So far in this course, we've established that there's a fine line between history and fiction. The historian has the liberty to include or exclude specific details in their account of events in order to frame things in a certain way. I found Doctorow's Ragtime to be a perfect example of this phenomenon.
Though Doctorow isn't a historian, he poses as one throughout Ragtime as he weaves together history and fiction into a tightly meshed story. With the historical figures that he ropes into his story, he chooses to mention certain events and specific parts of their lives while ignoring other, less desirable details. For example, Evelyn Nesbit had a child while Harry K. Thaw was in an insane asylum (due to his murder of Stanford White). She claimed it was Thaw's child and had been conceived during one of her visits, but he denied paternity. This is some wild stuff! But because Doctorow tries to separate Evelyn from the gossip and scandals that surrounded her, he left out this massive scandal that would distract the reader from her more developed personality.
Another example of Doctorow's selective storytelling is his portrayal of Henry Ford. A large part of Ford's public persona was his extreme right-wing politics and blatant antisemitism. However, Doctorow only acknowledges these traits in passing, and in such a vague manner that some readers could miss it entirely. He chooses to conceal Ford's personal beliefs to keep the reader focused on Ford's mechanical genius, which he decides is more relevant.
Though this is an acceptable strategy for a fiction writer, it is a questionable one for a historian. With Doctorow posing as both a historian and a novelist, he isn't technically selectively telling history, but he's coming pretty darn close.
I really like this blog post. You’ve articulated, much better than I could have, the aspect of Ragtime I’ve been having the most trouble swallowing – Doctorow’s power over the course of history within his novel. Obviously, I’ve read historical fiction before, and obviously, plenty of those novels were meant to illustrate social problems, but it’s never triggered the same discomfort. Like you say, Doctorow feels far more like a historian in Ragtime than he does an author, a persona he is deliberately cultivating by spending so much time at the beginning establishing the setting of the early 1900s and then by pretending to be reconstructing, rather than telling, Coalhouse’s story. Doctorow is pretending that the story he’s telling is not his – which becomes seriously problematic when you consider that it is his story, that any story has a message, and any story that draws so extensively on real world events will be editing and cropping those events to tell that story. Doctorow framing his story as history feels very problematic to me for exactly reasons you describe, something that I’ve never been as bothered by when reading historical fiction in the past.
ReplyDeleteMr. Mitchell you have ruined historical fiction for me. I’ll always be disturbed by this.
Isn't that kinda the point, though? Doctorow's intentionally creating this really wacky, obviously false "history" as some sort of test case for the reader. Doctorow is selectively telling us certain things and leaving others out, manipulating some facts and fabricating others. Aren't other historians doing the same thing? Isn't that the point of all the readings on postmodernism we've been doing? Sure, Doctorow is messing with the facts to a degree not usually seen in history. But that idea that he *is* changing something to fit with a preconceived narrative, that idea that you want to escape (honestly me too), is inescapable in history. The question is: if Ragtime falls on one side of the "this is an unacceptable degree of weirdness" line, and your favorite history textbook doesn't, then where's the line? Is there a line?
DeleteIt feels like Doctorow is telling a story for our entertainment while subtly presenting his own views on society back then. He briefly mentions things that he dislikes, like Ford's factory conditions, but doesn't discuss them deeply enough to make it too apparent that he has his own critical views.
ReplyDeleteI agree. Doctorow definitely mimics the role of being a historian, and as I was reading Ragtime, I was surprised by how many extra details (not written down in history) that he managed to squeeze in without contradicting history. I think this book was a great one to start this class off with, as it shows the thin line between history and fiction, and how close fiction can be to history in many cases.
ReplyDeleteI know Doctorow is intentionally playing around with the gray areas of what we know as history, but it does call to question what exactly we can trust is real and fake. Like, obviously Doctorow made up Coalhouse and the unnamed family (as far as we know 🤔) and worked their story into a depiction of early-1900s America that, as far as we know, is pretty accurate, but set up in such a way that Doctorow selectively chooses what we know or how we perceive things, as you say in your post. Doctorow clearly seems to have some sort of agenda behind writing the book, to the point where him calling himself a historian seems a bit sacrilege. But maybe that's the point Doctorow is trying to make. Anyways, good post, thanks for bringing this up!
ReplyDeleteI didn't even know that Doctorow excluded so many big points from the real characters' lives, and I think that shows how much power that Doctorow has as an author. Like he doesn't need to follow rules about making it historically accurate, and I think that makes the book more interesting for the reader because we're constantly questioning whether parts of the story are actually true.
ReplyDeleteOne thing I found myself doing constantly while reading this book was questioning my knowledge of historical events. Doctorow is so good at creating his own plausible history, it makes me question the "truth" I have been to value as the "history" of our world. Furthermore, as Raneem said, as makes the readers question what is true and what isnt, it adds to the books enticement and keeps readers wanting to know what happens next; is it true? or is it fake? Though its confusing (lowkey a lot of the time), I think its also really cool because it makes you think harder about the classic stories we've been taught in school and such; makes your brain hurt a little, but also makes for some deeper thinking.
ReplyDeleteDoctorow's history has a very strange relationship with the "real" history. The broad trends of the era, as well as the most well known events are still there, but many of the smaller scale occurrences appear completely made up. While it is possible that Harry Thaw and Houdini ran into eachother, and it is possible that Evelyn Nesbitt was obsessed with some Jewish Immigrants, it probably didn't happen. Then there is the story of Coalhouse Walker, which seems to completely break the veil of possibilities.
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