Edgar Lawrence Doctorow’s Ragtime: Ragtime Music and the Musicalization of Fiction

Abstract

The purpose of the present paper is to explore Edgar Lawrence Doctorow’s novel Ragtime (1975) as a masterful adaptation of musical form in fiction. It demonstrates the ways in which the use of musical devices of Ragtime shapes the rhythmic/narrative structure of the novel. The article offers the reading of the novel as a musicalized fiction, or, in other words, as a form of musico-literary intermediality. It focuses on the chief characteristics of Doctorow’s novel such as a plurality of independent consciousnesses and a diversity of simultaneous points of view/voices . T he novel by its very design is polyphonic. Manipulating polyrhythmic effects, mixed rhythms, repetitive phrases and leitmotifs, Doctorow is experimenting with the rhythm both on micro and macro textual levels.