Not Ragging On Ragtime

*Warning: spoilers lie ahead like American flags lining the main street of Smalltown U.S.A.  Read on at your own risk.*

I love reading the first chapter of a new book.  Everything is new and nothing is known.  Who is the narrator?  What is the tone?  Who is this book about?  Where and when are we and why do we seem to be here?  Sometimes the first chapter is a grand struggle to make sense of the new surroundings.  Sometimes it’s like a dream, full of familiar objects in unfamiliar lighting.  Sometimes it’s like listening to a foreign language.

For me, Ragtime was like an immersion in a warm bath after a long afternoon shoveling snow.  Everything about E.L. Doctorow’s language was enjoyable and thrilling.  I knew before the end of the first paragraph (an admittedly HUGE paragraph) that I was going to love this book, and the rest of the novel fulfilled that promise.  I will detail what it was that I found so rewarding about the book, but I must first acknowledge that any love of a particular piece of literature is primarily aesthetic.  I love a detached narrator who presents emotionally powerful scenes with understated phrases.  I love a sense of irony that makes you read both what is said and what is not said.  To take an example from that first paragraph, the narrator describes life at the turn of the century: 

Teddy Roosevelt was President.  The population customarily gathered in great numbers either out of doors for parades, public concerts, fish fries, political picnics, social outings, or indoors in meeting halls, vaudeville theatres, operas, ballrooms.  There seemed to be no entertainment that did not involve great swarms of people.  Trains and steamers and trolleys moved them from one place to another.  That was the style, that was the way people lived.  Women were stouter then.  They visited the fleet carrying white parasols.  Everyone wore white in summer.  Tennis racquets were hefty and the racquet faces elliptical.  There was a lot of sexual fainting.  There were no Negroes.  There were no immigrants.

Here we have what appears to be a detailing of an historical time with what is almost textbook-like generalities.  We “learn” how people gathered, how they traveled, how they “lived.”  Only when you hit the final two sentences are you shaken from the lull you fell into as a reader and realize that you are hearing about only one tiny sliver of American populace.  These are the people who could afford to holiday, who carried parasols, played the gentrified sport of tennis—in short, the upper middle class white citizens.  That’s a narrator I want to keep talking to me!  Near the end of that same opening paragraph, Evelyn Nesbit is said to have met the revolutionary Emma Goldman: “Goldman lashed her with her tongue.  Apparently there were Negroes.  There were immigrants.”  The shock and disbelieve of the italicized “were” are nothing short of delicious.

What is established in this opening paragraph is a question that lingers throughout the novel:  what is history?  To what extent is history created and sculpted?  Doctorow blurs the line between history and fiction in Ragtime, fictionalizing historical characters and events and historicizing fictional characters and events.  Historical figures are given hilarious scenes, like Freud riding through the Tunnel of Love on Coney Island, sharing his boat with Jung; or Harry Thaw waving his penis at Harry Houdini during a trick in the Tombs; or J.P. Morgan’s conversation with Henry Ford about reincarnation.  The fictitious characters meanwhile are treated like figures pulled from history, such as when the narrator discusses the “little [that] is known about Coalhouse Walker Jr.”  The point of this blurring appears to be to call into question the authoritative nature of history, to draw to our attention how history is not different from fiction, really.  Yes, things actually happen, but all things that happen are not recorded, and all things that are recorded are not given equal weight.  There is selection and creation in history.  History as we learn it is created like a narrative to move us chronologically through the story of our nation's past that leads us to today.  And who writes history?  Who decides what stories live and which are lost?  Those in power, of course.

Power is at the heart of Ragtime.  It is the thing against which Emma Goldman is fighting.  It is the thing of which Younger Brother becomes acutely aware.  Power is at issue with the factory strike in Massachusetts, with the sexualizing of Evelyn Nesbit, with the special treatment of Harry K. Thaw, and of course it is the central concern in the narrative of Coalhouse Walker Jr, a man demanding justice from a society that believes itself just but which falls far short.  The system naturally protect Willy Conklin from any repercussions of his behavior, and it naturally vilifies Walker’s attempts to achieve justice.  When all normal channels are denied to him, Walker assumes the role of a revolutionary.  Revolutionaries are of course a sub-theme in Ragtime, since they are an attempt of the powerless to attain power.  It is no coincidence that Father’s money comes from his selling of patriotic paraphernalia.  What is the American flag but the symbol of a revolution that succeeded and became the ruling power in its turn?  But of course power does not admit easily to the power of others.   After hearing of Walker’s first retaliation against the fire department, Father cannot approve: “Does he have anyone but himself to blame for Sarah’s death?  Anything but his damnable nigger pride?  Nothing under heaven can excuse the killing of men and the destruction of property in this manner?”  But Doctorow counters this sentiment with Younger Brother’s response: “I did not hear such a eulogy at Sarah’s funeral . . . I did not hear you say then that death and the destruction of property was inexcusable.”  That tension fuels our nation and the movement of Doctorow’s novel, even when the narrative feels most relaxed.

Mother, Father, and their family are at the center of Doctorow’s narrative, a comfortable white, upper middle class family who at one time in the beginning of the novel believe “that all their days would be warm and fair.”  They represent one whole sliver of American society, the group for whom “there were no Negroes” or immigrants.  But their lives collide with the rest of American society, and nothing remains the same.  By the end of the novel, Mother has married Tateh, an immigrant, and their family consists of her white little boy, his Latvian little girl, and Coalhouse and Sarah’s baby.  They are an entirely new American family, worlds apart from the family that begins the novel.  Importantly, all the characters in the family are entirely fictitious, but they are the truest portrait of American in the novel.  “True” things happen in the novel, but the truth itself lies in the fiction.  

Ragtime is funny and moving and thought-provoking.  It is imaginative and relevant and utterly compelling.  It is, in short, a fantastic novel, and I look forward to reading more by Doctorow.

 

Dog Soldiers and the Corruption of the American Soul

*Spoilers lie ahead like heroin dust in a junkie’s home.  Read on with caution.*

Dog Soldiers, by Robert Stone, is yet another fantastic novel, smart and engaging.  At the center of the story is a bag of three kilograms of heroin that John Converse, a war correspondent in Vietnam, has smuggled into San Francisco near the end of the war.  The smuggler, Ray Hicks, is an old friend of Converse’s in the Merchant Marines.  From the moment Hicks arrives in the States, a group of men know what he is carrying and are trying their level best to get it from him even as he tries to deliver the package to Marge, Converse’s wife, who is supposed to pay Hicks for his labors.  Hicks and Marge go on the lam in order to find a profitable way to offload the drugs, while Antheil, an “agent,” and his two thugs, Danskin and Smitty, pursue them.  Converse returns home, is seized by Antheil’s men, and is brought along as a bargaining chip in retrieving the heroin.  The novel culminates in the wilds of southeastern California in the home of Dieter Bechstein, an old friend of Hicks’s and an erstwhile cult leader who no longer has a following.

The theme behind all this action is corruption.  Everyone in the novel is corrupted.  Converse and Marge have become drug dealers.  Marge’s father deals in “news” items that are entirely fictitious.  Converse’s correspondences from Vietnam are designed to invoke feelings that are antithetical to those Converse actually felt.  Antheil is a federal agent who has gone rogue.  Danskin is a psychopath full of rage and destruction.  And of course, all the mistakes and errors surround a large stash of heroin, an easy enough symbol for corruption.  But the corruption with which Stone is concerned is not a moral corruption.  This is not a book that holds up drug use for scorn—Stone is absolutely neutral when discussing Marge’s habit.  While he is clearly critical of Converse, it is not his attempt to become a drug dealer that is disappointing.  The corruption that Stone has fixed his eye on is a spiritual corruption.

For a headnote to the novel, Stone chose this passage from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness:   

I’ve seen the devil of violence and the devil of greed and the devil of hot desire; but, by all the stars! these were strong, lusty, red-eyed devils that swayed and drove men—men, I tell you.  But as I stood on that hillside, I foresaw that in the blinding sunshine of that land, I would become acquainted with a flabby, pretending weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly.

It is hard to re-read this quote after finishing the novel and not see the hillside of the climax as the subject of the quote.  What is disgusting to Stone  is not the “strong, lusty, red-eyed devils” but the “flabby pretending weak-eyed devil.”  The characters in the novel are not fighting over anything of real substance, of meaning; they are fighting instead over heroin, or worse yet, the money that the heroin can be cashed in for.  What a sad motivator for all the violence and bloodshed.  The shame is not that so much blood has been spilt, but that so much blood has been spilt for something so meaningless.  Instead of searching for the dope, these characters should have been on a spiritual journey,

Drug use in the 1970s had a very different cultural meaning than drug use in the 1960s.  In the ‘60s, there was a feeling of experimentation and a belief that mind-altering drugs might give the user access to new levels of perception and understanding.  All such idealism was dead or at least twitching in the corner by the mid ‘70s.  Marge is stoned for most of the novel, but her reason for shooting up is always to dull the pain and panic.  She is always running away from something through her drugs, not searching for something meaningful.  But the real character to pay attention to where drugs are concerned is Dieter.  When Dieter originally setup his commune on the hill, everything was good:  “Innocence.  Energy.  I believed it so much that for a while it came true for me.  . . . Marvelous things happened to us.  We were levitating, we were delirious.”  He says that it all went south when he “succumbed to the American dream”:  “Then it occurred to me that if I applied the American style—which I didn’t really understand—if I pushed a little, speeded things up a little, we might break into something really cosmic. . . . So I thought, a little push, a little shove, a little something extra to shake it loose.  And I ended up as Doctor Dope.”  In his desire to get to the truly transcendental plain, Dieter turned to drugs, nothing new in the ‘60s.  The outcome, however, was not the cosmic shift he hoped for, but the destruction of the commune and everyone in it.  Drugs prove to be a detour away from self-discovery, not a path towards it, and Dieter loses everything that is important.  That, for Stone, is the true problem with heroin and other drugs.

Dieter’s final moments are used up trying to convince Hicks to throw the dope away, to convince him that dope is a distraction.  Instead, Hicks is obsessed with the heroin, even though we never see him use it.  He’s certainly an addict, but not to the drug in his veins.  Something else in him cares so deeply about the heroin that he returns to fetch it at the end instead of escaping while he can with Converse and Marge.  Nor is it a convincing argument to say that he cares about the money that it will fetch since we never see Hicks think about money at all.  It’s almost as if he wants the drugs as a thing unto itself, which is exactly what Hicks thinks to himself while in his delirious state at the end of the novel: “without the pack, things would be much easier.  He recalled that the pack was what he wanted so he would have to carry it.  Serious people existed in order to want things, and to carry them.”  While Hicks reads philosophy and dabbles in Eastern religions, whatever self examination Hicks once engaged in is long gone.  He has defined himself as a type of samurai, a serious survivor with an honorable code, but the hollowness of that image is exposed in his definition of “serious people.”  That is the very picture of spiritual dryness, as dry as the desert through which Hicks finally meets his death.

It is a solid novel with fantastic characters and some wonderful scenes.  The scenes with Danskin and Smitty are really gripping, especially once they are traveling with Converse.  I was surprised by the depth of these characters, especially given how unpleasant they were.  In fact, it seems to me that Stone much prefers the characters who are thoroughly rotten to those who come closest to being “good.”  Hicks and Marge, while interesting in their way, especially before they meet, are rather flat characters. 

For being a quick read, Dog Soldiers is also a meaty book with as much to think about as you care to find.  It can be a simple chase with drugs and guns, or it can be an exploration of spiritual dryness in America in the 1970s.  I’m sure there is still more to pull from the novel, so don’t hesitate to add your thoughts below!

Gravity's Rainbow's Irresistable Pull

I never expected Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow to be an easy read, but I greatly underestimated exactly how challenging it would be.  Not since William Gaddis’s The Recognitions have I had to move so slowly and consult my notes so often just to keep track of who was who and what was happening.  At no point could I read on autopilot, letting my mind take a brief sojourn to consider tasks still to be done with any hope of knowing where I was when I returned at the end of the paragraph. 

To give you a sense of how demanding the novel is, I will show you two pictures.  Because I started this reading list reading library books, I took to taking notes on notecards instead of writing on the pages themselves.  I use 4x6 notecards to keep track of any named character as well as pivotal plot points or neat passages that I think I might want to refer back to down the line.  For a typical novel, I will fill in one or two notecards, both sides.  Here, for example, are my notes for Lord of the Flies:

Two notecards, complete with characters, quotes, and even a few sketches.  For The Recognitions, I used eight notecards to keep track of everyone, everything, and every theme.  Here’s a picture of my notecards from Gravity’s Rainbow:

Yeah, that’s eighteen notecards, and that’s not counting the two notecards I created to brainstorm about recurring themes and issues or the character chart I created to keep track of how various characters were related to each other.  That’s a huge number of characters, story arcs, plot points, and thematic concerns to keep sorted while reading the 776 pages of this phenomenal 1973 novel .

The novel is about . . . wow, that in and of itself is a challenging sentence to finish.  How about this: At the heart of the novel is the V2 bomb, built by the Germans and used repeatedly to strike London.  The bombs traveled faster than the speed of sound, so their victims didn’t hear them approaching until after they already struck.  The whole of the novel orbits around these rockets, their creation, their workings, the recovery of their parts, the mathematics and physics that govern their flight.  One of Pynchon’s abilities is to see the connections between disparate things, and in his discussions of these rockets he pulls together an incredible number of historical and cultural strands.  Gravity’s Rainbow pulls into the gravity of its own narration chemistry, the science of polymers and plastics, behavioral psychology, Pavlovian concepts of responses to stimuli, colonialism, the politics of race, the limits of state power, the history of the Hereros from Africa, psychological warfare, chess, the poet Rilke, the science of parabolas, mysticism and the readings of signs and omens, sadomasochism, submission and dominance, transvestitism, the meeting of opposites, international lighbulb cartels, the ethics of experimentation, the afterlife, conspiracies, paranoia, and the distance between the preterite and God’s chosen elite.  The sheer scope of Pynchon’s interests in this novel is mind-boggling, and in the hands of anyone less skilled or less intelligent, the novel would be little more than a gigantic mess.  But Pynchon is always in control of his material, and the poetry of both his thought and language are stunning.

It is not in the least surprising that Pynchon has paranoiacs at the center of his novels, because what is paranoia but the ability to see patterns and connections in the behaviors of the surrounding physical world?  Pynchon’s great big brain is able to assimilate all these different areas of life and draw out their connections to one another (noting how a haircut is merely a type of wavelength, for example!), so it is no wonder that his characters would be able to do the same.  As he notes in one of his discussions about Oneirine, a synthetic drug invented by the always-behind-the-scenes Dr. Jamf, “About the paranoia often noted under the drug, there is nothing remarkable.  Like other sorts of paranoia, it is nothing less than the onset, the leading edge, of the discovery that everything is connected, everything in the Creation.”

The narrative style of Gravity’s Rainbow itself underscores this notion that everything in the novel is connected.  The narrator often will jump from one character to another, or from one time to another, in mid-sentence, riding a subordinate clause into a whole new focus for the paragraph and section.  This narrative slipperiness is one of the things that make the book so challenging.  If you start to tune out in the middle of a long sentence you can easily miss the point of transition and find yourself in unfamiliar waters. 

In fact, the connections between all these different topics are themselves the actual focus of the novel.  Just as he did in The Crying of Lot 49, Pynchon creates a gripping narrative of a paranoid's search for meaning, leading his reader on with tantalizing clues and tasty conspiracies that point to some great mystery that we want solved as much as the protagonist does.  But as we learn, that search and the insight we gain along the way is the true focus of the narrative.  Pynchon gives us something of an answer for the larger mysteries when we learn about the SG-1’s one and only flight and its special cargo, but there are still more questions than answers.  And Slothrop’s presence in the final section could be a great disappointment if you are unwilling to shift your focus to the implications of his fate.

Hovering over my eighteen notecards, I feel like Slothrop searching for the imipolex payload or Enzian sifting through the rubble for evidence of the 00000 rocket.  There are so many delicious connections to make and so many depths to plumb.  It is a remarkable journey to read, and as a reader it is a remarkable journey to go on.  Be a good traveler and don’t rush down the road just because it is long.  Take your time and absorb all you can.  The more time you spend with this novel, the more rewarding it is.