Michael Kohlhaas Walker

Today, feeling too lazy to get up off my coach to look for my hard copy of Ragtime, I briefly searched (in vain) for a pdf online. Though I didn't find what I was looking for, I did stumble across something very interesting: an audiobook of Michael Kohlhaas by Heinrich von Kleist.

At first I was confused as to why this seemingly unrelated German audiobook was mixed into my otherwise disappointing but relevant results. And then I kind of read it out loud in my head. "Kohlhaas", like "Coalhouse" perhaps? We've known that Coalhouse is a weird character: he doesn't seem to be real, but he still has a name that's not a title (unlike Mother, Father, Tateh, Little Girl, and all of Doctorow's other original characters except for Sarah), and he seems to be extra detached from Doctorow's narration. So I thought, "could he be a character that already exists in some other author's universe or vaguely based on a real person?-- something between real and a product of Doctorow's imagination?"

Well, according to Kohlhaas's Wikipedia page, he's based on a real 16th century German dude named Kohlhase who, after having his horses seized unjustly, "sought redress in the Saxon courts but failed to obtain it. Outraged, he issued a public challenge in 1534 and burned down houses in Wittenberg. Even a letter of admonition from Martin Luther could not dissuade him, and Kohlhase and the band he collected committed further acts of terror."

It's pretty obvious that the similarities in the names of the three characters are no coincidence. Our Coalhouse could have been based directly on the historical figure or on the character. (The "hows" instead of a "hays" suggests to me that maybe he was based off of the character, which would mean that we've got some multilayered history-fiction mingling going on. Pretty cool.)

I think it's too bad that the story of the original Kohlhase has no racial or even American significance at all; the analogy ends with the immediate story and misses out on the (very important) political context. But its still a cool allusion, and it makes it clear why Coalhouse has an actual name.

Ragtime

I'm really liking Ragtime. At first, I was a little bewildered by the book because the english seemed simple, yet I found myself losing track of what was happening and who was being described. And the tone was throwing me off. The narrator depicts all these emotionally fraught scenes without any concern-- almost flippantly. This makes sense if you assume that he's adopting a sort of detached, historian's perspective on the events he's depicting. But then occasionally he'll depart from an objective stance and say thing like "odd things were happening in lighthouses" (These comments often take two subjective stances: the literal meaning of the sentence which is probably supposed to reflect the antiquated opinions of the time, and one the author actually seems to be taking which finds these antiquated opinions [like "there were no Negroes"] completely ridiculous). He's still utterly un-aligned with the emotions of the characters, but he's not being a very good historian.
Anyway, the lack of structure and strange tone aren't bothering me anymore. Now they're kind of fun. And I'm finding quite a bit to read between the disjointed and unusual lines. I'll get to those observations in a moment, but first, some funny sentences:

"..There was a lot of sexual fainting. There were no Negroes..."
"...and shot the famous architect three times in the head. On the roof. There were screams."
"He escaped from bank vaults, nailed-up barrels,... a rolltop desk, a sausage skin."
"The marriage seemed to flourish on Father's extended absences."
"On a Sunday, in a wild impractical mood, they spent twelve cents..."
 "Children suffered no discriminatory treatment." (meaning that they were also allowed to work dangerous jobs for little money)

Now the observations:

• Everybody is connected. Houdini speaks to the family with no names and sees Evelyn's husband in jail, Mother's Younger Brother is obsessed with Evelyn who Freud sees being depicted by Tateh on the street. I'm not sure how the author scooting around in his chair comes into things yet, but maybe he will. 

• While the narrator is following Freud through New York, Freud's companion claims to appreciate street art because he finds the woman who is the subject of the artwork (who turns out to be Evelyn) beautiful and, in a very freudian way, presents this as an appreciation for the man's (Tateh's) work. Freud clamps his teeth on his cigar and says nothing, as if he's quietly developing a theory. In that same scene, Jung (who I know very little about, but who I think disagreed with Freud about something relating to childhood) sees the little girl, and the author makes a note about how his theories would later split from his mentor's (Freud's). 

• How dare Tateh kick his wife out of the house! This isn't an observation; I'm just mad. She did nothing what-so-ever to deserve that. I wanted to respect him because he was a hard working, poor, otherwise-decent socialist artist. But now I dislike him very much. It's a shame that he subscribes to the ridiculous double standard about promiscuity (and even unwilling promiscuity) which American culture has been mostly working to overcome in the hundred years since his time. (His views on "whores" are fleshed out a little more in the chapter after the ones we were supposed to read for tonight. I won't go into what he says/does exactly, but it's irksome.)  

• Women's profiles reoccur. First Evelyn's profile is painted by some guy who makes a question mark out of her hair. Then, fireworks depict a woman's face in profile. When I read the bit about the street artist making the paper profile of the beautiful woman, I thought it a strange coincidence that women's profiles kept popping up in art. And then it turned out to be the same woman as was the subject of the first painting (which made me very happy).

• The author has mentioned a very good portion of what we talked about in history last year: the shirtwaist factory fire, the idea that God gave the rich power because they deserved it, the towns owned by corporations, Henry Clay Frick (and his attempted assassination). I know that today in class we seemed to take the stance that he was ridiculing everyone indiscriminately and not making social commentary, and, though I agree that no one, no matter how pure of heart (like Riis, the photographer) is safe from the narrator's condescension, I can't help but read a liberal, politically modern, and socially conscious perspective into the narrator's accounts of these subjects. Emma Goldman seems almost like a mouthpiece for his opinions (big maybe behind this sentence). I'm not sure why; it's just a feeling. If you disagree, I'd be happy to hear why.