E. L. Doctorow and the Danger of Crossover Fiction

E. L. Doctorow, who died last week at the age of 84, both wrote about American history and warned us about people who write about American history. Both parts of that formulation are fun to read, but the second one is too often ignored. Where Doctorow warned us against letting any representation mistake itself for reality, those of us who teach high school too often let the most overt of fictions crowd out careful study of the facts.  

Probably Doctorow's most famous passage of writing comes from the opening paragraph of Ragtime. It has been quoted everywhere in the last week, but is worth reading again in full: "Patriotism was a reliable sentiment in the early 1900's. Teddy Roosevelt was President. The population customarily gathered in great numbers either out of doors for parades, public concerts, fish fries, political picnics, social outings, or indoors in meeting halls, vaudeville theatres, operas, ballrooms. There seemed to be no entertainment that did not involve great swarms of people. Trains and steamers and trolleys moved them from one place to another, That was the style, that was the way people lived. Women were stouter then. They visited the fleet carrying white parasols. Everyone wore white in summer. Tennis racquets were hefty and the racquet faces elliptical. There was a lot of sexual fainting. There were no Negroes. There were no immigrants."

Doctorow is here obviously not writing about the Progressive Era. Rather, he is writing about how we write about the Progressive Era, pointing us to all of the most threadbare cliches we have for the age. As Fredric Jameson famously points out in Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Doctorow renders history "flat," as though, were he writing in French, he was using only the passé composé and thus taking all nuance of chronology out of his narration. This is history as rendered in the worst of high school history class film strips. 

This passage is emblematic of a strong strain in Doctorow's fiction. Part of his project was, in a sense, to write so badly about history that we could not help but pay attention to how badly we all write about history. (And, of course, Doctorow then went on to play delightfully with the vignettes he had created, subverting the story he had started out telling.) In this way his novels stand for us as a warning: don't do this to history; don't mistake the threadbare fictions for the actuality of the past.

That aspect of Doctorow's fictional project is particularly relevant for those of us who teach high school English for it is us, too often, who allow the convenient fiction to stand in for the complexity of history in just the way Doctorow warned us against. 

Let us take the most obvious (if somewhat complicated) example, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. To make the obvious point, The Jungle is a novel: every character is invented, as is the plot. Moreover, it is an extremely didactic novel, with events arranged not in the name of verisimilitude but in the name of socialist propaganda. And yet, as I argued in a 2007 article for Studies in American Naturalism, neither The Jungle nor Sinclair himself are often considered as literary matters at all. Rather, they are treated as primary sources on the Progressive Era. Thus fiction makes a strange crossover move, becoming fact right before our eyes. 

In The Jungle's case, this crossover move is a bit more complicated. Sinclair claimed that every individual event in the book did, in some manner, actually occur. Moreover, his claims of veracity led to a federal investigation that, more or less, confirmed much of the "truth" of the novel. Nonetheless, The Jungle did not happen. No one family suffered the avalanche of hardships foisted upon the Rudkus family, and condensing every evil of the Progressive Era into one book greatly skews our sense of the period. 

This problem is, I think, broader than just The Jungle. If Sinclair's novel has become our snapshot of the Progressive era, how often does The Things They Carried become our snapshot of Vietnam? Or To Kill a Mockingbird become our vision of the pre-Civil Rights South. This, we imply, is what it was like back then. And thus one highly mediated text becomes historical fact. 

An even more problematic case is the ubiquitous use of Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God to represent the Harlem Renaissance. Here a novel written well after the Harlem Renaissance (at least in the usual dating) was over, not set in Harlem, and thematically much more connected to a later generation of Black writers' (Alice Walker, Toni Morrison) rethinking of Southern life can become a kind of cartoon of the period it now stands in for: Black artistic expression, African American vernacular, boisterous Black communities, etc. 

Doctorow warns us against letting easy fictions slide into the place of history. When these novels become primary sources, we allow a version of just that movement. 

A counter-argument could be made here: In reality, if, two years after taking a year of American studies, what a student remembers of the Progressive Era are 3 vivid scenes from The Jungle, that would have to be considered a win. Given the enormous breadth of information high school students are expected to study, retaining much beyond that is both unlikely and not particularly well rewarded when it happens. 

But maybe that is another challenge Doctorow poses to us. If students were to get past the clichés Doctorow enumerates in the opening of Ragtime, they would have to focus more deeply on fewer periods of history and literature. And doing that would imperil the whole survey-course model; students would have to spend much more time studying the contradictions and complexities of fewer eras. In the process, they would lose sweep in the name of depth, a substitution that might have its benefits.