Doctorow, Kushner and History
History in E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime (1975) and Tony Kushner's Angels in America (1991)
Baring striking similarities in
their approach to historicism, Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow and Angels
in America by Tony Kushner are both underpinned by magnetic forces of
American progress. Doctorow depicts early 20th-century capitalist expansion as
an ‘upward’ movement while Kushner envisions a ‘downward’ pull toward
apocalypse as the millennium approaches. In both cases, characters are drawn
towards the earth’s magnetic poles as a reflection of the historical forces
shaping their worlds. Kushner and Doctorow warn against the tendency to impose
linear narratives onto history, a critique shared by both authors, informed by
their Jewish heritage. In Kushner’s words, we must remember that throughout
history ‘the future [has] remained indeterminate.’[1]
Doctorow, in an
interview with Paul Levine, remarked that history ‘belongs more to the
novelists and the poets than it does to the social scientists’ because ‘at
least we admit that we lie.’[2]
This skepticism aligns with centuries of philosophical thought critiquing the historicist
impulse to retroactively ascribe ‘inexorable and immutable law[s] of destiny’
to the past.[3] We
write history as if it anticipates the present. In Angels in America,
ancestral history overshadows personal identity. Rabbi Isidor Chemelwitz opens
the play by eulogising Sarah Ironson as ‘not a person but a whole kind of
person, the ones who crossed the ocean,’ reducing her to a symbol of cultural
continuity.[4] Similarly,
Prior Walter is defined by his lineage, his name itself a reminder of ‘the
Walter before this one’ (p. 53). Chosen as the Angel’s prophet for his
‘long-descended’ ancestry, Prior’s family history is transformed from a chain
of random events into a predestined historical narrative (p. 161). By framing
Prior’s ancestry as a divine mandate, Kushner critiques the value we place on
ancestral history, ignoring the past’s inherent chaos and complexity. ‘It’s
old. Very old. Which in some circles equals impressive,’ Louis Ironson jokes
about the Bayeux Tapestry (p. 54).
Kushner’s Jewish
upbringing shaped his understanding of the human tendency to impose linear
narratives on the past. As scholar Ken Neilsen observes, Kushner grew up in a
community where ‘connections between the ancient suffering of the Jewish people
and contemporary struggles’ were regularly drawn.[5]
This heritage, shared with Doctorow, gives both authors a unique perspective on
the malleability of historical narratives. Doctorow notes, ‘the person who
represented what happened fifty or a hundred years ago has a chance to begin to
say things about us now.’[6]
This interplay between past and present is felt by the Jewish characters of the
texts, with Louis describing himself as ‘connected to these forces [...] of constant
historical progress,’ as he sees history as a grand motion towards perfection (Angels,
p. 25). Ragtime’s Tateh is similarly aware of the historical forces
around him, as he is able to ‘point his life along the lines of flow of
American energy’ by adopting a capitalist mindset.[7]
Scholars have taken issue with Doctorow’s depiction of the socialist abandoning
his principles and being rewarded for it, but I believe Walter Benjamin’s Theses
on the Philosophy of History provide some explanation.[8]
Benjamin writes that ‘nothing has corrupted the German working class so much as
the notion that it was moving with the current.’[9]
Doctorow may therefore be warning his readers not to believe America’s
narrative of unstoppable capitalist expansion, as it could discourage workers
from unionizing.
Both authors' familiarity with the Jewish tradition of linking the
present to a religious past enables them to more keenly recognise the
anticipatory ‘forces’ we apply to history and reconfigure them in these
portraits of 20th Century America.
Geographical movement
becomes a metaphor for historical progress in both works. In Angels in
America, progress is tied to migration. To ‘Cease to Progress,’ ‘YOU
MUST STOP MOVING’ the Angel tells Prior, whose ancestry can be traced
back to various events in the history of global migration, such as the
Mayflower (p. 172, 53). The Angel’s ‘Anti-Migratory Epistle’ implies that geographical
movement is the driving force behind American progress (p. 262). Kushner’s
depiction of America as a ‘rootless’ nation mirrors Doctorow’s view that it is
yet to ‘fix, narrow or focus into a real, true national identity,’ allowing
Americans to ‘have the illusion about ourselves that we are still in the
process of becoming’ (Angels, p. 18).[10]
The Angel sees America, like Ragtime’s Freud, as ‘a gigantic mistake’ brought
about by global migration, still in the process of settling (Ragtime, p.
33). Kushner thereby warns his audience against taking a fatalistic view of history:
the Angel sees the past as one long destructive narrative, like the Klee
painting in Walter Benjamin’s Theses which was her inspiration.[11]
She turns toward the past, viewing what ‘we perceive as a chain of events’ as
‘one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage.’[12]
Her error is in seeing history as a chain of geographical migrations that can
only end in apocalypse, when Kushner knows the future to be indeterminate.
In Ragtime, the
historical narrative of American progress is embodied by the disintegration of
a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant family into a diverse collective of ‘children
who were pals, white black, fat thin, rich poor, all kinds,’ a microcosm of
mid-20th-century America (p. 269-70). Capitalism’s relentless drive forms a
constant undercurrent in the novel, physically guiding its character’s
narratives. In the words of Al Alvarez, ‘history has everyone by the throat.’[13]
Emma Goldman’s arc suggests a deterministic view of history, as she tells Evelyn
Nesbit, ‘Your life was destined to interact with my own’ (p. 49). This creates
a fated sense unreality where Goldman feels the presence of her future author, in
contrast to Kushner’s portrayal of generational disconnect: Louis Ironson
recalls his grandmother seeing Emma Goldman speak but remembering only her hat
(Angels, p. 19). The constructed nature of history is revealed when
Doctorow brings to life real historical figures. Where Kushner writes about real
people, he does so to reflect the blurring of past and present endemic in
historicism. As Nielsen observes, ‘the play draws clear parallels, through the
historical characters of Roy Cohn and Ethel Rosenberg, between Reagan’s America
and its AIDS crisis.’[14]
I believe the play’s comparison of the 1980s with the 1950s is the impetus
behind Kushner’s decision to revive Ethel Rosenberg as a ghost. By viewing the past
through the eyes of the present, we de-chronologise the linear narrative of
history.
The ‘upward’ undercurrent
of capitalist growth in Ragtime can be read to pull magnetically from
south to north within the novel’s universe, a physical representation of the forces
we ascribe to history. Doctorow positions the family’s home in New Rochelle near
Broadview Avenue’s intersection with North Street which runs Northwards from
Main Street, the highway connecting them to the rest of New York (p. 3, 77). We
can therefore assume that Harry Houdini and Coalhouse Walker both enter the family’s
lives via North Street, having travelled towards them in a Northwards
direction. Roads and vehicles are representations of American progress for both
Kushner and Doctorow, as Belize tells Louis, the ‘sounds of traffic,
whistles, alarms, people [...] determinedly moving ahead’ make up ‘the
sound of energy, the sound of time’ (Angels, p. 176). The ‘Tracks!
Tracks!’ of American infrastructure which symbolise technological advancement in Ragtime move northward, as Doctorow takes the example of the Joralemon
Street Tunnel which was constructed ‘from Brooklyn to the Battery’ (p. 80). The
northward magnetism of this progress calls Father to the Arctic, where he feels the winds
strengthen with a ‘force that gripped you by the neck and faced you into it’
(p. 66). But this force of
progress is not celebrated. As Doctorow tells Levine, he feels ‘we’ve done
everything wrong’ making America, and that ‘human life is a mistake.’[15]
As such, when the explorers reach the earth’s northernmost point, they find the
pursuit of glory has been futile. They are unable to find the exact location of
the pole, and ‘because of the light the faces are indistinguishable’ in the
photographs (pp. 67-8). In Ragtime, therefore, Doctorow constructs a
magnetic compulsion of American progress but shows that this perceived
historical force is illusory.
While Ragtime features
an upward-pulling force of historical progress in the early 20th
Century, Angels in America features a downwards-pulling magnetism as its
characters look ahead to the millennium. It is not only the Angel who anticipates
apocalypse: the homeless woman Hannah Pitt encounters also says that ‘in the
new century I think we will all be insane’ (p. 111), echoing Harper’s
valium-induced prediction that ‘the world’s coming to an end’ (p. 28). Louis recognises
the downward force of history, remarking that ‘the power that was once so
carefully preserved at the top of the pyramid [...] seems drawn inexorably
downward and outward in spite of the best efforts of the right to stop this’
(pp. 93-4). On his deathbed, Roy Cohn, as a symbol of this political right,
says ‘I have searched all my life for absolute bottom, and I found it, believe
me’ (p. 210). The downward force of history felt by characters like Harper is
implied to originate in ‘holes in the ozone layer. Over Antarctica’ so this
magnetic pull towards apocalypse draws from the earth’s southernmost point (p.
28). Like Father, Harper is pulled by the downwards forces she sees in history
towards the magnetic pole: she tells Mr. Lies ‘I want to see the hole in the
ozone’ (p. 18). When she arrives at the ‘bottommost part of the world’ in a
hallucination, she finds the desolate environment a personal ‘heaven,’ a place
for her to restart her life (p. 106, 145). Whilst in Father’s hostile Arctic,
‘the air itself seemed to have changed its physical nature, being now
unassimilable crystals in one’s lungs’ (p. 66), Harper delights in the ‘ice
crystals in her lungs, wonderful and sharp’ (p. 105). Like Father’s Arctic voyage, Harper’s
Antarctic hallucination offers no resolution, dissolving back into the harsh
reality of New York City (p. 145). Doctorow and Kushner therefore stress
that the magnetic forces we project onto history are illusory and cannot be
used to predict the future, whether they are optimistic, as in Doctorow’s case,
or pessimistic, as in Kushner’s.
In Walter Benjamin’s
words, history is filled only by ‘the presence of the now,’ and the application
of any broad narrative to this history causes problems.[16]
It can create catastrophists, like Kushner’s Angel, or make radicals complacent,
like Doctorow’s Tateh. Both authors underscore that the narratives we craft
about the past shape our approach to the future, whilst cautioning against
assigning these narratives undue authority. They remind us that the patterns we project onto history are
constructs of hindsight, with the characters of Father and Harper embodying
this tension, drawn toward poles of imagined destiny but finding neither
resolution nor fulfilment. We are called to remember that history, like
the future, remains indeterminate.
References
[1] Tony Kushner, ‘Introduction’, in Angels in America (Theatre Communications Group, 2013), p. xi.
[2] Paul Levine, ‘The Writer as Independent Witness’, in E. L. Doctorow, Essays and Conversations, ed. by Richard Trenner (Ontario Review Press, 1983), pp. 57-71 (p. 67).
[4] Tony Kushner, Angels in America (Theatre Communications Group, 2013), p. 10. All further references are to this edition.
[5] Ken Nielsen, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (Bloomsbury, 2012), p. 14.
[6] Levine, p. 59.
[7] E. L. Doctorow, Ragtime (Penguin, 2006), p. 111. All further references are to this edition.
[8] John McGowan, ‘Ways of Worldmaking: Hannah Arendt and E. L. Doctorow Respond to Modernity’, College Literature, 38.1 (2011), 150-175 (p. 168).
[9] Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminated, trans. by Harry Zohn (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), pp. 253-64 (p. 258).
[10] Levine, p. 58.
[11] Nielsen, p. 14.
[12] Benjamin, p. 257.
[13] Al Alvarez, ‘Introduction’, in Ragtime (Penguin, 2006), p. x.
[14] Nielsen, p. 16.
[15] Levine, p. 57.
[16] Benjamin, p. 261.
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