The waterworks

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The waterworks (English original title: Waterworks ) is a novel by EL Doctorow , which was published in 1994 in the USA and in 1995 as a translation in Germany .

content

action

The novel is set in New York in 1871. It is about the freelance journalist Martin Pemberton, who fell out with his corrupt father years before his death. When he sees his father - after his death - drive past him several times in a white omnibus, he begins to research. Martin disappears and one of his employers goes looking for him. To shed light on the darkness, he speaks to Martin's fiancé Emily Tisdale, his stepmother, his painter friend Harry Wheelwright and the clergyman Charles Grimshaw. But only when he asks the police officer Edmund Donne for help, they get on the track. In their search for Martin Pemberton they repeatedly come across the Croton Water Reservoir. It soon turns out that Augustus Pemberton never died, but is kept alive along with other empires in the city by the highly intelligent doctor Sartorius. With the participation of the real person of William Tweed , Dr. Sartorius worked on the realization of eternal life. To do this, he took blood and tissue from orphans and injected them into the elderly. Many of the children died - as Sartorius states, not because he killed them with his treatment, but out of fear. Martin Pemberton, who was temporarily imprisoned by Sartorius, returns to his family disturbed after his liberation, but he no longer seems to be the same. He was too disturbed by his fascination for the doctor and his experiences at times. Sartorius is caught and taken to the mental hospital on Blackwell's Island, where he conducts self-experiments. His rich patients - including Martin Pemberton's father - die. New York witnessed the exposure of tweeds and their disempowerment. The public does not learn anything about Sartorius' experiments.

people

  • Martin Pemberton: Freelance journalist who wrote sharp reviews and broke with his corrupt father
  • Augustus Pemberton: Got rich with slave trade and inferior war production during the Civil War
  • Harry Wheelwright: Martin's only friend who is portrayed rather unsympathetically by the first-person narrator
  • Emily Tisdale: Martin's fiancée and childhood friend
  • Charles Grimshaw: clergyman who allowed himself to be captured by Augustus Pemberton
  • Edmund Donne: One of the few police officers in New York who the first-person narrator does not consider corrupt
  • Dr. Sartorius: A doctor with a Faustian thirst for knowledge who was a hospital doctor during the civil war. As such, he reappears in Doctorow's 2006 novel The March . The first-person narrator refers to the German origin of the name. It is a Latinization of the name Schneider.

worldview

Through the culture-pessimistic view of the first-person narrator, Doctorow paints a successful picture of New York at this time. Very realistically, McIlvaine describes the corruption of Tammany Hall and its "party machine" under William Tweed , whose caricatures of Thomas Nast in Harper's Weekly contributed to his overthrow. He describes the misery of the newspaper boys, as well as numerous streets and buildings as they looked at that time. He disagrees with Walt Whitman's positive descriptions of the city .

shape

The plot is determined by the first-person narrator McIlvaine, who recorded the events of 1872. Although he repeatedly makes references to the personality of individual characters, he does not anticipate the plot to the extent that he would reveal the outcome of the criminal act prematurely. The novel draws its authentic and gloomy mood from the descriptions of McIlvaines, who repeatedly digresses from the “Pemberton case” and reveals his experiences and his knowledge of the city.

Position in literary history

Classification in the work of the author

The waterworks is one of Doctorow's less successful novels, although he too presents a typical amalgamation of history and fiction, like Doctorow's bestsellers such as Billy Bathgate , Ragtime and The March . In addition, the story's staff also include those who appear in other works, such as Dr. Sartorius in The March . Doctorow, whose first name is Edgar Lawrence, was named this way by his father because he loved Edgar Allan Poe . Doctorow believes that with Das Wasserwerk he paid tribute to Poe. As early as 1984 Doctorow published a short story entitled Das Wasserwerk . In terms of content, this story largely coincides with McIlvaine's memory of a child drowning in the Croton Reservoir.

Position in literary history

In the scenes in which child poverty in New York is described, the novel is strongly reminiscent of the works of Charles Dickens . He was in New York in the 1840s and recorded his experiences in his American Notes 1843. Another model may have been George G. Foster's stories New York by Gas-light and Other Urban Sketches from 1850. You can read in them the meeting of the newspaper boys at Buttercake Dick.

criticism

The Berliner Zeitung praises in her review in 2013 Doctorow's representation of the waterworks of the title as "the heart of this thoughtful, but classy constructed novel. A mixture of genius and immorality spirit of research and unscrupulousness" Furthermore, it is stated in the novel criticism: "What Doctorow here about the 'Gilded Age' - the 'Gilded Age' of the Vanderbilts, Rockefellers and other robber barons - points far beyond that bygone era. Because the type of 'godless doctor' Sartorius lives on in our times of genetic manipulation, organ trafficking and artificial reproduction technologies. "

literature

Text output

Secondary literature

  • Kurbjuweit, Dirk: "New York in the ice". In: Die Zeit , April 7, 1995
  • Scheck, Denis: “The hunt for greedy old men”. In: Focus , July 10, 1995
  • Spiegel, Hubert: "New York, New York". In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , June 24, 1995
  • Weber, Bruce: EL Doctorow's New York; A Native of the Bronx Chronicles a Century of the City. In: New York Times , July 5, 1995
  • Schama, Simon: New York, Gaslight Necropolis, In: New York Times, June 19, 1994

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Schama: New York, Gaslight Necropolis. In: New York Times , June 19, 1994.
  2. ↑ In: EL Doctorow: The life of the poet . Cologne 1995.
  3. ^ George G. Foster: New York by Gas-light and Other Urban Sketches . New York 1990, University of California Press. Chapter VI, Dick's Butter Cake, pp. 112-120.
  4. ^ New York gold leaf . In: Berliner Zeitung , July 11, 1995. Retrieved October 2, 2013.
  5. ↑ Detective puzzle game in New York - EL Doctorow's "Waterworks" . In: Focus, July 10, 1995. Retrieved September 2, 2013
  6. ^ New York Times, July 5, 1995
  7. ^ New York Times, June 19, 1994