Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2000. [Vol. 6.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 26)

Studies - Hans-Wolfgang Schaller: The Survival of the Novel: E. L. Doctorow's Escape out of the Postmodern Deadend

III In 1977 Edgar Laurence Doctorow published an essay with the title "False Documents"

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3. In this article he tried to approach the problem of a literary text from a more practical perspective, laying aside linguistic and philosophical considerations, and looking at the functions texts of any kind have in modern society. As an author of fictional texts trying to relate human experience he notes that modern industrial society relies heavily an texts which linguistically communicate discoveries of science and run "on empirical thinking and precise calculations." Language is seen as a property of facts themselves - their persuasive property. We are taught that facts are to be distinguished from feeling and that feeling is what we are permitted for our rest and relaxation when the facts get us down. This is the bias of scientific method and empiricism by which the world reveals itself and gives itself over to our control insofar as we recognize the primacy of fact-reality

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4. Literature, he observes, in comparison for example to the middle ages, has dramatically lost its impact and political importance being confined to the realm of leisure and relaxation. In former times literature had something to communicate, to pass on values and to give advise, "if the story was good the counsel was valuable and therefore the story was true" (219). Doctorow obviously does not care for the philosophical and linguistic theories which caused Federman and others to enthusiastically reject notions of value, of true and false, of right and wrong; he is solely interested in the function any given text has within the communicative context of society

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5. Thus true and untrue loose their ethical meaning and are reduced to "it works which equals true, and it does not work which equals untrue'. It is surprising how Doctorow thus can evade any ideological or religious fixation 13 Edgar Laurence Doctorow, „Falle Documents",American Review 27 (November 1977), 215-32. 1

4 op. cit., 216. 1

5 for the following discussion 1 am indebted to the excellent dissertation of Robert von Morgen, Die Romane EL. Doctorows im Kontext des postmodernism, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1993. 92