Demythologization In E.L.Doctorow’s Historical Fiction

Focusing on Welcome to Hard Times, Ragtime, Loon Lake, and The March asrepresentative of Doctorow’s historical novels, this dissertation seeks to demonstrateDoctorow’s life-long demythologizing spirit and efforts in his historical fiction.Based on Roland Barthes’ theory on mythologies, this dissertation proposes thatmyth is a grand narrative that, due to psychological, cognitive and political factors,claims the status of truth, but, in fact, is often the distorted result of human intentionsand imaginations, therefore, tends to be false. As a tireless myth-fighter, Doctorow hasbeen fighting a persistent war against myths ever since the publication of his firstfiction. By countering the grand narrative of myths with liberating narrative strategiessuch as parody, irony, intertextuality and polyphony, Doctorow subverts not only thecentral myths that concern American society most deeply and persistently over time,but also the myth of history itself.Through a Western frontier town’s cycle ofdestruction-reconstruction-deconstruction, Doctorow in Welcome to Hard Timesradicallyviolates readers’ belief in the Western hero and the myth of the West as a landof hope and promise. Doctorow’s strategic use of parody foregrounds the gap betweenthe fictional West and the mythical West, problematizes American people’s blindoptimism in the human perfectibility, and topples their conviction in Americancivilization as a guarantor of happiness and prosperity.In Ragtime, a seemingly impeccable world of America is ironically juxtaposedagainst one where minority groups are denied their equality and justice. With irony as astrategy of co-operative subversion, Doctorow launches his demythologization fromright within the discourse of the dominant culture, exposing from their own perspectivethe hypocrisy and conservativeness of the dominant classes in America.In Loon Lake, through the hero’s degeneration from a youth of innocence to a manof corruption, Doctorow subverts the American people’s general conviction in their virtues of kindness and benevolence. A strategic employment of intertextualitybetween the hero and the classic literary characters of Huck Finn and Gatsby exposesthe evil forces latent in American society that robs a young man of his innocence andthe American nation of its poetic dreams.In American history, the fact that two opposing myths have evolved aroundSherman and the March in the American North and South reveals most explicitly thedeceptive nature of myths. In The March, by adopting a Bakhtinnian polyphonicnarration, Doctorow creates a kind of “gay relativity” which deconstructs theabsoluteness and totality of the mythic narratives, and restores humanity to Shermanand genuine historicity to the March.Doctorow sets his novels in important historical periods, examining not only thevalidity of those central myths in American social life, but also the myth of history itself.Firmly convinced of the liberating power of language just as he is strongly suspiciousof its controlling power, Doctorow resorts to “false” documents to challenge thelegitimation of the “true” historical documents and break their monopoly over history.Every novel of his is presented as “false” documents such as ledgers, journals, ormemoirs in an effort to compose history from a different perspective from the officialdocuments. History thus loses its mythical status as the closed, unchallengeable facts,and falls to the level of narratives.Out of his belief in democracy and truth, Doctorow subverts the central myths inAmerican Exceptionalism and the myth of history as a science of facts. His historicalfiction restores complexity and ambiguity to the American social life and offersdifferent interpretations to the otherwise monolithic American history.