Looking again at the essay, "Volatile Forms: The Transgressive Energy of Ragtime as Novel and Film", by Joanna E. Rapf, answer these following questions for Tuesday's discussion
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Rapf, Joanna E. "Volatile Forms: The Transgressive Energy of Ragtime as Novel and Film." Literature/Film Quarterly 26.1 (1998): 16-22. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter. Vol. 214. Detroit: Gale, 2006. Literature Resource Center. Web. 30 Apr. 2011.
Father kept himself under control by writing in his journal. This was a system too, the system of language and conceptualization. It proposed that human beings, by the act of making witness, warranted times and places for their existence other than the time and place they were living through.--E. L. Doctorow, Ragtime1
E. L. Doctorow's novel, Ragtime,is certainly about "making witness." Its serpentine structure, drifting from one subject and one point-of-view to another, with its allusive narrator who seems by the end to be a little boy reflecting on the past of his youth, is about the creation and re-creation of history, a discipline, Doctorow seems to suggest, that is itself about making order out of disorder, about "control." While he is in the Arctic, Father "kept himself under control by writing in his journal." This process of ordering, of fixing, is crucial in Doctorow's work. Ragtime is all about things going out of control as the nineteenth century marches into the twentieth: race riots (Coalhouse), the automobile (Ford), Communist agitation and women's rights (Emma Goldman), labor strikes, and world war. The tranquility of the opening chapter--with Father's house, patriotism as "a reliable sentiment in the early 1900s," vaudeville, and "no Negroes" and "no immigrants," when Winslow Homer was still painting, capturing the fleeting image of a certain kind of light--is all shattered in the few short years chronicled by the novel. By the end of Part II, "Father wondered at this moment if their lives might no longer be under their control" (240), and by the end of Part IV, Winslow Homer is dead, along with Father, Grandfather, and Younger Brother. Emma Goldman has been deported, Evelyn Nesbit has lost her looks, and the era of Ragtime had run out, with the heavy breath of the machine, "as if history were no more than a tune on a player piano" (369). And indeed, this is Doctorow's vision of history, being composed and re-composed, so that the human sense of order might be liberating and creative rather than oppressive, restrictive, and stifling of spirit. He has said:
Since history can be composed, you see, then you want to have as many people active in the composition as possible. A kind of democracy of perception ... a multiplicity of witnesses. If you don't constantly recompose and re-interpret history, then it begins to tighten its grip on your throat as myth and you find yourself in some kind of totalitarian society, either secular or religious.("A Multiplicity of Witness"184)
The whole subtext of Ragtime is about telling, making witness and narrating history. The little boy, as a grown man looking back, seems to narrate the novel we read. Anthony B. Dawson has called him "the privileged consciousness of the novel" (208). He tells its history, but within that novel, Father keeps a journal to tell his history, and so does Younger Brother:
Our knowledge of this clandestine history comes to us by Younger Brother's own hand. He kept a diary from the day of his arrival in Harlem to the day of his death in Mexico a little more than a year later.(282)
And Grandfather narrates stories of transformation, people who become animals or trees, just as Ragtime itself is a narration of transformation, about people who become something they were not at the beginning of the book. The immigrant silhouette artist, Tateh, becomes a moviemaker; the meek Younger Brother becomes a lover and a revolutionary; the musician, Coalhouse Walker, Jr., becomes an angry symbol of the struggle for dignity and human rights. The patchwork of these stories suggests, as the boy narrates, that "forms of life were volatile and that everything in the world could as easily become something else" (132-33). He found, he says, "proof in his own experience of the instability of both things and people." The recurring figure in the novel of the magician/escape artist Harry Houdini is a running metaphor of this experience, a man who does not even use his own name--"He was a Jew. His real name was Erich Weiss" (39)--and whose only source of order in a volatile world is his mother. Even in death she continues to order his life: "Every feat enacted Houdini's desire for his dead mother. He was buried and reborn, buried and reborn" (234): the theme of reincarnation so crucial to J. P. Morgan's failed quest in the novel. The pattern always is one of an attempt to fix the volatility of life, to order, to "re-compose."
Two other metaphors in the book that seem to usurp nineteenth-century orderings and renew them in twentieth-century forms are baseball and the movies. Father's instinct at the time of losing control, when "it was clear the crisis was driving the spirit from their lives," is to take his son to a baseball game. A baseball game presents excitement within an order, a structure, that repeats itself again and again. Doctorow writes:
Father sank into his chair. As the afternoon wore on he entertained the illusion that what he saw was not baseball but an elaborate representation of his own problems accounted, for his secret understanding, in the coded clarity of numbers that could be seen from a distance.(266, bold mine)
Baseball encompasses a "re-presentation," the problems of his life "accounted," with its metaphor of the ordering of numbers, the tidy summation of a ledger making sense of disorder while creating an understanding. When Father asks the boy what he likes about the game, the boy replies, "The same thing happens over and over," just as he had said in an earlier chapter that he liked to listen to the same record over and over again on the Victrola "as if to test the endurance of a duplicated event," and that he liked to look at himself in the mirror "not from vanity but because he discovered the mirror as a means of self-duplication" (133-34). The fragility of this ordering, its illusory nature, is reiterated by Doctorow at the end of the baseball chapter when the outcast player, Charles Victor Faust, actually gets a chance to pitch one inning for the Giants, but then is sent on his way. Out of the ordering of baseball, he ends up in an insane asylum and dies.
But as long as we can maintain an illusion, and thereby our sanity, "understanding" is possible. Doctorow's second metaphor for this understanding is the movies. When the little boy in Chapter 15 is worrying about the volatility of things we have what seems like two sentences put together that have no clear connection with each other:
If he raised the window in his room it might shut itself at the moment he thought the room was getting cold. He liked to go to the moving picture shows downtown at the New Rochelle Theatre on Main Street.(133)
In a style typical of Doctorow, he leaves the reader to make the crucial connection between the two sentences, which are skillfully linked together like a form cut in a movie. There is the visual image of the frame, the window frame and the movie frame, and the mental image of a problem--discontinuity--and its solution--finding continuity at the movies.
It is in the transformation of Tateh (Hebrew for Father, so by name he represents a kind of reincarnation into the twentieth century of the first, nineteenth-century father of the book, who literally blows up and sinks with the Lusitania) from immigrant silhouette artist to successful immigrant moviemaker. Chapter 18 begins with this description: "Thus did the artist point his life along the lines of flow of American energy," and goes on to report that "The value of the duplicable event was everywhere perceived" (153), not just in the movies, but in factories and soda fountains. But it is the movies that offer the possibility of understanding, like Father's accounting illusion of baseball. The reincarnated Tateh, as Baron Ashkenazy, frames life with his rectangular glass, giving it shape and form. "In the movie films, he said, we only look at what is there already. Life shines on the shadow screen, as from the darkness of one's mind," a sentence that brings together the physical screen and also what Bruce Kawin has called the "mindscreen" involved in the perception of movies. The new Baron Ashkenazy goes on,
People want to know what is happening to them. For a few pennies they sit and see their selves in movement, running, racing in motorcars, fighting and, forgive me, embracing one another. This is most important today, in this country, where everybody is so new. There is such a need to understand.(297)
Both in terms of its style and content, Ragtime looks to the twentieth-century art form of the movies for understanding, for its structuring of history. Doctorow once said that The Book of Daniel "was constructed like Laugh-In" (qtd. in McCaffery 41). This is because in an age where visual media have replaced print as primary agents of mass communication, Doctorow recognizes that we no longer read with the same expectations of continuity that characterize nineteenth century essays and fiction. "I don't know how anyone can write today without accommodating eighty or ninety years of film technology" (qtd. in McCaffery 40). Consequently, the effects of that technology are manifest not just referentially but also structurally in his work. From film, he says, "we've learned that we don't have to explain things." The audience or the reader can fill in gaps and will accept jumps in time and space. "My writing," he tells us, "is powered by discontinuity, switches in scene, tense, voice, the mystery of who's talking. ... Anyone who's ever watched a news broadcast on television knows all about discontinuity" (qtd. in McCaffery 41).
It is commonplace to call Ragtime a "cinematic" novel. Its style is itself an attempt to find a "literary equivalent for the cinematic process," while its content suggests that "only the motion picture offers an artistic solution for historical volatility." For example, the jumps in time, place, and subject between chapters are often tied together by visual images, as they would be if one were editing a movie. Chapter 12 ends with Tateh and his daughter on an electric railway, "humming along dirt roads" on their way to Boston. Chapter 13 begins, "Tracks! Tracks! It seemed to the visionaries who wrote for the popular magazines that the future lay at the end of parallel rails" (109), a description that returns us to New York and Houdini, and for the time being we have dropped the subject of Tateh and his daughter. The technique goes back to Locke and his "association of ideas." It's a form of stream-of-consciousness montage where it is not necessary to explain connections to the reader. And not only are chapters linked this way, but so are sentences within Doctorow's extended paragraphs. In Chapter 1, when Evelyn Nesbit is introduced, we actually get very little visual description of her. The long first paragraph of the novel ends this way:
Evelyn fainted. She had been a well-known artist's model at the age of fifteen. Her under-clothes were white. Her husband habitually whipped her. She happened once to meet Emma Goldman, the revolutionary. Goldman lashed her with her tongue. Apparently there were Negroes. There were immigrants. And though the newspapers called the shooting the Crime of the Century, Goldman k knew it was only 1906 and there were ninety-four years to go.(5-6)
Much of the book is encapsulated in these cryptic, imaginatively connected sentences. They seem to work this way: being an artist's model suggests undressing, hence the underclothes; her husband, we will find out, does not approve of her being a model, so this idea brings him into the picture, along with whipping her, both for punishment and sexual gratification; the connection with Goldman is made through the image of whipping, for Goldman "lashed her with her tongue"; lashings bring to mind the images of blacks being lashed, which in turn suggest minorities, those outside the main stream, and hence "immigrants"; the final sentence pulls us out of these shots which have started with intimate close-ups of underclothes and gradually broadened their scope from the particular, Nesbit, then Goldman, to larger groups, Negroes, then immigrants, dollying back to a kind of establishing shot that reminds us of the small time period of the novel, only about ten years out of the one hundred of the twentieth century.
These short, factual sentences, working by means of association of ideas, pull together many of the strands of the novel: upper class life, middle class life, immigrant life, blacks, revolutionaries, and, most significantly, crimes, which we will see in various forms throughout the book. It focuses essentially on three family groups: Father/Mother and their family (middle class), Tateh and his daughter (immigrant life), and Coalhouse Walker, Jr., Sarah, and their child (black life), all of whom, during the course of the roughly ten-year span, interact with upper class life. In conclusion, as John Parks has noted, these strands are remarkably tied together as the three families become one with the marriage of Tateh and Mother who have adopted the child of Coalhouse and Sarah (63).
Doctorow's verbal style maintains a distance from his fictions. Indeed, the novel at times seems to be spoken rather than written.2For example, chapters will begin with questions, as if the narrator suddenly realizes that the reader may have been wondering if some characters in the story have simply been forgotten. Chapter 12: "And what of Tateh and his little girl?" Chapter 32: "And what of Younger Brother?" Doctorow's technique here is similar to Lord Byron's, who uses this rhetorical device for transition between digressions in works such as Childe Harold--"But where is he, the Pilgrim of my song, / The being who upheld it through the past?" (Canto IV, 1477-1478)--or Don Juan. The ironic, conversational narrator who pretends to lose control of his story, who apologizes for digression when in fact digression is the heart of his "story," is central to both Byron and Doctorow as social satirists. Both write pseudo-history, putting their fictional characters into a world populated by "real" historical people such as Catherine the Great (Byron) or Booker T. Washington (Doctorow), and play with our notions of truth and fiction. This delightful ironic voice depends on the narrator having a distance from the material being narrated. Charles Eidsvik writes, "It may be that Doctorow's commitment to social satire demands the inscrutable, impersonal detached voice, the almost mythic artist" (309).
For Eidsvik there are three techniques, all media related (although, of course, Byron was using these techniques for his social satire long before movies and television) that structure Doctorow's fiction: 1) an ironic use of real, historical, public figures; 2) a carnivalesque attitude toward these figures by putting together people who, in reality, would not be joined; and 3) wildly digressive shifts in plot. It is, then, the tension between the seriousness of Doctorow's materials and vision, and the playfulness of his structures that make him "an important voice in contemporary fiction" (309).
Because the structure of Ragtimeis so cinematic and because, in many ways, it is about volatile forms and the function of cinema to order those forms and create "history," it would seem at first to be a promising subject for adaptation to the screen. And indeed, the adaptation by Michael Weller and Milos Forman is successful in a number of respects. Gerhard Bach and Leonard and Barbara Quart are too hard on it. The Quarts suggest that the film lacks a governing vision and purpose (72). They see the cross-cutting of the film as "conventional," and like Bach, they argue that it fails to pick up Doctorow's playful spirit of discontinuity, volatility, even surreality. In other words, that crucial tension between the medium and the message, to quote McCluhan, is missing in the film adaptation.
Although this may be true, it is not for the reasons that the Quarts and Bach suggest. The film does make a real effort to evoke the feeling of discontinuity so crucial to the novel. Especially in what might be considered the film's first act, its introduction, we find scenes or sequences edited together in an abrupt manner. For example, after Sarah's baby has been found and Mother and Father are arguing what to do about him (which is changed from the novel where Father is away when the baby is found), we have a pause, during which time Mother says, "Excuse us, for a moment, won't you," and she and Father exit the room to talk, but the camera does not follow them and we are left "to fill in the gap" about their conversation. Instead, there is a CUT on the sound of the door closing to Henry Thaw, in what seems to be a complete non-sequitur, exclaiming to his lawyers that he wants the nude statue of his wife, Evelyn, taken down off Madison Square Garden. And this short scene also ends on incomplete action as Thaw threatens his lawyers by saying, "'cause if you don't, ..." and we abruptly CUT to an exterior street scene with a horse and wagon moving right to left, the same direction Thaw was looking and pointing.
Then there are a number of playful transitions, such as the freeze frame of the black-and-white face of Harry Houdini's mother from a newsreel dissolving into color live action of the same face, or the head that abruptly rises from the bottom of the frame, marking a transition from Coalhouse Walker, Jr. at Mother and Father's house saying. "Tell her I'll be back," to Harry K. Thaw's trial. However, as the characters in the film begin to come together there is less and less of this disjunctive editing.
The film's narrative eliminates many of the patterns in Doctorow's quilt--Emma Goldman, Harry Houdini and his mother. Freud and Jung, Morgan and Ford--and concentrates with dramatic intensity on the Coalhouse Walker, Jr. story. But by exploiting our knowledge of film history, Forman and Weller attempt something like Doctorow's mixing of fact and fiction by casting Jimmy Cagney as Rheinlander Waldo (a character invented for the movie--in the novel he's District Attorney Whitman), Cagney's longtime buddy, off-screen and on, Pat O'Brien as the lawyer, Delmas, dancing legend Donald O'Connor as Nesbit's dancing instructor, and literary legend Norman Mailer as Stanford White. Such reflexivity does allow the film to do "what the novel does in some ways."3These cross-textual references also reflect what Eidsvik describes as the first two of Doctorow's media techniques, while the disjunctive editing is an example of the third. But what is still missing in the film is 1) the sense of ironic distance created by Doctorow's narrative voice and 2) the idea about the importance of creating history, of giving form to the disjunctive, chaotic experiences of life.
Narrating history, making witness, composing and re-composing are certainly suggested by the newsreel sequences in the film of Ragtime.Not only do these sequences allow Forman and Weller to bring in characters and the panorama of historical events from the novel that they do not specifically treat in the film--Houdini, Freud, Ford, Morgan, Teddy Roosevelt--but they suggest the "making of history," not through writing but through filming, which of course has become increasingly important as the century in which Ragtime begins has passed through Emma Goldman's "ninety-four years to go." The changing form and increasing importance of this kind of "making witness" is subtly suggested in a contrast between the two Harry Houdini newsreel scenes that are given to us in the film. This is a framing device that is used in the novel, and the film makes skillful, albeit subtle, use of it. One of the concluding visions of the novel is an image that composes itself in Houdini's mind as he is hanging upside down from a twelfth-floor window before escaping from a strait jacket. "The image was of a small boy looking at himself in the shiny brass headlamp of an automobile," an echo of the image that concludes the first chapter of the novel where Houdini sees the boy "gazing at the distorted macrocephalic image of himself in the shiny brass fitting of the headlight," a form of self-duplication for which the little boy in the novel is constantly questing. The camera, of course, can give us just this sort of enlarged image, and both the novel and film suggest that in the twentieth century the movies may be the way we deal with the volatility, and create our sense of history. Consequently, many of the characters of Ragtime are presented to us in Forman's film by means of newsreels. The Houdini feat of escaping from a strait jacket while hanging from a skyscraper we see in the second newsreel sequence in the film. Then, as if no time has passed, we see the scene again at the end of Ragtime,but this time it seems to be part of the actual diegesis of the film, because it is in color, and it gives us two important pieces of information: 1) WAR IS DECLARED, so we have moved from 1906 to 1914, and 2) we see one of the spectators taking a picture of Houdini with a camera. This is a subtly brilliant touch, a gentle, ironic moment that perfectly reflects Doctorow's vision about the recording of history. But it passes so fast it is almost unnoticeable.
The second missing ingredient in Ragtime the film, ironic distance, is harder to reproduce on screen just because a novel has at least three tenses--past, present, and future--that allow for hindsight, foresight, and distance from "the present," while a film seems to unroll in a continuous present, and without a voice-over narrator it is very hard to create the distance necessary for ironic commentary on the unfolding action. Comedy, in particular black comedy, can be successful in doing this--Dr. Strangelove, for example, or a film like Buster Keaton's Sherlock, Jr., which like Ragtime comments on its own form and parodies human melodrama by naming its characters Father, the Boy, the Girl, and so on, so that these are "types" rather than individuals. Ragtime's characters, with the exception of those who have a historical or literary basis, are also identified as types, and both the film and the novel are structured as comedies, that is, their forms are circular and they end with a sense of renewal or the ongoing process of life. But for the irony to come through on screen, the action itself within the comic frame or structure has to be caricatured--the exaggerations of Strangelove, the gags of Sherlock, Jr. The diegetic action of Ragtime the film, however, with the exception of the casting and film techniques mentioned above, is presented in a fairly straight-forward, dramatic manner, concentrating its intensity on the powerful story of injustice embodied in the person and experience of Coalhouse Walker, Jr., with whom we are allowed to sympathize. The camera does not keep us at a distance, like the narrator of the novel. For example, near the end of the book we are simply told, "Coalhouse never once went to the window to look at it [the Model T Ford]. He sat at Pierpont Morgan's desk in the West Room and composed his will" (342). In the film, on the other hand, we move in to a close-up of Walker as he sits at the desk, hands on the handle of a detonator, and prays: "Lord, I'd hoped I'd have the courage to know what I should do now." He cries, and we cry with him. This is a powerfully emotional moment, unlike anything in the novel, and there is no satire here, no ironic voice. We are, however, saved the pain of his death. His shooting takes place in silence from the perspective of a high angle long shot, and as he falls on the steps on the Library, the camera holds in that shot; we do not come in any closer. Steam rises in front of the frame and we hear the ragtime music that segues into the closing shots of Father, Fire Chief Conklin, and, as we saw at the beginning of the film, Evelyn dancing in a swirling red skirt. The music and the repetition of this dancing sequence suggest that life goes on, like Harry K. Thaw marching "annually at Newport in the Armistice Day parade," the closing line of the novel.
Unlike the Burt Kennedy film of Welcome to Hard Times, this adaptation of a Doctorow novel keeps the dominant metaphors: the ragtime music that carries us through the film and the duplicating images, in particular, the motion picture. Both novels deal with a present telling about the past, and so both are about the importance of telling, of recording, of making history. Like the windmill in Hard Times[Welcome to Hard Times], the dancing figure of Evelyn, going round and round, suggests the cyclical nature of history, that it represents a moral process not progress. But that dancing figure of Evelyn gives a playful look at the camera as the film comes to a close, suggesting an awareness of the artificiality of all constructions of experience. Forman's film is filled with little moments like this, maybe not enough to embody fully a successful translation of novel to screen, but enough to share in that "democracy of perception." It becomes yet another voice in the "multiplicity of witnesses" that keep history from becoming myth.
Notes
1. See Dawson 209 and Parks 61.
2. See Gerhard Bach, "Novel as History and Film as Fiction," in Friedl and Schulz 167.
3. See Michael Shiels, "Look! It's James Cagney," Friedl and Schulz 155.
Works Cited
Dawson, Anthony B. "Ragtimeand the Movies: The Aura of the Duplicable." MosaicXVI, 1-2 (Winter/Spring 1983), 205-14.
Doctorow, E. L., Ragtime.New York: Bantam Books, 1976.
Eidsvik, Charles. "Playful Perceptions: E. L. Doctorow's Use of Media Structures and Conventions in Ragtime." Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch Im Auftrage der Görres-Gesellschaeft30 (1989), 301-309.
McCaffery, Larry. "A Spirit of Transgression." E. L. Doctorow: Essays and Conversations.Ed. Richard Trenner. Princeton: Ontario Review Press, 1983.
"A Multiplicity of Witness: E. L. Doctorow at Heidelberg." E. L. Doctorow: A Democracy of Perception.Ed. Herwig Friedl and Dieter Schulz. Essen: Blau Eule, 1988.
Parks, John G. E. L. Doctorow.New York: Frederick Ungar Books, Continuum, 1991.
Quart, Leonard and Barbara Quart. "RagtimeWithout a Melody." Literature/Film Quarterly10.2 (1982), 71-74.
Trenner, Richard, ed. E. L. Doctorow: Essays and Conversations.Princeton: Ontario Review Press, 1983.
Source Citation Rapf, Joanna E. "Volatile Forms: The Transgressive Energy of Ragtimeas Novel and Film." Literature/Film Quarterly 26.1 (1998): 16-22. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter. Vol. 214. Detroit: Gale, 2006. Literature Resource Center. Web. 30 Apr. 2011.Document URL
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“...because a mind is a terrible thing to waste,” ~ UNCF slogan since 1970s
1. What is Raft's Thesis?
2. According to author, how does this theme or thesis relate to recent field trips to Tenement Museum, Harlem or other aspects concerning Ms. Moore's History classes?
3. What other texts recently read, correlate to Raft's ideas of "transformation"? Or other themes?
4. According to Raft, whom is the Voice of Reason (VoR) within the novel?
5. Describe three of the fundamental differences between novel and the movie.
6. At one point, Raft alludes to another person we've studied recently. Explain who this person is and how his/her philosophies differ or coincide with the movie and novel.
_______________________________________________
Rapf, Joanna E. "Volatile Forms: The Transgressive Energy of Ragtime as Novel and Film." Literature/Film Quarterly 26.1 (1998): 16-22. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter. Vol. 214. Detroit: Gale, 2006. Literature Resource Center. Web. 30 Apr. 2011.
Father kept himself under control by writing in his journal. This was a system too, the system of language and conceptualization. It proposed that human beings, by the act of making witness, warranted times and places for their existence other than the time and place they were living through.--E. L. Doctorow, Ragtime1
E. L. Doctorow's novel, Ragtime,is certainly about "making witness." Its serpentine structure, drifting from one subject and one point-of-view to another, with its allusive narrator who seems by the end to be a little boy reflecting on the past of his youth, is about the creation and re-creation of history, a discipline, Doctorow seems to suggest, that is itself about making order out of disorder, about "control." While he is in the Arctic, Father "kept himself under control by writing in his journal." This process of ordering, of fixing, is crucial in Doctorow's work. Ragtime is all about things going out of control as the nineteenth century marches into the twentieth: race riots (Coalhouse), the automobile (Ford), Communist agitation and women's rights (Emma Goldman), labor strikes, and world war. The tranquility of the opening chapter--with Father's house, patriotism as "a reliable sentiment in the early 1900s," vaudeville, and "no Negroes" and "no immigrants," when Winslow Homer was still painting, capturing the fleeting image of a certain kind of light--is all shattered in the few short years chronicled by the novel. By the end of Part II, "Father wondered at this moment if their lives might no longer be under their control" (240), and by the end of Part IV, Winslow Homer is dead, along with Father, Grandfather, and Younger Brother. Emma Goldman has been deported, Evelyn Nesbit has lost her looks, and the era of Ragtime had run out, with the heavy breath of the machine, "as if history were no more than a tune on a player piano" (369). And indeed, this is Doctorow's vision of history, being composed and re-composed, so that the human sense of order might be liberating and creative rather than oppressive, restrictive, and stifling of spirit. He has said:
Since history can be composed, you see, then you want to have as many people active in the composition as possible. A kind of democracy of perception ... a multiplicity of witnesses. If you don't constantly recompose and re-interpret history, then it begins to tighten its grip on your throat as myth and you find yourself in some kind of totalitarian society, either secular or religious.("A Multiplicity of Witness"184)
The whole subtext of Ragtime is about telling, making witness and narrating history. The little boy, as a grown man looking back, seems to narrate the novel we read. Anthony B. Dawson has called him "the privileged consciousness of the novel" (208). He tells its history, but within that novel, Father keeps a journal to tell his history, and so does Younger Brother:
Our knowledge of this clandestine history comes to us by Younger Brother's own hand. He kept a diary from the day of his arrival in Harlem to the day of his death in Mexico a little more than a year later.(282)
And Grandfather narrates stories of transformation, people who become animals or trees, just as Ragtime itself is a narration of transformation, about people who become something they were not at the beginning of the book. The immigrant silhouette artist, Tateh, becomes a moviemaker; the meek Younger Brother becomes a lover and a revolutionary; the musician, Coalhouse Walker, Jr., becomes an angry symbol of the struggle for dignity and human rights. The patchwork of these stories suggests, as the boy narrates, that "forms of life were volatile and that everything in the world could as easily become something else" (132-33). He found, he says, "proof in his own experience of the instability of both things and people." The recurring figure in the novel of the magician/escape artist Harry Houdini is a running metaphor of this experience, a man who does not even use his own name--"He was a Jew. His real name was Erich Weiss" (39)--and whose only source of order in a volatile world is his mother. Even in death she continues to order his life: "Every feat enacted Houdini's desire for his dead mother. He was buried and reborn, buried and reborn" (234): the theme of reincarnation so crucial to J. P. Morgan's failed quest in the novel. The pattern always is one of an attempt to fix the volatility of life, to order, to "re-compose."
Two other metaphors in the book that seem to usurp nineteenth-century orderings and renew them in twentieth-century forms are baseball and the movies. Father's instinct at the time of losing control, when "it was clear the crisis was driving the spirit from their lives," is to take his son to a baseball game. A baseball game presents excitement within an order, a structure, that repeats itself again and again. Doctorow writes:
Father sank into his chair. As the afternoon wore on he entertained the illusion that what he saw was not baseball but an elaborate representation of his own problems accounted, for his secret understanding, in the coded clarity of numbers that could be seen from a distance.(266, bold mine)
Baseball encompasses a "re-presentation," the problems of his life "accounted," with its metaphor of the ordering of numbers, the tidy summation of a ledger making sense of disorder while creating an understanding. When Father asks the boy what he likes about the game, the boy replies, "The same thing happens over and over," just as he had said in an earlier chapter that he liked to listen to the same record over and over again on the Victrola "as if to test the endurance of a duplicated event," and that he liked to look at himself in the mirror "not from vanity but because he discovered the mirror as a means of self-duplication" (133-34). The fragility of this ordering, its illusory nature, is reiterated by Doctorow at the end of the baseball chapter when the outcast player, Charles Victor Faust, actually gets a chance to pitch one inning for the Giants, but then is sent on his way. Out of the ordering of baseball, he ends up in an insane asylum and dies.
But as long as we can maintain an illusion, and thereby our sanity, "understanding" is possible. Doctorow's second metaphor for this understanding is the movies. When the little boy in Chapter 15 is worrying about the volatility of things we have what seems like two sentences put together that have no clear connection with each other:
If he raised the window in his room it might shut itself at the moment he thought the room was getting cold. He liked to go to the moving picture shows downtown at the New Rochelle Theatre on Main Street.(133)
In a style typical of Doctorow, he leaves the reader to make the crucial connection between the two sentences, which are skillfully linked together like a form cut in a movie. There is the visual image of the frame, the window frame and the movie frame, and the mental image of a problem--discontinuity--and its solution--finding continuity at the movies.
It is in the transformation of Tateh (Hebrew for Father, so by name he represents a kind of reincarnation into the twentieth century of the first, nineteenth-century father of the book, who literally blows up and sinks with the Lusitania) from immigrant silhouette artist to successful immigrant moviemaker. Chapter 18 begins with this description: "Thus did the artist point his life along the lines of flow of American energy," and goes on to report that "The value of the duplicable event was everywhere perceived" (153), not just in the movies, but in factories and soda fountains. But it is the movies that offer the possibility of understanding, like Father's accounting illusion of baseball. The reincarnated Tateh, as Baron Ashkenazy, frames life with his rectangular glass, giving it shape and form. "In the movie films, he said, we only look at what is there already. Life shines on the shadow screen, as from the darkness of one's mind," a sentence that brings together the physical screen and also what Bruce Kawin has called the "mindscreen" involved in the perception of movies. The new Baron Ashkenazy goes on,
People want to know what is happening to them. For a few pennies they sit and see their selves in movement, running, racing in motorcars, fighting and, forgive me, embracing one another. This is most important today, in this country, where everybody is so new. There is such a need to understand.(297)
Both in terms of its style and content, Ragtime looks to the twentieth-century art form of the movies for understanding, for its structuring of history. Doctorow once said that The Book of Daniel "was constructed like Laugh-In" (qtd. in McCaffery 41). This is because in an age where visual media have replaced print as primary agents of mass communication, Doctorow recognizes that we no longer read with the same expectations of continuity that characterize nineteenth century essays and fiction. "I don't know how anyone can write today without accommodating eighty or ninety years of film technology" (qtd. in McCaffery 40). Consequently, the effects of that technology are manifest not just referentially but also structurally in his work. From film, he says, "we've learned that we don't have to explain things." The audience or the reader can fill in gaps and will accept jumps in time and space. "My writing," he tells us, "is powered by discontinuity, switches in scene, tense, voice, the mystery of who's talking. ... Anyone who's ever watched a news broadcast on television knows all about discontinuity" (qtd. in McCaffery 41).
It is commonplace to call Ragtime a "cinematic" novel. Its style is itself an attempt to find a "literary equivalent for the cinematic process," while its content suggests that "only the motion picture offers an artistic solution for historical volatility." For example, the jumps in time, place, and subject between chapters are often tied together by visual images, as they would be if one were editing a movie. Chapter 12 ends with Tateh and his daughter on an electric railway, "humming along dirt roads" on their way to Boston. Chapter 13 begins, "Tracks! Tracks! It seemed to the visionaries who wrote for the popular magazines that the future lay at the end of parallel rails" (109), a description that returns us to New York and Houdini, and for the time being we have dropped the subject of Tateh and his daughter. The technique goes back to Locke and his "association of ideas." It's a form of stream-of-consciousness montage where it is not necessary to explain connections to the reader. And not only are chapters linked this way, but so are sentences within Doctorow's extended paragraphs. In Chapter 1, when Evelyn Nesbit is introduced, we actually get very little visual description of her. The long first paragraph of the novel ends this way:
Evelyn fainted. She had been a well-known artist's model at the age of fifteen. Her under-clothes were white. Her husband habitually whipped her. She happened once to meet Emma Goldman, the revolutionary. Goldman lashed her with her tongue. Apparently there were Negroes. There were immigrants. And though the newspapers called the shooting the Crime of the Century, Goldman k knew it was only 1906 and there were ninety-four years to go.(5-6)
Much of the book is encapsulated in these cryptic, imaginatively connected sentences. They seem to work this way: being an artist's model suggests undressing, hence the underclothes; her husband, we will find out, does not approve of her being a model, so this idea brings him into the picture, along with whipping her, both for punishment and sexual gratification; the connection with Goldman is made through the image of whipping, for Goldman "lashed her with her tongue"; lashings bring to mind the images of blacks being lashed, which in turn suggest minorities, those outside the main stream, and hence "immigrants"; the final sentence pulls us out of these shots which have started with intimate close-ups of underclothes and gradually broadened their scope from the particular, Nesbit, then Goldman, to larger groups, Negroes, then immigrants, dollying back to a kind of establishing shot that reminds us of the small time period of the novel, only about ten years out of the one hundred of the twentieth century.
These short, factual sentences, working by means of association of ideas, pull together many of the strands of the novel: upper class life, middle class life, immigrant life, blacks, revolutionaries, and, most significantly, crimes, which we will see in various forms throughout the book. It focuses essentially on three family groups: Father/Mother and their family (middle class), Tateh and his daughter (immigrant life), and Coalhouse Walker, Jr., Sarah, and their child (black life), all of whom, during the course of the roughly ten-year span, interact with upper class life. In conclusion, as John Parks has noted, these strands are remarkably tied together as the three families become one with the marriage of Tateh and Mother who have adopted the child of Coalhouse and Sarah (63).
Doctorow's verbal style maintains a distance from his fictions. Indeed, the novel at times seems to be spoken rather than written.2For example, chapters will begin with questions, as if the narrator suddenly realizes that the reader may have been wondering if some characters in the story have simply been forgotten. Chapter 12: "And what of Tateh and his little girl?" Chapter 32: "And what of Younger Brother?" Doctorow's technique here is similar to Lord Byron's, who uses this rhetorical device for transition between digressions in works such as Childe Harold--"But where is he, the Pilgrim of my song, / The being who upheld it through the past?" (Canto IV, 1477-1478)--or Don Juan. The ironic, conversational narrator who pretends to lose control of his story, who apologizes for digression when in fact digression is the heart of his "story," is central to both Byron and Doctorow as social satirists. Both write pseudo-history, putting their fictional characters into a world populated by "real" historical people such as Catherine the Great (Byron) or Booker T. Washington (Doctorow), and play with our notions of truth and fiction. This delightful ironic voice depends on the narrator having a distance from the material being narrated. Charles Eidsvik writes, "It may be that Doctorow's commitment to social satire demands the inscrutable, impersonal detached voice, the almost mythic artist" (309).
For Eidsvik there are three techniques, all media related (although, of course, Byron was using these techniques for his social satire long before movies and television) that structure Doctorow's fiction: 1) an ironic use of real, historical, public figures; 2) a carnivalesque attitude toward these figures by putting together people who, in reality, would not be joined; and 3) wildly digressive shifts in plot. It is, then, the tension between the seriousness of Doctorow's materials and vision, and the playfulness of his structures that make him "an important voice in contemporary fiction" (309).
Because the structure of Ragtimeis so cinematic and because, in many ways, it is about volatile forms and the function of cinema to order those forms and create "history," it would seem at first to be a promising subject for adaptation to the screen. And indeed, the adaptation by Michael Weller and Milos Forman is successful in a number of respects. Gerhard Bach and Leonard and Barbara Quart are too hard on it. The Quarts suggest that the film lacks a governing vision and purpose (72). They see the cross-cutting of the film as "conventional," and like Bach, they argue that it fails to pick up Doctorow's playful spirit of discontinuity, volatility, even surreality. In other words, that crucial tension between the medium and the message, to quote McCluhan, is missing in the film adaptation.
Although this may be true, it is not for the reasons that the Quarts and Bach suggest. The film does make a real effort to evoke the feeling of discontinuity so crucial to the novel. Especially in what might be considered the film's first act, its introduction, we find scenes or sequences edited together in an abrupt manner. For example, after Sarah's baby has been found and Mother and Father are arguing what to do about him (which is changed from the novel where Father is away when the baby is found), we have a pause, during which time Mother says, "Excuse us, for a moment, won't you," and she and Father exit the room to talk, but the camera does not follow them and we are left "to fill in the gap" about their conversation. Instead, there is a CUT on the sound of the door closing to Henry Thaw, in what seems to be a complete non-sequitur, exclaiming to his lawyers that he wants the nude statue of his wife, Evelyn, taken down off Madison Square Garden. And this short scene also ends on incomplete action as Thaw threatens his lawyers by saying, "'cause if you don't, ..." and we abruptly CUT to an exterior street scene with a horse and wagon moving right to left, the same direction Thaw was looking and pointing.
Then there are a number of playful transitions, such as the freeze frame of the black-and-white face of Harry Houdini's mother from a newsreel dissolving into color live action of the same face, or the head that abruptly rises from the bottom of the frame, marking a transition from Coalhouse Walker, Jr. at Mother and Father's house saying. "Tell her I'll be back," to Harry K. Thaw's trial. However, as the characters in the film begin to come together there is less and less of this disjunctive editing.
The film's narrative eliminates many of the patterns in Doctorow's quilt--Emma Goldman, Harry Houdini and his mother. Freud and Jung, Morgan and Ford--and concentrates with dramatic intensity on the Coalhouse Walker, Jr. story. But by exploiting our knowledge of film history, Forman and Weller attempt something like Doctorow's mixing of fact and fiction by casting Jimmy Cagney as Rheinlander Waldo (a character invented for the movie--in the novel he's District Attorney Whitman), Cagney's longtime buddy, off-screen and on, Pat O'Brien as the lawyer, Delmas, dancing legend Donald O'Connor as Nesbit's dancing instructor, and literary legend Norman Mailer as Stanford White. Such reflexivity does allow the film to do "what the novel does in some ways."3These cross-textual references also reflect what Eidsvik describes as the first two of Doctorow's media techniques, while the disjunctive editing is an example of the third. But what is still missing in the film is 1) the sense of ironic distance created by Doctorow's narrative voice and 2) the idea about the importance of creating history, of giving form to the disjunctive, chaotic experiences of life.
Narrating history, making witness, composing and re-composing are certainly suggested by the newsreel sequences in the film of Ragtime.Not only do these sequences allow Forman and Weller to bring in characters and the panorama of historical events from the novel that they do not specifically treat in the film--Houdini, Freud, Ford, Morgan, Teddy Roosevelt--but they suggest the "making of history," not through writing but through filming, which of course has become increasingly important as the century in which Ragtime begins has passed through Emma Goldman's "ninety-four years to go." The changing form and increasing importance of this kind of "making witness" is subtly suggested in a contrast between the two Harry Houdini newsreel scenes that are given to us in the film. This is a framing device that is used in the novel, and the film makes skillful, albeit subtle, use of it. One of the concluding visions of the novel is an image that composes itself in Houdini's mind as he is hanging upside down from a twelfth-floor window before escaping from a strait jacket. "The image was of a small boy looking at himself in the shiny brass headlamp of an automobile," an echo of the image that concludes the first chapter of the novel where Houdini sees the boy "gazing at the distorted macrocephalic image of himself in the shiny brass fitting of the headlight," a form of self-duplication for which the little boy in the novel is constantly questing. The camera, of course, can give us just this sort of enlarged image, and both the novel and film suggest that in the twentieth century the movies may be the way we deal with the volatility, and create our sense of history. Consequently, many of the characters of Ragtime are presented to us in Forman's film by means of newsreels. The Houdini feat of escaping from a strait jacket while hanging from a skyscraper we see in the second newsreel sequence in the film. Then, as if no time has passed, we see the scene again at the end of Ragtime,but this time it seems to be part of the actual diegesis of the film, because it is in color, and it gives us two important pieces of information: 1) WAR IS DECLARED, so we have moved from 1906 to 1914, and 2) we see one of the spectators taking a picture of Houdini with a camera. This is a subtly brilliant touch, a gentle, ironic moment that perfectly reflects Doctorow's vision about the recording of history. But it passes so fast it is almost unnoticeable.
The second missing ingredient in Ragtime the film, ironic distance, is harder to reproduce on screen just because a novel has at least three tenses--past, present, and future--that allow for hindsight, foresight, and distance from "the present," while a film seems to unroll in a continuous present, and without a voice-over narrator it is very hard to create the distance necessary for ironic commentary on the unfolding action. Comedy, in particular black comedy, can be successful in doing this--Dr. Strangelove, for example, or a film like Buster Keaton's Sherlock, Jr., which like Ragtime comments on its own form and parodies human melodrama by naming its characters Father, the Boy, the Girl, and so on, so that these are "types" rather than individuals. Ragtime's characters, with the exception of those who have a historical or literary basis, are also identified as types, and both the film and the novel are structured as comedies, that is, their forms are circular and they end with a sense of renewal or the ongoing process of life. But for the irony to come through on screen, the action itself within the comic frame or structure has to be caricatured--the exaggerations of Strangelove, the gags of Sherlock, Jr. The diegetic action of Ragtime the film, however, with the exception of the casting and film techniques mentioned above, is presented in a fairly straight-forward, dramatic manner, concentrating its intensity on the powerful story of injustice embodied in the person and experience of Coalhouse Walker, Jr., with whom we are allowed to sympathize. The camera does not keep us at a distance, like the narrator of the novel. For example, near the end of the book we are simply told, "Coalhouse never once went to the window to look at it [the Model T Ford]. He sat at Pierpont Morgan's desk in the West Room and composed his will" (342). In the film, on the other hand, we move in to a close-up of Walker as he sits at the desk, hands on the handle of a detonator, and prays: "Lord, I'd hoped I'd have the courage to know what I should do now." He cries, and we cry with him. This is a powerfully emotional moment, unlike anything in the novel, and there is no satire here, no ironic voice. We are, however, saved the pain of his death. His shooting takes place in silence from the perspective of a high angle long shot, and as he falls on the steps on the Library, the camera holds in that shot; we do not come in any closer. Steam rises in front of the frame and we hear the ragtime music that segues into the closing shots of Father, Fire Chief Conklin, and, as we saw at the beginning of the film, Evelyn dancing in a swirling red skirt. The music and the repetition of this dancing sequence suggest that life goes on, like Harry K. Thaw marching "annually at Newport in the Armistice Day parade," the closing line of the novel.
Unlike the Burt Kennedy film of Welcome to Hard Times, this adaptation of a Doctorow novel keeps the dominant metaphors: the ragtime music that carries us through the film and the duplicating images, in particular, the motion picture. Both novels deal with a present telling about the past, and so both are about the importance of telling, of recording, of making history. Like the windmill in Hard Times[Welcome to Hard Times], the dancing figure of Evelyn, going round and round, suggests the cyclical nature of history, that it represents a moral process not progress. But that dancing figure of Evelyn gives a playful look at the camera as the film comes to a close, suggesting an awareness of the artificiality of all constructions of experience. Forman's film is filled with little moments like this, maybe not enough to embody fully a successful translation of novel to screen, but enough to share in that "democracy of perception." It becomes yet another voice in the "multiplicity of witnesses" that keep history from becoming myth.
Notes
1. See Dawson 209 and Parks 61.
2. See Gerhard Bach, "Novel as History and Film as Fiction," in Friedl and Schulz 167.
3. See Michael Shiels, "Look! It's James Cagney," Friedl and Schulz 155.
Works Cited
Dawson, Anthony B. "Ragtimeand the Movies: The Aura of the Duplicable." MosaicXVI, 1-2 (Winter/Spring 1983), 205-14.
Doctorow, E. L., Ragtime.New York: Bantam Books, 1976.
Eidsvik, Charles. "Playful Perceptions: E. L. Doctorow's Use of Media Structures and Conventions in Ragtime." Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch Im Auftrage der Görres-Gesellschaeft30 (1989), 301-309.
McCaffery, Larry. "A Spirit of Transgression." E. L. Doctorow: Essays and Conversations.Ed. Richard Trenner. Princeton: Ontario Review Press, 1983.
"A Multiplicity of Witness: E. L. Doctorow at Heidelberg." E. L. Doctorow: A Democracy of Perception.Ed. Herwig Friedl and Dieter Schulz. Essen: Blau Eule, 1988.
Parks, John G. E. L. Doctorow.New York: Frederick Ungar Books, Continuum, 1991.
Quart, Leonard and Barbara Quart. "RagtimeWithout a Melody." Literature/Film Quarterly10.2 (1982), 71-74.
Trenner, Richard, ed. E. L. Doctorow: Essays and Conversations.Princeton: Ontario Review Press, 1983.
Source Citation Rapf, Joanna E. "Volatile Forms: The Transgressive Energy of Ragtimeas Novel and Film." Literature/Film Quarterly 26.1 (1998): 16-22. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter. Vol. 214. Detroit: Gale, 2006. Literature Resource Center. Web. 30 Apr. 2011.Document URL
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The moral virtues, then, are produced in us neither by nature nor against nature. Nature, indeed, prepares in us the ground for their reception, but their complete formation is the product of habit.
Aristole
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