First encounters

In Kindred, a lot of emphasis is placed on the first encounters of characters and between characters. First encounters and more importantly first impressions are critical in outlining the direction of the ensuing relationship, no matter how casual or intimate. In every public speaking class I have ever heard of, the importance of first impressions on an audience is stressed. When speaking or meeting someone for the first time, it is recommended that attire, stance, and greeting are all coordinated to imply confidence and friendliness with the goal of the audience relaxing. In this way we can glean a lot of information from the introduction of various characters in Kindred.

In the very beginning of the novel we are thrown into the mind of Dana with very little in the way of intro. She starts by saying that on the last trip home she lost her arm. We are given no explanation and no excuse for that scene. Based on that scene we can reason that Dana has experienced some form of trauma recently, not only the physical loss of her arm but some extreme emotional trauma evidenced by the haze and confusion she shows when being taken to a hospital and having to spare Kevin.

When Rufus and his family are first introduced, we notice can notice a few telling things. First there is Rufus himself, a helpless boy who managed to get himself into serious trouble and nearly die. Then there is his mother who is a hysterical woman who tries to beat up Dana for rescuing Rufus. Lastly there is Tom who displays an epitome of 1821 class and shoves a shotgun in her face until she convinces him that she is harmless.

I will argue that everytime that Dana meets Rufus, it is like a first encounter for him. Ever since the very first encounter, Rufus has given the same impression to us. He is always grateful to see Dana but treats her like a slave woman. He additionally has a survivor complex where he feels like he owes Dana something which is unusual since he also feels like he owns her. Every time Dana meets Rufus, he has listened to her but she was the one to become a subordinate and follow him.

Footnotes

Among all the odd formating things in Mumbo Jumbo, footnotes would easily be able to be dismissed as unimportant or only focused on as a source of "further information" and "sources". It has been mentioned that Ishmael Reed includes an entire bibliography at the end of Mumbo Jumbo which contains most of the sources referenced by the footnotes. They give the story a quasi-academic quality, obviously interrupted by the dubious nature of the sources and questionable context of the quotes. More than that, footnotes are a tool to make the reader feel as if they are sharing an inside joke or superior knowledge with the narrator/author.

While footnotes tend to be rare outside of scholarly works, they can be found occasionally in other works of fiction. One book which uses them extensively is The Amulet of Samarkand  by Jonathon Shroud. The narrator of the book is a demon/jinni who is over four thousand years old. What makes the book especially fascinating are the extremely cynical and sarcastic quips from Bartimaeus, the demon, as well as his lengthy tangents and stories which are stuffed into sometimes multi-page footnotes.

I believe that Mumbo Jumbo and The Amulet demonstrate one quality that a good postmodernist history should have. Footnotes allow there to be a narrative as well as to contain the author's desired skepticism or support of that narrative. As we read through history, especially the sanitized versions, we are constantly bombarded with words which have certain connotations. Footnotes are a way that would be ideal for a postmodernist historian to provide context to people and motivations. It is equally likely that the historian would use it to provide an "alternate" view of history, yet one that is either equally plausible or equally hard to disprove.

Why do we like to watch escape artists?

There is only one escape artist in Ragtime that gets any note, Houdini of course. We know his character only in Ragtime as we are without the ability to travel into the past and speak with him. Houdini's career and the depiction of his performances are some of the most reliable pieces that Doctorow includes. We cannot know for certain what Houdini said or did in his private time but we do have records of his acts and the escapes and magic in his many performances. With this we try to answer the question, Why do we like to watch escape artists?

What makes magic and supernatural performances dazzle an audience is a suspension of disbelief. We know that, or should by now, that "impossible" escapes are just clever tricks that we are not in the know about. That leads to the second reason why. We are curious to see just how the artist performs his tricks. We want to be in on it and yet the irritation of not being so informed just reinforces our sense of disbelief. Escape artists play on both reasons by presenting a challenge, performing the impossible, yet letting us know that there is nothing that they do that can't be done by conventional methods.

In chapter 27 we see Houdini perform more and more recklessly. His feats are normally strange and are a little unusual, but here his mother's death has made him almost frantic in his attempt to do bigger and more dangerous tricks. I think that the story of Houdini's latest performance is a lot like Doctorow's telling Ragtime. In the start of Ragtime there are a series of events and narration that make us doubt the plausibility of the chapters. Coincidence follows coincidence which follows random events. We, like Houdini's, audience start doubting taking Doctorow's story at face value. Houdini's attempted explanation that all events are much safer, read relevant, than they appear is drowned out in the roar of an explosion which leaves us doubting the entirety of the story. I argue that the place that we are in has started to get even more unrealistic. Grandfather feels spry then breaks his pelvis immediately, Sarah dies in a odd coincidence of events. Doctorow is testing our limits as an audience before he shows the conclusion, which I hope is as spectacular as the end of Houdini's show.