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.
ReplyDeleteThis is a nice, semester-closing consideration of two very different forms of history-fiction interweaving for ironic purposes. DeLillo's technique in particular captures Hayden White's ideas about narrative as essential to historical discourse--historical writing AS fiction, in many respects. We get a huge amount of nonfiction "data points," but these data points don't speak for themselves, as White reminds us. Think of Lee's time in Atsugi, which the historical record doesn't document extensively. We have the incident report where he shoots himself with an unauthorized gun (reported to be two different calibers in two different reports). We have the military police records from his court martial, where he is sentenced for his altercation with a superior officer (exacerbated by the unauthorized weapon charge). On their own, these two data points do not tell a story--so DeLillo crafts a plausible narrative context around them, so we see Lee being persuaded to shoot himself with a gun given to him by this Japanese underworld figure, Konno, and then Lee "pushes his luck" and fights this superior officer (in a very Lee kind of way), getting him sent to the brig as a "political prisoner." According to White, DeLillo is just doing what any historian has to do at some level--the narrative is "connective tissue" to hold together the facts and give them meaning. It's a question of how bothered we are by the unverifiable nature of most of that narrative, and even some of those facts.
ReplyDeleteI always felt like there was a weird indiscernible parallel between the warping of history in Ragtime and Libra. I really like the point you made about how Libra is the "reverse reaction" of Ragtime, where instead of stringing together several narratives, it tears apart a preexisting narrative into pieces and passively mocks you for attempting to make sense of it.
ReplyDeleteHey Jason. This is a really clear and insightful comparison. Your examples, like Coalhouse Walker in Ragtime and the fictionalized elements around Oswald in Libra, illustrate this contrast perfectly. I like also how you were able to incorporate themes from the past book into this.
ReplyDelete