I've noticed a recurring theme while reading Doctorow's Ragtime. I'll call it duplication, though it might be more accurate to say "the same thing happening or existing repeatedly, sometimes in a different form". The little boy fixates on this in Chapter 15, playing the same records over and over "as if to test the endurance of a duplicated event" and stares at himself in the mirror for hours, entranced by the idea of creating a second self. He wholeheartedly believes his grandfather's stories, which describe bodily forms as fluid, changeable. The boy's obsessions call to mind Morgan's belief in reincarnation, specifically his belief that he himself is the reincarnated form of an Egyptian pharaoh. The same being, different forms, over and over.
Ford, too, believes in reincarnation, in more ways than one. His assembly line creates the same exact car, over and over. It's workers are interchangeable; any position is fluid; various people might fill the same position over time, but their purpose in the machine is the same. To move away from the abstract a bit, Tateh appears to literally invent the flip book (although a quick Wikipedia search tells me they existed as early as 1868) which show the same scene, over and over, the exact same each time.
I can't figure out though, why Doctorow focuses on this. It is clearly intentional (if nothing else the boy's fixation on duplication is explicit). Is this Doctorow calling to our attention the nature of his novel, viewing historical fiction as a duplication of the past and wanting us to consider and acknowledge the genre's inherent imperfection? An interesting thought, but I'm more inclined to think right now it's a nod to a theme of the period he's writing in. Perhaps everyone is so obsessed with re-creating things because music stored on a disk, the assembly line and mass production are the exciting new inventions of the Ragtime Era.
"Duplication" is a good word for the phenomenon, I think. As you said, it's been a highly recurrent theme (imagine that, duplication duplicating itself; wow; how meta is this book going to get; etc) without any explicit explanation, at least not yet. Yet another example of duplication occurs in chapter 30, when the boy comments that sometimes the pitcher fools the batter but other times the batter turns the tables and fools the pitcher instead. It's the tiny variations between pitches that fascinate him. Maybe that's what all the characters (and, by extension, Doctorow) are looking for. Ford's assembly line cars aren't of much note in and of themselves until Coalhouse's Model T is wrecked. It breaks the pattern of identical cars and therefore stands out more in the bigger story than if the car had just been some other random brand not associated with identicality.
ReplyDeleteIn some sense, "the duplicable event" is definitive of modern culture, not only in manufacturing (we WANT the products we buy to NOT look like human hands have ever touched them, and we want them to all look the same), but in artistic culture as well. The cultural critic Walter Benjamin wrote about "art in the age of mechanical reproduction" and wondered whether some crucial "aura" of a work of art is lost once it is mass-produced (a really nice print of the Mona Lisa, rather than the "real" one encased in glass and beset with flashbulbs at the Louvre, not to mention the same image on t-shirts, mugs, pencil cases, sometimes with sunglasses or a moustache). The 20th Century is all about "duplicable" art--movies, television/video, recorded music (and sampled music), silk-screen prints (Warhol), photography (film and digital). The duplicability of such art is inseparable from its commercial function--art is more profitable when it can be mass-produced and sold. In this respect, Tateh's "genius" is on par with Ford's.
ReplyDeleteI think Doctorow keeps using this duplication because he doesn't like it and finds it obnoxious in some way. His whole book completely ruins the idea of exactly duplicating history, with fictional events and characters that we know are not a mirror of the past. I think he really keeps bringing out duplicity because he wants us to think about it, how much it is a part of our world, how much even the smallest children are obsessed with it and the greatest artists succumb to it.
ReplyDeleteThis is an interesting observation, and I think something it may be indicating is the way in which history repeats itself. We talked about it in 3rd period a bit - Doctorow writes for an audience in the 70's and as he does that, he seems to hint that the things he writes about are re-emerging. I could be reading into it wrong, though.
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