I really enjoyed the discussion we had in class today, and while I'm kind of afraid to delve into our nice, long, packet of reading on the subject just yet, I'm sure I'll enjoy that, too. Basically, the main question was, was I irked/bugged/offended by how Doctorow essentially steals Coalhouse Walker from Heinrich von Kleist's story? No, I'm really not.
For one thing, I don't think "steals" is exactly the right word. Stealing implies plagiarism, and this definitely doesn't seem like plagiarism to me. Doctorow puts Coalhouse in a completely different context. In Kleist's narrative, it seems to be just a struggle of class: the rich man abusing the poor man, and so on and so forth. In Ragtime, however, Doctorow kind of reverses that. Coalhouse is an upstanding citizen, he's a musician in Harlem, a pretty worldly guy, while Fire Chief Conklin is widely accepted as a thug. Coalhouse is clearly Conklin's superior in all aspects, except for one, and that is race. Conklin is angry because a black man is his superior, so he destroys Coalhouse's car on the spot. In the Kleist story, the horses are "allowed to deteriorate into a woeful state." Not that I don't love horses and that's not a terrible thing, it just doesn't have the same kind of weight (and maybe I say that because I'm a horse person and I know horses are unbelievably temperamental and can deteriorate from just about anything). In any case, it's obvious that there are very clear differences between the Doctorow version and the Kleist version of the story, and I definitely would not classify it as plagiarism.
On another note, I ask the question, how is what Doctorow does with Coalhouse any different than what he does with his other characters? Doctorow draws from the pool of historical fact quite frequently and spins it to make it his own, so why can't he draw from the pool of literature and spin it to make it his own? If you're going to get mad at Doctorow for plagiarizing Kleist, then you have to get mad at him for, I don't know, screwing with the historical record. The point was raised that people get angry with Doctorow for twisting historical fact because it changes perspectives on the people that actually existed. But is that negative? I don't really think so.
Doctorow picks characters, I think, anyway, that he can flesh out and make his own because nobody really knows the other side of them. Take Harry Houdini, for example. Everyone knows he was an escape artist, but no one really knows what his personal life was like unless they're willing to do research and read the entire Wikipedia article. Doctorow is capable of taking these historical figures and creating this believable, yet fictional scenes because nobody really knows what was actually going on inside their heads, or behind the scenes at a Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish party, or 12 stories up in a straight jacket. Doctorow fleshes them out, he gives previously "dead" historical figures new life and emotions, he changes our perspectives on them, but not necessarily in a bad way. None of his caricatures are particularly malicious, he just makes them more believable as people.
3 comments:
Just before reading this post, I came across something by the (postmodernist) filmmaker Jim Jarmusch that speaks to your points about Doctorow's creative and original "stealing" of von Kleist's fictional material: "Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with your inspiration or fuels your imagination. . . . Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality in non-existent." And then Jarmusch quotes (steals from?) the French filmmaker Godard: "It's not where you take things from--it's where you take them to."
This pomo view of "originality" versus "authenticity" I think totally applies to your affirmation of Doctorow's use of materials from the "pools" of fiction and history. Coalhouse is *authentic* even if he's not "original."
I like the idea of Doctorow being able to draw from the pools of history and literature. Both are resources at his disposal. I was thinking about how what he does with Coalhouse is similar to some of the masterpiece recreations that Ms. Evans showed us in art (in particular the combination of multiple famous paintings). Doctorow is taking elements from all over and making them into his own unified whole. What Doctorow does is something that happens in all art forms.
The quote Mr. Mitchell gave has a nice ring to it "It's not where you take things from--it's where you take them to."
I'm going to half-agree with you here. When it comes to Coalhouse, I'm actually completely okay with Doctorow borrowing a character from another piece of literature—in fact, I sort of like it just a little bit, which is definitely saying something because I have not admitted to liking many (any?) other aspects of this book. I guess what I like is the idea of fiction being a separate world that goes on independently of what we real-world readers get to know of it. I think you're well familiar with my Salinger fancies so I'll go ahead and use him as an analogy—Salinger has a handful of characters who appear repeatedly in a bunch of his stories, and I like it because a lot of their lives are alluded to but not outright narrated, so it makes me feel like their lives aren't bound by the covers of just one book, but rather that they're constantly living in some sort of parallel world that I sometimes am lucky enough to catch a glimpse of.
So, while Doctorow's use of a different author's fictional character isn't exactly the same situation, I still like it because it feeds into that same kind of enjoyment for me. I feel like Coalhouse Walker's story is one that's ongoing in a fictional world separate from ours, and when he appears in novels it's like looking at a snapshot of his life through a little window or something. At any rate, I willingly admit that I did in fact like this one aspect of Ragtime. The reason I said at the beginning of this comment that I was only going to "half-agree" with you, however, is that I don't consider Doctorow's use of Coalhouse quite the same as his use of historical figures, the latter being something I very strongly disliked. However, this comment is long enough as it is, so I think I'll just stop here for the time being and we can get into my dislikes some other time if you're in the mood for an argument.
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