After our discussion in class just now, I feel slightly bad about being kind of harsh on Doctorow. The truth is, I don't really dislike the way Doctorow fuses the historical and fictional characters; it's more of just that I'm so not used to this kind of writing, particularly with historical fiction. I think our expectations have a lot to do with whether or not we like things on the first go-around, so for me, having never read anything like Ragtime, I couldn't help but be a little frustrated. I genuinely did like how Doctorow used several seemingly disconnected stories to tell one bigger story. I thought the plot was original and not overly complicated.
In terms of what we draw from the novel, I disagree with Nikita when she said that there's no real point to the novel. On the surface, there are definitely parts of the book that I thought were weird and glossed over (like the whole mirror scene in the Tombs), but I think there are certain ideas we can think about. For example, the whole Coalhouse situation says a lot about the race dynamic especially because it's not like he's making a scene just for the sake of fighting for equality. Another example is the way Ford and Morgan are portrayed. Just because Doctorow takes liberty with the way he represents both of them doesn't mean that there's no value to his fictionalized versions of the two characters.
I wish there was a way for me to just ask Doctorow what he was implying in so many parts of the novel, but on the other hand, I think the fact that it's all open to interpretation has a lot to do with the appeal. I generally liked Ragtime, and though I'm not very into re-reading books, I feel like being able to read it again expecting something different would help me enjoy it more.
3 comments:
I always wish we could just call Doctorow up and ask him about the book. It's easy to dismiss the entire novel as meaningless, but every piece of work was made with a purpose, and it would be a lot easier to just ask the author himself than bicker over his intentions. I'm making the assumption that he didn't write an entire novel just to mess with people's heads- and he takes very clear stances on issues such as race, class, and patriotism. I understand what Nikita said in that we don't really walk away with any new sense of morality or anything, but if anything we are at least forced to reconsider the standards of fictional literature. That in itself is a good enough reason to write a book.
Well, the author is alive and working, and you could always pen him a letter with some pointed questions. And there are a number of interviews with him available, where he "defends" his methods against some of the same kinds of criticisms that have been aired in class.
While I'm very much interested in Doctorow's own views (and I look forward to discussing his essay "False Documents" in class next week), we aren't necessarily arguing about his intentions here--we're arguing about what's in the book, and what we as readers make of it. When I refer to "Doctorow" in class--as in, "What is Doctorow's view of Morgan here?"--there really should be invisible quotation marks, as I mean something like what literary theorists would call the "implied author," our constructed sense of the coherent, organizing intelligence "behind" the work, as it is manifest in the often ambiguous and ironic narrative. Any claims about what the novel does or means need to be referred to the text itself, not to the author's retrospective articulation of his intentions. It's the task of literary criticism (of the sort that will be presented by the panels, and the sort you'll all be writing in your response papers) to try to unpack this meaning for ourselves.
Nice piece. Personally, I agreed with Nikita. Perhaps it's simply because I'm not much of a literary critic, I failed to see a deep underlying message Doctorow was trying to send (that might prove to be a problem later on). That's not to say I didn't like the book--I thought it was well written and enjoyed reading it--but just I saw it as a very interesting rewrite of Michael Kohlhass with new dynamics thrown in without an actual point. I don't know. Maybe I'm simply not reading it right.
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