[In honor of May Day/International Workers’ Day, a series on some compelling cultural representations of communism in American history and identity. Leading up to a special weekend post on contemporary communist culture!]
On two distinct
but complementary postmodern historical novels.
As I wrote in this
post on American hypocrites, Tony Kushner’s play Angels
in America (1991-1993) includes one of the most searing and tragic
depictions of McCarthyism: Kushner’s portrayal of Roy Cohn, and most especially
of Cohn’s literally and
figuratively haunting conversations with the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg,
whose conviction and demise a young Cohn helped ensure and who becomes in
Kushner’s imagining the last “person” to speak with Cohn before his own death
from AIDS. And Kushner isn’t alone is capitalizing upon Ethel Rosenberg’s
literary and symbolic qualities, as the famous communist (whether guilty
of espionage or not, she certainly was that) and her husband also occupy a
complex and central place in two of the most significant late 20th
century American historical novels: E.L. Doctorow’s The
Book of Daniel (1971) and Robert Coover’s The
Public Burning (1977).
Scholar Linda
Hutcheon developed a new category, “historiographic
metafiction,” to describe postmodern historical novels, works that put
history and fiction in complex and often playful interrelationship and that do
so in self-aware and –reflective ways. Both Doctorow’s and Coover’s novels fit
aspects of this category, but in very different ways: Doctorow’s novel is
narrated by the son of a fictionalized version of the Rosenbergs (known in his
novel as the Isaacsons), and it is the narrator Daniel’s awareness of his own
project, audience, and historical significance that makes the book truly
postmodern; whereas Coover’s novel’s most prominent characters include not only
Ethel Rosenberg but also Richard Nixon (who serves as one of the text’s main
perspectives) and Uncle Sam (who is a folksy and vulgar chorus of sorts,
appearing periodically to comment on the action). Needless to say, despite
their shared subject matter, only one of the novels produced a significant
controversy upon its publication.
Yet if we
consider that shared subject matter, and more exactly the question of how
fiction can help us engage with difficult and divisive historical subjects more
generally, it seems to me that Doctorow’s and Coover’s books complement each
other quite nicely. Coover’s is biting and angry, lashing out at the kinds of
hysterias and extremes that McCarthyism exemplified (whether the Rosenbergs
were guilty or not) and that Uncle
Sam’s America has always included. Doctorow’s is intimate and tragic,
considering the legacies of such histories on the individuals and families, as
well as the communities and nation, that experience them. Coover focuses on the
most public moments and figures, Doctorow on the most private effects and
lives. Together, they help us remember that every American history and issue,
even the Cold War boogeyman of communism, became and remains a part of our
communal and human landscapes as well.
Next cultural
communism tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Cultural representations of communism you’d highlight?
No comments:
Post a Comment