While we were reading Ragtime, I did not realize the extent to which Tateh parallels Houdini throughout the novel. Houdini and Tateh have many parallels, many of which are very obvious, such as them both being immigrants who manage to greatly improve their living situations. I was really struck with one more very important connection between them during the panel presentations, when thinking about how Houdini interacts with the miner who survived (escaped) a disaster. It struck me that Tateh underwent a very similar situation in the aftermath of the strike. After the strikers and their parents had been attacked, everything was in chaos, and everyone was injured or dead. Despite all of this, Tateh managed to barely escape onto the train with his daughter, and was the only person to manage this. In that one scene, Tateh manages to do what Houdini yearns for, which is to make an escape that matters.
Towards the end of the novel, Doctorow writes about Houdini with growing irony, which I believe is in response to Houdini's self-perception in which nothing he does really matters. He seems plagued by self-doubt, continuously pushing his limits further and further in an attempt to do something that he sees as meaningful. Meanwhile, Tateh has managed to escape unscathed (or at least without any lasting scars) from many a stifling situation. He repeatedly just up and leaves his residence and goes somewhere new, leaving his fate to fate, if you will. By doing this, Tateh manages to perform the truly meaningful escapes that Houdini strives for, and he does so without any conscious desire to do so. Tateh obviously wants to have his life improve, but I do not get the impression that he worries about his struggles overly much. And that lack of worry may be why he succeeds where Houdini fails. Both in that Tateh manages to escape (his self-doubt, despair, and worry) and that he is left untouched by Doctorow's biting irony. I might be merely projecting my own thoughts onto Doctorow, but I think that he allows Tateh to flourish because Tateh does not worry about not flourishing.
Hmm lots of good points in this post. I like the point about Tateh managing to truly escape situations. I do worry that Tateh will go down the same path as Houdini after the novel. What with his new-found wealth, I'm starting to think he's going to have a sort of identity crisis similar to Houdini. Will he find that his art loses meaning now that its a duplicable event? Will he find himself feeling out of place with the rich, despite the fact that he is a "baron?" Tateh was one of the few characters I really liked, so I hope not, but a lot is left unsaid, so we don't really know.
ReplyDeleteThere *may* be some irony in Doctorow having Tateh doing so well producing war propaganda films for the US government--not exactly the genre we'd expect a good socialist to engage in! This aligns him closely with Father, of all people, in the end (which is ironic for a range of reasons). That irony is maybe "redeemed" when we hear about Tateh's somewhat utopian inspiration for The Little Rascals, looking at his own multicultural/nontraditional family. And in general, I agree that the irony is more strongly directed toward Houdini (esp. with that guy in the window flipping him off!). Houdini, as someone in class said, is "left hanging" by the novel, while Tateh gets the most "successful" closing moments.
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