Michelle Tokarczyk does not neglect the upper-case History that al- ways seems to evade the novel's grasp, but she pays more attention to the everyday social grime and mess in which Doctorow delightedly dirties his hands. Asking “what it means to write political fiction in America ... at this historical moment, ” Tokarczyk uses the word “political” in its en- larged contemporary sense, a sense instructed by feminism and other recent social movements to remember that strikes and barricades do not exhaust the subject of politics. If “the personal is the political, ” then most if not all novelists must count as political novelists. But Tokarczyk refuses to take this easy way out. She gives Doctorow full credit for his commit- ment to politics of a literal or traditional kind—for example, his treatment of Boss Tweed in The Waterworks, which she presents as an allegory of Reaganism—and she takes for her real subject what she calls Doctorow's “politics of indirection”: the tense zone of subtle and unpredictable interactions that Doctorow sets up between such large, public, historical mat- ters and the “personal” materials of the novel. She wants to know, for example, what Daniel's sexual sadism has to do with the politics of the Rosenberg case in The Book of Daniel, what the unashamed and uncriticized upward mobility of Tateh and Houdini has to do with the historical trajectory of Ragtime, what Joe's strange identification with the union-busting detective next door has to do with the strike episodes of Loon Lake. It is mystifying, piety-resistant puzzles like these that call for skepticism and commitment to pool their resources. from forward by Bruce Robbins Michelle Tokarczyk "E. L. Doctorow's Skeptical Commitment"

Теги других блогов: literary criticism political fiction E. L. Doctorow