"I'm Commandeering this Ship! Er, Story!"

I am currently taking an anthropology class at the U of I, and as the semester continued I began realizing many topics that were crossing over with History as Fiction. My anthropology professor, in explaining the role of anthropology since its recognition as a study, gave a shoutout to Postmodernism. In the adoption of the understanding that in a common space there can be multiple ways of understanding, multiple worlds and realities, anthropology benefited as a study of different cultures .

This anthropology class has made me think of History as Fiction on numerous occasions. The professor often relays accounts told by notable anthropologists, and one was of a British woman who happened to bring along Hamlet with her to Nigeria. After a few days of reading it alone, the leaders of the village became interested in what kept her so wrapped up and asked her to share the story. Thinking it had the potential to be universally appreciated, she obliged to reading aloud. But the cultural differences of Nigeria and England became vocalized every time someone would stop her and ask questions, confused by the subtleties of English culture that the play emanates. The meaning could not be appreciated by this group of people who were so unfamiliar with the point-of-view of very society wherein the story resides. The unspoken, longstanding traditions and historical context of the anthropologist’s culture contributed to a story that the Nigerian listeners had clear difficulty gleaning importance from it.

After discovering that the Coalhouse Walker story was a clear transposition of the Michael Kohlhaas tale, my mind immediately jumped to the argument of stories being altered by people to translate better to a new audience. Had someone taken the tale of Hamlet and integrated appropriate Nigerian historical context and cultural subtleties to produce a new version, would the listeners then take away something more valuable? In a context more familiar, would the story carry meaning that would otherwise be lost? Although the Kohlhaas story is unmistakably present, Ragtime provides an added dimension for different people than the original audience of Heinrich von Kleist’s novella. The readers in 1811 Germany were much different than those of 1975 America. The historical context in Ragtime is significant. The nostalgia Doctorow threads through the novel deeply affects how it is read by American audiences. It aides in connecting the Americans of 1975 to Americans during the time period of Ragtime. The story of Kohlhaas has now been filled with the capacity to be extraordinarily meaningful to a different culture.

In his essay, False Documents, Doctorow clearly places the value of narrative presentations of truths as higher than the value of impersonal presentations of facts. The difference seemingly being that the latter lacks meaning. Ragtime only includes a handful of documented facts, and yet, for me, it is full of reality. It puts a face, heart, and soul on some of the different demographics American school-kids briefly learn about, and then weaves them together. From his essay and interview, Doctorow would no doubt make a case for Ragtime giving a better historical context for 1975 America than the “official history” of the people he includes in the novel.

“If there are enough of us, somehow a common wisdom will come through the community and pick and choose what it needs in order to survive and go on.”

This quote from Doctorow’s interview, included in Paul Levine’s Conversations, doesn’t necessarily name Ragtime as a component of our survival, but it most definitely places it in the narrative from which we draw our identity. So is it worth is to commandeer another person’s story if you have the capacity to make it meaningful to a new audience? Doctorow certainly thinks so.