"We're living a national ideology that's invisible to us because we're inside it."
"We're living a national ideology that's invisible to us because we're inside it."
At the outset of his career E. L. Doctorow
told Paul Levine, "History written by historians is clearly insufficient."
Doctorow's novels carry out that conviction by imagining the great moments
of American history--the Old West, the gilded age, the Depression, the
cold war--as backdrops for tales of excruciating moral pain and injustice
in America.
In Conversations with E. L. Doctorow
Christopher D. Morris has gathered over twenty of the most revelatory interviews
with the acclaimed author of Ragtime, World's Fair, Billy
Bathgate, The Book of Daniel, and other novels, plays, and short
stories. Whatever the setting or time period, Doctorow's characters spark
an unparalleled urgency in the novelist's recreations of history. In his
work the American dream and the values his characters try to live by turn
to madness and ashes.
Within this collection Doctorow explores
the themes of his work not only in the contexts of national and literary
history but also in terms of disturbing trends in contemporary American
culture. Talking about style, Doctorow discusses his experiments with shifting
points of view and unreliable narrators as part of the modernist heritage
to which readers have become accustomed. But he stresses that these techniques
are always subordinate to the telling of a good story and the creation
of memorable characters.
"My portrait of J. P. Morgan in Ragtime
is truer to the man's soul and the substance of his life than his authorized
biography," he says. Doctorow's critical and popular success comes from
the creation and re-creation of such great characters and the telling of
captivating stories in which the writer serves as an independent witness
to both the ideals and the corruptions that have driven our history.
Christopher D. Morris has been the Charles A. Dana Professor of English
at Norwich University in Northfield, Vermont, since 1996. He is also the
author of Models of Misrepresentation: On the Fiction of E. L. Doctorow
and regularly publishes in journals like The Ohio Review, Critique,
and Film Criticism.
256 pp.