Thoughts on The Book of Daniel

I'm in the midst of revising an article on E.L. Doctorow's The Book of Daniel, and am using Blogger to both get a different view on different paragraphs and lexias from my text and to back up my writing in yet another place.

A critical element of Daniel’s vicious eroticism is Daniel’s role as a teacher, the older man who instructs and educates Phyllis. There are multiple levels at play here: on the one hand, Daniel is, as an ABD PhD student on the verge of becoming a professor, literally a professional pedagogue, and his text is laced with academic analyses and observations. On the other hand, Daniel assumes the role of Phyllis’s mentor from the very beginning of their relationship. After meeting at a “Central Park Be-In,” Daniel takes Phyllis to his apartment where he wows her with his intellectualism by playing some Bartók and amazing her with the “numbers of books” (56). He reports: “I suggested to her that fucking was a philosophical act of considerable importance (57). Daniel’s suggestion is, as he acknowledges, part of his seduction strategy, a come-on line intended to get Phyllis into bed (“I knew that in deference to this possibility she would allow herself to be fucked”). Yet Daniel’s sentiments should not be dismissed too quickly. What is interesting is how the novel’s “strong erotic content” reinforces this postulate, which, ironically, proves to be something of a prophetic utterance. The irony lies in the fact that the prophecy is largely self-fulfilling, as the eroticized rhetoric in genreal and the sex scenes between Daniel and Phyllis in particular suggest that, by the novel’s present, Daniel has truly come to believe in the philosophical import of fucking. For Daniel, sex is integral to the formation of one’s (political) subjectivity. As Phyllis’s instructor and tormentor, Daniel aims to use sex to teach his wife a lesson about the fragility of political principles. [explain..] Daniel’s tormenting of Phyllis is an effort to convey a sense of the suffering that the Isaacsons experienced, and a fantasy that enables him to act as though he were the committed political subject that he is not.

At issue: must one experience pain and suffering in order to take a stand against it?