Ralph Ellison And The Politics Of The Novel Book

If you pick up this book expecting E.L. Doctorow to weigh in on "intelligent design" or other anti-Darwinian controversies you'll be disappointed. It's a book of essays mostly about literature: Poe, Melville, Twain, Malraux, Kleist, Kafka, et al. Doctorow calls it "a modest celebration of the creative act."

Creationists is a whimsical title; Doctorow doesn't have much in common with the creationists who use the Bible to make an end run around science. But he does give his collection a biblical structure: It begins with an essay on the book of Genesis and ends with an apocalypse, an essay on the threat of nuclear holocaust. And he does sense that creativity has a fundamental mysteriousness about it. As he puts it, "the act of writing, when it is going well, seems no more than the dutiful secretarial response to a silent dictation."

This idea of the seeming autonomy of the imagination gets its strongest expression not in an essay on literature but in one on science, "Einstein: Seeing the Unseen." "Einstein's theory of relativity was an arduous work of self-expression no less than that of a great writer or painter," Doctorow says, referring to "the occasion of lightning clarity when that formula E=mc2¬ wrote itself in his brain, the moment of creative crisis, the eureka moment."

On the analogy of the cosmic creative moment known as the Big Bang, Doctorow calls this "the Little Bang of the writer's or scientist's inspiration," in which, in the writer's case, "from the slightest bit of material a whole novelistic world is created."
And he notes that "the writers of the ancient texts, the sacred texts of our religions" were "so awed … by the mystery of their own creative process" that they "attributed the Little Bang of their own written cosmologies … to God."

From Welcome to Hard Times to The March, and especially in such novels as The Book of Daniel, Ragtime and Billy Bathgate, Doctorow's own creativity has been fired by American history, by the West, the Civil War, the Cold War, by gangsters and rebels and immigrants. So some of the most provocative things he has to say in these essays are about the writer's relationship to America - or in the case of Franz Kafka, to Amerika, a novel that foundered because Kafka's claustrophobic Old World imagination was stymied by the immensity of the country. As Doctorow says, Kafka "held his book together as long as he'd ignored the true scale of the American continent," but "the minute he tried to fold our vast openness into his conceit he was finished."

But even American writers come to grief. Harriet Beecher Stowe may have touched the American conscience with Uncle Tom's Cabin, but Doctorow faults the book for "the implicit racism of Stowe's stereotypes" of black people. "It is an indication of how tortuous is the moral progress of a culture where even the religiously driven protest, the aesthetically organized act of moral intellect, assumes the biases of the system it would overthrow."

And Stowe is not the only transgressor when it comes to racial stereotyping that ironically works against the author's message. Doctorow faults Mark Twain for letting Tom Sawyer take over the latter part of Huckleberry Finn - this is "terrible for American literature," he says, not only because it turns a grown-up book into juvenile fiction, but also because it weakens the rapport between Huck and Jim. And the portrayal of Jim troubles him as much as Stowe's stereotyping. Huck, Doctorow notes, "struggles against the white mores of his time to help the black man, Jim, escape from slavery, but it is Huck's progenitor" - Twain himself - "who portrays Jim, in minstrelese, as a gullible black child-man led by white children."

Doctorow rejects Hemingway's famous assertion: "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn." Instead, he says, "It begins with Moby-Dick, the book that swallowed European civilization whole." The essay on Moby-Dick may be the best in the book, exuberant cheerleading for Melville's daunting masterpiece. "I don't know any other writer in history as uncannily able to parody Shakespeare - at moments to be equal to him - with his monologues and scenes, but also to so successfully adopt the social structuring of his characters, their hierarchies of rank, comedy, and tragedy, their parallel relationships to those in the master's plays," he writes.

Throughout the book, Doctorow reminds us of the necessity of fiction, that "Stories … connect the visible with the invisible, the present with the past. They propose life as something of moral consequence. … Stories were the first repositories of human knowledge. They were as important to survival as a spear or a hoe." This book is also a reminder, if one is needed, that good storytellers often make very good critics. The essays in Creationists are probing, subtle and smart. You might even say that they're intelligently designed.