Myths of Individualism in E.L. Doctorow's 'Ragtime'

Abstract

Contemplating his imminent departure from Poland, with its long and compromising 'genealogies of concern and obligation', this central character in Susan Sontag's recent historical novel gives expression to the now-hackneyed dream of the New World. Looking westward, he conveys a longing for the promise of imaginative self-renewal -- in effect at once a yearning for regenerative innocence and a fantasy of romanticised self-perfection -- a promise that coincides with the idea of America as a place of 'newness, emptiness, pastlessness' where the individual can turn 'life into pure future.'¹ That Ryszard communicates his feelings in the ambiguous form of a rhetorical question (put to himself in the third person) is worth noting for, in what is also a now-familiar story, what he and his fellow emigres inevitably discover is that the idea of self-renewal is, in practical terms, a far more difficult proposition. Sontag's novel is more complex than this suggests, and is noteworthy for what appears to be her revaluation of the symbolic significance of 'America' -- the 'old' New World that Sontag portrays in contrast to the contemporary United States.² In restating what arguably remains the central American idea -- that of the potential for untrammelled self-transformation -- within the form of an historical novel that looks back to an 'America' of the past, Sontag's text serves as a fitting introduction to E. L. Doctorow's historical novel 'Ragtime', a novel which offers a more explicit critique of this very same idea.³