Compared to regular fiction, I think the text of Ragtime makes you think more because it's presented as being historical, and given the historical context anything fictional makes you question its validity. As I read more of the novel, the idea of a person recalling what a certain time was like became less viable to me, maybe because there was too great of a range of things described by the narrator that one person can't know. Parts of Houdini's life, described in anecdotal events, make up part of the text along with insight into the going-ons of a fictional middle class white family. All the different parts of these events can't be known by a single narrator. Also, given the context of postmodernism there doesn't have to be a believable explanation for where the narration is coming from. Fictional information about real-life figures are dispensed throughout Ragtime, and this questions the meaning of "historical" when the historical elements are fictional.
Thursday, January 21, 2016
Fluctuation of the Narration
Something obviously unique about Ragtime was apparent in just its first pages; its structure of long paragraphs made up of short sentences and a range of subjects touched upon but never always completely connected. Reading this book's beginning chapters gave me the sense of someone describing every aspect they could remember from a certain time in their past. The way the narration mentions information that's seemingly inconsequential for the establishment of a plot could be explained through the perspective of someone that lived when all these things were happening around them; brief sentences like "Teddy Roosevelt was President" and "Women were stouter then" can be connected by that sort of context. There's a mingling of fact and opinion in the narration which reflects the question that started off the class: what makes history different from fiction? One way to know is if you've lived through an actual historical event, but afterwards the event can never be repeated. It fades into memory and seems to become about as physical as fiction can be. Being aware of this further blurs the narration's status as something either historical or fictional.
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I like your description of the overstuffed first paragraph as an author seemingly throwing in everything he can think of to mention in an effort to establish his historical period--there's definitely a sense of apparent arbitrariness and non sequitor in some of these offhand references.
ReplyDeleteBut it doesn't seem quite so personal to me--a reminiscence about "a certain time in their past." It seems more like an author or putative historian throwing down every reference he can think of to set the scene, stuff he's gleaned from photographs ("everyone wore white"; large crowds gathered outdoors) and history books (Emma Goldman's remark about "the crime of the century"). This distance helps establish the irony we've talked so much about. And as I wrote about on my blog, there's also the way that Doctorow uses art and photography as his points of reference: he's not *recalling* the light on the eastern seaboard, which was ostensibly "available" in the early 20th century but not any longer, from memory; he's alluding quite directly to certain paintings by Winslow Homer. Art rather than "reality" is our point of departure. This, too, gives the impression of a considerable degree of remove between the author and his material.
I agree with your mention that Doctorow wants to make us think. I really think that "making the reader think" is the point of postmodernist history. We've experienced it in our history classes at Uni, though not to such as fanciful degree. We are encouraged to explore different views and see a bigger more complicated picture than a single narrative. Humans are imperfect by nature, and so the nature of history is "imperfect" filled with biases and different ideas. I think Doctorow is emphasizing that that's okay, because, what does history matter but what we remember or think of it?
ReplyDeleteI also really like your description of Doctorow setting the scene at the beginning of the book. It seems like he just sets up this "historical" picture of what people associate with that time period, so he can then go on to blast it to bits later on. Like Grace said, it's like he wants us to think -- to reconsider this broad view at the beginning and see what's really going on when we look closer.
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ReplyDeleteThe interesting thing about Ragtime is that it could easily be a fictional book, and yet the historical context and the real, historical characters add a completely new dimension to it. One of the things you mentioned was that all of the events described in the book could not be known to a single narrator, and I think this is true of history as well. We cannot know everything about any particular historical figure, and although we do know quite a bit about Henry Ford and J.P. Morgan, Doctorow has been able to place them in scenes that border on absurdity without contradicting the historical record. I think it really emphasizes how much we don't yet know about our history, and that we should reserve judgement of historical figures such as Ford, supposedly an American hero, until we really have enough evidence to justify it.
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