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.
I really like your point about how you feel like Doctorow's writing style is similar to Houdini's method of tricking the audience. In many points in the novel, I've definitely found myself questioning the accuracy of Doctorow's story, and think it would be a fitting ending for Doctorow to have some sort of grand ending similar to that of Houdini to pull all the loose ties together.
ReplyDeleteI really like your point about how you feel like Doctorow's writing style is similar to Houdini's method of tricking the audience. In many points in the novel, I've definitely found myself questioning the accuracy of Doctorow's story, and think it would be a fitting ending for Doctorow to have some sort of grand ending similar to that of Houdini to pull all the loose ties together.
ReplyDeleteThis is a really cool post and I hadn't thought about the parallels between Doctorow's writing and Houdini's shows before. At the beginning of the book (the chapter where the family is introduced especially) Doctorow introduces this idealized, impossible image of the world, and then proceeds to demonstrate all the ways the real world contradicts it. This reminds me of the way Houdini puts on a spectacular show of magic but the tricks he relies on are really just things like hiding keys in his foot, etc.
ReplyDeleteIt's true that, as a narrator and author, Doctorow is more of a "conjuror" or magician than the typical realist author: there is the sense of certain "tricks" being performed, a kind of literary daredevilry.
ReplyDeleteBut in thinking about the popular appeal of Houdini, in his contemporary context, I do think there's something to the idea that he dramatizes a kind of "escape" from circumstances that resonates with American Dream metanarratives: with grit and ingenuity, the anonymous immigrant can turn himself into one of the most recognized names in history (a name he's given *himself*, significantly--an "escape" from the circumstances of birth), and his audiences thrill to his demonstrations that we are NOT in fact bound by our circumstances, that we can escape from seemingly impermeable traps. This is a very "American" idea, at the turn of the century.