Ragtime 
by 

E.L. Doctorow

 

No One Ever Drove This Fast Before

The most startling thing about Ragtime is the pace of the narrative. It never slackens, even to allow direct speech. It moves relentlessly from place to place, person to person, with non-stop description, assertion, connection, reversal. There are crowds and traffic and excitement wherever you look. If there is temporary equilibrium, it is fragile: a tour boat listing first to starboard then to port; a motor car belching steam at the crest of a hill, a chauffeur bribed to keep his mouth shut.

This is extrovert writing. Active voice. Strong verbs. Present tense. High-frequency transmission. Introspection and interior monologue are almost non-existent. It's like travelling in an empty railway carriage as the scenery of events passes by, with billboards flashing the names of contemporary celebrities: Admiral Peary, Teddy Roosevelt, Stanford White, Freud, Houdini. Not until Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho will there be more trendy brand names and trademarks in a novel.

What matters in Ragtime is mood, style, spirit. Plot is really the history of the epoch, a new age in America. Character is the making of that history by immigrants and street people and freaks and the new suburbanites and the Robber Barons of Fifth Avenue and Murray Hill. The principle characters are roles not people: Father, Tateh (Yiddish for Daddy), Younger Brother, The Boy. To have a proper name in Ragtime means the character is disposable background used to connect the principle roles to historical events: Houdini comes to the suburban house and exchanges adventure-tales with Father; Evelyn Nesbit, notorious wife of a celebrity-murderer, has an affair with Younger Brother and falls in love with Tateh.

Getting on, moving up, splashing out is what everyone does. Each in their own way dependent on class: insanely opulent parties for the insanely wealthy, polar expeditions for the well-off bourgeoisie, and an outing on the street cars for the proles. Members of each class know almost nothing of those of another, but each celebrates its distinct freedoms to the most they are able. This is the American Way. If it seems heartless or pointless - racist lynchings, destitution, child labour, starvation wages - that's only because you're not part of it. This constitutes the real world: get over it, or go back where you came from, or die: it's called freedom of choice.

Socialism and anarchism come with the immigrants. Agitation is intellectual - plays, lectures, study groups - with an international awareness that would disappear by mid-century. The plays of Ibsen are used to incite the masses as well as provoke police retaliation. Sex is something you discover accidentally for yourself. Unanalysed, it just happens, and you get on with that too, usually badly, and with the still prevailing dire consequences. Assassination is still a common form of transfer of governmental power.

Men still love their non-Oedipal mothers without guilt or shame. Women radicals like Emma Goldman make no distinction between capitalist oppression and patriarchal abuse. Both oppression and abuse have to be eradicated and the corporate system, because neither it nor its universal media yet exist, don't co-opt them as armchair liberals. The automobile is a luxury but that doesn't matter because trams can get you from New York to Boston for a nickel. But probably not if you're Black.

This is a novel of America on the turn, racing to get somewhere else as rapidly as possible. The immigrants want out of New York, the aspiring rubes want in. The national horror of the Civil War has been fictionalised by both sides into an heroic misunderstanding. So much fuss it was and no one could remember what it was about. These labour unions are going to crush this country if we don't crush them first. None of 'em is even American, yet. The only thing more irritating than immigrants is black folk, specially when they start acting like they was white folk.

Europeans may be decadent and always feuding over something silly, but their armies are sufficiently distant not to be a worry. Everything we want is made, or grown, or taken out of the earth right here, or soon will be thanks to Morgan's money and Ford's genius. Anyway the Pacific is easier prey: Hawaii, Guam and the Philippines in the bag already.

Industrialisation has taken an unexpected direction: not the factory-model of England so effectively attacked by Marx, but in the construction of giant corporate cartels controlled by a few hundred financiers. But who’s worried: the American world runs on parallel rails of steel that have no obvious terminus.

Everything after this cultural turn we can recognise as modern America. What happened before is forgotten or mythologised. It might as well be the new creation talked about in the Bible. At least that idea would keep the momentum, the crowds, the traffic, the striving upward, the excitement of 20th century America going; even if the ultimate destination isn't a religious paradise but entirely un-thought and unknown. 

Movement is the most important thing. Our legacy, honoured still.