Among the most immediately apparent “postmodernist” aspects of Ragtime are the subtle ways that Doctorow acknowledges the fictional status of his narrative within the narrative itself (metafiction), even as he labors to ground it in a specific and clearly defined historical context. Phrases like “at this time in our history” or references to the fact that the novel is being written “nearly fifty years since [Houdini’s] death” (8) pointedly call attention to the written (or constructed, or composed) nature of this story. Rather than attempting to “transport” the reader, to place us “in” 1906 America, to imagine living as these characters did (the traditional aims of historical fiction), Doctorow makes no bones about the fact that he’s writing a novel—and we’re reading a novel. When Houdini’s car crashes into a telephone pole right in front of Father’s house, immediately after the narrative details the Little Boy in the sailor blouse and his fascination with Houdini’s work, he isn’t even trying to make this “coincidence” seem plausible (a fact that itself is drawn attention to when he begins chapter 2 with the phrase, “As it happened”—when clearly it did not “happen,” other than on these pages). He’s flaunting the coincidence, and reminding us that there’s an author behind this whole thing, making stuff coincide.
Another way that the narrative flaunts its own status as art (rather than “reality”—realism is art that tries to conceal the fact that it’s art) is when Doctorow explicitly (and implicitly) cites visual artists as his points of departure. Clearly, a great deal of historical research has gone into this novel, but even when he’s describing Younger Brother strolling among the salt marshes, he doesn’t attempt a “realistic” description of these marshes. Or, rather, he begins in this vein—“The air was salt. . . . Sea birds started and flew up” (4)—but quickly abandons realist techniques in favor of artistic cross-reference: “This was the time in our history when Winslow Homer was doing his painting. A certain light was still available along the Eastern seaboard. Homer painted the light. It gave the sea a heavy dull menace and shone coldly on the rocks and shoals of the New England coast. There were unexplained shipwrecks and brave towline rescues” (4).
How do we know what the light was like on the Eastern seaboard back in 1906? Was it even all that different from today? (In the daytime, at least—it’s surely much brighter at night these days.) Well, look at this painting—here’s how it used to look. Are these references to the “heavy dull menace” of the sea and the “cold shine” on the rocks and shoals Younger Brother’s impressions? Maybe, maybe not. Doctorow is referring to another work of art here, and not “reality.” The paintings are cited as a kind of narrative-visual shorthand, to do the work of description in the absence of Doctorow’s own adjectives. And in the first (long) paragraph of the novel, this is one more way that the book flaunts its status as art. This flaunting is even more apparent if you’re familiar with Winslow Homer’s work, as Doctorow actually alludes obliquely to one of his most famous paintings: “There were . . . brave towline rescues.” What initially might appear to be a strange non sequitur stating something about “the kind of things that happened back then,” akin to curious the mention of “odd things [going] on in lighthouses and shacks,” is clearly a reference to this painting:
So is our point of reference the actual coast of the northeastern United States as it existed at the start of the last century? Or is it to another work of art, with no “unmediated” access to reality? I’d say it is both—Homer’s work does provide a handy and compelling visual supplement to the image of Younger Brother moping around the beach with his trousers rolled (an allusion to the marquee modernist T. S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock? He is “having difficulty finding himself” . . .), and Homer’s art is in the naturalist tradition, so this presumably is what the beach “used to” look like in this part of the country. But I’m reminded of Oscar Wilde’s remarks about how the sunsets started imitating Monet’s paintings once he taught us how to see them. Is art imitating life here, or is art merely imitating art?
Something similar happens when Doctorow cites the photography and social activism of Jacob Riis: “At this time in our history Jacob Riis, a tireless newspaper reporter and reformer, wrote about the need for housing for the poor. They lived too many to a room. There was no sanitation. The streets reeked of shit. Children died of mild colds or slight rashes. . . . He went around climbing dark stairs and knocking on doors and taking flash photos of indigent families in their dwellings. He held up the flash pan and put his head under the hood and a picture exploded” (16-17). On the one hand, like the Homer reference earlier, this is another way that Doctorow fills in the historical setting—“At this time in our history.” It’s a way of introducing us to the squalor of the Lower East Side, which will be important to the Evelyn Nesbit plot in the next few chapters, but again, rather than simply presenting detailed descriptions of these conditions himself, as a traditional novelist might do (in order to “put the reader there” imaginatively), again Doctorow piggybacks his narrative-fictional art on another art form—photojournalism. A traditional novelist would very likely have referred extensively to Riis’s vast body of documentary photography as part of their research, in order to bolster descriptions of this setting, but it’s a postmodernist move to implicitly acknowledge this fact. When we read Doctorow’s account of Evelyn’s first impressions of the Lower East Side in chapter 7, we could be reading a summary description of the photographs in Riis’s landmark collection How the Other Half Lives (1890):
Dark-eyed faces peered into the hansom. Men with big moustaches smiled
through their gold teeth. Street workers sat on the curbs in the heat and
fanned themselves with their derbies. Boys in knickers ran alongside the car
with bulky loads of piecework on their shoulders. Evelyn saw stores with
Hebrew signs in the windows. . . . She saw the iron fire escapes on the
tenements as tiers of cellblocks. Nags in their yokes lifted their bowed
necks to gaze at her. (41)
And so on. How does Doctorow “know” what it would have looked like to be chauffeured through these tenements? The same way any novelist or historian would—by doing research, looking at photographic or other visual evidence, and building an imaginative account from there. But as with the Winslow Homer allusion earlier, he cites his sources, which is unusual in historical fiction, and quintessentially postmodernist.
A few more such allusions, before I sign off. The image of Evelyn Nesbit that Younger Brother hangs on his bedroom wall (5) is described in detail in the text—the reader’s first impression of her is via a famous drawing that was widely circulated, Charles Dana Gibson’s “The Eternal Question”:
The description of Harry K. Thaw in his cell, which “glowed like a stage in the perpetual dusk of the cavernous prison,” as seen by Harry Houdini, is a reference to a notorious photograph of Thaw in the New York Tombs (“The prisoner had a broad flat face with a porcine nose, a wide mouth, and eyes that seemed unnaturally bright and large. He had coarse hair combed back from an oddly crescent hairline. Houdini, a vaudevillian, thought of the face of a ventriloquist’s dummy. The prisoner was sitting at a table laid with linen and service. On the table were the remains of a large meal” [30]):
Various accounts of the White-Nesbit-Thaw affair are available online; for a detailed and entertaining one that’s full of visual images, check this out.
Houdini did not perform an escape from the New York Tombs in 1906, when Thaw was an inmate there, but he did escape from the less-infamous Boston Tombs in pretty much exactly the way Doctorow describes (though he does, happily, appear to be wearing underpants).
Finally, the photograph of Robert Peary, Mathew Henson, and their Inuit guides at the North Pole (“It shows five stubby figures wrapped in furs, the flag set in a paleocrystic peak behind them that might suggest a real physical Pole. Because of the light the faces are indistinguishable, seen only as black blanks framed by caribou fur” [81]) is famous in its own right. Hey, that’s Father’s American flag in the background!
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