Context and Reflection

I've been working on and off basically since the start of the class trying to figure out exactly what I think about how narrative works, specifically with regard to the first question we were asked, about the difference between history and fiction. To be honest I'm not sure how much of what I have at the moment is actually coherent (the last time I tried to explain in class it devolved into something I'm not sure was entirely English), but hopefully writing this down in a way that's a little more formal and public than my notebook will help me gather my thoughts.

Basically, anything we read is going to fundamentally consist of a bunch of ideas that exist in some author's head somewhere, that they've tried to articulate in whatever way they think is going to express those ideas the best. That goes for any written thing, really, from a history book to song lyrics to a novel to a blog post to a tax form. There are only really two variables: which ideas are being expressed, and how the author is expressing them. Ideally, we like to think that in a history book, the ideas being transmitted are the objective fact of something that could theoretically at one point have been observed, and maybe an interpretation of those events that comes as close to an even-handed look at the exact provable effects of everything that's being written about, and the way the book is written is just to be as clear and evocative as possible, to make sure the reader understands exactly what the author is saying. By comparison, fiction authors are "allowed" to make more biased interpretations; the ideas they're expressing are supposed to be shaped and muddled by all the other things going on inside the author's hide, to the extent that they're even allowed to put down words in combinations that make the reader imagine things that haven't happened and never could happen.

The image I've been working with to explain how writing works is to image the writer's brain as sort of a reverse of the Dark Side Of The Moon-type prism, where instead of a beam of light getting broken into individual colors, it's individual beams of information or context entering into the author's head, and one clear idea emerging. For a historical writer, the brain is supposed to just act as a smooth, clear medium to focus all the little bits of historical fact into one cohesive narrative that explains them in a totally objective way, unaffected by the material they have to pass through. In fiction it's expected instead that the author's head is full of unproven personal assumptions and biases that twist and bend the original, factual information into an interesting but fundamentally not "true" set of assertions and ideas. In both cases that single beam is what the author then shapes into the words that best serve the purpose of their concept. The problem with this assumption is that no human being has a brain made of totally clear, defectless glass; you just can't try to interpret something without adding your own personal spin on the story. Just the act of narrowing down an enormous flood of information into something a non-expert can digest will necessarily expose the author's own beliefs about what matters and what doesn't, and actually attaching meaning to the fact puree is never going to be an objective process -- no one could possibly know exactly what causes what in the infinite numbers of essentially random processes that make up day-to-day life. That's because no matter how dedicated an author may be, they aren't going to live their life consuming only pure, undiluted historical knowledge; there are going to be millions of other little beams of context coming from every other source in their life, from the time they were born to the time they die, that will muddle the historical narrative almost as much as the purposefully muddled fictional one. 

Since it's impossible to get an actual objective (ie unaffected by a human context) source for anything, the next-best thing seems to be just to accept that impossibility, and to try to consume information with the understanding that what you're seeing is less that clear beam of truth, and more a messy imprint of the inside of some other human being's head. 

The American Dream in Ragtime

It's been brought up more than once in class that Ragtime is a book that's not necessarily just about the 1900's, it's meant to draw comparisons between that time and the time it was written. More specifically, it tries to ask questions about a time that many Americans see as one of the high points of the nation's culture as it's classically imagined (maybe more in the 70's than now; the 50's seem to occupy that place today). When people think of the 1900's, their minds are immediately drawn to sandlot baseball, apple pie sitting on a flawless white windowsill, an American flag in front of every house, and immigrants Americanizing and making it big in a true meritocracy. At least when I imagine 1910, everything is sunny and green and there are kids playing nonstop in the streets. As a result, it's a time that gets pointed to (again, probably more in the 70's than now) as an ideal that we should be trying to return to. By challenging the preconceptions people have of the 1900's -- or, more accurately, by challenging the idea that the things we remember about the 1900's were actually good things -- Doctorow is trying to argue against the conservative political ideas aiming to return America to that "high point." One of the most important arguments that would have been around in the 70's, and which is still ongoing, is the image of the Americanized "outsider" getting rich quick, and it's a topic that Doctorow looks at in some depth in the novel.

There's a very clear divide in the novel between people who are "classically" rich in the sense of aristocratic WASPs like Harry K. Thaw, Stuyvesant Fish, and Pierpoint Morgan, whether they earned their own money or not, and the people who succeed financially but find themselves still somehow different from their respectable white American counterparts, like Harry Houdini, Tateh, and Coalhouse Walker. The behavior of the first group shows people who are fully comfortable in their positions of power; they feel like they deserve everything they have and more, by virtue of who they are. Morgan's belief that he is the descendant of pharaohs is an extreme example, but it fits with the general point; even if Thaw or Fish don't necessarily express that they're above "normal" people because of their blood, it's implied in their actions. All three of these characters do things that dehumanize other people and make it clear that they think of people "beneath them" -- Evelyn Nesbit, the circus freaks, or Morgan's servants -- as basically worthless. By comparison, the characters who are more outside the expected group for success feel more self-conscious and conflicted about their positions, which manifests itself in a number of different ways. 

In the case of characters of European origin, like Houdini or Tateh, success brings with it changes in their beliefs to make them fit more with how they imagine rich people to be. At first, both characters show at least some level of class tension against the rich, with Tateh's socialism the stronger example. However, as both get more and more successful, they seem to emulate more and more the rich people they know of -- especially the European aristocracy. Houdini comes to respect Archduke Ferdinand, despite the book describing him in very unflattering terms, and Tateh goes one step further, actually giving himself a false name and pretending to be a foreign noble. This change in name, which both Houdini and Tateh go through, also signifies an acceptance on the part of the two main Jewish characters' parts of their difference from mainstream American society. The names "Houdini" and "Baron Ashkenazy" are both stage names that play up the mysterious otherness of the people who take them, and probably contribute in some way to their success.

By comparison, Coalhouse Walker isn't willing or able to play up his status as outside the American mainstream. To his mind, he simply is American, black or no. As a result, his stage name -- assuming Coalhouse even is a stage name -- sounds all-American, exactly like the kind of thing a musician out of St. Louis would call himself. He doesn't see any reason why he shouldn't behave the way any other successful person would, which means he has the right to wear expensive clothes and speak formally and drive a nice car. When he comes up against working-class whites treating him as though he's beneath them even though, to his mind, he's as above them as a wealthy white person would be (in the JP Morgan-esque philosophy of the time), it causes him to suddenly realize just what the limits are on his success as a black man in the early twentieth century. If he was like Houdini or Tateh, who both accept that they are outsiders and embrace it, this wouldn't be so much of a problem; but since he considers himself as "American" as any white man, and he does everything he can to fit in with the image of what a respectable (white) American is supposed to be like, to have all that dismissed simply because of the color of his skin flies in the face of everything he's been working his whole life for. What's the point of going for the American Dream if your ceiling in that dream is still lower than everyone else's?