I thought I knew what to expect when reading historical fiction, considering the restrictions the genre can put on a story, limiting it within certain confines of what we know to be true about history. Of course it's possible to throw in completely unbelievable plot twists for the sake of a more engaging plot, but only at the risk of losing your readers' trust. But E. L. Doctorow masterfully stays true to the books while crafting his own stories into the mix, and somehow manages to present the craziest of situations in such a way that they can't be historically disproven. One of the most striking such occurrences right at the beginning of the book is when the little boy is pondering Houdini and Houdini crashes into a telephone pole outside his house and ends up having to pay his family a visit. But who's to say Houdini didn't crash his car into a telephone pole and visit such a family? Doctorow even throws Evelyn Nesbit and Emma Goldman together in a strangely intimate scene that makes for fascinating parallels between the two historical figures despite Nesbit using her body to climb the capitalist social ladder and Goldman using her mind to spread her political ideals. And even if that encounter didn't happen, Doctorow makes it feel as if it should have. "You came because in such ways as the universe works, your life was destined to interact with my own," Goldman tells Nesbit. Another great pairing Doctorow forms is a meeting between Henry Ford and J. P. Morgan. Again, there's this sense that even if they never had met, tif they had, it would have fit into history perfectly.
It was upon his [J.P. Morgan's] return to America that he began to think about Henry Ford. He had no illusions that Ford was a gentleman. He recognized him for a shrewd provincial, as uneducated as a piece of wood. But he thought he saw in Ford's use of men a reincarnation of pharaohism.
With this, Doctorow builds in a sense of destiny in their encounter, with Ford representing something the affluent J. P. Morgan is seeking to give meaning to a world in which he can buy anything or anyone. "Suppose I could demonstrate that you yourself are an instrumentation in our modern age of trends in human identity that affirm the oldest wisdom in the world," J. P. Morgan tells Ford. In fact, trying to give meaning to the world is a recurring theme of Doctorow's. A few chapters earlier, we see the little boy finding meaning in treasures discarded, looking at the tracks of skates in the ice and seeing only "traces quickly erased of moments passed." "It was evident to him that the world composed and recomposed itself constantly in an endless process of dissatisfaction," Doctorow writes.
Yet even as Doctorow writes with this force of greater purpose that makes us believe that some of these historical figures were destined to meet one another or that his characters might have touched on some profound aspect of life meaning, he laces his narrative heavily with irony in a way that toys with my hypothesis that historical fiction serves to garner sympathy for its characters. He makes Ford seem conniving, telling us that he thought most humans were too dumb to make a decent living. He makes J. P. Morgan seem out of touch with reality because of his excess wealth, his interests in mysticism seemingly a pass time designed to help him cope with his lack of anything to work toward. Emma Goldman seems strangely paradoxical with her unrelenting judgements of Evelyn Nesbit while attempting to reach out to her. Evelyn Nesbit is one of the few characters who gets more sincerely portrayed by Doctorow, with her life described as one tragedy after the next, and the transformation of her character as she reaches out to Tateh's daughter. So, maybe Doctorow is interested in drawing in his readers' sympathies for certain characters, but he does so sparingly, and maybe that's what makes his style especially effective. But with his mix of leading his readers to believe in some greater life meaning alongside his habitual irony, Doctorow's narrative is the most difficult character to capture of all.
Yeah totally agree with most of the points you raise here! I came into the class expecting something entirely different as I had thought I was familiar with the genre of books we typically classify as 'historical fiction', but reading Ragtime has been something else entirely. Doctorow does a really amazing job at navigating the constraints of history while still adding whatever he wants into his novel; everything seems out of place but completely plausible at the same time. I also really love his use of irony, and just how the whole book is so heavily peppered with it. Really excited to see what will happen next.
ReplyDelete"Destiny" is a funny word to use in this context--and I totally see what you mean; it reflects that sense that such meetings "should have" happened even if they didn't in fact. And, of course, there's inherent irony in using such a term in the context of fiction, as we're aware (esp. in this novel) of an author arranging such meetings deliberately--the only "destiny" is Doctorow's plot outline. But with Morgan and Ford, there's even another level of "destiny" at work, as Morgan himself clearly sees his life in terms of "signs" and deeper meanings, and *he* believes that he and Ford are "destined" to explore their immortality together. (Of course, his sense of destiny is treated ironically by the novel, as Ford basically shrugs it off.)
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