Ragtime: Lessons

 

Additional notes and “lessons” derived from Ragtime, within our on-going project.

Original entry here.

 

1) Importance of individual’s experience; decision-making and action based upon their subjective condition results in the shift in their narrative. We are familiar with this convention of narrative, particularly in the form of the “hero(ine)” who “takes action” — a distinctly “American” cultural value.

        examples: Younger Brother, Coalhouse, Tateh, Evelyn Nesbit

Recognizing the individual functioning as metonym for a collective demographic.

Understanding and perspective of individual situated within and participating in a larger social network. We see that a network (or multiple?) is heterogeneous — contra the homogeneity of myth and the homogenizing impulse of consensus. Speaking on a broader level, — for example in describing or labeling “American society” — requires generalizing, focusing on similarity and thus eliding unique attributes (“differences”).

Remember: we’ll avoid generalizing, (re)iterating stereotypes and cliches.

Also note the parallel concept of the heterogeneous social network — Barthes describes the Text as a network (review); is this concept what he means by “stereographic plurality”?

 
 

2) How to treat Historicity and Historiography, given that this is literature, as distinct from “historical discourse”? We did not engage this issue as explicitly as we should have. On the one hand, the novel presents itself as fiction — for example, in calling attention to itself as literary, such as when the boy tells Houdini “Warn the duke” in the first chapter (10); after meeting Archiduke Franz Ferdinand (105), Houdini recalls this incident — both cases disrupt “historicity” (or the sense that we are “reading the past”).

 
Indeed, Frederic Jameson asserts that “This historical novel can no longer set out to represent the historical past; it can only ‘represent’ our ideas and stereotypes about that past (which thereby at once becomes ‘pop history’)” (Postmodernism 25). Additionally, Linda Hutcheon identifies how the historical figures in Ragtime function “to challenge our perhaps unexamined notions about what might constitute historical truth” (The Politics of Postmodernism 91); consequently, the novel “both confirms and subverts the power of the representations of history” (91).

 
Although we are not “reading the past,” we keep in mind the historical specificity of
the narratives — especially concerning “the American Dream” and the rise of mass culture. As we identified, the boy and Tateh both demonstrate (as metonyms) the broader cultural narrative of the nation’s shift away from traditional ideals — identified in the
figure of Father, who remarks how “Patriotism was a reliable sentiment in the early 1900s” (3). The rise of the “culture industry” along with technological “progress” (e.g. film) — in tandem with the (proportionate? reciprocal?) fall of the labor movement — occurs throughout the 20th century; this is a narrative that plays out
over the course of the novel, “in miniature,” and identified in Tateh (producer) and the boy (media-obsessed consumer).

Yet we remember that simply recognizing Ragtime as the narrative of “Capitalist Success” (metonyms: Tateh, Mother) over Radical/Leftist alternatives (metonyms: E. Goldman, Y.Brother, Coalhouse) would oversimplify the complexity to a condensed (homogenized?) historical myth.

 
 
3) What of the novel’s “stance”? (Another question barely discussed.) We
acknowledge that there are multiple (such as? toward?), none of which appearing “nostalgic” — characters like Father, including Morgan and Archiduke Ferdinand die off with the “progress” of history. The ending projects past the victory of WWI toward the advanced weapons that the U.S. will have used in WWII (designed by Y.Brother). We clearly identified the death of “the old order” — isolated particularly in Ferdinand, heir to an empire that “disappears.”

Besides the “course of history” that we have come to learn, what other types of knowledge emerge? (flowing as an “alternate current” — cf. AC / DC; note definitions: “cyclical” vs. “constant” — incidentally, who won the “War of Currents”? Consensus at work?)

 
 
4) As discussed in class, J.P. Morgan and Henry Ford (the characters)
believe in reincarnation, (a “cyclical view of history”). Beyond Houdini’s belief in supernatural communication — which distinctly gives way to his investing faith into “modern” 20th-C technology of the airplane and Edison’s Fluoroscope — Morgan’s mode of knowledge is distinctly “dissenting” from the prevailing consensus of the
day. The “prisca theologia” (“secret wisdom”) he references interests us in two ways:

 

Morgan believed that reproducibility, (the emerging dominant mode of knowledge, in mechanical reproduction, as the Boy observes), constituted a “projection of organic truth” — “scientific” or empirical, as “universal patterns of order and repetition that give meaning to the activity of this planet” (148). We recall that the reproducibility of myths is the process we are interrogating; likewise that we are not working in the empirical mode, seeking to observe/prove “organic truth” — this enacts the process of turning socially-constructed knowledge into natural laws.

 
Moreover, we are diverging from the “secret wisdom” that Morgan references — the “Hermetica” (149), which explicitly evokes hermeneutics. We are not working toward an interpretation that explains the novel, after discovering the “secret meaning” — nor asking what the text means but how it functions; or as Barthes says, “everything disentangled, yet nothing deciphered” (IMT 147).