E.L. Doctorow’s fictional autobiography: World’s Fair (1985) as a carnivalesque Bildungsroman
Abstract
In World’s Fair (1985) E.L. (Edgar Lawrence) Doctorow (1931–) artistically transforms
autobiographical and historical facts and memories of the actual world of his childhood
into a Bildungsroman. Doctorow was in his fifties when he wrote this novel, which is widely
regarded as more autobiographic than his other Bildungsromane, namely The Book of Daniel
(1971), Loon Lake (1980) and Billy Bathgate (1989). This fictionalisation takes place through the
use of a retrospective narrator who depicts the memories of his formative experiences as a
nine-year-old boy. The novel is marked by a striking structural feature, namely that positive
and sombre or serious events alternate. The question therefore arises: Why does Doctorow
construct his childhood memoir in this manner? In brief, the answer is that the narrator’s
Bildung depends on a carnivalesque dialectic of dangerous and/or threatening events and
the relief and/or repair of these same events. This article therefore attempts to make sense of
World’s Fair in terms of selected aspects of M.M. Bakhtin’s notion of ‘carnival’. It shows a clear
link between, on the one hand, this novel’s status as a Bildungsroman along with the personal
growth of the narrator and central character and, on the other hand, a carnivalesque dialectic
of seriousness and amelioration. It thus shows that the main theme of the book is, in fact, the
reliance of growth on this dialectic. The article begins with a brief analysis of the novel in
terms of its semi-autobiographic character and then provides an equally brief overview of
Bakhtin’s (1984, 1985) notion of carnival. The main body of the text provides examples from
the novel and thus evidence for the above-mentioned dialectic.
Collections
- Faculty of Humanities [2033]