Nickolas Herman

Master’s Dossier

Prof. Harvey Teres

May 1, 1998

The Novel as Rescuing Critique: Postmodernism,

Narrative, and Moral History in The Book of Daniel

In examining The Book of Daniel by E.L. Doctorow, it is extremely important to keep in mind the proper critical framework in which this novel should be read. Rudiger Kunow writes that although "the historical novel has for a long time now become a marginal if not defunct genre" (Kunow1 373), novels which deal with history and historical representation are a prominent part of the postmodern cultural landscape. Kunow calls these "metafictions," and calls their domain "the problematics of...the conjuncture of narrative discourse and historical representation" (Kunow1 372). The Book of Daniel serves as one instance in which narrative--the longstanding compass for the writing of history--is itself made the focus of fiction through the problematic treatment of historical events.

To read Doctorow's novel is to witness the working-through and interrogation of numerous competing modes of historical discourse. This creates an artifact which carries out an internal inquiry into theories of history, and this inquiry is grounded in the conviction that conscious representation--exemplified by the art of the novel, in this case--is one crucially necessary "theory" among those explored. Narrative art, in all its diverse and sometimes contradictory elements, becomes the lens through which a range of historical sensibilities are viewed; the conditions of the novel form thus infiltrate and redefine historical sensibility. Doctorow's book is a site in which neither the category of art (i.e. literature) nor that of history are taken for granted.

Under these circumstances, I will seek in this paper to generate a reading of The Book of Daniel in the context of the historical-theoretical criticism offered by Kunow, Hayden White, and Walter Benjamin. All three writers investigate thoroughly the conceptual issues raised by the "conjuncture" (Kunow’s term) of narrative and historical discourse, and although Benjamin wrote during the pre-World War II era, he shares with Kunow and White a skepticism toward the chief Modernist "master narratives" that places them in a common terrain of postmodern thought. Moreover, all three recognize at varying levels the central importance of moral discourse--expressed in concepts as various as revolution, Fascism, violence, remembrance of the oppressed, and cultural mores--in defining the relation between narrative and history. History must confront the questions of right and wrong, legitimacy, and human progress, and narrative as history’s traditional form must make these moral categories the basis of its interpretaton of events. As White writes, "the greatest historians have always dealt with those events in the histories of their cultures which are 'traumatic' in nature" (White2 87). The representations of history carry the burden of reconciliation with those discourses of suffering and responsibility we name moral.

Grounded in the experience of the Isaacson family, the children of which were, Doctorow writes, "like figures in a myth who suffer the same fate no matter which version is told" (Doctorow 63), The Book of Daniel also includes the moral dimension in an acute and highly developed form. Through readings of Kunow, White, Benjamin, and the novel, in fact, I will seek to demonstrate how it is ultimately the critique of moral concepts that both sets Benjamin's historical-narrative theory on a higher plane of sophistication than that of either Kunow or White and makes Benjamin's "rescuing critique" (Habermas2 136-7) the subtler guide to discerning the complexities of Doctorow's novel. Benjamin’s theory, by exploring the profound implications of serial concepts of time for both aesthetic and moral experience, offers a more powerful interpretation of Daniel as well as a more comprehensive analysis of the meaning of narrative.

The question of narrative and history forms the basis for two essays by Rudiger Kunow, "Making Sense of History: The Sense of the Past in Postmodern Times" (1989), and "Without Telos or Subject? Coover's and Doctorow's Presentations of History" (1990). In both essays, Kunow offers chiefly a summary and explication of the postmodern historiographic scene. However, he does gradually defend several significant positions on postmodern historical thought.

He writes that works of postmodern American fiction, including novels by Doctorow, Pynchon, Coover, and Reed, "expose...the narrative dimension of...meaning-endowment, and in doing so, they possess important affinities with contemporary historiography" (Kunow2 195). Kunow believes that the postmodern fictionist is engaged in a process whereby the nature of history as a mode of thought is examined through exercises in aesthetic practice. Moreover, according to Kunow, contemporary historiography is in turn acutely aware of the aesthetic dimension of historical discourse:

...Both the text as an organized/organizing structural unity and its elements, e.g. beginnings and ends, are to be understood not only for their aesthetic function but also for the way in which they define or impinge on the version/vision of history presented in the respective textual form. (Kunow1 375)

This analysis is reasonable and profitable in Kunow's assessment because "fiction and history can be taken as having in narrative their common basic mode of operation" (Kunow1 377).

Despite the extent of Kunow's project of linking historical discourse with narrative, a great deal of his own conclusions branch off from the observation that it is often the failure of narrative to provide a successful pattern for history-making that becomes the focus of the work of both theorists and novelists. He writes that due to Lyotard's critique of "grand narratives," "the difficulties, rather than the successes, encountered in the narrativization of history [become] centrally important" (Kunow1 377). In other words, despite Kunow's cataloguing of the widespread belief that historical discourse bears profound similarity to fictional narrative, the resolution--the point of resolve, the frame of conclusion, the gesture toward future criticism as it were--that his writing invokes is the profound disparity and irreconcilability of the two discourse-modes.

Kunow reads in the postmodern manifestation of the modernist project a profound questioning of the capacity of history to yield reliable knowledge. Postmodern works of fiction

forego the modernist technique of re-instrumentalizing history as an organon of knowledge by establishing a contrast between contemporary chaos and ideal historical order. Instead, these novels establish a contrast between the inherited fiction of a humanized history and their own fictions of history. (Kunow2 189)

Rather than viewing the present as a time in which history has been made temporarily unreliable, postmodern historical discourse finds historical modes themselves suspect and in fact subverts its own capacity to make substantive claims based on historical analyses. Where modernism saw the moment of creative intellectual activity at the disjuncture between a chaotic present and an ordered (perhaps imaginary) past of artifice and intellect represented in the cultural tradition, postmodernism defines the potentially creative disjuncture as that between the present ability to make unreliable fictions and the cultural past in which fictions were thought to be reliable and transparent. Kunow quotes Jameson as authoritative: "what this narrative does is 'rendering' History by its thoroughgoing demonstration of the impossibility of narrating this unthinkable dimension of collective reality" (Kunow2 196).

In addition to defining as disjuncture and irreconcilable aporia the moment of creativity in postmodern narrative-historical discourse, Kunow includes prominently in his conclusions the moral ingredient of this problematic. He calls the relation between narrative and historical discourses both an "aporia" and a "dialectic" (a term laden with Hegelian connotations of productive antithesis), and asks "how can we retain in narrative a sense of the suffering and pain inflicted in the historical continuum without reverting to a holistic, totalizing tale of history" (Kunow1 388). It is, then, the irreconcilability of any moral narrativization of suffering with the dictum that narratives cannot be made "grand" or authoritative that produces the aporia marking and fueling both postmodern fiction and postmodern historiography.

Kunow's surprisingly resigned reaction to this aporia between human suffering and the effectiveness of our discourse upon it is notable in his final stance or tone of critical completion. Apparently concerned both to preserve the stature of narrative and relieve it of its burden of moral regeneration, he writes

It may well be that the decline of narrative reflects less a condition of decadence than a sickness unto death with the stories that representatives of official culture are always invoking to justify the sacrifices and sufferings of the citizenry.... The problem may not be how to get into history but how to get out of it. (Kunow2 196-7)

Kunow makes no convincing or systematic distinction between "official" and "unofficial" narratives. This leads to the suspicion that while it is often necessary in Kunow's brand of narrative theory to avoid the task of defining precisely what form of narrative could be held truly morally accountable, it remains imperative to assert the apocryphal possibility of such accountability. Kunow's rather loose suggestion (compared to Benjamin's rigorous account of how the historical continuum can be broken open and liberation of moral life can occur) of "getting out of history" is further qualified when Kunow, somewhat bleakly, quotes Jameson: "History is what hurts....its alienating necessities will not forget us, however much we might prefer to ignore them" (Kunow 2:197).

The lack of development of the links among these interconnected concepts of history, narrative, and morality is the chief deficiency of Kunow's assessment of the best possible theoretical work in these areas. It is difficult to find any significant dissatisfaction in Kunow with the largely impenetrable and enigmatic state in which he leaves the definitive aporia implicit in his model of postmodern thought. By contrast, later in this paper I will seek to illustrate how is it precisely the strength of the links made by Benjamin in these same areas that distinguishes his theoretical reflections from Kunow's. Despite the taboo Hegelianism in the notion of productive dialectic, it is in precisely the instability of Kunow's aporia that Benjamin finds the true development of (and out of) historical and narrative discourse into a defensible integration of the past, moral imperatives, and present-time discourse.

In The Content of the Form and Tropics of Discourse, also seeks to articulate what Kunow calls "probably the most full-fledged narrativist theory of history" (Kuno1 376). White sees narrative as not only fundamental to the historical sense, but as a basic human mode of thought. He writes:

So natural is the impulse to narrate, so inevitable is the form of narrative for any report on the way things really happened, that narrativity could appear problematical only in a culture in which it was absent--or...programmatically refused. (White1 1)

White quotes nostalgically Barthes' statement that "narrative 'is simply there like life itself'" (White1 1), and adds that "far from being one code among many that a culture may utilize for endowing experience with meaning, narrative is a meta-code, a human universal" (White1 1). Not to underestimate White's adherence to the value of narrative meaning, he states absolutely that "the absence of narrative capacity or refusal of narrative indicates an absence or refusal of meaning itself" (White1 2).

Narrative is, in White's view, of particular importance in the creation of historical discourse. It is the susceptibility of events to a narrative representation that makes them achieve the status of "history," which is not an attribute intrinsic to events themselves but resides only in our discursive construction of them. History is thus a construction, but not all constructions (or discourses) qualify as history. White writes,

It is not enough that [events] be recorded in the order of their original occurrence....the historical account endows this reality [of events] with form and thereby makes it desirable by the imposition upon its processes of the formal coherency that only stories possess.

(White 1 20)

Historical representation is uniquely able, through creating the appearance that events fit the formal pattern of story, to make our perception of events "desirable;" "only stories" can offer the coherency and sense, it seems, to generate this desire.

In the context of this association of narrative with the ability to generate historical meanings, White, like Kunow, also finds a highly productive source of meaning in the "difficulties" or aporias that arise in the process of combining narrative with historical events. Though White's aporias are not specifically those dealing with the methodological difficulty of representing suffering, White most certainly places the "traumatic event" susceptible to multiple interpretations at the center of his view of history. He writes,

Where moral sensitivity is lacking, as it seems to be in an annalistic account of reality...not only meaning but the means to track such shifts of meaning, that is, narrative, appears to be lacking also. Where... narrativity is present, we can be sure that...a moralizing impulse is too. (White1 23-24)

The aporia that makes narrative and historical representation function is the moment of struggle between systems of authority, or more specifically, that form of authority which is able to endow events with moral meanings. The uncertainty or potential for divergent meanings is the moment of historical representation, and the site of both the defintion and evolution of moral regimes: "What else could narrative closure consist of than the passage from one moral order to another?" (White1 23).

In these reflections, White is clearly both affirming the intrinsic value of narrative in the historical mode, and also establishing the ways in which historical events resist the imposition of a narrative model of reality upon them. It is in fact this resistance, the non-givenness of the narrative account of events, that makes historical narrative productive of relevant cultural meanings. For White, the concern is not (as with Kunow) that any discussion of the moral in historical narrative may lead to an over-extended master-narrative; rather, because every moral discourse is narrative in origin the dilemma lies not in using narrative in a moral context, but only in the struggle between competing uses. That narrative does not exactly fit events makes moral discourse possible.

While White clearly discusses a broad range of the nature of effects derived from the use of narrative in historical representation, particularly in the area of generating moral meanings, there are nevertheless numerous areas where Benjamin's theory surpasses that of White in sophistication and subtlety. Benjamin's advantages lie in his superior reconciliation of divergent elements in the cultural framework surrounding morality, history, and narrative. While White acknowledges that the “annalistic,” or non-interpretive and chronological, ordering of events lacks the capacity to imbue events with moral significance, he neglects to theorize the powerful relevance of linearity (the sole concept of the annal) that narrative retains. White does not consider the possibility of a more radical concept of the Jetztzeit (Benjamin’s term), or “time filled with the presence of the now,” a powerful alternative to “homogeneous, empty [i.e. linear] time” (Benjamin 254) that permeates both annal and narrative. The weakness of of narrative, in Benjamin’s view, is its inability to access either the moral or aesthetic meaning-potential accessible only within the framework of the Jetztzeit.

White, somewhat surprisingly, hesitates to equate history with fiction, writing that "the relationship between historiography and literature is, of course, as tenuous and difficult to define as that between historiography and science" (White1 44). (Given the bulk of argument offered in support of history as narrative, this statement is rather confusing.) He does grant that the links of narrativist historical theory with literature exist, but feels obliged to add that

This affiliation of narrative historiography with literature and myth should provide no reason for embarrassment, however, because the systems of meaning production shared by all three are distillates of the historical experience of a people, a group, a culture. (White1 45)

Numerous critiques of White's methods can be generated by examining this passage from the point of view of some of Benjamin's writings. One point of entry for such a critique of White can be found in Benjamin's argument that "It [cultural history] increases the burden of treasures that is piled on the back of humanity. But it does not bestow upon us the power to shake it off, so as to put it at our disposal" (Habermas 2:130). Where White is striving to protect his view of an aestheticized or imagination-based concept of history, and grounds his argument in aesthetic history's capacity to "distill" and accumulate cultural meanings, Benjamin takes the critique one step further: he implicates aesthetic creations in the very historical problems which historical representation seeks to illuminate. To accept the aesthetic as the source of the historical sense is to immunize that aesthetic from the interrogation of historicized concepts of the aesthetic; the validity of an aesthetic history is only as great as the historical legitimacy of that aesthetic. In this regard, White must be seen as freezing the instabilities in the history/narrative aporia rather than blasting them open.

Benjamin places the critical tension in history, in fact, at the locus of the artifact. He writes, "there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism" (Benjamin 256). He reiterates this idea of negative accumulation in his discussion in "Theses on the Philosophy of History" of Klee's "Angelus Novus," in which the angel's gaze

is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed....[but a] storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned....This storm is what we call progress. (Benjamin 258)

Clearly, the idea that simply because literature and myth serve to accumulate meanings, to "distill" them, there is no necessary cause to view this accumulation as progress except perhaps in some diabolical, nightmare sense.

White's confidence in the historical effectivity of the aesthetic nature of myth and literature is thus undermined, particularly if the equation can be made between the "wreckage" piling up at Klee's angel's feet and the aesthetic artifact. Benjamin's warning against "the burden of treasures" certainly carries the suggestion of such an equation. Also, Benjamin writes in great depth on the process of "overcoming of culture [Aufhebung der Kultur]" (Habermas2 131), and how "Beauty will find a new embodiment when it no longer is represented as real illusion but, instead, expresses reality and joy in reality" (Habermas2 132). That cultural artifacts of every type often fall into this category of catastrophic wreckage and "burden of treasures" is certain. What makes Benjamin's analysis complex (and thus more rigorous) is that distinctions are made between artifactual practices which mask the potential to emerge from catastrophic history and those which carry through the emergence, in gradual steps, into a messianic now. The accumulation of moments of messianic time or "Jetztzeit" can (and certainly does) occur at times through artifacts, but by no means do all artifacts always participate in this positive accumulation. Benjamin's assessment of the historical valence of the aesthetic, then, includes numerous layers and differentiated processes--through which aesthetic production remains bound to a linear historical paradigm that permeates both the aesthetic and political spheres--which are largely absent from White's account. Moreover, there is clearly a moral ingredient in Benjamin's concern about the effect of the aesthetic artifact on humanity--he sees it as a potential burden, potential catastrophe, and never a morally neutral "distillate" or record.

The advantage of Benjamin's historical theory over White's is illustrated further in the numerous instances where White suggests ideas with strong similarities to Benjamin's, but is either unwilling to develop them fully or unable to without contradicting and undermining his other claimsTake, for example, White's assessment that

all narrative is not simply a recording of "what happened" in the transition from one state of affairs to another, but a progressive redescription of sets of events in such a way as to dismantle a structure encoded in one verbal mode in the beginning so as to justify a recoding of it in another mode at the end. This is what the "middle" of all narratives consist of. (White2 98)

Here White is trying literally to place the process of the evolution of meanings within--"in the middle"--of a discursive form, i.e. narrative. This could well account for White's belief that narrative is not "one code among others," but a universal, because no matter what permutations of cultural discourse occur they will always be bounded by the form which iself enables change.

The flaw or weakness in this argument is clearly the risk of tautology; to argue that since narrative accommodates all change it must itself be unchanging avoids the possible forms of change that evolve "verbal modes" to forms not reconcilable with narrative. Benjamin also recognizes the transformation of discourse that can occur within artifacts, but he articulates this transformation in both subtler and more complex concepts. "Rescuing critique" is the name Benjamin gives to the mode of criticism which

aims...at rescuing a past charged with the Jetztzeit. It ascertains the moments in which the artistic sensibility puts a stop to fate draped as progress and enciphers the utopian experience in a dialectical image....[artifacts] have to be revived in another, as it were, awaited present and brought to readability for the sake of being preserved as tradition for authentic progress. (Habermas2 138)

Clearly, Benjamin wishes to discern the moments of change that occur within artifacts. However, the true change the artifact creates may have to lifted out of the artifact itself--out of the chain of tradition and formal language in which it occurred--in order not to be lost to "authentic progress."

The point here is that where White seems to consider all changes that occur within narratives to be containable within narrative as a form (hence the form's durability, historiographical preeminence, etc.), Benjamin acknowledges a much greater complexity in the transformations that can occur within discourse-moments--even to the point of transcending or "blasting open" the continuum of narrative models. In a passage with strong linkages to the Isaacsons in Doctorow's novel (as the threatened dead), Habermas summarizes the necessity of the conservative/revolutionary action of rescuing criticism as follows: "The enemy that threatens the dead as much as the living when rescuing criticism is missing and forgetting takes its place remained one and the same: the dominance of mythic fate" (Habermas2 137). Again, it is a moral obligation to both living and dead humanity (and perhaps culture) that requires we resist the "forgetting" of the formally self-transcendent potentials within artifacts by accepting a false view of progress as cumulative reiterations of mythic--or literary-mythological narrative--discourse continuums. White's deficiency vis-a-vis Benjamin's aesthetic-historical theory here also bears a moral cast.

Benjamin's thought, like that of Kunow and White, centers around an aporia or energizing point of paradoxical contradiction. This point of indeterminacy in Benjamin lies at the location where, in historical representation, "the time of the now...[is] blasted out of the continuum of history" (Benjamin 261). (To call this moment an aporia involves some license; my intent is to draw parallels between three critics' characterization of a certain temporal or dialectical moment of meaning-creation. For Benjamin, the moment of "blasting open" is a starting point for his thought and not, as in Kunow, a sort of end point. All three emphasize this moment's unpredictability, and characterize it as--from certain discursive standpoints--unexpressible or "unnarratable," that is, not representable in all terminologies.)

Radiating outward, as it were, from this moment of the blasting open of history, are three further categories: the first is the concept of the "Jetztzeit," or "time of the now," which is not strictly the present but the present infused with all meanings relevant to it. The second is the concept of rescuing critique, which carries out the transfer of meaning from its entrapment in the continuum of history to the moment of the Jetztzeit. The third and last is the idea of "correspondences and connections" (Habermas2 144) that characterizes meaning in the reclaimed or reconstructed Jetztzeit.

In "Theses on the Philosophy of History," Benjamin discusses the idea of blasting open the continuum of history. However, in order to set up this discussion he needs to define this continuum, that is, what sort of temporal structure it is that will be shattered to usher in another one. He writes,

The concept of the historical progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through homogeneous, empty time. A critique of the concept of such a progression must be the basis of any criticism of the concept of progress itself. (Benjamin 261)

What Benjamin objects to is the idea that with the accumulation of repeated moments of time automatically comes progress. Like the Angel in Klee's painting, Benjamin's perspective is that of a witness to a drawing onward of a temporal continuum which holds meaning in its grip. The faculty and discourse which Benjamin wishes to restore is that faculty whose temporal-contemplative relation to events and objects is lost due to the overpowering force of a temporal system which sees history as linear and constantly "starting over" (homogeneous and empty) rather than as the construction of a continuing cognitive present--the Angel's gaze.

In opposition to homogeneous, empty time, Benjamin offers the idea of the Jetztzeit. In this view, events and temporality interact in the creation of a constructed present rather than of points on a temporal line or continuum. Benjamin writes,

History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now [Jetztzeit]. Thus, to Robespierre ancient Rome was a past charged with the time of the now which he blasted out of the continuum of history. (261)

In this example, for the present moment of revolutionary France (the present of which defined history at that moment) the "history" or historical meaning of ancient Rome was its relation to the present--that is, its connections to the time-structure or Jetztzeit that existed at that moment. This concept is subtle but extremely important. It suggests that Rome and the French Revolution were not, as it were, dots on a line whose connection was limited to linearity as an abstraction, but a constellation of moments oriented according to vectors within a volumetric present. If time is thought of (as it is by Benjamin) almost as a physical force, it is not one which continues forward in a line but one which flexes and reconfigures like a shifting set of points in three dimensions.

The crucial meaning of the concept of the Jetztzeit for our discussion here lies in its implications for cultural and aesthetic critique. Just as the concept holds for historical events, it pertains to cultural artifacts which are, by definition, a form of event in a historical framework. Again, as is suggested by Benjamin's use of the image in Klee's painting, the historical representation of the meanings of aesthetic objects can fall either into the category of forgetting or retention of meaning. A "false" concept of progress which assumes that history occurs in empty linear time will lose the meanings of events and artifacts, whereas a "true" concept of progress will function under a paradigm of the Jetztzeit and "rescue" the meaning from events. It is the evaluation and critique of aesthetic objects according to historical paradigm of the Jetztzeit that Benjamin calls "rescuing critique."

The idea of rescuing critique is complex, in ways very similar to the ways in which the idea of a changing and shifting present is more complex than that of linear time. Habermas writes that Benjamin’s art criticism

behaves conservatively toward its objects....It aims, to be sure, at the "mortification of the works"...but the criticism practices this mortification of the art work only to transpose what is worth knowing from the medium of the beautiful to that of the true and thereby to rescue it. (Habermas2 136)

Just as with the events of history, Benjamin believes, works of art have great meaning reposited in them but that meaning is lost if we cannot truly interpret them within the charged time of the present. Moreover, in a move that profoundly blurs the boundaries between art and art criticism, it is (as quoted above) the artistic sensibility which determines what meanings can be broken out of the continuum of linear time and re-situated within a complexly configured present. The similarities here to White's concept of the "restructuring and re-coding" of meanings is notable, but the conceptual context offered by Benjamin is clearly both more rigorous and more complex.

Lastly, before turning to a few illustrative readings of The Book of Daniel, I will outline something of the quality of the meaning within Benjamin's aesthetic-historical present. The lineaments of the nature of meaning as it exists in a present whose development as been freed from the restraints of a homogeneous, empty time-structure are rather complex. (It is worth noting, as well, that Benjamin's specific description of this Jetztzeit-based meaning need not be accepted in order for his temporal or historical arguments for such a meaning-present to be justified. I mention his description primarily in order to set the stage for reading a particular aesthetic work--Doctorow's--in Benjaminian terms.) The primary characteristic seems to be that of connections or "correspondances" (Habermas2 144). This emphasis on correspondence is not only used to discern the meanings which are being liberated from the correspondence-deadening structure of linear history, but is itself a basic aesthetic mode of human perception. As Habermas interprets it,

Whatever is expressed...is not a mere subjective state but...the as-yet- uninterrupted connection of the human organism with surrounding nature; expressive movements [the basis of the aesthetic sense] are systematically linked with the qualities of the environment that evoke them. (Habermas2 147)

The gist of this view is that the subject is not autonomous but functions both historically and aesthetically within a present environment. It is connection as a principle, correspondence, or, as Benjamin puts it in ahistorical context, "constellation" (Benjamin 263) that is a basic structure of aesthetic experience.

Moving now to a discussion of Doctorow's The Book of Daniel, I would like to begin with a few readings which demonstrate ways in which interpretation of the novel through the historical-aesthetic models of Kunow and White seem not to offer the most satisfactory results. I will finish with some readings that seem to exemplify the interpretive value of Benjamin's ideas of the aesthetic. I will not present these in any particularly systematic fashion, but I do not feel this will fundamentally disturb their coherence. If, as I hope to show, the novel parallels in significant ways the paradigms Benjamin sets forth, each aspect of the work will show this parallel at each point.

One erroneous or weak reading which Kunow offers on the novel is illustrated in his observation that in Daniel Doctorow is carrying out a "centripetal...reconstructive narrativization of history" (Kunow1 385). In Daniel's attempt to recover some sense of the historical meaning of his parents' experience within the context of the Cold War, Kunow sees what might be delegitimized as "reverting (regressing?) to the Lukacsian idea that...there is indeed a one-to-one correspondence between the personal and collective destiny" (Kunow1 388). This would seem to place Doctorow's work at least partially within the category of a "totalizing narrative," and hence a suspect construction.

Kunow's error seems to me to be expressed in his assertion that Daniel's narration proves that "the privileged medium organizing this narrative is memory" (Kunow1 387). Kunow misses the ironic and doomed nature of Daniel's so-called reconstruction. Daniel knows that remembering alone is unreliable, and no solution to the historical crux in which he is placed (and in which his parents were permanently fixed through their quasi-mythic fate). A better criticism here would notice that Daniel repeatedly subverts both his and his parents' perception that they somehow fulfilled some Lukacsian historical destiny. What he is doing in his narrative (and what Doctorow is doing) in not reconstructing but showing both the need to process the past and the impossibility of doing so within a continuous historical "destiny." It is Daniel's “work”--whose questionable authority is symbolized in the black humor of his feeble attempts to write a doctoral thesis--at arranging a present or Jetztzeit that moves him forward by generating an aestheticization of history. Moreover, this aesthetic does not pursue a universalizing moral interpretation of the Isaacson’s fate, but a reconciliation of the past into Daniel’s own charged present.

White also fails to discern the full and subtly problematic relevance of sequence in the novel. He writes in support of his concept of narrative-based historical form that “The demand for closure in the historical story is a demand, I suggest, for moral meaning, a demand that sequences of real events be assessed as to their significance as elements of a moral drama (White 1:21).”

I would argue that sequence, on the contrary, is the demon that prevents Daniel from discerning the moral meaning of his parents' and his own life. Evoking deep similarity to the Angel of History, Doctorow writes

What is most monstrous is sequence. When we are there why do we withdraw only to return?....The monstrous reader who goes on from one word to the next. The monstrous writer who places one word after another. The monstrous magician. (Doctorow 245-6)

The loss of moral bearing under the pressure of sequence is here made very clear. Although it is characterized a fact of life, as the nature of existence, sequence is made "monstrous" somehow by its hyper-inflation as a mode of consciousness. Daniel is left by his mother in the prison visiting area, and recurrence stripped of the construction of meaning becomes a juggernaut that destroys the base of consciousness. This bears great resemblance to Benjamin's description of the obliterating quality of linear time, time that does not follow the pattern of a Jetztzeit but is instead a "progress" of a time-line or fate eviscerated of meaning. (Interestingly, Daniel articulate its monstrosity not only in personal imagery but in the image of textual composition, as if writing sequence were also somehow monstrous.) White's inability to truly formulate the dangers of sequence, even its enhanced but still linear-dependent manifestation in narrative, inverts his assessment of the moral function of sequence--creative rather than obliterative--when read in the context of the novel.

In contrast to these serious misreadings or under-readings that result from applying Kunow and White's historical aesthetic to The Book of Daniel, many applications of Benjamin's concepts offer comparatively far richer readings. I will discuss two in particular: the first is the account of Daniel's meeting with Mindish in Disneyland, and the second is the motif of liberation symbolized by Sternlicht's attempts at revolution and Daniel's ushering out of the library (and out of the novel) in the final pages.

Regarding the creation of history into purchasable but meaning-deficient objects, Habermas writes

[Benjamin] deals with the documents of culture (which are at the same time those of barbarism) not from the historicist viewpoint of stored- up cultural goods but from the critical viewpoint...of the decline of culture into "goods that can become and object of possession for humanity." (Habermas2 131)

What happens when history is appropriated in this way is that the meaning of the past is lost just as it is made crudely possessible. This analysis is analogous to Doctorow’s, who writes that the "quintessential and culminating sentiment" of Disneyland for those who accept its "totalitarian" vision of history and the aesthetic is "the moment of purchase" (Doctorow 288-89).

For both Benjamin and Doctorow, the commodification of history into entertainment purchases entails a massive loss of meaning. But directly into this environment comes Mindish--potentially holding the great secret which will finally confirm Daniel's fervent wish to know that his parents died for the story of "the other couple." Pursuing the possibility of breaking out of the grip of past events that still hold both him and Mindish's daughter, Daniel seeks a form of knowledge from the decrepit former faker and socially crude dentist. What he receives, a mute kiss on the head, is perfect--not for his project but for Doctorow's, which involves certain failures on Daniel's part.

What Mindish's kiss articulates is not the re-connection to the Old Left that Daniel supposedly wants in T.V. Reed's reading. Were Mindish to confirm the story of the other couple, then myth would be made to unspeak itself. The present moment for Daniel--a Jetztzeit comprising the suffocation of America under simplified and coercive narratives sold to tourists; the Marxist and Hooverist narratives that destroyed his innocent parents by making them connections of espionage and electricity; an imperialist war, his own misery, his sister's misery--would be made strongly liberating, even utopian, were this unspeaking of myth to occur.

Doctorow's message is not this positive. The kiss is almost a plea by Mindish for forgiveness. Mindish cannot speak or refute his own complicity even if he wanted to; he loves to drive the little cars and is no more an ubermensch in Californian retirement than he was as a Bronx dentist. If Mindish is the voice of one of the overpowering myth-narratives Daniel is resisting, Habermas' following quote has special resonance:

It is as if Benjamin were afraid of myth's being eradicated without any intervening liberation....Far from being a guarantee of liberation, deritualization [the destruction of myth] menaces us with a specific loss of experience. (Habermas2 143)

Doctorow's Jetztzeit is not Daniel's; or more precisely, the storybook fulfillment of Daniel's consciousness would entail a cartoonish degradation of Doctorow's. To retain the meaning of his own aporias Doctorow must preserve Daniel's.

Like the unacceptable happy ending Doctorow avoids in Daniel's encounter with Mindish, other happy endings are obstructed as well. Sternlicht's revolution, in which he claims to be able to fulfill his Jetztzeit through the proliferation of images, does not serve to liberate Daniel. Daniel's alienation from Sternlicht is grounded in the fact that it all rings false somehow. Daniel sees that "The radical is given the occasion for one last discovery--the connection between society and his death" (Doctorow 140). To accept the role of radicalism in Sternlicht's model is to become a mere part of a narrative of resistance (electrical pun intended) just as his the Isaacsons did. Accompanying this personal reduction is the highly significant image of the reduction of culture: "EVERYTHING THAT CAME BEFORE IS ALL THE SAME!" (Doctorow 136). Daniel's own image-making (and self-making) lacks the certainty that "this is it, I'm the revolution, this is the end of it all." Sternlicht's attempt to simply "put on the put on" (Doctorow 140), while correct in principle, cannot be fulfilled, but would rather fall into the category of "a false elimination of art...[which] along with the dominative organization of the work of art...liquidates its truth at the same time" (Habermas2 141).

The last such thwarted transcendence and fictional victory is written on the last pages of the novel. The student tells Daniel "Close the book, man, what's the matter with you? Don't you know you're liberated?" (Doctorow 302). Even Daniel's attempt to write a history-blasting text of his own life and to diarize his dissertation amounts only to a rather dismal recognition that he has only completed a shadow of what he had hoped. The emergence from the historical continuum occurs only fragment by fragment, both personally and aesthetic-historically. As the biblical quotation reads, "Go thy way Daniel: for the words are closed up and sealed till the time of the end" (Doctorow 303). The following passage from “Theses on the Philosophy of History” has particular relevance given Doctorow's overt association of the Isaacsons with secularized interpretations of messianic Judaism:

We know that the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future...This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future turned into homogeneous, empty time. For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter. (Benjamin 264)

Works Cited:

1. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1969.

2. Carmichael, Virginia. Framing History: The Rosenberg Story and the Cold War. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1993.

3. Habermas, Jurgen (1). "Theodor Adorno, The Primal History of Subjectivity--Self-Affirmation Gone Wild," in Philosophical/Political Profiles. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1983.

4. Habermas, Jurgen (2). "Walter Benjamin: Consciousness-Raising or Rescuing Critique," in Philosophical/Political Profiles. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1983.

5. Kunow, Rudiger (1). "Without Telos or Subject?" In Reconstructing American Literary Historical Studies. Eds. Lent, Keil, Brock-Sallah. New York: St.

Martin's Press, 1990.

6. Kunow, Rudiger (2). "Making Sense of History." Making Sense: The Role of the Reader in Contemporary American Fiction. Ed. Gerhard Hoffman. American Studies: A Monograph Series, Vol. 68. Munchen: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1989.

7. Reed, T.V. "Genealogy/Narrative/Power." American Literary History, 4,2 (Summer 1992).

8. White, Hayden (1). The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1987.

9. White, Hayden (2). Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978.