El Doctorow had a rule for writing. “I have to feel that I’m transgressing,” he told numerous interviewers. “The only time it’s good is when I’m breaking some rule.” He consistently pushed against the boundaries, experimenting in form and voice, challenging prevailing orthodoxies and pushing moral boundaries. He also, often, made his readers feel distinctly uncomfortable. The Waterworks presses hard questions about medical ethics, madness and science. The Book of Daniel confronts us with the death of Daniel’s parents, based on Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who were executed for treason by the US government in 1953, and details their last minutes in vivid detail.
This latter scene especially has caused controversy here on the reading group. Last week, I suggested that the scene gained charge because it was rooted in reality. Perhaps I would have been better to say that it makes us feel awful. It feels too intimate. Too close to real suffering. It’s a moment when The Book of Daniel becomes a document that exposes the horror of history, the rawness of reality. To my mind, it’s an astonishing bit of writing – but serious objections have been raised. A commenter called Swelter wrote:
It’s powerfully and memorably written, but it describes the Rosenbergs’ execution, not the Isaacsons’. In Billy Bathgate, Dutch Schultz at least was shown dying under his own name, the Rosenbergs were not granted that dignity in The Book of Daniel.
Swelter had other interesting points to make about the similarities between Doctorow’s subjects the Isaacsons and the real-life Rosenbergs in The Book of Daniel: “In fictionalising such major figures, it feels to me that Doctorow undermines the sense of ‘this is what it was really like’ he otherwise tries to convey, such as in the scene after the Robeson concert.”
MythicalMagpie also had qualms:
I do wonder about the ethics of writing fiction that comes from events within living memory but changing things so they are almost but not quite true. I seem to be left balancing the idea that fiction is fiction and it doesn’t matter if it’s not completely true against its power to influence thought and responsibility to historical accuracy.
I tend to agree that fiction is fiction and should be taken as such. Plenty don’t. Doctorow was frequently criticised for playing fast and loose with history, most notably by John Updike, who wrote of of Ragtime: “It smacked of playing with helpless dead puppets, and turned the historical novel into a gravity-free, faintly sadistic game.”
In a respectful obituary, the New York Times also noted “a noisy minority of critics who generally found Mr Doctorow’s tinkering with history misleading if not an outright violation of the tenets of narrative literature”.
So what are these tenets? And how can a novel – a work of fiction, let’s not forget – be misleading? My first instinct is to dismiss these criticisms. Doctorow is a sophisticated and fiercely intelligent writer. Surely anyone who reads him is able to understand that he is creating his own world, even if it borrows from ours?
“When you use a historical character like [General] Sherman,” Doctorow once said, “it’s your Sherman. You’re doing what a painter does when he paints a portrait. It’s a rendering ... Whether the character is publicly known or not publicly known, you’re doing the same thing.” In other words, he isn’t saying: this is how it was. He is aiming only for narrative truth.
“Which is fine,” said MythicalMagpie again, “if people always only read fiction as entertainment and it had no power to influence their thoughts or behaviour. But that’s not true, is it? People do have their perceptions altered by fiction. In some ways, I think art has a more powerful influence on the societies we live in and the development of our children than facts. I have a horrible feeling I owe my own sense of morality to Enid Blyton more than anything else. So where does that leave fiction that alters historical fact? Is it safe or dangerous in the wrong hands?”
I’d maybe question the notion that fiction should be termed “safe” or “dangerous” – but I take the point. Think of all the people who queued outside Scottish cinemas to see Braveheart in the 90s and seem to have taken it as gospel truth. Think of all those propaganda films in the second world war. Think (as reading group contributor Pythoness suggested) of Michael Crichton, whose fictional presentation of data about areas that had cooled in Antarctica earned a complaint from a scientist to the New York Times: “Our results have been misused as ‘evidence’ against global warming by Michael Crichton in his novel State of Fear.” Crichton even managed to irk Al Gore, who told a US House committee: “The planet has a fever. If your baby has a fever, you go to the doctor … if your doctor tells you you need to intervene here, you don’t say, ‘Well, I read a science-fiction novel that tells me it’s not a problem’.”
So do we criticise Crichton’s readers for taking him too literally, or Crichton for misleading them? And do we feel differently about Doctorow because he writes a different kind of book? A book that people like me – and I’m assuming most of my fellow Guardian readers – would tend to think of as better and smarter?
It’s easier to ask those questions than it is to provide answers. Reading group contributor Dylanwolf offered a neat way out, for The Book of Daniel at least:
There is an inevitable osmosis of events and ideas between the novel and the real events. In best practice, an accomplished author will achieve that, utilising the response of the reader to the real event to enrich their experience of reading the fiction. The novel and the real event become siblings, not identical twins, and each reveals components that the other obfuscates.
It’s also worth noting that, although Doctorow changed the paradigm (and arguably paved the way for novelists such as Hilary Mantel), writers have been playing with fact and fiction ever since Homer sang to us about the Trojan War and Virgil retold how Rome was founded. Everythingsperfect wrote: “I don’t understand this objection to using historical facts as inspiration. Does anyone object to War and Peace for that reason?”
EL Doctorow also brought up Tolstoy when asked about historical fiction (a term, incidentally, to which he objected) by the Paris Review. As is usual with the great man, his answer is worth quoting at length:
I myself like the way Shakespeare fiddles with history; and Tolstoy. In this country we tend to be naive about history. We think it’s Newton’s perfect mechanical universe, out there predictably for everyone to see and set their watches by. But it’s more like curved space, and infinitely compressible and expandable time. It’s constant subatomic chaos. When President Reagan says the Nazi SS were as much victims as the Jews they murdered – wouldn’t you call that fiddling? Or the Japanese educators who’ve been rewriting their textbooks to eliminate the embarrassing facts of their invasion of China, the atrocities they committed in Manchuria in 1937? Orwell told us about this. History is a battlefield. It’s constantly being fought over because the past controls the present. History is the present. That’s why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth. So to be irreverent to myth, to play with it, let in some light and air, to try to combust it back into history, is to risk being seen as someone who distorts truth.
History is the present. The Book of Daniel is named after the living son rather than his long-dead parents, after all. It is about the new left and Doctorow’s contemporaries, dealing with conscription and campus riots, as much about the old left and nuclear paranoia. To complain that he distorts the past is a red herring. It’s what he says about us that matters.
