EXECUTION REFASHIONING: APPROPRIATIVE IMPROVISATION IN E. L. DOCTOROW’S THE BOOK OF DANIEL

Daniel Isaacson, the narrator in E. L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel (1971), recounts the story of the life and execution of his parents, in the form of a doctoral dissertation. As a vehicle of textual politics, Daniel’s narration, however, transcends a mere historical retelling of the past and fashions a personal synthesis of the ideological conflicts that have irreversibly damaged him and his family. The present article proposes to argue that Daniel’s refashioning of the lives of the Isaacsons is an instance of Stephen Greenblatt’s notion of “improvisation”. Daniel manipulates familiar history and improvises the past into his own version of fiction, while maintaining sufficient distance. By exposing the conflicting positions in the narrative as deeply flawed ideological constructs, Daniel’s appropriative improvisation gestures toward an ultimate synthesis, which, far from endorsing the Old or New Left, de-glorifies radical subversion and limns it as inefficacious.