Abstract
This article examines E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime in the context of historiographic metafiction as theorized by Linda Hutcheon. The blurring of the boundaries between fiction and history through discourse is a major theme in Doctorow’s novels. Ragtime imitates the genre of the historical novel but reveals its limitations and corresponds to what Hutcheon calls historiographic metafiction. Doctorow does not consider history as a reliable field and treats notions such as truth, reality, and objectivity in an ironic fashion. The study explores Doctorow’s use of intertextuality, his mix of historical and fictional characters, his ambiguous narrator, and his rewriting of history to show that reality and history are not fixed notions but are rewritten and recreated continuously.
Keywords: E. L. Doctorow, Ragtime, historiographic metafiction, Linda Hutcheon, postmodernism, history, fiction, intertextuality, identity
History and Fiction: A Theoretical Overview
Since antiquity, critics have mused over the relationship between history and fiction. Aristotle sees history and fiction as antithetical subjects. The distinctions mapped out by Aristotle are disregarded by twentieth-century critics because history is not considered a reliable domain. R. G. Collingwood defines the historian’s role as a mental activity of re-enactment of past thought in the historian’s own mind. Hayden White posits that historiography is a poetic construct. In his books Time and Narrative and History and Truth, Paul Ricoeur also argues for the interweaving of history with fiction.
Hutcheon’s Historiographic Metafiction
Linda Hutcheon writes extensively about the unreliability of history and about the fortunate meeting of history and fiction in historical novels. Historiographic metafiction according to Hutcheon displays both “a world of fiction … self-consciously presented as a constructed one [and] also a world of public experience.” She argues that historiographic metafiction incorporates literature, history, and theory, and that “its theoretical self-awareness of history and fiction as human constructs … is made the grounds for its rethinking and reworking of the forms and contents of the past.” Historiographic metafiction refutes the natural or common-sense methods of distinguishing between historical fact or fiction.
Doctorow’s America in Ragtime
In Ragtime, Doctorow reveals an America in flux during the first decade of the twentieth century when social, economic, and political changes shaped the country’s as well as its citizens’ identities. Doctorow offers an interpreted and fictional version of twentieth-century American history. Although Ragtime leaves the impression that this version is an almost reportorial and thus objective account of American social life, the novel mixes real persons and events that happened with fictional characters and events.
The Ambiguous Narrator
Like the protagonists, the narrator remains ambiguous and changes his identity throughout the novel. Some critics suggest that the omniscient narrator is the little boy. The omniscient narrator moves periodically from narrating stories about the characters of the novel to describing events and situations in American society, blurring the line between fiction and historical commentary.
Character Transformations and Identity
The physical, mental, social, and political metamorphoses that the characters undergo reinforce the rewriting and revision of history itself. Tateh, for instance, changes his name and even his political views; no longer an idealist working-class radical, he becomes Baron Ashkenazy, a successful film producer. Mother also changes her identity and rewrites her individual history when she marries Tateh and becomes a stepmother. Younger Brother wants to change his identity as well and become black in order to join Coalhouse’s team.
Intertextuality and the Coalhouse Walker Plot
Another type of reincarnation is the rewriting of historical traces through Doctorow’s source of inspiration — he borrows and rewrites a plot line from nineteenth-century German author Heinrich von Kleist’s “Michael Kohlhaas.” Doctorow adapts Coalhouse’s story to twentieth-century American standards, creating a fictional character that is rewritten after his nineteenth-century fictional ancestor.
The Mix of Historical and Fictional Characters
Doctorow includes actual figures such as Harry Houdini, J. P. Morgan, Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, Sigmund Freud, and Emma Goldman with fictional characters such as Mother, Father, little boy, Grandfather, Younger Brother, and Coalhouse Walker. The author puts historical characters in situations they have never been in before and he makes them say words they have never uttered previously. The humorous dialogues between real and fictional characters underscore Doctorow’s point that fiction is more enjoyable and creative.
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