Doctorow Abstract

Spent most of the evening rewriting and revising an abstract for a conference that I hope to attend next year. It's only 358 words long (which still might be too verbosel; abstracts are typically under 200 words in the PMLA) so I shudder to think at how many words per minute this that averages out to be.

Ah, well, there's still a few days left in the semester to deal with everything else that must be done...

‘THEY’RE STILL FUCKING US’: SEX AND THE FAMILY MYTHOLOGY IN E.L. DOCTOROW’S THE BOOK OF DANIEL

The fate of the family in modern America, the decline of patriarchal authority, and the search for surrogate families are recurring motifs in E.L. Doctorow’s fiction. The Book of Daniel—Doctorow’s most overtly political novel and an experimental, hybridized text that mixes family history, personal memoir, sociology, political theory and pornography—fits this pattern. Through the figure of Daniel Isaacson Lewin, born to the Issacsons, a Russian-Jewish, communist immigrants (loosely modeled on the Rosenbergs) and adopted by the Lewins, more ‘respectable’ East Coast liberals, Doctorow details the demise of an ‘extended’ patriarchal family and the fracturing of a ‘nuclear’ family as they confront Cold War forces. While recent readings have illuminated how Paul and Rochelle Issacson’s trial and death function as familial and national traumas that return to haunt their children, the emphasis has remained on the family as a figure for foregrounding generational differences dividing the Old and New Left. Taking seriously Doctorow’s remark that he did not write a “documentary novel,” my paper will analyze an element in The Book of Daniel that, surprisingly, critics have largely overlooked—namely, the hyper-eroticized familial relationships depicted by Daniel, the novel’s narrator. These relationships include Daniel’s sadomasochistic and abusive relationship with his “child bride,” Phyllis; Oedipal tensions with his biological parents; and incestuous fantasies about his sister Susan and a childhood friend. By focusing on the trope of “vicious eroticism” in Daniel’s rhetoric and the analogies that Daniel makes between various sexual acts when narrating the “family mythology,” I will explain why the family becomes the privileged site in which sexual and political desires are conflated in Daniel’s mind. My reading will be informed by Michel Foucault’s observation that modern forms of biopower effected a shift from a ‘symbolics of blood ‘to an ‘analytics of sexuality.’ That is, I will argue that if the subjectivizing effects of Daniel’s discourse is taken into account, then The Book of Daniel, i.e., the ostensibly real “false document” we’re reading, appears to be far less of a liberating or therapeutic project than many critics have previously supposed.