history as a narrative?
In "False Documents," E. L. Doctorow says history is like a narrative. At first glance, I probably would have raised my eyebrows at this interesting take and wondered if Doctorow had ever sat through one of those year-long history lectures that most definitely did not sound like a narrative. First of all, history is fact. It's not the story of one person like you'd expect from a narrative, but an objective bird's-eye view of countless many interconnected lives and events. There's fact in history that doesn't come from a bias-influenced individual point of view like narratives and stories do. History is truth.... right?
Okay, maybe not. Most definitely not. After Ragtime and many semesters of amazing Uni history teachers, it's a recurring theme that history is an ever-changing story -- multiple stories, in fact -- that is alive because the sources from which we know it are alive. The history we learn and know is not some indisputable chronology from an all-seeing eye. It is a narrative, in a way; history is a patchwork quilt of layers upon layers of different stories. Interwoven memories and lives create the past as we know it. How else, aside from wild guesswork drawn from dusty artifacts of days long gone, can we create a rendition of that reality? I'm a little dramatic right now, but I understand why Doctorow would say history is a narrative.
We can see what Doctorow means by his idea of the story-like nature of history in Ragtime. Think of those hidden pockets of time that he uses to set up whatever implausible, yet actually possible series of events he wants. It's still a valid point that we can't really disprove that Emma Goldman did this or Harry Houdini did that because we were not there, and as Doctorow reminds us, neither were the eyes of anyone else that would otherwise refute those events in our history textbooks (I feel like I'm getting into crazy hypothetical, Schrodinger's cat territory now, but let me have some fun...). Ragtime is Doctorow's narrative of history, it's the narrative of the characters he nurtured and expanded, some of them based on real figures, but all of them fabricated to some extent. Yet at the same time, we as people on our laptops in 2022 can't say for sure that certain things never happened. Doctorow is testing those waters -- how far can he push the fluidity of history and still make his story sellable? Ragtime being a written story allows Doctorow to experiment with these fanatical ideas that other media would not. I mean obviously, Ragtime is a fictional, but it uses the artistic license that fictional novels allow to get crazy and make a point about how we can never be too sure about what really happened.
Your blog post was an entertaining read and I agree with a lot of what you’re saying. At first with Doctorow and this class I was a bit skeptical, because history and narrative fiction are talked about as completely separate things. However, as I began to think about it more, even history is made up of stories, and stories are made up of history, and it begins to be easy to see how the line gets blurred. The truth is that a completely objective perfect history can’t exist, so I guess why not play around. Great job!
ReplyDeleteI definitely shared the same sentiments as you when we started this semester. During the first notebook prompt, I very clearly stated that history and fiction were separate. Now, after reading ragtime and the course reader, my opinion has changed. I'm not quite as convinced as you though. I still think there are some historical subjects that have been so extensively researched and debated that any serious recent document is going to be mostly "factual". But I definitely recognize the potential for some amount of personal narrative, although I think such personal narrative is actually super important. After all, it is in part due to that very personal narrative that science has progressed as much as it has.
ReplyDeleteI definitely agree with how you describe history as living and changing, because its very sources are living and changing. I think Ragtime forces us to rethink both history and fiction, not only as things we study, but as representations of our own lives. After all, we may do something historical, but in 100 years, what happens in the pockets between those historical moments will be about as provable as any fiction one might make up. I guess I'm saying... enjoy the moment?
ReplyDeleteHi Tracy, I really enjoyed reading your post. This idea took me a while to wrap my head around. Throughout our educations we are taught that history is simply fact, and there isn't a whole lot of freedom we have with speculating about events in the past. However, given the same hard facts that professional historians, our guess as to what the narrative that interlinks artifacts is just as valid as theirs. There are so many events that could have happened that are just as disprovable as what historians have to say. The fact that there is this much fluidity, like you say, in history is both such a scary, but also freeing idea.
ReplyDeleteHi, great post! I think you did a great job of taking the more "bigger question" approach rather than talking about the specific contents of the novel. It was a super fun and interesting post to read. And I do think that reading ragtime has changed my perspective on that line between history being fact vs a story.
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