In follow up to the multi-award winner, The March, E.L. Doctorow focuses his brilliant mind on writers, with eloquent and surprising essays on the literary craft. These revelatory essays on the nature of creativity in writers run the gamut, from the literary, to the comic, to the cosmic. Rich with philosophical asides, personality, historical context and speculation, personal observations and literary judgments, Doctorow considers creativity from many angles. What emerges is a thoughtful and provocative portrait of art, literature and society, as well as a surprising view into one of the great literary minds of our time.
The King James Version of the Bible, an early-seventeenth-century translation, seems, by its now venerable diction, to have added a degree of poetic luster to the ancient tales, genealogies, and covenantal events of the original. It is the version preachers quote from who believe in the divinity of the text. Certainly in the case of Genesis 1--4, in which the world is formed, and populated, and Adam and Eve are sent from the Garden, there could be no more appropriate language than the English of Shakespeare's time. The King James does not suffer at all from what is inconsistent or self-contradictory in the text any more than do the cryptic ancient Hebrew and erring Greek from which it is derived. Once you assume poetically divine authorship, only your understanding is imperfect.
But when you read of these same matters in the contemporary diction of the Revised Standard Version, the Jamesian voice of holy scripture is not quite what you hear. In plainspoken modern English, Genesis--especially as it moves on from the Flood and the Tower of Babel, and comes up in time through the lives of Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebecca, and then to the more detailed adventures of Jacob and Rachel and Joseph and his brothers--seems manifestly of the oral tradition of preliterate storytelling out of which the biblical documents emerged, when history and moral instruction, genealogy, law, science, and momentous confrontations with God were not recorded on papyrus or clay tablets but held in the mind for transmittal by generations of narrators. And so Genesis in the Revised Standard Version is homier--something like a collection of stories about people trying to work things out.
The contemporary reader would do well to read the King James side by side with the Revised Standard. Some lovely stereophonic truths come of the fact that a devotion to God did not preclude the use of narrative strategies.
If not in all stories then certainly in all mystery stories, the writer works backward. The ending is known and the story is designed to arrive at the ending. If you know the people of the world speak many languages, that is the ending. The story of the Tower of Babel gets you there. The known ending of life is death: the story of Adam and Eve and the forbidden fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil arrives at that ending. Why do we suffer, why must we die? Well, you see, there was this garden. . . . The story has turned the human condition into a sequential narrative of how it came to be; it has used conflict and suspense to create a moral framework for being. And in suggesting that things might have worked out another way for humanity if the fruit had not been eaten, it has, not incidentally, left itself open to revision by some subsequent fantasist who will read into it the idea of original sin.
Artistry is at work also in the blessings the dying Jacob bestows on his twelve eponymous sons. Each blessing, an astute judgment of character, will explain the fate of the twelve tribes led by the sons. A beginning is invented for each of the historical tribal endings known to the writer. Never mind that we understand from the documentary thesis of Bible sources--for it is, after all, the work of various storytellers and their editors--that different sons are accorded hands-on leadership by their father according to which writer is telling the story. Character is fate. And life under God is always an allegory.
Another venerable storytelling practice is the appropriation of an ...
Reviews
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Doctorow's voice is rich and deep and full of intelligence, inviting the reader to attend to what he says. It's a pleasure to hear him speak, and seem also to think his way through, this collection of 16 essays, gathered from his introductions, reviews, and public lectures. The writings themselves explore creativity, mostly literary--with selections on Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Sinclair Lewis, and Ernest Hemingway. A few pieces discuss creative acts in other spheres, as well--Harpo Marx, Albert Einstein. These personal reflections are not anchored by tight, formal theses; rather, they create a context for making stimulating observations on their topics and are well presented in Doctorow's smart reading. G.H. (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine
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