It is monstrous of the reader to go through event after event. It is monstrous of the writer to do it. But it is also the monstrous work of a magician.

The complex discourse that results from this multitude of voices and styles gets even more complicated by the fact that the past constantly flows into the future, that it is impossible to tear the fictional apart from the real, while Daniel’s voice itself passes, without any transition, from the first to the third person.

We might believe, from this brief presentation, that we are dealing with a novelist who is obsessed with the method of the postmodern novel. Although he is a good apprentice of this method, Doctorow will not allow his style to lure him away from his main concern, which is the novel as a historiographical narrative[7]. To the history as narrative, Doctorow adds a subtle dimension, that of the ‘usable’ history, of history as indoctrination. This is the path that takes Doctorow towards an interest in politics. Daniel tries to be a representative of his generation, a ‘flower power’ young man, a radical protesting against the war in Vietnam. But he is hindered from living his life in the present by his obsession with the unresolved past.

Another dimension of history, lightly touched upon by Doctorow, is that of history as tragedy. In it the characters are sacrificial victims, scapegoats. In this most literary aspect of history, Doctorow writes one of the most poetic passages, the one in which Daniel has the revelation of his parent, caught in an awkward position in the whirl of history.

The novel is built around landmark moments of loss of the religious feeling in the American present: Memorial Day, Halloween – childish celebration of the death of all the saints –, Christmas. The final chapter, ‘Christmas’, appears in the typical atmosphere of the consumer celebration, in the emblematic topos of Disneyland. It is here that Daniel meets his destiny, Mindish, the treacherous friend of his parents, responsible for their conviction. But the sly traitor has become a senile character, gloating in the merriment of the children’s playground.

It is, in fact, emblematic for Doctorow’s attitude that he is not trying to put the blame on the system. Neither does he try to offer a solution. The enigma stays enigmatic, but at least it has been discussed.

The end of the novel is postponed several times. It is not so much an open ending typical of postmodernist fiction, but a sign that history modifies itself with the passage of time, that the end is different, depending on the moment when it takes place. In the voice of the doctoral researcher Doctorow announces that he would have liked to conclude the novel by a discussion of its narrative problems. But, in a a Tristramshandyan manner, just as he is about to do it, while in the library of the University, somebody calls to him to come out, since it is outside that the really important things take place, not among books. The colloquial voice (‘Come out, man!”) echos back into the prophetic formula (“son of man”). And it is indeed with the prophetic voice that the book ends. The Daniel of the Old Testament, as we know, sees and interprets dreams, but will not speak about their significance yet.

Placed within the authoritative framework of the Old Testament, The Book of Daniel, the novel, speaks its interest in reality.

 

 

Notes