"The discussion of the relation between literature and scripture is a discussion of our country's future," renowned author E. L. Doctorow told a Salomon 101 audience Wednesday in a lecture titled "Literature and Religion."
Doctorow - author of works such as "Ragtime," "City of God" and "The March" - appeared on campus for a speech sponsored by the Andrea Rosenthal Memorial Lectureship Fund. He explained that the difference between the literary and the scriptural lies in the perception of the author - unlike prophets who claimed to transmit the sacred truths to others, modern authors don't call for followers for their work, he said.
Nevertheless, early modern and modern writers have tried to efface their own authorship with the hope that their work might seem more like truth and less like fiction. According to Doctorow, Daniel Defoe claimed that he merely edited "Robinson Crusoe," and Miguel de Cervantes maintained that he bought an Arabic text of "Don Quixote" and translated it so that the text would look like a document, not fiction.
What further separates a novel from scripture lies in one's conviction, Doctorow argued. The eradication of doubt in the face of faith is what distinguishes scripture from literature. Doctorow said doubt is one of humanity's great creative impetuses.
"Literature down to its deepest roots is secular," as creativity demands that all writers reevaluate their traditional beliefs, he said.
"Every writer worth the name is unaffiliated," he said.
The institutionalization of religious and nationalist conviction is one of the evils of our world, and fanaticism is the state where doubt is eliminated, Doctorow said. "The problem with al-Qaida is that their conception of the world is attributed to one supreme author. Any innovation cannot be anything except an abomination," he said. By contrast, he said, "A true democracy demands a multiplicity of authors and voices."
Doctorow further explained that there is a doubt institutionalized in the Constitution, which Doctorow called the sacred text of our "civil religion." The constitutional conviction that "there is no proven path to salvation, only traditions" has paradoxically led the United States to become one of "the most prayerful nation(s) in the world."
So it is not doctrine but "doubt" that Doctorow calls "the civilizing element of life." He argued that a secular society can evolve but theoretically a theocracy can't. Only a society that believes in the possibility of an essential truth yet does not espouse any particular one can change and incorporate new ideas, he said.
Concluding, Doctorow told the audience to suspect those who try to subvert the state to dogma, a trend he finds in the theocratic tendencies of the contemporary religious right and in religious fanatics overseas.
"What makes people think of us as 'infidels' overseas and within our own borders," he said, "is not that we are Christians, Jews, Muslims or atheists but rather that within our population of 300 million we are everything."
