Both E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime and Don DeLillo’s Libra are masters of spinning history into tapestries of fiction. Both novels take real events and real people, but cleverly slip fictional details in to craft their own narrative. They share this core method, but they use it for completely different purposes. Ragtime builds a huge, connected story of a whole time period, while Libra takes apart a tragic event until it feels like it has no solid truth at all.
These books both treat history like their own sandbox. For example, Doctorow puts his fictional family in the same room with famous figures like Harry Houdini and J.P. Morgan almost casually. Some parts of the story are real, like Peary’s expedition to the north pole. However, some aren't, like how Father came along and brought the flag in the iconic photo. Delillo, on the other hand, retells backstories of real characters and his fictional characters to “manipulate” real life characters to create his narrative.
In Ragtime, Doctorow uses fiction to connect the dots of early American history. Coalhouse Walker, for example, is a completely fictional a Black pianist who becomes a radical after a racist attack. Through him, Doctorow connects the worlds of immigrants, factory workers, famous activists, and billionaires like JP Morgan. The story of Coalhouse gives a reason for all these separate historical facts to collide. It makes the whole era feel like one big interconnected story. After finishing Ragtime, you feel like you understand the time period, even though some of the scenes never happened.
Libra, on the other hand, uses fiction to do the opposite. Instead of connecting history together through fiction, DeLillo creates a narrative that makes you question history. Focusing on the JFK assassination, he adds fictional CIA agents with fictitious backstories into his invented narrative, but all based in real life events—similarly to Ragtime. The real Lee Harvey Oswald’s pathetic life gets mixed with made-up conspiracies. The point of Libra seems to be to create his own version of history, but one that really could have happened.
Doctorow weaves together a narrative to tell the story of a time period. DeLillo however creates a story that dissects a single event and makes you question everything.
Doctorow, E. L. Ragtime. Random House, 2007.
DeLillo, Don. Libra. Viking Press, 1988.
Hi Jason, I really enjoyed reading your blog! I liked how you compared Libra and Ragtime's use of history in order to shape a plot. I agree that while Ragtime is more about, well, Ragtime, Libra pieces together specific weird coincidences to form a plotline. I also think that Libra's stringing together of facts is somewhat reminiscent of a detective case - indeed, he tries to fill in the gaps of JFK's murder through his book.
ReplyDelete