Interconnectedness of Epic Proportions

We've encountered a lot of different storylines in Ragtime so far, but all of these storylines intertwine to an extent that I don't think I've ever seen in a novel before. It's not just that one storyline connects to the next, which connects to the next, and so on in a big chain; each storyline relates to several others in a complex web of interconnectedness.

At the beginning, the three main storylines are that of the Family, that of Harry Houdini, and that of the whole White-Nesbit-Thaw affair. Each of these three connects to both of the others - Houdini's car crashes in front of the Family's house and he chitchats with them while he's waiting on repairs, Houdini meets Harry K. Thaw at the Tombs in a particularly disturbing scene, and Mother's Younger Brother meets Evelyn Nesbit inside Emma Goldman's room in an even more disturbing scene.

There are other storylines, of course. Nesbit and Goldman met in the first place through Tateh and his daughter, who, along with Nesbit, made an appearance during Sigmund Freud's parade through New York. Tateh, Mameh, and their daughter, right after they were introduced in the story and well before Nesbit came into the picture, took a train to Madison Avenue and looked at a row of mansions that outraged the socialist in Tateh and were designed by none other than Stanford White. After learning of Nesbit's identity, Tateh took his daughter and left New York, and his travels just happened to take him through New Rochelle, where he just happened to be passed by by Mother and her son, the latter of which shared a long gaze with Tateh's daughter. After that, they passed through Bridgeport, which Doctorow specifically identified as the burial place of Tom Thumb, whose widow, of course, had spoken to Harry Houdini.

Houdini, meanwhile, was about to embark on a trip to Europe to do some soul-searching. At about this time, he felt particularly outdone by Robert Peary, who had just discovered the North Pole (well, maybe...) - with Father aboard his expedition. While in Europe, he purchased a Voisin biplane and learned to fly it, leading to the appearance of one final historical figure in the first part of the book - the now-iconic Austro-Hungarian archduke, Franz Ferdinand, whose entry into the story harkens back to Houdini's original meeting with the Family and the little boy's last words to him: "Warn the Duke."

The Incompleteness of Fiction

For all of its incomprehensibility, the reading from Postmodernist Fiction by Brain McHale did contain one passage that really made me think. It begins with an excerpt from Gilbert Sorrentino's Mulligan Stew:

It is a rather odd house, to say the least. There is the living room and the den, but we have not been able to find any other rooms. It seems as if there are other rooms, but when we approach them, they are - I don't quite know how to put this - they are simply not there! There is no kitchen, no porch, no bedrooms, no bath. At the side of the living room, a staircase leads "nowhere." Oh, I don't mean to say that it disappears into empty space, it simply leads to a kind of . . . haziness, in which one knows there is supposed to be a hallway and bedroom doors: but there is absolutely nothing.

McHale then offers his own commentary:

All houses in fiction are like this, partly specified, partly left vague. Normally neither the reader nor the character who shares the same world with such a house notices this vagueness; Sorrentino's characters, however, are aware of being inside a fiction, and so find this house anomalous, with its permanent gaps where a real-world house would be ontologically determinate.

It's certainly an interesting observation. Authors of fiction, after all, must create entirely new realities in for which their characters to live, and individual aspects of these worlds need only be defined when it is convenient for the authors to define them. All other characteristics of the worlds remain ambiguous. The main character of a work of fiction, for example, might have a nuclear laboratory in his basement. Until the author confirms or denies this fact, either directly or through implication (i.e., "the basement of the house was entirely unfinished and completely empty, save for a single storage cabinet near the foot of the stairs"), it is impossible to know whether or not such a fact is true. It is then up to each individual reader to decide things like this for themselves. Although it would be unorthodox for a reader to spontaneously decide that there was a nuclear laboratory in the main character's basement, readers are likely to disagree on more minor details, such as what color the character's bedroom walls were painted, or whether or not the town library that the character often visited was within walking distance of his house. Each reader effectively draws a mental map of the world in which the story takes place, often having to tweak various details as they are revealed by the author.

So What are "History" and "Fiction," Anyway?

The terms "history" and "fiction" seem almost antonymous. The former refers to things that have happened, and the latter refers to things that have not; that someone made up. So how can these two ideas possibly combine to form such a thing as "historical fiction"? The way I see it, they can do so in one of three main ways:

1. Historical Setting, Fictional Plot:
Many historical fiction novels are just like any other works of fiction in that they tell of events that simply never happened. They do, however, place these fictional tales in a historical setting, making it so that they could plausibly have happened at some point in the past. The first book that pops into my head when I think of historical fiction is Rover, a book that I read several years ago. This novel tells the story of a Scandinavian girl (whose name I cannot remember) and her dog (whose name you can probably guess) through a Viking attack on their village that culminates in the girl being taken into slavery. The book then follows her subsequent life as a Viking slave. Now, it is certainly true that the Vikings attacked villages and took slaves, but the particular girl whose tale is told by Rover never existed. Her story, however, is typical of those of the thousands of girls taken as Viking slaves.

2. Historical Plot, Fictional Details:
Some works of historical fiction actually do tell of an actual event that happened in history. Take Ragtime, for instance. There was a person named Stanford White who was murdered by Harry K. Thaw of Pittsburgh during a performance of "I Could Love a Million Girls." The details of the murder and subsequent criminal case, however, do not match exactly those related by E.L. Doctorow in Ragtime. Ragtime, then, tells of a historical event with the help of fictional details, this blurring the line between history as fiction.

3. Historical Plot, Fictional Context:
This last one is a little hard to generalise. It is probably best exemplified by Libra, which tells the story of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, a very well-known historical event, but which makes up an explanation as to why it happened that greatly differs from the official story. The main plot of the book is mostly non-fictional, but the set-up and behind-the-scenes action are definitely fictional.