Jes Grew

I was thinking about all the Jes Grew epidemics throughout the world’s history when I thought about a form of Jes Grew in the 70’s. Disco. The date at the end of the epilogue is right at the emergence of disco, with 1971 being the first time Disco reaches television with Soul Train.

As disco emerged it was met with backlash from rock fans because it didn’t carry the same subject matter that rock did, yet was becoming just as popular. Also, part of that reason was because disco embraced themes that weren’t exclusively white and heterosexual. According to Wikipedia, “[disco’s] initial audiences were club-goers from the gay, African American, Italian American, Latino, and psychedelic communities in Philadelphia and then later New York City during the late 1960s and early 1970s.” Papa Labas is giving his speech in New York around this time, so evidently he must know about the rise of disco in America. Perhaps this particular lecture is focused on because it is the dawn of a new Jes Grew movement and Papa Labas wants to try to educate everyone to know that eventually Jes Grew will win and whatever that particular strain of Jes Grew is will be let into the culture of the atonists. What do you all think?

With disco there was a dancing everywhere, as characteristic of Jes Grew. With television it spread rapidly and by the mid 70’s there were movies coming out that were focused around disco dancing such as Saturday Night Fever -- which you all probably have heard about.

It seems that with disco, it was tolerated and embraced far quicker by the “atonists” than Jes Grew was. Within a few short years it’s transfer onto television makes everyone familiar with it and many people are overtaken by how groovy it is. However, the age of disco is quite short, ending in the early 1980’s. Its ending is very abrupt, just like Jes Grew in the book.

Those are some parallels that I saw, do you all see anything else?

Little Boy Narrator in Ragtime

When I was researching for my panel presentation the article I was using stated, “The memory of the young boy, the principal narrator, reaches backward to 1902, when the house in New Rochelle was built, and forward to the marriage of Tateh and Mother in 1917 “ (Ostendorf 579).

While I was reading ragtime, I never thought that the Little Boy could be the narrator. However, now that I think about it, I think it could fit. That makes sense why the mother and father of the family are called Mother and Father throughout the book.  It also makes sense why the information on Coalhouse came from other sources and the narration didn’t get in his mind. He’s not directly connected to the little boy, so everything he can gather either must have come from his father, uncle, or newspapers. Having access to Mother’s Younger Brother’s diary also seems more probable. For people not close to him and not seeming to have any major contact with any of the family members (such as Ford, Morgan, or Houdini) I’m not sure how the little boy would get that information. He does seem to have supernatural powers (like making Houdini’s car stop in front of his house and predicting his father would take him to the baseball game) but there is still a lot of information the little boy would have to read out of Morgan or Ford’s mind. And, if he could read their mind, why wouldn’t he read Coalhouse’s? Perhaps the narrator changes at certain points?

I sifted through google to see if Doctorow confirmed that the little boy was the narrator at any point, and I found the answer in an interview of Doctorow done by Michael Wutz in 1994.

Doctorow: The hidden narrator of Ragtime is probably the little boy in later times

Wutz: Excuse me for interrupting here. Why do you say "probably"? Of late, that's a question that has received quite some attention within the critical community-whether or not the little boy is, indeed, the narrator.

Doctorow: Because he was hidden to me for so much of that book. At a certain point quite near the end he betrays a personal relationship to everything he has narrated and appears to be the son of Mother and Father, namely the little boy. I'm pretty sure that's who it is, but I'm not sure that that is essential for reading the book to know that.

Even Doctorow isn’t totally positive about the little boy being the narrator. I guess it’s even still open to interpretation. What do you all think?

For more of the interview:

https://weberstudies.weber.edu/archive/archive%20B%20Vol.%2011-16.1/Vol.%2011.1/11.1Wutz.htm