The Making Of History On The Relationship Between Literature And History In Doctorow's The Book Of Daniel And World's Fair

This paper is intended to explore the relationship between history and fiction in Doctorow's novels The Book of Daniel and World's Fair and to analyze its underlying intention with the application of Linda Hutcheon and Hayden White's view of history and fiction respectively elaborated in the Poetics of Postmodernism (1988) and Metashitory (1973).Doctorow holds that history is constructed and fiction writer can also get involved in the re-imagining and re-writing of history. Thus he not only articulates his view of the relationship between history and fiction in his famous essay "false document" but also tries many narrative innovations such as the discontinuous and anachronistic narrative, mixed genres of oral history, doctoral dissertation, and news paper report, ironic intermingling of the factual and the fictive, and multiplicity of endings and narrators so as to challenge the conventions of official history and give voice to the voiceless. Doctorow's understanding of history and fiction well corresponds with what Hayden White and Linda Hutcheon argue in this issue. Both White and Hutcheon believe that all written history is in a way constructed, the writing of history and the writing of fiction are not fundamentally different, thus literary writers can rewrite and construct a history with a truth claim to some extent.Centering on the issue of history and fiction, this paper first explores a "criminal" perception, the relationship between the Rosenberg case and the Isaacson case, and the stylistic experiments in The Book of Daniel, then expounds on a child perception, how memory functions in dealing with the factual and the fictional, and how oral history is employed in the World's Fair, finally compares a public and political history of 1950s and 60s represented in The Book of Daniel and a personal and private history of 1930s in World's Fair. In short, these two novels are telling examples of historicity of text and textuality of history.Moreover, this paper further illustrates the function of writing by examining not only the writing scenes in the novels but also Doctorow's opinions of writing expressed in his interviews and essays. Accordingly, writing functions as a way to get rid of the past and help face the present and future, as well as a way to gain recognition and fashion one's mind unconsciously, which demands writers of humanistic concern and responsibility. Here comes the conclusion that is, fiction can rewrite history and can also do as much as history does in society, when serious writer's works are studied.