Recently in class we briefly touched on the issue of perspective in historical fiction writing. Should historians be purely objective, while writers of historical fiction can be openly subjective? The writing of any history is inevitably a process of selection and in a way all written history is present tense, about the historian’s own time as well as the past one they’re writing about, and it can’t be otherwise because the historian is a part of his or her own culture, just as the people being written about were in theirs, and this inescapable fact shapes the history being written. Phew. Ok but it's impossible to write any narrative with complete objectivity. No matter how hard an author tries to disguise their connections to the modern age, it can’t be done. Not totally. So now I’m wondering what traces of the 1960s and 70s, the time of Ragtime’s composition, can be found if we read between the lines.
I don’t know much about history but I know that the era Doctorow describes in Ragtime is often thought of as a progressive time in American history. Such change was possible because, so we are told, there was broad agreement among most Americans about political means and ends and this consensus engendered evolutionary rather than revolutionary change. We don’t typically think of revolt and anarchy when we think of the early 20th century, yet instead of consensus, Doctorow chooses to emphasize conflict (between blacks and whites, capital and labor, men and women, haves and have-nots) and it is these conflicts which are so often repeated throughout the course of our country's history.
In place of basic optimism about American “progress,” Doctorow substitutes an ironic skepticism about whether any such progress is possible, at least not without a fundamental reordering of social, economic, and political power. This mordant view is underscored by the fates of the novel’s most principled characters: Coalhouse is assassinated and his followers scattered; Goldman is deported; and Tateh abjures his political principles and recreates himself as their antithesis. We debated a little in class about whether these characters’ fates were actually doomed, and Amalia (I think it was her, at least) convinced me otherwise- maybe they’ll go on to greener pastures, etc. But I don’t see it as optimistic, either. I think Doctorow is just showing how progression doesn’t really exist but neither does regression, that there are only opportunities leading down various paths.. I’m getting way way way off base from what I wanted to talk about. 60s! Bullet points!
- Coalhouse Walker- Black Panthers, Black Muslims, Malcom X
- Emma Goldman- feminism, political radicalism
- Younger Brother- New Left
- social and political violence
- the development of a grassroots, utopian, and non-Marxist radicalism
- new cultural visibility. Jews primarily in the earlier period, as represented by Tateh, and African Americans in the later one, as represented by Coalhouse.
Maybe I’m reading too much into the characters. But I think these characteristics of the 60s help to explain the features of the ragtime era that Doctorow chose to emphasize, and they illustrate how the ideas of the historian’s own time can influence the history he or she writes. It makes perfect sense that historians strive to be more than antiquarians, that is, they want their understanding of the past to have some contemporary relevance as well, to illuminate the problems and potential of their own modern culture.
