![]() ![]() ![]() On the way, he is met by an almost endless stream of European royalty, coming to him hat in hand to try to sell off their various treasures in order to cash in on their inherited wealth before the onset of the coming conflagration. Morgan travels across Europe in the days just prior to World War I. In one telling scene, late in the text, famous financier and industrialist J. The end of the aristocracy is clearly foretold by the events of Ragtime. It also includes within its narrative some of the most important historical events of this period, such as a complex of images surrounding the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand (including the assassination itself), the event that triggered World War I, a world-changing war that destroyed the Russian and Austrio-Hungarian empires, thus virtually sweeping the traditional aristocracy from power in Europe. On the surface, Ragtime is, first and foremost, an historical novel that vividly evokes the first two decades or so of the twentieth century, one of the most crucial periods in all of American history. Ragtime, in many ways, seems like a very simple novel, partly because of the simple, declarative sentences of which it is mostly constructed. Indeed, one of the central projects of Ragtime is to track the beginnings of the historical developments that would ultimately make such historical novels impossible. The first decades of the twentieth century were indeed a time of radical transformation in American society, and Ragtime tracks this transformation quite effectively, even if it necessarily lacks the history-driven narrative drive of the novels of Balzac and the other great novels praised by Georg Lukács in his monumental study of the historical novel. “Its official subject,” Fredric Jameson points out, “is the transition from a pre-World War I radical and working-class politics (the great strikes) to the technological invention and new commodity production of the 1920s” ( Postmodernism 22). As a whole, the novel can be read as an allegorization of the large and powerful forces that transformed America in the early decades of the twentieth century from a mostly rural provincial backwater to the richest, most powerful, and most industrialized nation on earth. Most of the action related in Ragtime takes place between 1906 and the beginning of World War I in 1914, though the novel looks back on events as early as 1902 and forward to events at the beginning of the 1920s. Doctorow constructs a complex multi-layered historical allegory that paradoxically makes the book both a historical novel very much of the kind once praised by Georg Lukács in relation to bourgeois literature of the early nineteenth century and a demonstration of the impossibility of such historical novels in the postmodern era. ![]()
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