CUSHING STROUT
431
no alternative conclusion, but proved its point as conclusively as
a demonstration in mathematics." Nothing could be further
from the spirit of the current fictionalizers of history, or the liter–
ary cri tics for whom everything is a fictive text, as if ei ther texts
or fiction could be defined in the absence of something from
which to distinguish them. Certainly the spheres of history, fic–
tion, and biography do overlap as narrative forms. But an over–
lapping is not the same thing as the swallowing up of one cate–
gory by another. This night of the voracious imagination is not
the one in which all cats are gray, but rather the one in which
they are as brightly painted as Henri Rousseau's animals. Or to
vary the metaphor, the hungry lion of the imagination is made
to lie down with the lamb of humble fact by giving the lion every
day a fresh lamb to devour.
What happens in this case is demonstrated by E.
L.
Doctorow's
Ragtime
and Robert Coover's
The Public Burning.
Both novels
display a remarkable novelistic cleverness, but their desire to
surprise and stun is also greedy.
It
is ominously similar to what
Samuel Johnson called "that hunger of imagination which preys
incessantly upon life, " symbolized for him by the vain impulse
behind the building of the Great Pyramid in Egypt. Doctorow's
Ragtime
seems to be a historical novel, at first, but its narrative
power derives from an anachronism, a black protestor from the
1960s, who is thrust into the era of the early 1900s, where his mil–
itancy was historically impossible. Moreover, this character is
himself derived from Kleist's Michael Kohlhauss, with the change
of his horse to a car and the only clue to its German source being
the change of his name to an English spelling, "Coalhouse."
Coover carries the cleverness of voracious imagination even further
in his hyperbolic and scatalogical parody of the Rosenberg case.
Richard Nixon is his central character, who unbelievably becomes
infatuated with Ethel Rosenberg and is finally brutally sodomized
by a folklore figure of Uncle Sam in Times Square, as the Supreme
Court slips on elephant droppings. "What if we broke all the
rules, played games with the evidence, manipulated language it–
self, made History a partisan ally?" this narrator asks. The fic–
tional Nixon thus makes his parallel with the actual Nixon in his
treatment of the Watergate issues. But Coover's literary use of this
same premise only contributes further to a cavalier disdain for
historical actuality, probability, or even plausibility. Ironically,
