DANIEL AARON
241
places. They may have little literary substance. Yet they possess the
kind of verisimilitude to be found in some of the popular "docudra–
mas" and the film variations on the theme of Watergate into which
they are so readily convertible. Novelized histories are less adaptable to
the media, but perhaps they have a value other than their literary
merits. Treated as artifacts, they might conceivably offer some clues to
the historian or novelist of the future seeking to fathom a type of
sensibility (circa 1975) for whom American history was camp or junk
and pertinent only in so far as it lent itself to farce or traced the course
of national degradation.
