HOW TO RECAPTURE SELECTIVE MEMORIES
117
posterity. Hersey would later become wary of such meta-journalistic
resurrections.
Doctorow too invents a contemporary to chronicle th e liquidation of
Kovno's .Jews but adds a twist: the lapsed priest is the one who hunts
down and retrieves the lost archive. In addition, the novel's novelist,
who calls himself a "faux Pop" (mocking the priestly honorific of
"Father"), insinuates himself into the life of all his characters-some of
whom are still in process, still being invented.
The very ease with which writers or cineasts deceive us, moving like
Doctorow between gritty simulacra of daily life, archival quests, and
dreamlike or imaginative fugues, betrays the doubt that has penetrated
our sense of reality, radicalizing the eternal question about the truth of
appearances. As an explicit symptom of this, Doctorow's novelist
describes an affair with a woman whom he persuades-if only as a plot
he conceives for a movie-to lure her husband into a situation where the
latter's identity is nullified, because the lover's perfect counterfeit has
successfully taken his place.
That the narrator calls himself a "faux Pop" is another symptom of
distrust. It links
City
of
God to the search for a true father or authority
figure, a search that is a constant in Anglo-American history from early
religious revivals
to
contemporary confidence hucksters. Docs that
theme of the "faux Pop" also connect with our new biographica l cul–
ture, its claim of realism?
To answer-and conclude-I will look at one of the more interesting
of a recent spate of academic autobiographies. Jane Tompkins's
A Life
il1
Schoo!
is the conversion narrative of a teacher who reviews her quite
ordinary life starting with "the dark corridors" of P.S. 98, through col–
lege, graduate training, and many years as a professor in various uni–
versities. The book tells of a late awakening to the fact that schooling
has left out what school is for: life and community building.
Nowhere does the author find a holistic education. Her diagnosis, at
once political and spiritual, is that the system substitutes authority for
an alive teaching, and she recounts her not always successful efforts to
relinquish authority in the classroom. Even when the classroom is made
free and safe for the students, by the instructor removing herself as
authority figure, it becomes unsafe for the teacher who used to be
shielded by the mask of authority but is now open to the quirky as well
as just criticism of her students.
I single out this memoir because it seeks to exorcize one type of "faux
pop," that is, false authority, without falling prey to another "faux pop,"
that is, false populism or facile notions of community. It illustrates the
