Stephen Harris
The Fiction of Gore Vidal and E. L. Doctorow: Writing the Historical Self
New York: Peter Lang, 2002. Pp. 304. $43.95

Reviewed by Axel Knoenagel

The historical novel has a long tradition in international literature. Almost as long is the tradition of examining this genre. Györgi Lukács's seminal work is only the best-known critical account of the concept of reflecting on the present by describing events and developments of the nearer or farther past. Stephen Harris has added another title to the long shelf of literary criticism on the historical novel. In his recently published study he focuses on the two best-known authors of historical fiction currently working in the United States, Gore Vidal and E. L. Doctorow.

As the subtitle of Harris's study suggests, his main interest is not so much in the literary construction of the novels but in their engagement with basic concepts of American self-understanding: "What I want to argue is that the individual's alienation from and frequent antagonism toward the collective results in an estrangement not only from society and community, but also from history" (12). The concept of an autonomous self at odds with a larger societal whole has been one of the basic myths in American self-understanding and at the same time a staple of American fiction ever since the days of Leatherstocking and Huckleberry Finn.

Harris sees the two authors he selected for his study as centrally concerned with the individual self perceived as shaping and being shaped by history. Vidal and Doctorow, however, differ in some aspects. While Vidal focuses mostly on the "high politics" of the late nineteenth century to show the mechanisms that worked to shape the coming superpower of the twentieth century and the people who guide it, Doctorow's novels describe the fates of less influential people in historical situations that embody basic elements of contemporary society.

As befits a doctoral thesis on concepts of self in American historical fiction, Harris's book begins with a cursory survey of American philosophy, historiography, and tensions between self, community, and history in the collective American psyche. This introductory chapter attempts to cover the ground from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Don DeLillo's novel Libra. Unfortunately, this ground is far too wide to be covered in a mere fifty pages. Thus Harris arrives at rather banal conclusions such as "for Americans there continues an invigorating sense of historical significance" (54).

In his study of the two novelists, Harris chooses from each a representative novel and a second one to corroborate his theses. The discussion of Vidal's fiction concentrates mostly on the novel Burr with some reference to 1876. Harris sees Vidal using the historical character Aaron Burr, one of the most influential and controversial politicians in American politics at the beginning of the nineteenth century, as an attempt to revise traditional perceptions of this presumed traitor. According to Harris, Vidal's Burr "personifies a 'counter-memory', a critical voice formerly discredited and silenced through ostracism, but now liberated, as it were, to speak the, or at least another, truth" (133). In most of his novels, Vidal presents the individual as capable of influencing history. Burr emerges as Vidal's "ideal mouthpiece on American history" (162). Harris sees a mixed message coming from Vidal. Burr demonstrates the potential significance of the individual for the historical process and at the same time the shortcomings of an ideology that puts so much emphasis on the individual.

The Book of Daniel is the novel that Harris uses mostly to discuss E. L. Doctorow's approach to history in fiction. Some references to Ragtime support his points. He views The Book of Daniel "in terms of the drama of the individual at once having a formative connection with, and contestatory relation to, history as conceived from within America" (174). Pretending to convey the memories of someone readily identified as the child of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the book allows a "demythologizing of the past" (240). Daniel Isaacson may appear as an active force in history just as his parents had almost become, but eventually it becomes evident that he is "undeniably subject to the moulding influences that surround him" (269).

Harris concludes his study with the insight that both Gore Vidal and E. L. Doctorow "endeavour to promote a higher level of historical consciousness by quite pointedly challenging accepted versions of the American past in order to reveal the manner in which political power in secured" (277). The conclusions put forward in The Fiction of Gore Vidal and E. L. Doctorow are neither unique nor challenging. The comparison of Vidal and Doctorow is new, but since there is very little direct comparison brought into the study, not very much is gained. And that which is gained is won only with hard labor. While the external structure of the study is clear, the same cannot be said about the individual chapters. Harris drifts from point to point in overly long and badly organized sections. The book would have profited from a tighter structure and more precise arguing.