Post-modernism and Ragtime

I know it's kind of late to be writing a post about postmodernism, but I haven't really had the time before now. It might be kind of scattered since I'm basically just trying to collect a few things I've been thinking about that relate to the class but hopefully it'll make sense.

One of the things that's most helpful for me when I'm thinking about post-modernism is an idea I read somewhere (I think it was David Foster Wallace but I can't find the exact quote) that modern fiction should aspire to be a conversation between the author and the reader. The author shouldn't be writing in order to have something that can stand up and fulfill certain objective values of quality, but rather to elicit some reaction in their audience. In many ways that's the biggest difference between modernism and post-modernism: modernists tend to believe that there's an objective measure of how good a certain piece of writing is, and that all art needs to strive towards being objectively "good," whereas post-modernists believe that it's impossible to really quantify what's good and bad beyond the way it makes the people consuming it feel. Modernist fiction would be just as good if it existed in a vacuum, because it would still be measured against the same standards; post-modernist fiction depends on the audience to invent the standard. What matters isn't the words of the text themselves, it's what they make their audience think.

To use Ragtime as an example, Doctorow's narration never directly betrays any kind of direct judgement of the characters or events in the novel, and yet his opinions manage to be made clear. By this point in the book (midway through Part II), everyone is pretty aware of what Doctorow thinks of America in 1906, despite him never coming out and saying anything. Instead, his style (when writing his less individually-focused historical overviews, at least) tends to be somewhat whimsical and flip about things that almost any modern reader would agree are morally wrong. He knows that his audience is made up of people who will almost all agree that things like poverty balls and child labor are immoral, and so he doesn't need to guide us to those conclusions. He just needs to present the facts as he sees them, with maybe a few lines about "happy elves" or dim-witted workers to twist the knife a bit, and most readers will react with the same indignation that Doctorow himself seems to feel. By presenting casual racism and classism in the same tones as the more conventionally popular stereotypes of the early 1900's, he is able to shock the reader without necessarily feeling the need to tell them how they should feel about things they already feel strongly about. Of course, Doctorow does guide the reader to some extent; he spends enough time discussing social injustice that even without any explicit condemnations, we can still tell he cares a lot about the subject.

An even better way to see Doctorow's opinions than looking at the historical facts he draws attention to is to look at the ones he just makes up. Doctorow's embellishments of the historical record exist to hammer home a lot of the points he's trying to make, without him having to come out and say that, for example, capitalists at the turn of the century were too separated from the workers. This use of what could probably be called outright lying if it was presented in a less obviously fictional light to make points about actual history is an idea that wouldn't have been seen just a few decades before Doctorow. It makes the book resist easy categorization as clear "historical fiction" by the traditional standards, while still basically being a book that places a fictional narrative in the context of "actual" history. Importantly, Doctorow never actually says anything that contradicts the generally accepted historical narrative -- he just adds to it. This definitely isn't necessary in modern fiction (there are plenty of books that do completely contradict historical fact), but it makes it trickier to categorize exactly what it is that makes Ragtime not just a normal "historical fiction" novel. That's because actually leaving the realm of reality would nullify a lot of the point of the novel -- Doctorow is trying to show that the popular image of the 1900's is misguided, and to compare the problems of that time to those of his own, without coming out and saying anything outright, and the best way he sees to do that is to add little "white lie" vignettes to illustrate the problems. They serve to punctuate the factual overviews he gives and to remind us to keep the personal effects of what we read in mind. This is something that a more traditional writer would probably never have done -- they would have considered presenting the truth more important than presenting an idea, because the truth is something that can be defined (relatively) objectively, whereas an idea is something that exists only with the audience, and can even be misunderstood by them. Doctorow breaks from that tradition by believing, in a more post-modernist point of view, that the truth is important in a novel only so far as it gets the audience to understand something the author is trying to say. The conversation between the reader and the writer becomes more important than the factual legitimacy of the words on the page.