Presently there is such excitement over some socially conscious fiction, such as Don De Lillo's Underworld and Toni Morrison's Beloved, that it may be difficult to recall how disparaged political writing has been as recently as the 1980s, when what some have described as more insulated fiction was far more popular. 3 To understand Doctorow's pull toward political fiction, as well as the particular contours of politics in his fiction, it is useful to review his biography. E. L. Doctorow was born in the Bronx (New York City) in 1931 to lower-middle-class Jewish-American parents. His paternal grandfather was an intellectual, a socialist, and an atheist.
His family's and to some extent Doctorow's own political and religious views have been characterized by critic John Clayton as radical Jewish humanism, “It is the heritage of Jewish writers to deal with suffering, especially suffering as a result of some essential injustice in the human or divine world, suffering to which they offer a response of compassion and yearning for a life modeled on human kindness” (in Trenner 109). Furthermore, Clayton argues that the politics of Jewish immigrant culture was largely radical—anarchist, socialist, communist, Zionist, or some amalgam of these with faith in the labor movement (110). Religious practice need not play a critical role in defining oneself as a Jew; rather, one's sensibility and ideals might.
As an undergraduate in the 1950s Doctorow attended Kenyon College, majored in philosophy, and studied with John Crowe Ransom, one of the New Criticism's foremost critics at a time when this approach reigned. The New Criticism perceived of a literary work as a “well-wrought urn, ” 4 a self-contained artifact that could be understood by examining its formal techniques, not by examining the context in which it was written. The insular approach of this criticism, coupled with the conservative political climate of the 1950s, made many critics wary of political novels, ready to dismiss them as propaganda. 5 In a conversation with me years ago Doctorow acknowledged the tension between his upbringing in a New York progressive Jewish home and his schooling in a college stressing formalism, but emphasized that the tension was ultimately productive, enabling him to avoid the excesses of both formulaic political writing and he academic dandy novel. 6 He navigates between these extremes through
his adaptation of popular and literary genres as well by his insistence on
certain themes.
Unlike some contemporary authors who seem to glow in celebrity sta-
tus, Doctorow is predisposed to privacy. Certainly he has inserted himself
into public debates, having written numerous essays that critique govern-
ment policy or public sensibility in matters such as nuclear weapons. 7 But
unlike some other writers, such as Amiri Baraka, who boldly assert their
political views, Doctorow is wary of direct statements. Consider his words
in the introduction to his collection of essays Jack London, Hemingway
and the Constitution, “With one exception the pieces in this book were
written because someone asked me to write them. Left to my own de-
vices I will write fiction. I will choose the thrown voice and its tropes” (ix).
The image of the novelist as ventriloquist evokes Bakhtin's concept of
indirect discourse and prompts me to describe Doctorow's politics as a
politics of indirection. It is a politics borne out of a combination of a
private personality, a particular upbringing, and coming of age at a par-
ticular historical moment. Certainly Doctorow shies away from direct political involvement in part
because he is afraid of taking too much time away from his writing.
E. L. Doctorow's Skeptical Commitment (Twentieth Century American Jewish Writers, Vol. 13)
by Michelle M. Tokarczyk