The Politics of Polyphony: The Fiction of E. L. Doctorow

Abstract

chief business of twentieth-century philosophy, R. G. Collingwood remarks in his Autobiography, is to reckon with twentiethcentury history. In the fifty years since Collingwood wrote those words that reckoning with history has become increasingly problematic, especially when considering the situation of the contemporary writer. Describing the writer's alienation from history in the modern period, as well as his loss of faith in the direction of history, Georg Lukacs, in his work The Historical Novel, observes that history for the writer becomes either collection and reproduction of interesting facts about the past or chaos to be ordered as one likes (176, 181). More recently, Philip Roth and David Lodge describe a similar division among recent writers, who have largely abandoned the social and political realm for the exploration of the self. As Lodge puts it: Art can no longer compete with life on equal terms, showing the universal in the particular. The alternatives are either to cleave to the particular . . . or to abandon history altogether and construct pure fictions which reflect in an emotional or metaphysical way the discords of contemporary experience (33). As Tony Tanner puts it, this means that novelists have lost faith in the idea that the individual can ever realize himself in