Ragtime And The Tain: Literary Analysis

People lose themselves when they acquire possessions. Family, friends, and even a person’s own life are in jeopardy. This insatiable desire to accumulate, threatens the very sanctity of society. Thankfully, literature fights against this impending doom. Particularly, E.L. Doctorow’s, Ragtime, and China Mieville’s, The Tain. Through characters, relationships, and locations, both authors present searing arguments against the accumulation of cultural property. Furthermore, both authors push for the restoration of cultural property. Together, Mieville and Doctorow manipulate the future and the past, respectively, to denounce the accumulation of cultural property. They also suggest that the first step towards restoration of cultural property is …show more content…
In Ragtime, the Morgan Library is established as the stage, where this argument is made. The Morgan Library is significant because it houses a plethora of cultural property amassed by J.P Morgan: red silk damask (121), fancy paintings (121), ancient parchment covered with Latin calligraphy (124), a possible specimen of Hermes in the original cuneiform (124), and a coffin of a great pharaoh (125). Walker, who represents a radicalized member of a marginalized group, possesses the library. Walker is radicalized because he threatens to destroy the …show more content…
In addition, the possession of Morgan’s possessions is a tantamount to possessing him: “We wanted the man and so we have him since we have his property” (226). Walker’s marginalization is significant because he is an African-American that has suffered from racism. This ties back into Doctorow’s manipulation of the past, which allows him to use a post-reconstruction framework. What does it mean for a black man to engage in a hostile takeover of a place that has appropriated art at the orders of a white capitalist? One meaning is that the possession of cultural property has a cyclical nature. An offended black man’s possession of the library represents the slave past of America that possessed cultural property in the form of people. Therefore, Doctorow’s creation of this scene magnifies Walker’s request for the restoration of his car into a request for the restoration of black people. The possessed has become the possessor—and vice versa. Notwithstanding, repositories of cultural property are volatile because they represent unstable sites of power that place society in peril, when someone with malice intentions takes over. For this reason, the accumulation of cultural property serves as a metaphorical time-bomb that threatens to obliterate wherever place it is stored. Walker in Ragtime, is an example of