When the interviewer asks if Doctorow feels a responsibility to "explain, describe, invent, create the reality, unify the reality," his eventual response is illuminating: "I'm under the illusion that all of my inventions are quite true. For instance, in Ragtime, I'm satisfied that everything I made up about Morgan and Ford is true, whether it happened or not. Perhaps truer because it didn't happen." This is a really loaded statement; I think what Doctorow is describing here is the ability of narrative to reconcile history and fiction. In Doctorow's words, "there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction: there is only narrative."
Rather than advertising his novel as fiction, Doctorow acknowledges that he has created something true--maybe not true in the sense of a verifiable, physical truth, but certainly true in the possibility that it could have happened, even though it didn't. When Doctorow says "Perhaps truer because it didn't happen," I interpret that as him as applying what Doctorow refers to as "the power of freedom." That is, Doctorow knows that we cannot completely and with no doubt verify that Morgan did not go to Egypt and sleep in a pyramid. And this mere possibility allows writers (and even historians) the creative license to create something new and unhindered by what we observe as the distinction between fact and fiction.
2 comments:
Doctorow kind of reminds me of that one politician in that whole, "Not intended to be a factual statement," scandal of last year.
But that's not to say I'm not liking these readings and your post! It's all so deep, yet not deep somehow... it's like, anything I say is true because I said it, and it could be true, even if it's not verify-ably true. Which is kind of a dangerous weapon for Doctorow to have at his disposal, but I don't think he's really abusing as badly as he could be.
Doctorow uses "true" in a sense that's distinct from "factual" (or "real," or "actual"). The idea is that the fictional J. P. Morgan may in many ways reflect deeper "truths" (about power, isolation, modern capitalists as "gods," etc.) than a strictly "factual" account (which would itself be inherently and inescapably selective and incomplete, framed according to various narrative structures, and "fictional" in lots of ways that have nothing to do with "fact"). We don't *expect* factual statements from novelists all the time--this gives them a kind of freedom that a politician on the floor of the US House of Representatives does not have.
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