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Rosenberg (ro’zin-bûrg’), Julius. 1918-1953. American spy who with his wife, Ethel (1915-1953), was convicted of helping pass information concerning nuclear weaponry to the Soviets. Despite questions concerning the fairness of the trial and international pleas for clemency, the couple was executed. –AMERICAN HERITAGE DICTIONARY

Over the past half-century since 1953, a virtual cultural industry has grown up around the Rosenberg trial. Biographies and histories have been written. Numerous studies definitively proving the Rosenbergs’ innocence have been published, as have a roughly equal number of studies definitively proving their guilt. Photographs, collages, paintings and installations have been exhibited in prominent museums and galleries around the world. Documentaries and plays have been produced. Recently, Ethel Rosenberg and Roy Cohn, the assistant prosecutor in the Rosenberg trial, appeared as characters in Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play ANGELS IN AMERICA (1993).

In addition, the Rosenbergs have been mentioned or have made cameo appearances in dozens of novels, at least two of which–E.L. Doctorow’s THE BOOK OF DANIEL and Robert Coover’s THE PUBLIC BURNING–have taken the Rosenbergs as their primary subject matter. These novels have attracted literary critics in droves, generating dozens of full-length studies and literally hundreds of papers and articles. The Rosenbergs have provided a locus for so much dissent and contention in so many areas of cultural production–literary, critical, artistic, theatrical, historiographic, theoretical–that Gore Vidal has been able to offer a credible alternative to the label postmodernism, at least as it applies to the United States, referring to the period that has witnessed the erosion of the explanatory power of metanarratives as the “post-Rosenberg era.”

The citation from the AMERICAN HERITAGE DICTIONARY represents the Rosenberg agon in miniature. On the one hand, we have the official story: Julius Rosenberg the “American spy” convicted and executed along with his wife for “helping pass information concerning nuclear weaponry to the Soviets.” Exactly what this information was isn’t specified. At the time of the trial, the prosecution strongly suggested (a suggestion picked up by and promulgated through the media) that Julius had given the Soviets the “bomb itself,” although no certified atomic scientists were called to testify to this effect.

Subsequently, scientists have examined the fatal Greenglass “bomb” sketches that convicted the Rosenbergs and found them to be everything from “confused and imprecise” to a “caricature.” General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, was quoted while testifying in 1954 before an AEC special Personnel Security Board hearing that “the data that went out in the case of the Rosenbergs was of minor value. I would never say that publicly. Again, that is something, while it is not secret, I think should be kept very quiet because irrespective of the value of that in the over-all picture, the Rosenbergs deserved to hang.”

Against this official story the AMERICAN HERITAGE DICTIONARY notes the various “questions concerning the fairness of the trial,” questions which remain alive and troubling to this day. Virginia Carmichael’s analysis of the trial (in FRAMING HISTORY: THE ROSENBERG STORY AND THE COLD WAR) demonstrates that, among other abuses, due process was repeatedly violated; the Rosenbergs were effectively tried and found guilty in the newspapers before a verdict was ever passed; and, most disconcerting of all, by “being charged for conspiracy but rhetorically convicted and sentenced for treason, the Rosenbergs were deprived of the constitutional safeguard of the two-witness rule for treason.”

Another problematic issue hinted at by the AMERICAN HERITAGE DICTIONARY is the role played by Ethel Rosenberg in the “atomic spy ring” that supposedly gave the Soviets the bomb. Note that the dictionary entry reads, “American spy who with his wife, Ethel (1915-1953), was convicted …” The odd staccato syntax used to describe two individuals known to history collectively as the Rosenbergs obliquely betrays an awareness that Julius was the only one against whom actual charges were brought. From the FBI files released under the Freedom of Information Act, it’s now recognized there was virtually no evidence against Ethel Rosenberg. Carmichael describes how she was, in essence, illegally used by the FBI as a “lever” to make Julius confess and implicate others in what was touted by J. Edgar Hoover to be an immense international communist spy ring.

The power of the Rosenberg case to compel and fascinate hinges on its ambiguity. In an oft-cited essay entitled “False Documents,” Doctorow has written, “Consider those occasions–criminal trials in courts of law–when society arranges with all its investigative apparatus to apprehend factual reality. Using the tested rules of evidence and the accrued wisdom of our system of laws we determine the guilt or innocence of defendants and come to judgment. Yet the most important trials in our history, those which reverberate in our lives and have most meaning for our future are those in which the judgment is called into question: Scopes, Sacco and Vanzetti, the Rosenbergs. Facts are buried, exhumed, deposed, contradicted, recanted. There is a decision by the jury and, when the historical and prejudicial context of the decision is examined, a subsequent judgment by history. And the trial shimmers forever with just that perplexing ambiguity of a true novel.”

Indeed, the judgment of history has ranged outright “proof” of the Rosenbergs’ innocence alongside such smugly confident statements as Leslie Fiedler’s assertion that “the legal guilt of the Rosenbergs was clearly established at their trial.” Doctorow’s point is that determining the innocence or guilt of the Rosenbergs is, precisely, no longer the point. This kind of spectacular trial, with its dense historical palimpsest of arguments and counterarguments, justifications and recriminations, “shimmers” emblematic of a reality that is always already a matter of interpretation.

The notion of an extralinguistic reality, of a world of preconstituted facts that could be apprehended, weighed, measured and graphed, is an empiricist illusion. In Doctorow’s words, “there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction: there is only narrative.” Such a statement can be considered a postmodern manifesto, and indeed, “False Documents” has been read as just that. Although early in his career Doctorow balked at being labeled a postmodernist, as I’m defining the term he represents the postmodern writer par excéllence.

One of the ironies of a retrospective judgment like Fiedler’s is that, for all his assurance of the Rosenbergs’ guilt, he can’t resist “reading” them as characters in a historical drama. Perhaps this is because he’s a literary critic by trade, but I rather believe his gesture responds (intuitively as it were) to the literary quality of history itself–to the way it “shimmers forever with just that perplexing ambiguity of a true novel.” Fiedler argues that there were actually two Rosenberg cases, the “open-and-shut” one in which the couple was convicted as atomic spies, and a second, “legendary” one which transformed the Rosenbergs into “a parody of martyrdom … too absurd to be truly tragic, too grim to be the joke it is always threatening to become.”

And yet Fiedler has trouble keeping the two cases apart. He keeps returning to the first case, to events like Ethel’s final appeal to Eisenhower, which, he writes, “is surely among the most embarrassing [of her letters], combining with Ethel’s customary attempts at a ‘literary’ style, and the constitutional inability to be frank which she shared with her husband, a deliberate and transparent craftiness.”

This is one of numerous aesthetic criticisms Fiedler levels at the Rosenbergs. The impression is that he’s obsessively compelled to convict and re-convict them, not on the basis of any “factual” evidence, but on their literary shortcomings! As Doctorow suggests, the Rosenberg case, like all events subsumed into history, inherently possesses a narrative structure. And it possesses one because, as Hayden White (THE CONTENT OF THE FORM) has repeatedly argued, it can only attain the status of history by assuming such a structure.

This kind of thinking underwrites Carmichael’s study, which overtly reads the case as what Paul Isaacson, Julius Rosenberg’s surrogate in THE BOOK OF DANIEL, calls a “capitalist drama … [a] passion play for our Christian masters.” Carmichael deliberately tells the Rosenberg story in terms of “Plotting,” “Casting,” “Rehearsals” and other “Dramatic Strategies” in order to foreground its histrionic–as opposed to historical–character. “By the time of the executions,” she explains, “the textually elaborated official story had crystallized into the coherent form of a traditional novel or drama with distinct characters, a defined and polarized conflictual plot, a strong and unambiguous linear cause-and-effect development and narrative line, and a rising and falling action bounded by a necessary beginning and the most definitive ending available in history or fiction: death as retribution and redemption.”

With the foregoing discussion in mind, there should be little question as to why Doctorow chose in THE BOOK OF DANIEL to reflect on 1960s radicalism through the kaleidoscopic, shimmering lens of the Rosenberg legacy. Published in 1971, the novel appeared at the apex of public discontent over Vietnam, when skepticism concerning Enlightenment master narratives was at an all-time high, at a time when the Old Left was dead and the New Left was failing.

The moment was ripe for a reconception of the liberal humanist notions of an empirical or “essential” reality, the unified subject, and the possibility of political revolution. As a novelist Doctorow felt free to play with the idea of the Rosenbergs, making several important character substitutions. In his version of the story, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg become Paul and Rochelle Isaacson; Susan, their daughter, replaces one of the Rosenberg sons; and Ethel’s betrayer/brother David Greenglass is transformed into Dr. Selig Mindish, family friend and dentist. While remaining remarkably faithful to the official Rosenberg trial (for the most part merely altering the names of its principal participants), Doctorow assumes considerable poetic license in his treatment of the various traumas, neuroses and pathologies suffered by his fictional characters.

The narrative premise is disarmingly simple: Daniel Lewin (born Isaacson) sits in the stacks of the Columbia University library supposedly writing his doctoral dissertation. What he is actually trying to do, however, is come to terms with his nightmarish past, with a country which executed his parents for acts of espionage they may or may not have committed, and with a sister so shell-shocked by her own childhood that she has recently attempted suicide and is literally wasting away in a mental hospital. An exemplary self-begetting text, the result of Daniel’s “research” is the novel we’re reading, THE BOOK OF DANIEL, by E. L. Doctorow, problematically related to “DANIEL’S BOOK,” facetiously described by its “author” Daniel as “A Life Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Doctoral Degree in Social Biology, Gross Entomology, Women’s Anatomy, Children’s Cacophony, Arch Demonology, Eschatology, and Thermal Pollution.”

The association of Doctorow and Daniel, author and protagonist, as I hope I’ve suggested, is altogether deliberate. More than one critic has remarked this relationship. Not that Daniel in any simplistic way stands in for Doctorow. Rather, he represents the Artist, or the idea of the Artist, coming to terms with a specific country at a specific moment under specific cultural and historical circumstances: the United States, 1967, during the postmodern or post-Rosenberg era.

A child of the lower class, the son of communist “spies” in the cold war, Daniel, like his biblical namesake, struggles against a legacy of persecution and exile, chasing an elusive identity in a society where he can hardly be said to exist, much less belong. Referring to the dossier the FBI supposedly maintains to keep track of and neutralize him, Daniel observes, “I live in constant and degrading relationship to the society that has destroyed my mother and father … I am deprived of the chance of resisting my government … No matter what political or symbolic act I perform in protest or disobedience, no harm will befall me … I am totally deprived of the right to be dangerous.”

Christopher Morris, discussing THE BOOK OF DANIEL in his full-length study of Doctorow’s fiction (MODELS OF MISREPRESENTATION), has accurately remarked that among critics the “most controversial issue is disagreement as to whether the novel finally ‘endorses’ Daniel-as-artist and the process of narrative in general.” Citing the “division of opinion on this subject” as evidence that “Daniel’s empirical and narrational quests may be foredoomed to contradiction,” Morris’ deconstructionist reading correctly identifies the ambiguous and self-contradictory nature of Daniel’s narrative, and in the process manages to extinguish any scintilla of purpose or meaning his narrative might possess. Following in the steps of Paul de Man and J. Hillis Miller, Morris typically finds in the text’s contradictions proof of its “futility” and “dysfunction.”

I encourage the reader to consider that contradiction does not necessarily equal futility, that in fact postmodern writers in particular productively employ ambivalence in order to spotlight the contradictions inherent in a liberal humanist discourse which falsely operates under the sign of the natural or uncontradictory. Such an equivocal set of circumstances doesn’t stop Doctorow from writing; nor does it stop Daniel from coming down out of his ivory tower and taking action, however unsatisfactory or co-opted his gesture may be. The imperative is to avoid paralysis through analysis, to escape becoming a starfish like Susan, handless arms curled inward fetally. “My sister is dead,” Daniel writes toward the end of his narrative. “She died of a failure of analysis.” In a nutshell, this is the novel’s politically charged, if ambivalent, message: uncertainty in no way mitigates the necessity to perform.

I mean that literally, in a very “Judith Butlerian” sense: Daniel’s book is in every way a novel about the performance of power (or lack thereof). It’s no accident the text’s dominant–indeed, empowering–structural metaphor is electricity. As T. V. Reed has written in what I consider the best single article on Doctorow’s novel, “Genealogy/Narrative/Power: Questions of Postmodernity in Doctorow’s THE BOOK OF DANIEL, “Ubiquitous electrical metaphors come to embody the simultaneously destructive and productive nature of power … Electricity is at once the benign power that lights the library where Daniel writes and the terrible power that electrocutes his parents.”

Geoffrey Galt Harpham also stresses the importance of electricity in Doctorow’s text, and its double-edged quality, describing electricity as that which “ground[s] meaning and validate[s] narrative by dissolving the individual. Electrical awareness, we can conclude, is a fatal enlightenment.” Power is performed or experienced in the total absence of any “grounding,” to use Harpham’s word, in the historical or factual “real.” This is the first of Doctorow’s postmodern strategies: the stable referent of rational empiricist epistemology is liquidated and replaced by a Foucaultian network of discourse which simultaneously produces and obscures the real.

Nowhere is the real installed and subverted so conspicuously as in Daniel’s failed attempts to determine his parents’ guilt or innocence. We recognize in his gesture a desire for hermeneutical closure which participates in the same cold war, us/them, either/or logic that condemned Paul and Rochelle Isaacson to the electric chair. But the textual “evidence” (“History, that pig”) will repeatedly deny such closure.

Early in the novel Daniel, reflecting on a quasi-legendary couple who may or may not have been the actual atomic spies, writes that his parents “went to their deaths for crimes they did not commit. Or maybe they did committ them. Or maybe my mother and father got away with false passports for crimes they didn’t committ. How do you spell comit? Of one thing we are sure. Everything is elusive. Justice is elusive. Human character. Quarters for the cigarette machine.”

This is one of dozens of moments when Daniel, attempting to make sense of the past, runs up against an intractable ambiguity. Having thoroughly researched his parents’ case, both his own private and the public versions, Daniel is forced to admit, “I find no clues either to their guilt or innocence. Perhaps they are neither guilty nor innocent.” Daniel’s thinking at times borders on a radical or extreme skepticism, as he comes close to disavowing the veracity of his own narrative and thus self-consciously relegating himself to fictional status: “Probably none of this is true.”

Such textual ambiguity reaches a crescendo during Daniel’s Christmas odyssey to Disneyland. Robert Alter has called the novel’s brilliant analysis of this most “American” of places “monstrously disproportionate.” But perhaps it’s meant to be. Arguably, Doctorow is suggesting that Disneyland itself, everything it stands for, occupies a “monstrously disproportionate” place in U. S. culture.

Be that as it may, the way Daniel describes it, Disneyland is the great bodying forth of the hyperreal, much as it is in Jean Baudrillard’s famous, if belated, essay. In “Simulacres et simulations,” Baudrillard writes that Disneyland “est là pour cacher que c’est le pays ‘réel,’ toute l’Amérique ‘réelle’ qui est Disneyland … Disneyland est posé comme imaginaire afin de faire croire que le reste est réel, alors que tout Los Angeles et l’Amérique qui l’entoure ne sont déjà plus réels, mais de l’ordre de l’hyperréel et de la simulation.”

Similarly, Doctorow/Daniel observes “a separation of two ontological degrees between the Disneyland customer and the cultural artifacts he is presumed upon to treasure in his visit. The Mad Hatter’s Teacup Ride is emblematic of the Disney animated film, which is itself a drastic revision in form and content of a subtle dreamwork created out of the English language. And even to an adult who dimly remembers reading the original ALICE, and whose complicated response to this powerfully symbolic work has long since been incorporated into the psychic constructs of his life, what is being offered does not suggest the resonance of the original work, but is only a sentimental compression of something that is itself already a lie … We find this radical process of reduction occurring too with regard to the nature of historical reality.”

Coincidentally or otherwise, both Baudrillard and Doctorow characterize Disneyland as a postmodern avatar of the Nazi concentration camp. Baudrillard remarks of Disneyland’s parking lot that it is indeed a “véritable camp de concentration,” whereas in THE BOOK OF DANIEL Disneyland, located “somewhere between Buchenwald and Belsen,” is remarkable for its “handling of crowds”: “The problems of mass ingress and egress seem to have been solved here to a degree that would light admiration in the eyes of an SS transport officer.”

The principal difference between Baudrillard and Doctorow/Daniel’s versions of Disneyland lies in their respective attitudes toward its temporality. Baudrillard emphasizes that Disneyland is the sign that America is no longer real (which implies that supposedly it once was); but it’s far from certain that for Doctorow and his narrator Disneyland is anything other than a symbol for mediated “reality” in a transhistorical sense.

Several critics have remarked the spiral, if not exactly circular, pattern of Doctorow’s vision of history. Consider Baby’s collage entitled “EVERYTHING THAT CAME BEFORE IS ALL THE SAME!” Or Doctorow’s own statement that “surely the sense we have to have now of twentieth-century political alternatives is the kind of exhaustion of them all.” Doctorow is best approached not as a resigned pessimist, but as an engaged skeptic.

His skepticism extends to all types of cultural production, including his own. “I worry about images,” Daniel self-critically muses in a passage constructed through a series of images. “Images are what things mean. Take the word image. It connotes soft, sheer flesh shimmering on the air, like the rainbowed slick of a bubble. Image connotes images, the multiplicity being an image. Images break with a small ping, their destruction is as wonderful as their being, they are essentially instruments of torture exploding through the individual’s calloused capacity to feel powerful undifferentiated emotions full of longing and dissatisfaction and monumentality. They serve no social purpose.”

This severe auto-critique, the self-reflexive problematizing of the medium itself is eminently postmodernist. But the critical commentary on images doesn’t stop with the narrative; it highlights as well the New Left and its radical extreme embodied in the Jerry Rubin-like (and dubiously named) Artie Sternlicht.

Sternlicht’s political strategies are rendered suspect not only because they ring naively revolutionary and ahistorical in their narcissism–“A revolution happens. It’s a happening! It’s a change on the earth. It’s a new animal. A new consciousness! It’s me! I am Revolution!”–but also because they depend integrally on the power of images. “We’re going to overthrow the United States with images!” he triumphantly proclaims, oblivious in his disdain of liberal “Co-optation” that his “revolutionary” images are almost by definition co-opted by the system that controls the media. (The suggestion is that Sternlicht is, in essence, licking the system’s behind.) Readers seeking easy answers to complex political dilemmas are advised to look elsewhere. Radicalism of one kind or another may be the only viable alternative to liberal humanism in Doctorow’s novel, but it remains far from cause for celebration. As Daniel soberly puts it, “In a world divided in two the radical is free to choose one side or the other. That’s the radical choice.”

As previously noted, Disneyland is the site of the text’s climactic ambiguity, which occurs in arguably the novel’s most fully realized scene: Daniel’s brief visit with his parents’ friend and betrayer, Selig Mindish. Having flown to California with the intention of finally getting to the truth behind his parents’ presumed espionage, and having with some difficulty convinced a defensive Linda Mindish, Selig’s daughter, to give him an audience with her father, Daniel greets the atrophied, senile Selig under the Coca-Cola Tomorrowland Terrace:

I said, “Hello, Mr. Mindish. I’m Daniel Isaacson. I’m Paul and Rochelle’s son. Danny?”

Linda was kneeling beside him holding his hand. He struggled to understand me. His head stirred like a turtle’s head coming out of its shell. He smiled and nodded. Then as he looked in my eyes he became gradually still, and even his facial palsy ceased, and he no longer smiled. I was sickened to see water well from the congested yellow corners of his eyes. Tears tracked down his face.

“It’s all right, Papa,” Linda was saying. She patted his hand. She had begun to cry. “It’s all right, Papa.”

For one moment of recognition he was restored to life. In wonder he raised his large, clumsy hand and touched the side of my face. He found the back of my neck and pulled me forward and leaned toward me and touched the top of my head with his palsied lips.

This is how the chapter ends, and with it Daniel’s prolonged search for the “real” truth about his parents. “The truth was beyond reclamation,” he admits as he proceeds to “do” Paul and Rochelle’s electrocution. Daniel thus exposes the myth of History as an objective or essential past reality for what it truly is: a matter of guesswork, retelling and, in this case, his story.

Accompanying the disappearance of the real (or the emplotment of the real within and as conflictual discourses) we witness the continuous fragmentation and decentering of the traditional liberal humanist subject. This is the second of Doctorow’s postmodern strategies, and is carried out simultaneously on both stylistic and thematic levels. The distinction between form and content, however, is largely a bogus one, especially in postmodern novels like THE BOOK OF DANIEL which routinely foreground the “content of the(ir) form.” I employ the distinction as an organizing tool, but the text makes clear that the medium is the message. Consider the novel’s opening:

On Memorial Day in 1967 Daniel Lewin thumbed his way from New York to Worcester, Mass., in just under five hours. With him was his young wife, Phyllis, and their eight-month-old son, Paul, whom Daniel carried in a sling chair strapped to his shoulders like a pack. The day was hot and overcast with the threat of rain, and the early morning traffic was wondering–I mean the early morning traffic was light, but not many drivers could pass them without wondering who they were and where they were going.

This is a Thinline felt tip marker, black. This is Composition Notebook 79C made in U.S.A. by Long Island Paper Products, Inc. This is Daniel trying one of the dark coves of the Browsing Room. Books for browsing are on the shelves. I sit at a table with a floor lamp at my shoulder …

The abrupt metafictional intrusion–“This is a Thinline felt tip marker,” etc.–is Daniel-as-author’s first of many attempts to ground his narrative in the real in the face of a vertiginous past. And yet in the very same passage subjectivity undercuts his would-be objectivity as the omniscient third person voice is subverted by an abrupt–and as it were, involuntary–slippage into the first person. This undermining of “critical distance,” to use Frederic Jameson’s phrase, is a constant throughout, as I becomes he becomes I becomes he (and sometimes becomes Paul or Rochelle or Jacob Ascher, the Isaacsons’ lawyer) in bewildering rhythms and involutions. This process explodes the notion of a discrete, coherent, unified self.

The vast majority of criticism on THE BOOK OF DANIEL assumes a hermeneutical approach, reading Daniel’s narrative as a Bildungsroman (admittedly, a twisted one) which concludes with a sense of self-discovery. While it’s true that Daniel escapes death-by-paralysis, the “self” he ultimately discovers is unthinkable in, say, a Dickens novel.

Daniel himself suggests as much, labeling the more traditional aspects of his narrative “David Copperfield kind of crap.” The narrative “I,” the linchpin of the classic realist “novel as Private I”–with its presumptions of freedom, self-reliance and linear development–is shown to be always already produced, spoken, circumscribed. “Caught at the center of … conflicting generational forces,” explains Reed, “Daniel Isaacson’s story is one of learning the extent to which he, the ostensible narrator, is also in many ways the narrated.”

The paradox Daniel uncovers through writing is properly postmodern, as he finds himself authoring the story he has himself been authored by. Over the course of his career, according to Harpham’s essay “E. L. Doctorow and the Technology of Narrative,” Doctorow “has approached the position that there is no such thing as a uniquely human character, that the self is both the cause and effect of processes and elements generally thought of as external to the self.” I would only diverge from Harpham’s assessment by urging that this process is already complete in THE BOOK OF DANIEL.

Carmichael has argued that the novel juxtaposes “two literary modes–realism and postmodernism–as a method for bridging the two historical eras in which those modes prevailed: the pre-Rosenberg period of the old left, and the post-Rosenberg period of the 1960s and the New Left.” I agree that the novel places these two periods in opposition, along with the notions of “individual” and “subject” which respectively characterize them. But Carmichael’s view of purely “realistic” and “postmodern” literary modes, in addition to ignoring an important middle term (modernism), strikes me as naive.

A more productive way of reading Daniel’s narrative, in my opinion, is as an example of Bakhtinian heteroglossia. In addition to elements of the dissertation form, the text appropriates virtually every “literary” genre imaginable: realism, metafiction, historiography, confession, letters, diaries, journalism, advertising, notes to the reader, etc. Such a bouillabaisse of genres, rather than being gratuitous as some critics have claimed, constitutes a veritable recipe for critiquing any totalizing system, be it literary or political, individual or universal. This is an invasive novel in which the public is private, and the private is public, in which the long arm of the law literally comes into the home, in which personal letters become party documents, in which small children are used as pawns in a political struggle of great historical consequence. Daniel’s book is a purposeful refusal of simple ideologies of the discrete self and, by extension, of a unified national identity.

Such masculist capitalist ideologies (to use Carmichael’s phrase) are made manifest in the reification of antagonistic categories: patriot versus communist, American versus un-American (as in HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee), New Left versus Old Left, white versus black, light versus darkness. Categories are just words, of course, but as Doctorow/Daniel portrays them, they take on a life of their own, assume a physicality of sorts as dangerous as any bullet.

Consider, for example, the harrowing scene following the Paul Robeson concert, in which the bus transporting the Isaacson family and their fellow travelers is attacked by reactionaries: “Flying in with the rocks, like notes tied to them with string, the words kike, commie bastard, jew commie, red. I listen carefully. Jew. Commie. Red. Nigger. Bastard. Kike. Niggerlover. Red. Jew bastard. These words are shouted. The rocks, some of them as big as my head, are propelled by the motives of education. ‘We’ll teach you!’ the enraged voices cry. ‘This will teach you, you commie bastard kikes!’”

“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.” Daniel’s description challenges this puerile “truism” as epithets rain down with the rocks, like the rocks, on the people trapped inside the stalled bus. This is just before Daniel’s father, indignant at such injustice, attempts to intervene and the patriots snap his arm like a stick of wood. This is one of countless moments in the novel when categories serve as catalysts for violence. The point is that categories may be only words, possessing no empirical reality, but they affect how people think about the world, and that affects how they act in it.

Labeled “spies” with little or no factual evidence to back up such a claim, the Isaacsons, like the Rosenbergs, acquire firsthand knowledge of the power of categories to define and destroy. Paul LevineButler puts it beautifully in his discussion of the fatal error of both the Old Left, typified by Paul Isaacson, and the New (represented by Sternlicht). “Like Paul, [Sternlicht] underestimates the repressive power of the state and overestimates the revolutionary power of the individual,” writes Levine. “According to Sternlicht, society is a ‘put-on’ sustained by the inertia of authority which can be exposed as simple illusion. Society may be a put-on but it still has the power to electrocute you.”

This kind of authority is what Doctorow in “False Documents” calls the “power of the regime.” He equates this power with the soft terrorism (the phrase is Lyotard’s) of rational empiricist thinking, which he subsumes under the label “realism.” Opposing such naturalized and naturalizing authority is the “power of freedom,” basically another name for fiction. Harpham cleverly demonstrates how this essay, which dichotomizes the real and the imaginary only to collapse the distinction between them under the rubric of narrative, “is itself an especially complicated kind of false document,” one that proves its point (like the Rosenberg/Isaacson case) by resisting true/false (or guilty/not guilty) interpretations.

Indeed, one could argue that the central thrust of Doctorow’s fiction is against precisely such binary thinking. In THE BOOK OF DANIEL resistance to realism takes various forms, most prominently at the level of style, where objectivity is repeatedly undercut by subjectivity, omniscience diluted by ignorance.

For example, in the scene described above where Paul suffers a broken arm, Daniel, who finds himself squeezed down between the seats under his mother’s protective embrace and in no position to witness the events he recounts, briefly interrupts his narrative to ask, “How do I know this?” A non sequitur within the context, the question nevertheless obsesses Daniel, who returns to it over and over. How does one know anything? What is truth? Where and how to seek it? This is where the power of freedom intervenes, the power of fiction to know in ways unavailable to the regime of science, to go places off-limits to traditional, “objective” historiography. A “criminal of perception” since childhood, Daniel-as-artist is a born social critic able to see around and through, and even beyond, the stultifying binary “logic” which perpetuates U. S. terrorism at home and abroad.

This brings up the role of the reader, who is also, like the writer-as-witness, a “criminal of perception,” an involved observer in the (hi)story being created: “The monstrous reader who goes on from one word to the next. The monstrous writer who places one word after another.” “I suppose you think I can’t do the electrocution,” Daniel addresses the reader toward the end of the novel. “I know there is a you. There has always been a you. YOU: I will show you that I can do the electrocution.”

In the cruel scene where Daniel prepares to burn his wife with a cigarette lighter, the reader is practically defined as a voyeur: “Who are you anyway?” Daniel interrupts his narrative to ask. “Who told you you could read this? Is nothing sacred?” On the subject of the responsibility of the contemporary novelist, Doctorow has written, “At issue is the human mind, which has to be shocked, seduced, or otherwise provoked out of its habitual stupor.” And yet one of the most “shocking” passages in the novel never even occurs. Instead, Daniel’s act of sadism practiced on his wife is replaced by a description of the famous scene in Buñuel’s UN CHIEN ANDALOU where the razor slices the eyeball.

This substitution explicitly calls attention to the blindness inherent in seeing. I believe Doctorow/Daniel stops short of deconstructing the narrative project of creating consciousness into an abysmal, de Manian blindness of insight. But the text does point in a very postmodern way to the problems and ambiguities produced in the act of recognition. No such recognition is ever impartial. The scientist is always part of the experiment. As writers and as readers, we’re unavoidably complicit in–and at least partially, blind to–the narratives we produce and which simultaneously produce us.

Thus far this essay has been concerned to demonstrate the extent to which THE BOOK OF DANIEL is a meditation on the nature and effects of discursive categories. The novel is also, as I’ve argued, a dramatization of the necessity of taking action in an uncertain world. The rhetoricizing of the real and the decentering of the subject serve not as excuses for avoiding, but as incitements to performance. As Butler has eloquently written, “The deconstruction of identity is not the deconstruction of politics; rather, it establishes as political the very terms through which identity is articulated.”

This brings us to the third important ramification of Butler’s theory as articulated in GENDER TROUBLE and enumerated in my previous essay “Postmodern Politics: The Rhetoric of the Referent & the Performance of Identity”: categories cannot be escaped, but they can be modified. And they are modified in a very particular way: through performance. Referring to his merciless impersonation of the Inertia Kid, Daniel confesses that it was “the only time in my life I have ever performed. I haven’t got a performing nature.” But this expression of false modesty should fool no one: since childhood Daniel has lived in the spotlight. Indeed, his very existence is inscribed within a textual performance of considerable skill and magnitude, a performance which in its turns describes numerous performances, large and small.

Daniel’s acts of rebellion and resistance (including his narrative) may very well be complicit with or co-opted by the system, but they are not only complicit and co-opted. As Butler has clearly demonstrated, subversion operates within, not outside, the system. Daniel’s quest for a political alternative to the liberal humanist Old Left and the ahistorical, narcissistic New Left is as unsuccessful as his search for the truth about his parents. In the end his only recourse is to make the best of a difficult situation, to take up the tools where they lie and get busy challenging, however tentatively, the government that has destroyed his family.

Referring to the 1967 antiwar March on the Pentagon during which Daniel is beaten up and imprisoned, Reed has written that with “his sister’s death Daniel gives up the possibility of escaping the stories History is telling and instead gives himself to the best story he can find: the problematic but honorable story of resistance being written by the protesting bodies of young women and men of the New Left.” Daniel’s political performance–which includes both the antiwar gesture itself and the narrative act of articulating it–may be problematic, but it’s hardly without hope.

No reading of THE BOOK OF DANIEL would be complete without at least briefly addressing the novel’s three endings. Some critics have taken the plurality of endings as an instance of postmodern indeterminacy. Morris goes a step further, claiming, “It is hard to think of an ending that more dramatically trashes the idea of meaning in an ending.” Needless to say, I vehemently disagree. Rather, I believe with Carmichael that the novel’s three endings “follow instead a progressive logic … having to do with saying goodbye to outmoded forms of life and stepping down into the world from the security of a purely mental and reflective environment.” In this spirit I propose the following interpretations:

1. THE HOUSE. Daniel’s return to a home no longer his own, a home which effectively no longer exists, mirrors his progressive realization that the past “real” is inaccessible. A postmodern rewriting of the modernist fable, this ending demonstrates that YOU CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN. Literally. Daniel is exiled from the objective historical past in the direction of an undetermined, conjectural future. “Exile for the intellectual,” writes Edward Said, “… is restlessness, movement, constantly being unsettled, and unsettling others.” I find this to be an accurate description of Daniel’s narrative.

2. THE FUNERAL. The funeral referred to is actually two funerals: Daniel’s parents’ and his sister’s. One way of interpreting the conflation of the two is to view them together as symbolic of the death of revolution. Describing Susan’s funeral, which takes place on “one of those peculiar days of warmth with spring leaking through,” Daniel writes, “It is the kind of day the crocuses get fucked, exposing their petaled insides of delicate hue, yellow and white, lavender and flesh, to the spring. And it is too soon. It’s a miscalculation. Crocus, first flower, dead flower, flower of revolutionaries.” Revolutionary ideals, whether those of the Old Left (Paul and Rochelle) or the New (Susan), are doomed–at least for now–to failure. Daniel’s description recalls Susan’s “THEY’RE STILL FUCKING US,” a veritable refrain throughout the novel, where us might refer to anyone willing to challenge the powers-that-be. It’s important to note that Daniel has chosen not to be a crocus. They’re still fucking him, but he’ll live to fight another day. A different fight, with different rules.

3. THE LIBRARY. At some point the narrative, like all narratives, must end. At some point it’s necessary to leave the stacks and “see what’s going down.” Daniel has been “liberated,” but as he has come to realize, words mean nothing until they are made to mean. And words are made to mean by being performatively transformed into discrete acts by discrete bodies. The critical importance of this transubstantiation–of the word literally being made flesh–is suggested, ironically, by the biblical citation which concludes the text: “Go thy way Daniel: for the words are closed up and sealed till the time of the end.” Hutcheon observes that these “words of closure are of closure sous rature, so to speak …as [they] are opened up (not closed up) by our act of reading.”

Thus the ultimate performative transubstantiation occurs–or fails to occur–in the reader. Daniel’s book has “opened up” new ways of thinking of resistance, scripted new possibilities for political action that need to be explored. It is up to us as players in the human drama to make good on by embodying them.

[Sol Luckman is author of the internationally acclaimed nonfiction Conscious Healing: Book One on the Regenetics Method and the Beginner's Luke Series of novels. Luke's signature obsessions with self, sex, satire and slapdash highlight a serious, and life-changing, point: consciousness creates. The point is there is a point to living in the imagination–for only through it can we reinvent our ourselves and our world. Currently, the author is giving away FREE copies of Beginner's Luke. To take advantage of this special offer, click here.]