Introduction to E. L. Doctorow
By Edward Griffin, Professor of English
I’ll begin my brief introductory remarks this evening by telling you a little story. Back in 1968, the Southern History Association met in New Orleans. The program featured a panel discussion involving the preeminent historian of the American South, C. Vann Woodward, and three American novelists: Robert Penn Warren, Ralph Ellison, and William Styron. The announced topic was “The Uses of History in Fiction,” but the occasion was the furor caused the preceding year by Styron’s novel The Confessions of Nat Turner. For Styron had written a fiction about an historical event—the 1831 Virginia slave rebellion led by Nat Turner—and he had appropriated Turner by name as the central character, entering Turner’s mind, giving the reader his thoughts and desires, and supplying his motivations. The book had quickly triggered two major questions. One was literary: By what authority did a white Southern writer speak for the Black Southern slave? Another was historical: Did Styron’s account of the rebellion and its leader pass historical muster: was it accurate, and could it be substantiated by evidence?
The meeting started pleasantly enough, but it swiftly turned into a war of angry words between Styron and several African American historians and literary critics who denied Styron the authority to speak for Nat Turner and found Styron’s version of history riddled with inaccuracies. Robert Penn Warren joined Styron in defending the imaginative freedom of the novelist to select and invent, to be guided by the historical record but not governed by it. C. Vann Woodward stood for fidelity to the documented facts. And Ralph Ellison, waiting for his opening, then undercut the history versus literature debate by remarking that history is actually a form of literature and that both the historian and the novelist are professional liars. The difference, Ellison explained, is that the historian gives us the official lie and the novelist the unofficial. The official lie is available everywhere, which is why we need the unofficial. So, Ellison advised the panel, the novelist should leave history to the historian; if you put “a known figure” into your story, you’re trapped. Your lie will no longer count as unofficial; its particulars will be held up to the scrutiny of what passes for the official truth, and that, Ellison told Styron, is just what happened to him with Nat Turner—but didn’t happen to Warren in All the King’s Men because Warren put an imagined version of Huey Long into the novel but not the historical Huey Long.
I tell you this story tonight because throughout his career our guest has devoted himself to the question of “the uses of history in fiction” along with “the uses of fiction in history,” and he has rather miraculously managed to strip the historian’s official lies of their pretended authority while lending to the novelist’s unofficial lies a dimension of solid believability, of substantiation. He goes right ahead and mingles “known figures” with made-up ones, and he uses their real names. Freud and Jung take a ride together through the Tunnel of Love at Coney Island. Whether he would agree with Ellison that he and the historian are professional liars, he is quite aware that he and the historian are, finally, story-tellers—or what he calls in his recent book of essays, “creationists.” “Stories,” he writes, “are revelatory structures of facts. They connect the visible with the invisible, the present with the past. They propose life as something of moral consequence. They distribute the suffering so that it can be borne. . . .”
He warns us that we must not dismiss stories as illegitimate ways of knowing. “The storyteller,” he says, “practices the ancient way of knowing, the total discourse that antedates all the special vocabularies of modern intelligence. . . .” He insists that the single mind can render the world. And he knows the perils of revising the official lies. “Storytellers,” he asserts, “may not realize when they commit to the practice of fiction that they are ordained to contest the aggregate fictions of their societies. That,” he cautions us, “is their redeeming value, but also an indication of the risk they take. It can be a dangerous profession, storytelling” (Creationists, xii).
For more than forty years, in the last century and in this one, our guest has taken those risks and faced those dangers, contesting the aggregate fictions of his society, challenging the official lies, lovingly telling the unofficial ones, and creating in the process a new order of truth in a series of works illuminating the experience of the nation, connecting the present to the past and boxing the compass from such locales as the western town of Hard Times, the Eastern megapolis of Manhattan, and the South of General Sherman’s march to the sea.
It is an honor and a privilege to welcome to the University of Minnesota the 2007 Esther Freier speaker, Mr. E. L. Doctorow.
April 11, 2007
Ted Mann Concert Hall