Illusions of stability in change or change in stability heighten the novel’s use of the theme, as Doctorow’s emphasis on Harry Houdini attests. Yet even with these thumping regular octaves, the illusion ragtime music creates is of overwhelming change: “This was a most robust composition, a vigorous music that roused the senses and never stood still a moment” (Doctorow 183). Doctorow acknowledges this dual aspect when Coalhouse Walker plays ragtime for the family: “The pianist sat stiffly at the keyboard, his long dark hands with their pink nails seemingly with no effort producing the clusters of syncopating chords and the thumping octaves” (183). The basis for ragtime music is the tension between a restrained, ordered rhythm played by the left hand and free-flowing syncopation by the right (Blesh and Janis 7). The nature of leisure altered as well: the magic lantern turned into the motion picture musical tastes turned toward ragtime music.ĭoctorow uses ragtime music as a metaphor for the struggle between stability and change. Women, likewise, believed in and worked for positive change. Political leaders resisted the unions, but most Americans were confident that humankind was moving toward perfection. The growth of labor unions, begun in the late nineteenth century, continued. Both the assembly line and the automobile greatly affected the course of American history. Some languished in a poverty they did not expect to find others found jobs in sweatshops still others manned posts in Henry Ford’s assembly line. Most settled in the cities as America became an urban rather than a rural nation. The population of America rose significantly during the period, influenced greatly by the flood of immigrants who washed over Ellis Island onto America’s shore. The time the book covers, roughly 1900-1917, the Ragtime Era, was a time of great social, political, scientific, and industrial change in America, reflected as well in the age’s other name-the Progressive Era.
Both the content and the form of Ragtime support this theme. Generally, the characters who recognize the nature of the conflict fare much better than those who resist change. 1 Like Joplin’s caution for restraint in the face of an impulse for speed, most of the characters and events reflect the dialectical struggle between time’s inexorable force toward change and the human desire for stability. It is never right to play Ragtime fast.” This epigraph suggests the conflict that seems to hold together Doctorow’s odd mixture of fictional and historical characters and events: the struggle between change and stability.
Doctorow’s Ragtime is, appropriately, a quotation from Scott Joplin: “Do not play this piece fast.
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