![]() ![]() The ruling narrative of industrial capitalism that appears to be “pressed upon” them, externally, “by pressing the subject into subordination, assumes a psychic for that constitutes the subject self-identity” (Butler 3). Nonetheless, in this world “he best part of Father’s income derived from the manufacture of flags and buntings and other accoutrements of patriotism, including fireworks” (10). There to be quotas for death by starvation” (Doctorow 2007, 40). For in the world the story recounts, “ne hundred Negroes a year lynched. The microcosm Ragtime presents us with seems to revolve around a narrative that sustains the white, male, capitalist domination and masks the injustices within it. This way, I also hope to illuminate certain metatextual strategies the novel employs and provide a better understanding of the epistemological model Doctorow thus conceives. My aim, then, will be to show how stories govern the microcosm of Ragtime, condition the subjectivity and fate of its characters, and how stories themselves offer liberation from normative constraints. ![]() In this work, as I am convinced that Ragtime testifies to this awareness, put forward in “False Documents,” I will rely on Doctorow’s essay as a key to interpret the novel. As a result, in Doctorow’s view, fiction has the ability, by revealing the constructedness of the world, to free us from the narratives that circumscribe our lives and constrain us. Therefore, “hat we proclaim as the discovered factual world can be challenged as the questionable world we ourselves have painted” (152). This is so because, in Doctorow’s view, all forms of knowledge are rooted in storytelling, and there is no genuine difference between fact and fiction: “there is only narrative” (163). For fiction, speaking in the vernacular of freedom, has the ability, by revealing what we “threaten to become,” to transform the stories that govern our world (153). ![]() Yet, Doctorow does so in order to “give counsel” to point out our “contingency,” the very thing scientific discourse is desperate to keep hidden (157). That is, if they are to be taken seriously, they need to maintain the illusion of verifiability. This is so because “the regime of facts,” the epistemological dominant of industrial society, “derives its strength from what we are supposed to be,” and, living in a world centred around the scientific dogma of its own infallibility, writers of fiction are no exception - they too need to play along with the pretences of their era (153). In other words, hoping to gain “authority for the narrative,” Ragtime claims to have been there (155). Indeed, the novel revisits the early 1900s and, by blending historical figures and events with fictitious ones, blurs the lines between “the historic and the aesthetic, the real and the possibly real” (Doctorow 1993, 157). “My book is a false document,” claims E.L Doctorow in an interview about Ragtime (Gussow 4). Keywords: Doctorow, postmodernism, historiographic metafiction, power, narration Ragtime testifies to this awareness, put forward in “False Documents,” in the present work I will rely on Doctorow’s essay as a key to interpret the novel and my aim is to show how stories govern the microcosm of Ragtime, condition the subjectivity and fate of its characters, and how stories themselves offer a liberation from normative constraints. For, fiction, speaking in the vernacular of freedom, has the ability, by revealing what we “threaten to become,” to transform the stories that govern our world. In Doctorow ‘s view, only literature can offer us a way out of the tyranny of this rationality. Doctorow, there is no genuine difference between fact and fiction: “there is only narrative.” He believes that “the regime of facts,” the epistemological dominant of the world we live in, “derives its strength from what we are supposed to be.” In this sense, our microcosm does not merely revolve around the scientific dogma of its own infallibility, but the ruling scientific discourse defines us in our very beings and demarcates our agentic horizons. His MA dissertation by using Patricia Waugh’s definition of historiographic metafiction read Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and Against the Day as fiction that is not only conscious of its constructed nature but which aims to uncover the fictionality of our own world. In 2018 he obtained an MA degree in English Literature from the University of Bristol. His research interests are related to postmodernist and contemporary US fiction. Gergely Vörös is a postgraduate student at Comenius University in Bratislava. " Ragtime as “False Document”: Narratives and a Constructed world in E. ![]()
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