Introduction

What Charles Dickens was to London, E. L. Doctorow is becoming to New York.

——The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

All writers find a place for themselves, a home for their imagination, and I suppose the city is mine.

——E. L. Doctorow, Interview by Michelle Torkarczyk.“The City, The Waterworks, and Writing.”

1.Doctorow and His Boy-narrators in New York

Edgar Laurence Doctorow (1931—2015), one of the most prominent American Postmodern writers, has contributed to the literary altar 12 novels, 2 short story collections, 3 essay collections and 1 play, among which the 1971 novel The Book of Daniel and the 1989 novel Billy Bathgate won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the 1985 novel World’s Fair won the National Book Award. One thing worth noting about Doctorow’s fiction is that he bases most of his novels in the city of New York, where the author himself grew up and has been living now as a New Yorker.

Doctorow’s works have been highly praised and critically reviewed, both thematically and stylistically. Fredric Jameson, in Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, points out that Doctorow is “one of the few serious and innovative leftist novelists at work in the United States ” (Jameson 1991:21). Jameson thinks that Doctorow’s fiction is typically historical, for his novels cover almost all the historical stages of the United States since the Civil War. He says: “E. L. Doctorow is the epic poet of the disappearance of the American radical past, of the suppression of older traditions and moments of the American radical tradition.” But Jameson also argues that the so-called historical novel like Doctorow’s Ragtime does not actually and can not represent the “real history, ” despite the fact that there are quite a few historical figures in the novel; it can only “represent” our own ideas and stereotypes about history (25). He agrees with Linda Hutcheon, who writes in A Poetics of Postmodernism that in Ragtime there are “three paralleled families: the Anglo-American establishment one and the marginal immigrant European and American black ones. The novel’s action disperses the center of the first and moves the margins into the multiple ‘centers’ of the narrative, in a formal allegory of the social demographics of urban America” (Hutcheon 1988:61). Though Hutcheon mainly uses Doctorow’s fictional works to illustrate her ideas about postmodern historiography, and about the political engagement in historiography, she mentions this “demographics of urban America, ” which shows her keen attention to Doctorow’s urban imagination as well as his representation of the city.

So the question is: what is left for Doctorow to emphasize besides Jameson’s so-called “cultural logic of postmodernism ”? And besides being politically radical, historically focused, and Jewish-bound, is Doctorow’s fictional world worth exploring from other perspectives? John Parks points out in his book E. L. Doctorow that to put the label “political novelist” on Doctorow seems to be not only simplistic, but also misleading, as if the writer is merely to promote or sell an agenda or an ideology, which “devalues and discredits Doctorow’s fiction” (Parks 1991:11). Doctorow is usually seen as “a radical Jewish humanist” (Clayton 1977:60), but studies about him and his works until now have been focusing mainly on the historical, political and religious part, while the last and the foremost noun word “humanist” has not yet been well explored. This book aims to argue that Doctorow is not only concerned about Jewish life, but also the life and predicament of all the human beings living in the urban environment. He is sympathetic with the African-American’s life in Ragtime, as exemplified by Coalhaus Walker; with the Irish Catholic woman’s unhappiness, as exemplified in Billy Bathgate’s mother in the novel Billy Bathgate. He is not only concerned with the WASP families but also conscious of the minority groups’ assimilation to the so-called mainstream American culture. In a word, “Doctorow’s art is a unique fusion of moral involvement and poetic transformation ” (Fowler 1992:6). In an interview about The Waterworks, Doctorow says that he is “writing about the New Yorkers whom Edith Wharton left out, the ordinary people” (Tokarczyk 2000:156). The truth is Doctorow’s works are indeed about the ordinary life of ordinary people living mainly in the city of New York, with great humanistic sympathy for the weak and the poor.

Actually Doctorow is fairly aware of his own dual identity both as a New Yorker and as a Jewish writer. In an interview with Michelle Tokarczyk, Doctorow claims that “I was very lucky to be a New Yorker, ” since “it was a very fortunate thing for someone who was going to be a writer to grow up at the cutting edge of American culture…. New York was a very rich experience for a child” (Tokarczyk 1999:201). Doctorow also highlights that he is in touch with “the last vestiges of Jewish immigrant culture, ” and that he is “nourished by that Jewish humanist, not terribly religious, spirituality ” descended from his grandparents’ and parents’ generations of immigrants, which he regards as “another part of the New York mind-set” (202). In that interview, Doctorow admits that his personal growth in the New York City has influenced his writing on a large scale:

As a teenager, I used to go almost weekly to the Museum of Modern Art. I’d look at the permanent collection, look at the new work, go downstairs to the theatre and see a foreign film. As a boy I went matter-of-factly to plays, to concerts. And as I grew up, I was a beneficiary of the incredible energies of European émigrés in every field — all those great minds hounded out of Europe by Hitler. They brought enormous sophistication to literary criticism, philosophy, science, music…. (202)

In his writing practice, Doctorow combines the “vestige” of the Jewish traditional culture with New York urban characteristics. He pays special attention to the influence of the urban culture on ordinary people’s personal growth. Tokarczyk has noticed that so many of Doctorow’s fictional works — The Book of Daniel, Lives of the Poets, World’s Fair, Billy Bathgate and The Waterworks — are set in New York City (201). To complement this list of works, Doctorow’s fourth novel Ragtime published in 1973, and three novels published in the new millennium — The City of God (2001), Homer and Langley (2009) and Andrew’s Brain (2014) are also set in New York City. To view deeper into the novels, one might find another distinctive phenomenon, that is, the frequent use of boy-narrators, who most often like to wander in the city space in their growing process, and most of the boy-wanderers are real or metaphorical orphans. The boy-wanderer not only produces a special point of view, but also keeps a psychological distance from the adult perspective and way of narration, and thus creates Doctorow’s own understanding of urban aesthetics, which for him is positive as well as critical, with a strong sense of utopian-like desire for a better futurama of the citizens.

This book is an attempt to study three of Doctorow’s novels: The Book of Daniel, World’s Fair, and Billy Bathgate. It is intended to investigate, illustrate and justify the above view of mine. There are several reasons for me to choose these three texts. Firstly, each of the three novels has a boy-narrator, either a small boy, or a young adult, and is considered by critics as Bildungsroman. Secondly, in the three novels, the narrators frequently wander in the city, mostly New York, in their growing process. Thirdly, the neighborhood, that is, the Bronx borough of New York City, not only plays an important role in the growth of these boy-wanderers, but also helps to give a glimpse of the life of the immigrant communities in the city as perceived from the boys’ eyes. Fourthly, the three novels were published in the seventies and eighties of the 20th century, which were the prime years for Doctorow’s literary creation, and all won major awards — two National Books Critics Circle Awards and one National Book Award, which shows their value in representing Doctorow’s literary creation.

2.Dialogism Between Critics and Doctorow

Doctorow’s third novel, The Book of Daniel, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. According to Douglas Fowler, author of Understanding E. L. Doctorow, the novel “marks a great advance in Doctorow’s achievement, for in neither Welcome to Hard Times nor Big as Life was he able to bring to bear on his creations his own identity and that primitive sense of black magic that really does characterize the distortions and magnifications of a child’s mind” (Fowler 1992:40). Seemingly Daniel is searching for the truth about his parents’ execution in an attempt to prove their innocence; he is in fact “more concerned with generating an understanding of his own identity” (Savvas 2011:128). Michelle Tokarczyk in E. L. Doctorow’s Skeptical Commitment points out that after the first novel Welcome to Hard Times, Doctorow “moves to the urban landscape of New York City that will be the locale for so much of his work” (Tokarczyk 2000:69). The Book of Daniel is just one of them:

Initially, The Book of Daniel, set in New York City, paints a picture of a contemporary urban landscape with characteristic class inequities: the janitor is African-American, the working-class Paul Isaacson relies on his dentist friend to drive his family to the beach. The Isaacson’s move from the Lower East Side does not allow them to escape political and/or religious prosecution, or the progress of history, as Daniel says. By the time Daniel writes his account, the Bronx has become an impoverished area from which the middle class flee. (74)

If moving to the Bronx is an escape of the Jewish immigrants from the Lower East Side, the pursuit of happiness turns out to be only a hope rather than a realized truth. Besides, Tokarczyk believes the novel discloses the strong influence of national politics on personal growth. Tokarczyk says: “As a contemporary political novel, The Book of Daniel effectively blends the personal and the political, mingling questions of family relations with ruminations on history and politics and thereby suggesting that nothing is outside the influence of the state ” (69). He believes that this novel is a “hybrid — part autobiography, part political and part history, ”and reflects Daniel’s “effort in defining himself, not only as an Isaacson and as an American, but as a writer as well, ”which is the main reason for his furious and cynic tone throughout the novel (72).

When discussing the political engagement in historiography, Linda Hutcheon picks out one figure for each thematic issue: “The 1960’s revolutionary, Artie Sternlicht, rejects the past in the name of the present and future; Susan lives too much in the past and dies for it; Daniel tries to sort out the past in order to understand his present” (Hutcheon 1989:70). Hutcheon discusses the relationship between past and present from the perspective of historiography, while in this book I want to focus on the inevitable influence of the past on a specific human being’s personal growth. If Hutcheon’s is grand narrative, mine are small ones; if she is more theory-based, mine is more text-based, though of course without neglecting the context; if Hutcheon’s concern is more political, mine would be more humanistic.

The psychological trauma caused by the parents’ execution is shown in their children’s minds. The incident is reflected and narrated by Daniel both during and after his wandering in the city space. When choosing the narrative voice, Doctorow was very careful. He told Paul Levin that his “most difficult struggle with the material was the discovery of the voice in which to tell the tale” (Fowler 1992:32). Doctorow actually threw away 150 pages of manuscript and started all over again after finding the voice of the book — the narrator “Daniel” in his most reckless and desperate state of mind, like a Phoenix reborn. Fowler believes that Doctorow might have attempted to “create an American Diary of Anne Frank, ” and “it is Doctorow’s brilliance to know just the properties that an American boy’s mind would use to image the approach of this ultimate terror” (39). It is in the wandering around the house when the FBI were sitting in the car outside their house watching the family’s every gesture that Daniel realizes this “Anne Frank” situation of his:

I hang around the house feeling the different lights of the day. […] Every moment of my waking life is intensified and I know exactly what is happening. A giant eye machine, like the mysterious black apparatus at the Hayden Planetarium with the two diving helmet heads and the black rivets and its insect legs, is turning its planetary beam slowly in our direction. And that is what is bringing on the dark skies and the cold weather. And when it reaches us, like the prison search-light in the Nazi concentration camp, it will stop. And we will be pinned.” (Doctorow 2006:132)

The parents’ execution exerts a great impact on their children, who live with terror all through their lives. That is perhaps why Doctorow makes the comment in an interview by Marshall Bruce Gentry: “In a sense The Book of Daniel is not about the Rosenbergs, of whom I had no special knowledge. It is about what happened to them as designated pariahs of an entire nation. So that whether they were guilty or not becomes a secondary question. Maybe it’s not even as much about what happened to them as it is about their children ” (Gentry 2013:33). As Fowler emphasizes, childhood’s worst nightmare has overwhelmingly possessed the Isaacson children (Fowler 1992:43). It is worth noting that this sense of overwhelming possession of the childhood trauma, which the victimized children have always been trying to get rid of, is acknowledged and expressed in their stroll and meander in the city. Kids like Daniel Isaacson and Linda Mindish seem to have survived from the traumatic disaster, while Susan loses her life. It is the act of wandering and losing himself in thought which enables Daniel to probe into the “inside.” Wandering helps to construct Doctorow’s narrative.

Doctorow’s another novel World’s Fair, which is considered even more autobiographic than The Book of Daniel, has received, however, less critical attention, though it won the American National Book Award in 1986. Critic Bruce Weber notices the connection between this novel with James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. He believes that Doctorow “uses the Bronx much as Joyce used Dublin” (142). Albert E. Wilhelm in his book review also points out that “World’s Fair portrays a boy’s tentative journey toward maturity. In displaying Edgar’s growing sensitivity to language and skill as a writer, Doctorow also provides a portrait of the artist as a small boy” (Wilhelm 2000:2). Wilhelm says that the coincidence of the street address and first names of the Altschulers with the actual address and names of his own family “suggests that Edgar’s story of growing up is a thinly disguised account of Doctorow’s ‘own boyhood ’” (1). Richard Eder and many other critics also discover the connection between Doctorow’s World’s Fair and James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “His Daedalus lacks wings, but manages perfectly well on the subway” (Fowler 1992:142). But Fowler distinguishes the difference between the two writers’ intentions: “for Joyce was not content with the Dublin he found before him and spent the last thirty years of his career transforming the city into the mythical, surreal kingdoms of Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake. Doctorow’s intention was to recover the emotions and artifacts peculiar to the first decade of his life, deriving from those things only that which was really in them. It is the difference between artificer and archeologist” (143).

Doctorow depicts the Bronx neighborhood as the growing environment for little Edgar and his brother Donald, who is supposed to be a “sidewalk cowboy.” The boy-narrator Edgar is very sensitive to the Bronx apartment buildings and other architectural setting; the same is true with many other Doctorow novels. When it comes to the reasons for such intense focus on this built-environment, Doctorow claims in the interview by Michelle Tokarczyk: “I was very interested in the city’s architecture, not only in the waterworks and the reservoir, but in the orphanage, and the grid layout of Manhattan. The narrator is quite sensitive to such things; in fact at one point he talks of how architecture can inadequately express the hideousness of a culture” (Tokarczyk 1999:204). Not only in this interview, but also in his essay “The Nineteenth New York” and another novel by him City of God, Doctorow expresses his keen interest in New York’s architecture.

Douglas Fowler points out that since Worlds’ Fair concerns a lot about family life, it should be considered as a family memoir rather than a private memoir, in which there is a chorus of family voices (Fowler 1992:133). Fowler says that Doctorow as a mature writer “amplifies and re-imagines the experience of the child he once happened to be” (128). Wordsworth subtitles his poem The Prelude “The Growth of A Poet’s Mind, ” and Mark Twain calls The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn “a hymn to boyhood.” In a similar way this novel World’s Fair could also be regarded as a künstlerroman, which coincides with the views of Bruce Weber, Albert Wilhelm and Richard Eder.

Christopher Morris proposes that three activities from World’s Fair could be compared with novel writing: “the art of ventriloquism, the construction of time-capsules, and the deception of high-wire acts.” Doctorow denies this comparison as an intentional one designed by himself; instead, he says Edgar “compares the old clown routine ” to “growing up and proving out to be stronger and tougher and smarter than he is given credit for.” He continues to say that the novel could be viewed as “a fantasy of fulfillment” for Edgar, who “identifies himself as the super person he wants to be, disguised now in these ridiculous clown clothes of childhood” (Morris 1991:176).

Michael Wutz in an interview with Doctorow points out that in many of Doctorow’ fictional works, children play an important role in the narrative. Doctorow’s response is that indeed children are important narrative resources for novels like World’s Fair. And in The Book of Daniel, children’s experience “frame, organize and create the being of that book.” He ensures the interviewer Wutz that even for Ragtime, the narrator is the little boy though he is hidden in much of this book and is not revealed until very late in the novel. For the frequent use of children in fiction, Doctorow traces the tradition from Dickens, Mark Twain, to Robert Lois Stevens and J. D. Salinger. As for the reason, Doctorow says: “There is tremendous advantage writing from a child’s point of view” (Wutz 1999:195). Much the same as he answers Winifred Farrant Bevilacqua, Doctorow says:

You recover the capacity for wonder that you give up as an adult, that you’ve lost as an adult. You can rhapsodize the ordinary, which is empowering to a writer. Besides, you know, literature deals with hell and injustice and people going down under the weight of life, and the child is the symbol of the fully sensible mind and being who can’t quite control experiences. Childhood is full sentient being and powerlessness combined, which most adults in this world can probably understand quite well.” (195)

Similarly in another novel The Waterworks, the figure of wandering children in the streets and the orphans both in the orphanage and in the experimental labs may catch readers’ attention. Actually there were about thirty to forty thousand vagrant children running around in the nineteenth century New York, as is revealed in Michelle Tokarczyk’s interview of Doctorow “The City, The Waterworks and Writing.” These children were called “street rats.” Doctorow is highly conscious of that situation of the city when he composed the novel, using a lot of the materials of children’s experience (Tokaczyk 1999:203).

Since the narrator Edgar of World’s Fair is a small boy, it seems inevitable that Doctorow has to adopt the “oral language” to tell his story. This echoes Walter Benjamin’s appeal for the oral tradition in story telling both in his essays “The Story-teller” and “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (Wutz 1999:197) Doctorow’s reliance on the oral tradition of story telling on the one hand suits his narrator’s identity, and on the other, highlights their identity, as urban boys, either in their childhood or adolescence.

Finally Michael Wutz notices the similarity between the concluding parts in World’s Fair and The Book of Daniel: both take place in “a futuristic environment” — Town of Tomorrow in the 1939 New York World’s Fair and Land of Tomorrow in Disney Land; both in the historical present of wars: the Second World War and Vietnam War. Doctorow explains the intention of his plotting in this way: “Perhaps this is society’s way of praying — constructing a future when the very possibility of a future is in doubt” (197). Here the society’s prayer for future is depicted as a desire for utopia in Doctorow’s works, which reveals the writer’s own blessing and pursuit of a better living environment for the American urbanites.

If World’s Fair is about a “good boy, ” then it presents an opportunity for Doctorow to create a “bad boy, ” and that is how the novel Billy Bathgate came into being (Bevilacqua 1999:140). In the interview by Alvin P. Sanoff “The Audacious Lure of Evil, ” Doctorow proclaims: “Edgar is my Tom Sawyer and Billy is my Huck Finn. Edgar lives a fairly ordered life, while Billy is a tougher kid with less of a purchase on middle-class verities” (Sanoff 1991:146). Doctorow thinks the novel Billy Bathgate echoes with earlier books by Dickens or Mark Twain, and indeed as well as his own novel World’s Fair, which came out prior to it.

Billy Bathgate deals with the personal growth of a teenager, to be specific, a fifteen-year-old who fell to the Dutch Shultz gangster in the Bronx as an apprentice. The setting Bathgate Avenue appears in both The Book of Daniel and World’s Fair. It is known that Bathgate is the name of that street in the Bronx neighborhood, but here it is adopted by Billy to be his family name. “And whoever Billy was he would not now celebrate Bathgate Avenue in a song, but he would choose that name, under the pressure to find an alias, since it came out of his dream world, of the world of plenty, the street of the riches and fruits of the earth” (Morris 1991:168).

Since Billy’s father fled the family when he was very young, Billy, this fatherless figure is considered metaphorically as an orphan, the same as the characters in many other works by Doctorow. Doctorow, however, claims that he himself grew up in an ordinary family with a father and mother. His father died when he was twenty-four, while his mother was still living at the time of that interview by Morris in 1991. He points out that his usage of the orphan-narrators and orphan figures has nothing to do with his own life, but he acknowledges that there is “a certain sense of loss ” in his books, for instance, The Book of Daniel and Billy Bathgate “where the missing father is crucial to the composition of this boy.” He uses the orphanage in writing in order to “redress grievance, ” as a “metaphysical disturbance ” in one’s “personal psychic construction; ” he argues that “to be orphaned or the state of orphanage” is a “useful metaphor for all sorts of injustice” (166). That is perhaps why Wutz proposes that in the novel Billy Bathgate, there is a linkage between “paternity” and “identity.” Doctorow himself believes that this linkage is inevitable. He says that similar to the Bildungsroman like Dickens’ works, the boys do not know who their father is; it is true with Billy Bathgate. He emphasizes that “it’s maybe not knowing who your father is that requires In the interview by Michelle Tokarczyk, Doctorow points out the essence of the boy Billy: “Billy Bathgate is everything that you want a boy to be; he’s bright, he’s loyal, he’s enterprising, he’s observant, a quick learner. He has feelings, he is connected to his feelings, he works things out. But all these virtues are in service to the underworld, which fascinated him.” Hence, crime is a key tag for this novel. But the crime is not only a phenomenon for the New York kids in the 1930s; it came to the author in the 1980s when boys want “the same things: ” “They want the good life, […] they want a nice house; they want a car. A place in the world.” So presumably crime is “the instant way up from the lower depths” (Tokarczyk 1999:203). In a word, Doctorow has molded the novel on the boys of the 1980s, the time of his writing, who were in their passionate pursuit of the American Dream, only like those in the 1930s — Doctorow’s own contemporaries.

In “The Young Gangster as Mythic American Hero: E. L. Doctorow’s Billy Bathgate ”, Minako Baba reads this gangster novel as Bildungsroman, in which he analyzes this American hero’s “mythical journey”: “after traveling from a ghetto to the mainstream American society via the Jewish underground and gentile rural America, Billy is finally the master of two worlds, mainstream and ethnic, ‘normal’ and criminal, and is free to go across the border in a manner curiously reminiscent of the way mythic hero bridges his two worlds, divine and human” (Baba 1993:44). Baba notices the meta-fictional element in the novel in which juggling is compared to storytelling. He concludes that this is not only a gangster novel, but also a “lyric-comic myth of the 1930s”; it is not only a Bildungsroman, but also a “fascinating performance of verbal juggling” with “certain Jewish texture” (45). Therefore, there is a suggestion that thematically, Doctorow blends the different aspects of Billy’s life to construct his multi-faceted identity.

Similarly, in terms of style, Doctorow seems to have purposefully blurred the distinction between genres. Geoffery Galt Harpham, in “E. L. Doctorow and the Technology of Narrative, ” divides the contemporary American fiction writers into two “opposing ” categories: the “postmodernists” led by Nabokov, Pynchon, Barthelme, Barth, and Gaddis, and the “post-Great Traditionalists who work the realistic vein, ” like Bellow, Styron, Malamud and Roth. But Doctorow, as Harpham argues, “has contrived to be identified with both groups.” His works are a combination of both historical facts and creative imagination; his style is experimental here, but traditional there. Thus there is an “unclassifiability” with his work, like Gravity’s Rainbow, because it “obscures the opposition between realism and experimentalism” (Harpham 1985:81). As for the three novels The Book of Daniel, World’s Fair and Billy Bathgate, they are not merely Bildungsromane, they are political novels and historical novels; still they are crime story and autobiography. In this sense, Doctorow seems to purposefully blur the distinction between genres, as if the distinction, for him, does not quite exist, since he himself says in his 1977 essay “False Document” that “there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction: There is only narrative ” (Doctorow 1993:163). But one common characteristic of the three novels, whatever genre they belong to, is that the little wanderers play an important role in the narrative; they not only produce a unique point of view, but also provides a psychological detachment from the adult’s way of thinking and perceiving; they not only create a special perspective for us to see Doctorow’s relationship with the city, to be specific, New York, as a Jew, a writer, and an ordinary human being, but also helps construct a new urban aesthetics, which is both positive and critical.

3.“Little Wanderer” and the City

It is necessary to start this part with an introduction to the word “flaneur.” In this dissertation its English equivalent “wanderer” is used, but the true essence of the French word “flaneur” needs to be explained at the very beginning. In The Oxford Dictionary, “flaneur” refers to “a man who saunters around observing society, ” that is, a man who walks in a slow and relaxed manner in observation of the surrounding. We can see mostly the figure of flaneurs in Walter Benjamin and Charles Pierre Baudelaire’s works. In Baudelaire’s “L’Art romantique (Paris), ” he describes the flaneur as “to be away from home, yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the center of the world, yet to remain hidden from the world” (Benjamin 1999:443). Benjamin in Paris, the Capital of the 19th Century and The Arcades Project mentions the flaneur so many times that flaneur has become a key figure in his writing. In the introduction of Illuminations: Essays and Reflections by Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt points out that the flaneur represents Benjamin’s concern in slowness and aimlessness, so the word flanerie is usually paralleled with “strolling” and “idling.” It refers to the homeless and stateless state of artists and writers in the city of Paris (Arendt 1968:21). Arendt’s understanding of Benjamin’s flaneur figures has been acknowledged as the main authority in the scholarship on Benjamin’s writing.

Baudelaire was greatly interested in Poe’s story “The man of the crowd.” When analyzing Baudelaire’s perception about the story, Benjamin points out the dialectics of flanerie: “On one side, the man who feels himself viewed by all and sundry as a true suspect and, one the other side, the man who is utterly undiscoverable, the hidden man” (Benjamin 1999:420). So to gain a better understanding of the flaneur, one should not neglect the relationship between the flaneur and the crowd, nor the attitude of the flaneur to the crowd. “For the flaneur, the crowd is a veil hiding the masses” (334). The crowd provides an asylum for the flaneur, but the flaneur never finds home in the crowd. Instead, he is going through his own process of observation and meditation: “The case in which the flaneur completely distances himself from the type of the philosophical promenade and takes on the features of the werewolf restlessly roaming a social wilderness, was fixed for the first time and afterward by Poe in his story ‘The Man of the Crowd’” (417). In the philosophical promenade of the flaneur, he is open to a new way of thinking; he sees himself in a detached position; he is extremely sensitive to whatever element of the city space.

While idling in different corners of the city space, the flaneur undergoes a tremendous psychological change and spiritual transformation, which helps the flaneur to see more clearly the city landscape, and more importantly, to apprehend the situation he is in, and to see in a clear light the social atmosphere and historical tendency. As Benjamin says, “in the course of the flanerie, far-off times and places interpenetrate the landscape and the present moment” (419). There must be a certain duration of this kind of flanerie, like a student who never stops learning and the gambler who never has enough. For the flaneur, there is always something to see. “Idleness has in view an unlimited duration, which fundamentally distinguishes it from simple sensuous pleasure, of whatever variety” (806). The point is, for a flaneur, the city becomes a landscape; the city can no longer remain a “native ground, ” but represents a “theatrical display, an arena ” (347). Similarly, Lewis Mumford points out that the city is the theater of social activities (Mumford 1961:74). Kevin Lynch in The Image of the City also writes:

Moving elements in a city, and in particular the people and their activities, are as important as the stationary physical parts. We are not simply observers of this spectacle, but are ourselves a part of it, on the stage with the other participants. Most often our perception of the city is not sustained, but rather partial, fragmentary, mixed with other concerns. Nearly every sense is in operation, and the image is the composite of them. (Lynch 1960:2)

Arendt in the introduction to Illuminations: Essays and Relflections by Walter Benjamin believes that “without considering the background of the city which became a decisive experience for the young Benjamin one can hardly understand why the flaneur became the key figure in his writings ” (Arendt 1968:21). Arendt’s idea echoes Lewis Munford’s and Kevin Lynch’s ideas by pointing out the dual importance of the city both as the background and as the theatrical arena. For Benjamin, the flaneur is a figure special for Paris, for the arcades provide the best places for these strollers. However, the metaphor of the flaneur is not confined to Paris or to the understanding of French literature. Instead it has been used as an archetypal concept in literary criticism as well as cultural criticism worldwide. The accessibility of this usage makes it possible for me to use the figure of flaneur in this dissertation to discuss a contemporary American writer’s fictional works. In a deeper sense, the flaneur plays an important role in the narrative process. In her Ph.D. dissertation “Reconfiguring the Wanderer: Jewishness, Twentieth Century Literature, and the Political Imagination, ” Lara Trubowiz argues that in Benjamin’s works, both “The Author as Producer” and “The Arcades Project, ” the flaneur could be seen as a “producer, ” “a producer reconfigured as the embodiment of Benjamin’s narratological and philosophical methods, and as the figure through which Benjamin negotiates his ideas about the relationship of production to form and meaning” (Trubowiz 2001:133). To sum up her ideas, firstly, the flaneur narrator produces a unique point of view for narration. It determines the manner and the structure of the narrative. Secondly, it produces a psychological distance from other ways of narration. Thirdly, it produces the narrative itself. In my understanding, besides the three things mentioned above, the flaneur also creates a unique urban aesthetics. The flaneur’s perception of the city, his sensitivity to the buildings and streets, and his understanding of beauty and evil in the city space summons and influences readers’ response to the narrative itself and to its context as a whole.

A transformation takes place with respect to the street; it leads him through a vanished time. He strolls down the street; for him, every street is precipitous. It leads downward — if not the mythical Mother, then into a past that can be all the more profound because it is not his own, not private. Nevertheless, it always remains the past of a youth…. By this melody he recognizes what is around him; it is not a past coming from his own youth, from a recent youth, but a childhood lived before then that speaks to him, and it is all the same to him whether it is the childhood of an ancestor or his own. — An intoxication comes over the man who walks long and aimlessly through the streets.” (Benjamin 1999:880)

Being sensitive to the streets and the people and the events happening there is a unique characteristic of the flaneur. One thing worth mentioning in this citation is that Benjamin has realized that the childhood experience will inevitably influence the flaneur’s psychological promenade, in the way that it not only provides the object of his association, but also becomes a fuse that might trigger off one’s imagination. That leads to another key word in the title of the thesis “little.” Why is the word “little ” added here to “wanderers”? To answer this question, one must take Doctorow’s fictional works into consideration. As is mentioned before, in Doctorow’s fiction, there are quite a few boy-narrators and boy figures: the twelve-year-old Jimmy in Welcome to Hard Times, the little boy and Mother’s younger brother in Ragtime, Daniel Isaacson in The Book of Daniel, Joe in Loon Lake, the little boy in the novella “The Writer in the Family, ” Edgar and Donald in World’s Fair, Billy Bathgate in the novel with the same title Billy Bathgate and the short story “Billy Bathgate, ” and the little orphans like Garbage in Billy Bathgate and The Waterworks, to name just a few. Besides those male figures, there are also female figures, little girls like the little girl whose father is merely called Tateh and Coalhaus Walker’s fiancée the black girl Sarah in Ragtime, Susan in The Book of Daniel, Rebecca in Billy Bathgate and Mary Elizabeth in Homer and Langley. So here in the discussion of this book, “little wanderers” refer to children or young adults who tend to wander in the city space towards physical and psychological maturity. It is an adaptation of the concept “flaneur, ” because there is, firstly, an age limit of the wandering figures within children and adolescents; secondly, a spatial transfer from Paris to New York; and thirdly, a broader sense of wandering without confining the speed of it to “slowness.” Besides, the book prefers the word “wanderer” to “flaneur.” That is itself a linguistic adaptation. The word “wander” means more than mere strolling; it has an intense indication of homelessness and displacement. Benjamin originally used the flaneurs to refer to the intelligentsia: “in the flaneur, the intelligentsia sets foot in the marketplace — ostensibly to look around, but in truth to find a buyer ” (Benjamin 1999:10). There is no confinement of flaneurs within the intelligentsia in this book either. Meanwhile, the turtle speed of strolling of Parisian flaneurs does not mean the pace of thinking should be equally slow. Instead, there is a rapid psychological promenade within their minds. What is more, the flaneur dissolves “the boundaries between exterior and interior space, the country and the city, private and public life, ” and “provides the dialectical starting point from which the fruitful antithesis of form and content can be surpassed” (222). It is from the eyes of the “little wanderers” who may lose themselves in their meander in the city space that we see the cityscape tinted with the flavor of diversified urban culture; it is from their gaze of the streets and neighborhood people that we learn the essence of life for the Jewish immigrants in New York; and it is from their contemplation of city life that we see the relationship between the writer and the city itself.

4.Literature Review

Doctorow’s major works have been published since the 1960’s, but criticism on his works did not mushroom until his third novel The Book of Daniel was published. The first six book-length studies of Doctorow came out before the year 2000, the first three of which are of the same title: E. L. Doctorow (1985) by Paul Levine, E. L. Doctorow (1990) by Carol C. Harter and James R. Thompson, E. L. Doctorow (1991) by John. G. Parks. The other three are: Models of Misrepresentation: On the Fiction of E. L. Doctorow (1991) by Christopher D. Morris, Understanding E. L. Doctorow (1992) by Douglas Fowler, and Fiction as False Document: The Reception of E. L. Doctorow in the Postmodern Age (1996) by John Williams. The publication of those books constitutes the first phase of Doctorow studies.

Paul Levine’s book E. L. Doctorow turns out to be the first comprehensive study of Doctorow’s works in a book length. Levine discusses the relationship between fiction and politics, between fiction and radicalism, between fiction and history, and between fiction and the American Dream, using Doctorow’s texts as a case study. Though this book is introductory, it paves the way for further studies.

In E. L. Doctorow, Harter and Thompson combines the life and art of Doctorow and comments on his novels published before 1985, excluding all those after World’s Fair. Though this study is of a book length, there seems to be no central argument, with only a critical focus on each of the novels mentioned.

John Parks’ study of Doctorow continues this combination of biographic truth and Doctorow’s literary creation, but this time, with a unified theme. In his book E. L. Doctorow, Parks mainly argues that Doctorow’s prose is a political challenge to the American myth and history, in which Doctorow, with polyphonic and heteroglossic narratives, shows his willingness to counter the tendency of a culture which tends to monopolize the composition of truth.

Christopher Morris, based on the study of the previous three books, proposes his idea, that is, Doctorow’s works are models of misrepresentation, in the sense that Doctorow purposefully deviates from historical facts and composes a history from his own perspective. Besides, Morris, by citing de Man, Derrida, and Miller, points out that the interpretation on Doctorow’s works is mostly hermeneutic, which might be“foredoomed to failure ” (Parks 1991:22). He admits that his own interpretation of Doctorow’s works might also be a“misrepresentation” of Doctorow.

John Williams takes the title of Doctorow’s essay“False Documents” as the title of his book Fiction as False Document: The Reception of E. L. Doctorow in the Postmodern Age. He concentrates on the postmodern writing techniques of Doctorow, and surveys the reception of his works in the era dominated by post-structuralism and deconstruction. Williams’ central theme is:“postmodernism and the politics attached to it have created a field of study that exerts considerable influence on what gets written (not to mention what gets published)” (Williams 1996:2).

While the previous five book length studies mainly focus on the contradiction between Doctorow’s political commitment and his commitment to writing, Douglass Fowler, in Understanding E. L. Doctorow, pays his due attention to Doctorow’s commitment to family and to the city he lives in. In this critical as well as introductory work on Doctorow, Fowler concentrates on the autobiographical essence in Doctorow’s novels, which are said by Fowler to be self-creating and patrimony-searching, with his gothic imagination of the Bronx and New York as a whole. Though Fowler’s thoughts and comments are insightful, the book itself, as a series of guides or companions for students and nonacademic readers, cannot give a detailed study of each of the novels due to the limit of length, and thus leaves much space for further study.

The six book length studies of Doctorow in the 20^th century started a systematic and specialized field of the study of the specific contemporary author -E. L. Doctorow. Ever since the six books were published, Doctorow studies have taken on a new look and have come to a new phase in the new millennium, with the characteristics of being varied, inter-disciplinary and comprehensive. In E. L. Doctorow’s Skeptical Commitment published in 2000, at the threshold of the new millennium, Michelle Tokarczyk, synthesizing her published critical essays on Doctorow’s works, the transcripts of her interview with Doctorow and some of her new thoughts, argues that Doctorow’s works are allegories of his own society and city；they are autobiographical in the sense that they reveal how a New York author of Jewish tradition comes to be what he is now. She mentions that Doctorow’s writing has been influenced deeply by his own identity, and thus his novels, like The Book of Daniel, World’s Fair and The Waterworks, are mostly Künstlerromane, like James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in Dublin, which are just disguised portraits of himself as a young man in New York. Tokazrczyk’s exploration of the author’s relationship with the city of New York, however, remains only several mentionings in her book-length study. So in order to have a much clearer picture, we need a much more focalized study.

Catherine Walker Bergstrom’s Intuition of an Infinite Obligation: Narrative Ethics and Postmodern Gnostics in the Fiction of E. L. Doctorow (2010) also sheds new light on Doctorow studies, which uses the ethical approach to analyze Doctorow’s fiction, and points out that Doctorow’s narratives disrupt the postmodern skepticism -the unwillingness to express optimism and hope, and challenges to make connections between the seemingly contradictory past and present. Doctorow’s juxtaposition of the historical and imaginative texts calls for interpretation, which in Bergstrom’s understanding, is an“ethical act directed toward the Other ” (Bergstrom 2010:175). Bergstrom’s ethical approach to Doctorow not only provides the possibility of an inter-disciplinary research, but also conveys the idea that postmodern writers do not necessarily initiate pessimism in the narrative; or rather, Doctorow’s postmodern techniques could be well reconciled with his positive attitude towards life. This gives a shocking enlightenment to me, as I have noticed the optimism in many parts of Doctorow’s novels, which have always been interpreted as“misrepresentations” before.

Two other books about Doctorow, E. L. Doctorow: Essays and Conversations (1983), edited by Richard N. Trenner and Conversations with E. L. Doctorow (1999) edited by Christopher Morris give another perspective of the understanding of Doctorow’s works, that is, Doctorow’s own perspective. Knowing the authors’ instinctual purposes, his inspirations and concerns, his explanations for the specific elements in his fiction writing cast new light on the critical interpretation of his works. The importance of these two books is seen in the possibility of dialogism between literary critics and creative writers.

Besides book length studies, there are individual articles, published by major research journals like American Literature, Critique, Language and Literature, PMLA, etc., either commenting on Doctorow’s specific work, or on his narrative strategy as a whole. There are thematic analyses as well as stylistic concerns.

Within China, Doctorow studies have also gone through several steps, from merely translation of his works to criticism of his works. The translation of Doctorow’s works started from Tao Jie’s translation of Ragtime in 1986 and the second version of the translation of Ragtime is by Chang Tao and Liu Xi, which came out in the year after. Still the third translated version of Ragtime was by Lei Limei published in 1988. Other translated works include Billy Bathgate by Yang Renjing, City of God by Li Zhanzi and Han Bingjian, The March by Zou Hailun, and Creationists: Selected Essays, 1993-2006 by Guo Yingjian.

Criticism on Doctorow’s works in China started from general critical introduction to in-depth interpretation. To date, the critical works may be grouped into the following four categories: representation of history in Doctorow’s historical novels; political engagement as a postmodern strategy in his historiographic metafiction; the religious commitment in his fiction and the trajectory of Jewishness in his works. The postmodern writing techniques and the cultural implications of his works are the major concern. Till now, there is one published book length study, that is, On the Postmodern Art of E. L. Doctorow’s Historical Fiction (2012) by Hu Xuan’en, which is based on his Ph.D. dissertation of the same title. Hu’s main argument is Doctorow intentionally blurs the distinction between fiction and history, between imagination and reality, and experiments in the fictionalization of history with postmodern techniques like parody and collage, by which Doctorow composes the American history from his own political and cultural stance.

Besides the published book length study, there are three Ph.D. dissertations on Doctorow till now. Chen Junsong’s dissertation Political Engagement in Contemporary American Historiographic Metafiction (2010) distributes a chapter discussing the issue of political engagement in Doctorow’s third novel The Book of Daniel, which he argues“best exemplifies the inherent paradox of historiographic metafiction: self-reflexivity is juxtaposed with historical grounding” (Chen Junsong 2010:ix). Wang Liyan in her dissertation The Trajectory of Jewish Themes in E. L. Doctorow’s Fiction (2011) aims at arguing that Doctorow endeavors to preserve the Jewish culture in the different forms his Jewish protagonists endeavor to be, from resistance to acculturation, and thus achieves the dual identity of both being a Jew and an American. While Cai Yuxia in her dissertation Demythologization in E. L. Doctorow’s Historical Fiction (2013), based on Roland Barthes’s theory on mythologies, argues that Doctorow’s fiction deconstructs the myth of the American history. In her opinion, Welcome to Hard Times demythologizes the American West as a Promised Land; Ragtime demythologizes the American justice and equality; Loon Lake demythologizes the American Innocence, while The March demythologizes General Sherman and the March. In a word, her dissertation portrays Doctorow as a“myth-fighter” (Cai Yuxia 116).

Besides book length studies of Doctorow, either published or in the form of Ph.D. Dissertation, there have been a large number of critical essays within books or published in the major journals of literary and cultural studies in China. Professor Qiao Guoqiang, in his book American Jewish Literature discusses the political orientation of Doctorow behind his narrative techniques. Professor Qiao, in the context of American society and the condition of Jewish immigrants, comments on Doctorow’s revision of the Rosenberg Trial in The Book of Daniel and analyzes the author’s political stance and ethical orientation. Other established professors, such as Yang Renjing, Zhang Chong, Wang Shouren, and Chen Shidan, etc., have all given insightful comments on Doctorow’s works from different critical perspectives. In CNKI website, there is a long list of 321 critical essays on Doctorow and his works until now, a large percentage of which are published in the new millennium, which is an echo of the development of Doctorow studies abroad. One master thesis worth mentioning is“Creative Imaginary: Spatial Politics of New York City in E. L. Doctorow’s The Waterworks, World’s Fair and Lives of the Poets ” (2010) by Feng Jie supervised by Paul Levine. In that thesis, Feng observes the“imaginary New York ” in Doctorow’s works as“problematized and allegorized” using Henry Lefebvre’s theoretical framework of the production of space, by which she argues that Doctorow“put the historical and political New York on trial ” (Feng Jie 2010:I). Actually, her concern with Doctorow’s works is still within the framework of political engagement, while neglecting its aesthetic values and humanistic concerns, which in my understanding are equally important.

A survey of the works at home and abroad enables me thus to make a summary of Doctorow studies to date as having two major characteristics: firstly, the number of works introduced or discussed by critics is limited, with Ragtime and The Book of Daniel as their favorite ones; and secondly, the critical approaches mainly focus on New Historicism, Ethnic Study, Ethical Study, Religious Study and Narratology. There is a preference for politics over aesthetics, for chronology over simultaneity, and for temporality over spatiality. This book, however, aims at approaching Doctorow’s works from the spatial perspective, which is enabled by the boy wanderers as narrators of Doctorow’s fiction. It aims at exploring the function of“spatial wandering” in the novels’ thematic presentation and narrative deployment. It will combine Benjamin’s theory of“flâneur” with several other theories, say, the“Third Space” theory by Edward Soja and Homi Bhabha respectively, theory of Cultural Geography by Yifu Tuan and Mike Crane, the spatial narrative theory by Joseph Frank, Wesley Kort and Hana Wirth-Nesher respectively, and the Carnival theory by Bakhtin, to analyze the little wanderers in the city space, to view the New York cityscape from their perspectives, and to explore the characteristics of Doctorow’s urban aesthetics. If Douglass Fowler mentions Doctorow’s commitment to family and the city and his gothic imagination of the Bronx and New York only in several sections of his book, this book tends to present a book length study concentrated just on this topic. If Catherine Walker Bergstrom’s ethical study proves that Doctorow’s postmodern techniques can be well reconciled with his positive attitude towards life, this book tends to go further to prove that Doctorow, in his fictional world, presents us with a positive urban aesthetics that may redeem the city and lift the city from the profane.

The book consists of three parts: the introduction, the body and the conclusion. Between the introduction and the conclusion, there are three chapters. The synopses of the three chapters are as follows:

Chapter One focuses on the function of wandering in the city space in representing and curing Daniel’s childhood trauma in The Book of Daniel. As a psychic alien, Daniel is both an“outsider” in the sense that he is isolated from his own community, and an“insider” in the sense that he is active in his mental promenade during his meander in the city. The national politics has exerted great influence on the personal growth of the Isaacson children Daniel and Susan, who are orphaned and thus have been wandering in search of a real“home.” Linda Mindish, the child of the victimizer also proves to be a victim, who tries to escape from the past both geographically and psychologically. Daniel goes to Los Angeles to find the final truth to prove his parents’ innocence, only to get the epiphany when he finds the senile and feeble Mindishes in Autopia in Disneyland, which shows the author’s own desire for utopia in the city space.

Chapter Two analyzes the role wandering plays in the forming of personal identity for little Edgar in World’s Fair. His dual identity -Jewish and American -is added with a third element, that is urban, forming a triple identity. He is pursuing an identity as“typical American boy.” However, he is only one of the six mentions in the writing contest, but not the winner, which suggests that his pursuit is both successful and unsuccessful, and thus the pursuit is always on-going and has never stopped for Jewish boys like him and for all the children of Jewish immigrants in America. In Edgar’s wandering, he witnesses the decline of his father and his family in and after the Great Depression. It seems that the World’s Fair would be the hope to save the world from economic depression and political turmoil. Edgar’s wandering in the World’s Fair is like a tour around the world, linking the present with the future, and his mother’s earnest wish to see the Jewish Palestine pavilion suggests her strong wish to embrace the root of the Jewish ethnicity as a dignified cultural support. The World’s Fair is a world of tomorrow. The 1939 World’s Fair’s coincidence with the beginning of World War II emphasizes the author’s own wish for a better living environment for the Jewish people, and all the people in the world, as is perceived from little Edgar’s eyes.

Chapter Three probes into the New York cityscape from the perspective of an apprentice gangster boy in Billy Bathgate. Growing up in the Bronx neighborhood of New York city in the 1930s, Billy the fifteen-year-old is“capable” not only in the eyes of the Bronx gangster Dutch Shultz, but also in the sense that he pursues his American Dream and succeeds in getting a large fortune, and in providing his family with good living condition. Here, wandering is his ordinary way of life, both as a sidewalk cowboy and as a capable apprentice gangster. His way of growing morally mature and economically rich can be interpreted as the nation’s own process of becoming stronger, richer and more manipulative, and thus this novel itself can be viewed as America’s national Bildungsroman.

In the concluding part, the thesis points out that the three novels can be viewed as autobiographical urban Bildungnsromane which base themselves on the common ground on which Doctorow the author creates his fictional world, that is, his strong identification with the city of New York where he grows up and lives for most of his life. The boy wanderers in the three novels provide a unique perspective, both as narrators and as observers of the New York landscape. The narratives are, in a sense,“true documents ” of the American life in the Bronx neighborhood of New York City. In his fiction, Doctorow seems to have created a new urban aesthetics which is both positive and critical. His strong humanistic and aesthetic concern complements the historical, political and religious engagement in his literary creation.

1. Hana Wirth-Nesher. City Codes: Reading the Modern Urban Novel. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. In this book, Wirth-Nesher divides the urban space into four aspects: the natural environment, the built environment, the human environment and the verbal environment.
2. “The Man of the Crowd” is a short story written by Edgar Ellen Poe in 1840. In the story，a man sits in a coffee house in London and watches the passers-by and follows an old man who wanders aimlessly in the city. It is one of the first examples of using“flanéur” as a literary device.