Notebook Prompt: Jes Grew "Seeking Its Text"?

Both PaPa LaBas and Hinckle Von Vampton say that Jes Grew is “seeking its text.” We have been identifying Reed’s fictional “Jes Grew” virus as a rough analog for the real-life historical jazz music, dance, and culture that emerged in the 1920s. What connections might there be between writing/text and dance/music/culture? What might it mean for Jes Grew to be “seeking its text”?

Please take 5 minutes to contemplate these questions in your notebook.

A Happy Ending?

Near the very end of Ragtime, as chapter 40 and the novel itself is winding down, Doctorow indulges in one final metafictional joke: “By that time the era of Ragtime had run out, with the heavy breath of the machine, as if history were no more than a tune on a player piano” (319). The author seems resist the idea that we’ve gotten anywhere over the course of the novel, or that the “history” he’s narrated has been brought to any kind of meaningful or illuminating conclusion. (And if you didn’t notice, the “meta” joke here has to do with the capitalization of “Ragtime”—earlier, when referring to the genre of music, it’s appropriately lowercased, so here it refers simultaneously to the era that is named for the music as well as the novel Ragtime itself, the “era” or historical setting of which has now, in its final paragraph, “run out.” Get it?) We are left with a final image of mad Harry K. Thaw, now officially declared “sane,” marching patriotically in the annual Armistice Day parade. This seems of a piece with the generally cynical or ironic tone of the novel—history does not produce tidy narratives with clear morals or meanings; there is no “point” to be drawn from this story; the lunatic is also the patriot. Time keeps rolling on, and a new era of conflict, strife, confusion, and dark comedy is about to begin. And another. And another.

The primary fictional men in the novel have all died violent deaths in the name of their “causes”—Younger Brother under uncertain circumstances “in a skirmish with government troops” as a zapatista in the Mexican Revolution (305-6); Father as an arms dealer surreptitiously transporting war materiel on the Lusitania, the explosion and sinking of which is allegedly exacerbated by the shipments of “grenades, depth charges and puttied nitro” he is smuggling to Europe on board the purportedly neutral vessel (318); and Coalhouse Walker before a “coordinated volley of a firing squad” courtesy of the NYPD (301). There’s a prevailing sense of futility to these deaths, anonymous and lonely amid the larger flow of history as portrayed in chapter 40. The narrative “camera” pulls back, and in the larger scope of historical narrative these individual stories seem to make not a ripple. It’s sobering, after our deep engagement with the Coalhouse drama, that the only reference to him in the concluding montage is via J. P. Morgan traveling blithely through Europe, “the incident of the mad black man in his Library quite forgotten” (306). The central dramatic narrative of the novel seems to have had no appreciable impact on history—just one more “crime of the century” to be displaced by the next sensational story, erased from the collective memory. And again, this seems in keeping with the tone of ironic detachment we’ve observed in Doctorow’s narrator from the start of the novel. In conventional terms, it’s not a very satisfying ending, just as historical narrative itself may not be satisfying in the way that narrative fiction (traditionally) is.

Likewise, at first glance, the “period of dissolution” (316) that afflicts the Family seems a bleak and depressing development: Doctorow opens the novel with an ironically nostalgic portrait of a respectable middle-class family in New Rochelle, and proceeds to demolish that picture over the course of his narrative. But I would argue that in the conclusion of Mother’s story we have a rare bright spot, maybe even a glimpse of some kind of optimism for the future (which would seem rather uncharacteristic of Doctorow, if the preceding 300 pages have taught us anything). After the conventional period of mourning in the wake of Father’s death, Tateh proposes marriage, and Mother accepts with enthusiasm. Her relationship with Father has been deteriorating (“dissolving”) from the start of the novel, and toward the end they are only “on the most correct and abbreviated speaking terms, the death of Younger Brother in Mexico having provided the final impetus for their almost continuous separation” (317). Her dissatisfaction seems clearly linked to the development of her own independent consciousness (she’s been reading Emma Goldman) and consequent sexual frustration, and Father is increasingly bewildered and put off by her assertiveness, her failure to defer to his traditional role as head of the household. In contrast, we are told, “She adored [Tateh], she loved to be with him. They each relished the traits of character of the other” (319).

We see a more egalitarian or mutual model of a romantic relationship, and it’s a significantly multicultural model as well (with the Yiddish term “Tateh” replacing the WASPish “Father”). While Father is killed, significantly, at the very dawn of modernity (which many scholars identify with the First World War)—“his final exploration” (318), as if his nineteenth-century model can’t survive into the new era—Mother, in contrast, seems to flourish in modernity, as she and Tateh abandon the “Old World” of the East Coast for that quintessentially modern locale, California (likely Los Angeles/Hollywood, since Tateh is in the emergent and quintessentially modern film industry): “They lived in a large white stucco house with arched windows and an orange tile roof. There were palm trees along the sidewalk and beds of bright red flowers in the front yard” (319). Their family reflects a kind of nontraditional, patchwork, multicultural ideal, and in this vision of the future (which children typically represent, according to Whitney Houston) we are offered a possibly hopeful view. It’s inspirational for Tateh, at least: “One morning Tateh looked out the window of his study and saw the three children on the lawn. . . . They were talking and sunning themselves. His daughter, with dark hair, his tow-headed stepson and his legal responsibility, the schwartze child. He suddenly had an idea for a film. A bunch of children who were pals, white black, fat thin, rich poor, all kinds, mischievous little urchins who would have funny adventures in their own neighborhood, a society of ragamuffins, like all of us, a gang, getting into trouble and getting out again” (319). The fictional Tateh is posited here as the creator of the historically “real” Our Gang/Little Rascals series (with apologies to Hal Roach), which was revolutionary in its time for portraying black and white characters as equals, peers, compatriots, brothers in mischief, puncturing the pomposity of the wealthy and privileged at every opportunity. The phrase “like all of us” is telling—there’s a real democracy implied in this vision, not the superficial stuff of flags and bunting and fireworks (associated with Father). There is no hierarchy implied in this family portrait. And thus the three strands of the narrative come together—the WASP child in the sailor blouse, the dark-haired Jewish immigrant girl, and the Black orphan—and in this we might be tempted to see a hopeful vision for a more inclusive future.

Even with Emma Goldman deported from our shores and a violent century of racial and ethnic strife yet to unfold.

The Good Old Days

The enduring appeal of traditional historical fiction, I think, has a lot to do with nostalgia—the kind of imaginative “time travel” that a convincingly detailed, imaginative reconstruction of the past allows can appeal to a reader’s latent or sometimes explicit sense that things were somehow better “back then.” Life was simpler, less chaotic, less mediated or cacophonous. The reader is allowed a temporary escape from the confusion of the modern (or postmodern) world; there’s a kind of solace in it, even as we’re maybe less inclined to view our present age in a rose-colored hue by comparison.

When Ragtime was published in 1975, the United States was in dire need of such nostalgia: the Bicentennial celebrations would hearken back to a heroic and idealistic time when the nation was formed—an armed insurrection against an occupying power that, unlike our recent messy entanglements with armed insurrections against occupying powers in Southeast Asia, seemed to have clear moral bounds, “good guys” (the American Revolutionaries) and “bad guys” (the Redcoats). The national mood had been traumatized by the quagmire in Vietnam as well as revolutionary dissent at home, from the violent strife of the civil rights movement and the disillusionment of Watergate to the more militant and still controversial actions of radical groups like the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground. For many Americans, it must have been difficult to muster a whole lot of patriotic fervor; the “Spirit of ’76” was pretty ambivalent.

The early years of the twentieth century have often been portrayed as a period of comparative placidity and prosperity in the United States (even as imperial powers in Europe were amassing arms and rattling sabers in preparation for world war). From what I’ve read, Random House’s marketing campaign for Ragtime tapped into this national desire for nostalgia quite explicitly—the novel was cast as a kind of “national story,” a backward glance to our origins, a time just before the dawn of modernity, world war, genocide, and the attendant horrors of the twentieth century. Father’s business—“the manufacture of flags and buntings and other accoutrements of patriotism,” as we’re informed on the opening page of the novel—might be seen as an explicit “tease” to such a reader who opens the novel with a kind of red, white, and blue bunting of the mind. (Buntings and flags were booming business in 1976, as well.) But Doctorow’s narrator gives a hint to his contradictory impulses when he adds, “including fireworks.” “Patriotism was a reliable sentiment in the early 1900’s,” indeed—but as this novel continually reminds us, so were explosives, and they weren’t all being deployed in the cause of celebrating American triumphalism. In fact, “Guns were going off everywhere” (191), and one of this novel’s primary aims seems to be to demolish the sepia-toned image of a placid ­fin de siècle. The Family’s complacent view from New Rochelle—“There were no Negroes. There were no immigrants” (4)—is compromised immediately as the narrative unfolds. Their lives become intimately bound with those of immigrants (first, superficially, with Houdini, and later more substantially with Tateh and his daughter) and African Americans (Sarah, Coalhouse, and their son). Younger Brother’s awkward quest to “find himself” ends up leading to an idealistic and self-destructive “career as an outlaw and revolutionary” (243), under the influence of immigrant anarchists like Emma Goldman and Ben Reitman and inspired by the proud defiance of Coalhouse Walker and his “Negro insurrection.” Far from a nostalgic trip down memory lane, a stroll through simpler times when women were laced up in corsets and kept their opinions to themselves and black people (like Mathew Henson) “knew [their] place” (162), Ragtime depicts the years before World War I in the United States as fraught with political violence, grotesque gaps between extreme wealth and dire poverty, and casual racism, sexism, and xenophobia. This is not only a challenge to the prevailing view of this period itself; it’s a challenge to the very idea of nostalgia, the “metanarrative” (perennially appealing, it seems) that tells us we are living in an age that has lost touch with its roots, a diminished and decadent corruption of traditional values. The deeper we get into this novel, the more 2023 starts to look like 1910.

Although he likes to think of himself as a “progressive” (231), Father is probably the most nostalgic figure in the novel: he’s the most unnerved by Coalhouse Walker and his refusal to deploy “the customary deferences practiced by his race” (162); he’s alarmed by the boatload of immigrants his ship passes on its way to the North Pole (“A weird despair seized him” [13]); he chafes as his traditional role as head of the household seems to have eroded during his Arctic sojourn (“Toward his wife he felt drastically slipped in her estimation, an explorer in body only” [225]). The very idea that his self-image is pinned so thoroughly on his imagined role as an “explorer” (“he had been to the Arctic, to Africa, to the Philippines. He had traveled out west” [225]) aligns him more with a nineteenth-century colonialist attitude than that of the dawning twentieth century (it’s significant that the ship he travels on to the pole is the Roosevelt).

In chapter 30, when Father takes his son to the storied Polo Grounds, perhaps the most nostalgically laden ballpark in the history of the most nostalgically laden sport in American culture, to witness the storied N.Y. Giants under the storied manager John McGraw, we can observe this clash between nostalgia and reality on a number of levels. The setting itself—father and son bonding at the ballgame—is probably the most nostalgic cliché in American culture, and Father himself is shocked to witness the reality of what baseball has become since his Harvard days (“when the players addressed each other as Mister and played their game avidly, but as sportsmen, in sensible uniforms before audiences of collegians” [230-31]). The “paternal figure and commander of his team” (228), McGraw himself, vigorously cusses out the opposing team, and the crowd of cigar-chomping drunks participates vicariously and with gusto in the violent brawls on the field. Even the postmodern reader is likely shocked by spectacles such as the “Boston midget” and the “dirt eater” mascots, grown men whom the players pat on the head for luck. It’s not only Father’s nostalgia that is under attack here; Doctorow challenges the contemporary reader to reconsider the ease with which sports history (especially of baseball) lends itself to the metanarrative of nostalgia. Anyone familiar with the handwringing commentaries in the sports pages that lament the corruption and decline of the “steroid era” or the influence of players’ unions will know what I’m referring to. More than any other professional sport, “America’s pastime” indulges in nostalgic revisionism, and this is simply one more aspect of the “Ragtime era” Doctorow wants to undermine.

And yet, is it possible that the novel allows for another kind of nostalgia? Does the reader who feels alienated by the slick commercialization and end-to-end packaging of professional sports today maybe find this crude atmosphere somewhat appealing? Does the reader who despairs of the perceived diminishment of social activism and the decline of the labor movement in the twenty-first century (who might be heartened by the Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter movements) read Doctorow’s historically anchored accounts of Emma Goldman’s crowded anarchist meetings or the international network of IWW activism with a kind of nostalgic longing? Does Coalhouse Walker’s campaign seem to embody a clear moral position, in contrast to the ambiguities of racism in the “color-blind” post-civil-rights era? Does any evocation of the past tap into such feelings? Is Doctorow himself indulging in a little nostalgia here, despite his subversive, postmodernist, metanarrative-challenging intentions?

Ragtime in New Rochelle

In chapter 21 of Ragtime, the fictional Harlem piano player Coalhouse Walker Jr. plays a couple of Scott Joplin compositions for Mother, Father, Younger Brother, and the Little Boy (with the stubborn Sarah listening from upstairs). The first of these is "Wall Street Rag," which was composed and published in 1909 (so it would have been cutting-edge music at the time). Younger Brother is familiar with ragtime music from his "nightlife period in New York," but "he had never expected to hear it in his sister's home" (159). The narrator describes the family's reaction to these strange and wonderful sounds, the likes of which their out-of-tune parlor piano has never experienced before: "Small clear chords hung in the air like flowers. The melodies were like bouquets. There seemed to be no other possibilities for life than those delineated by the music" (159).

Walker follows this with "the most famous rag of all," Joplin's most popular and well-known piece, "Maple Leaf Rag" (1899)--"This was a most robust composition, a vigorous music that roused the senses and never stood still a moment" (160).

        

(This is from a piano roll recorded by Joplin himself.)

Winslow Homer and the Light on the Eastern Seaboard

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!

Notebook Prompt: Is this "history" or "fiction"?

Reread the long paragraph that closes chapter 6 of Ragtime, beginning with "At the time of course" (p. 39) through the end of the chapter on p. 40. 

How would you characterize the rhetoric in this passage? Is this history? Fiction? Polemic? Satire? What uses is Doctorow making of history here? Where is the author/narrator in relation to this barrage? What perspective or attitude toward this material is reflected? What kind of irony is this, and what is the effect?

Take 5 minutes to contemplate these questions in your notebook.

Notebook Prompt: What is the difference between history and fiction?

What is the difference between history and fiction? In what ways is fiction like and unlike history (and vice-versa)? What does each form of discourse have to offer that the other doesn’t? How do we consume these kinds of writing differently?

Please spend 5-7 minutes contemplating these questions in your notebook. Be prepared to share your thoughts and insights with the class on Thursday or Friday.