CL201, Feb 14, 2008
Comical interruptions started with a moment of embarassment for the Prof. when the audio was turned up too high, and again with a lot of futile bumbling about with the curtain concealing the blackboard, costing precious minutes in a short class period. Time did run out on the lecture and I was left wondering if there wasn't a page at the end that was never got to...
Prof. Rhodes started with an unequivocal endorsement of E.L.D., staking his personal scholarship and professional position on the commitment. Those qualities also make his lecture highly instructive in how to go about reading, in general, and Ragtime in particular.
Taking the bull by the horns, Prof. Rhodes confronted us with perhaps the most salacious passage in the book by reading it out loud. The scene occurs early in the novel and it is not until near the end, at the story's very climax, that the other shoe drops.
"...the semi-fictional cast of Ragtime are at times presented as puppet victims of history, jerked around in both comic and tragic ways by overwhelming forces, whether of repressed sexuality or institutionalized racism: Younger Brother by the rampant penis that "whips him about the floor" at the lesbian encounter of Emma Nesbitt and Emma Goldman (55), Coalhouse Walker by the firing squad that jerks the body about the street "in a sequence of attitudes as if it were trying to mop up its own blood"(222)". (Derek Wright, "Ragtime Revisited: History and Fiction in Doctorow's Novel", International Fiction Review, Vol. 20, No. 1, 1993, pp.14-16.)
I learnt somewhere that in French "l'petit mort" or "the little death" is a colloquialism for sexual orgasm. That connects the early passage to the climactic real death at the end.
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