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

and still salvage meaning on a very pragmatic level. This is rather close to the position the philosopher Richard Rorty takes in discussing objective truth. "Objective truth", he says, "is no more and no less than the best idea we currently have to explain what is going on.

1

6" That, of course, means that reality is nothing more than a concept society at any given moment agrees upon. Thus the notion of what reality really is constantly is changing. Therefore Doctorow refers to scientific language which communicates results of research as being of "the power of the regime" while literary and imaginative language to him appears as being "the power of freedom". Ever since the age of enlightenment, Doctorow observes, rationalism and empiricism dominate western civilization and rate scientific language as more important than imaginative literature. Thus it is no wonder that authors beginning with Cervantes and Defoe found it necessary to disguise the fictitious character of their tales by claiming they were simply editing manuscripts they had found or been given by a friend who in these accounts relates his adventures in the real world. They were producing " False Documents", the author hid behind a narrator in order to pass an the collective wisdom of mankind in a language that seemed to be committed to facts. This defensive attitude, imitating the scientific language in order to express imaginative and fictitious contexts is nothing but the beginning of the realistic mode of narration but its credibility is ensured only by the manner of presentation. 'Literary facts', in contrast to non-fictitious communication become believable because of the manner in which they are presented, making the text dominantly a self-referential entity and to a lesser degree an expression of the epistemological convictions of the age. And it is here where both, literary and non-literary texts, meet an a common ground because the agreed on convictions of an age determine what facts we perceive and incorporate into the mesh of our cultural identity. Doctorow gives a memorable example ...the regime of facts is not God but man-:made, and, as such infinitely violable. For instance, it used to be proposed as a biological fact that women were emotionally less stable and intellectually less capable than men. What we proclaim as the 1

6 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1980, 385. 93