That being said, fictional authors often do a great job of making a book entertaining, even if it isn't necessarily filled with action. Although Ragtime does have a lot of action in it, especially when Coalhouse is committing his crimes, it doesn't have an overwhelming amount. Yet we keep reading. Why don't we just skip the seemingly inconsequential parts of the book and get right to the good stuff about the bombs and murders? Doctorow does a great job of keeping us entertained through parts of the book that may not matter in the long run.
Before reading Ragtime, I viewed fiction and history as two entirely different things. I thought fiction was completely untrue. When I thought fiction I thought about novels that I've read for various english classes and in my own time. When I thought history, books rarely came to mind. I thought of history class and the way everything since the beginning of history had lead to the next as a never ending flow of events.
After reading Ragtime, some new things about the comparison between fiction and history have come to mind. I've realized that history can be intricately intertwined into fictional works. As obviously as in Ragtime with Henry Ford, JP Morgan, Emma Goldman, Evelyn Nesbit, Harry K. Thaw, Stanford White, and Harry Houdini but also not so obviously in other works. The entirety of history is unknown. Nobody knows everything that happens. Even to an author whose writing may appear fictional to everyone except a couple people. What is being written about may have happened at some point to someone. Furthermore, the fictional events that truly have not taken place are just waiting to take place. Fiction is the future history. Even science fiction novels may become reality someday. When that happens, there will be new science fiction novels to take their place. History and fiction is an endless string of events, fiction only being slightly ahead of history in the grand scheme of things.
This is an interesting way to look at it: any novel with a past-tense narrative, even if it narrates stuff that happened last week, is "historical" in the sense that we take it as an account of events set in the past, and we can contemplate and analyze those events as if they are "sealed off," complete, much as we engage historical narrative. It "holds still" so we can get a good look at it, unlike life itself with its constant flux. And fictional narrative about anonymous people living their lives and not making an impact on the "world historical stage" always *could be* real/historical, and there would be no way to confirm or deny based solely on the text itself.
ReplyDeleteBut once Doctorow starts bringing in Big Names like Ford, we're in a less hypothetical realm--we understand this as "the" Henry Ford, and we read Doctorow's depiction more as a comment on an actual person, much as we might take a fictional narrative set in New York City as a kind of comment on the "actual" city of New York--we would expect certain consistencies between the fictional version of the city and the real one.