The Flow of American Energy

"Thus did the artist point his life along the lines of the flow of American energy"-this sentence the seam that links two narratives in tE.L. Doctorow's Ragtime: the story of Tateh's disillusioned flight from the Lawrence, Massachusetts textile strike of 1912 and his subsequent decision to sell "movie books" through a novelty company AND the story of Henry Ford's development of the assembly line, where the "men who built the products would be themselves interchangeable parts." "From this moment, perhaps, Tateh began to perceive of his life as separate from the fate of the working class." That Tateh, an ardent socialist at the beginning of the novel, adopts out of self-interest the tactics of mass production pioneered by Ford may be a tragedy. It's hard to say. For one thing, there's clearly no role for an artist in Lawrence. Tateh is told by the IWW organizers that his posters are too beautiful; they need to be simpler to provoke anger. So while it's tempting to read Tateh's "selling out" as an ironic capitulation to necessity, Doctorow's market economy turns out to be more open to aesthetic value than his worker's councils are. Representing Ford as the figure of the artist may not, finally, be ironic at all.

This point is complicated, however, by the role cars, the product of Ford's art, play in the novel. On the one hand, the car is a metonym of Coalhouse Walker's pride. It differentiates him not only from other African-Americans, but from poor whites like Willie Conklin, the volunteer fire chief as well. A heroic reading of Coalhouse, then, buttresses a heroic reading of Ford (and ultimately Tateh.) However, Coalhouse's car--confined to the road and defined by its fragile pantasote top--might also signify the fragility of Coalhouse's dignity. Perhaps Coalhouse must invest his identity in a commodity, because other avenues of meaning are foreclosed for him, but that doesn't mean it's not shocking that his car must bear the weight of his identity. (I think in the next class, I can discuss the novel's representation of leftist politics shifting from a focus on labor to a focus on race and identity politics.)

Whether Tateh's abandoning the strikers for the novelty shop, and eventually the movies, is truly the act of an artist attuned to "the flow of American energy" or whether it is simply a story of labor's capitulation to capital, his move is intimately connected to Doctorow's representation of the family. Tateh repudiates the working class explicitly to provide for his daughter, and he rightly intuits that a successful strike will mean "six dollars and change" rather than six dollars a week (130). A book like Ragtime already highlights the role of family by defining its central characters only by their family roles: Father, Mother, Mother's Younger Brother. Just as family will draw Tateh away from the pickets and into the movie houses, so will Tateh be able to reconstitute family at the end of the novel because of his material success. The bereft and beleaguered family he formed in the ghetto with his daughter and Evelyn Nesbit will become the successful California family made up of Mother, Sarah's son, his daughter and the boy. (They will also fittingly become the prototypes for The Little Rascals.) Even the least bourgeois character in the book (besides Emma Goldman), Mother's Younger Brother, concludes the book heading off into Mexico, a perfect foil for J.P. Morgan, similarly heading across Europe toward Egypt. Yet he never repudiates Mother nor gives us reason to doubt her positive assessment of Tateh.

Finally, though, Mother's Younger Brother seems to offer the final twist on this question of art, mass production and leftist politics. As he begins his career as a bombmaker, he is mistaken for a poet (165). Is there room for poetry on the left after all, or are we to note how little like a poet Younger Brother is, how vast the mistake made by the young actresses he seduces?