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chapter seven The Corleones as “Our Gang”: The Godfather Interrogated by Doctorow’s Ragtime Father had always felt secretly that as a family they were touched by an extra light. He felt it going now. He felt stupid and plodding, available simply to have done to him what circumstances would do. —Doctorow, Ragtime [Jack London was] the kind of writer who went to a place and wrote his dreams into it, the kind of writer who found an idea and spun his psyche around it. He was a workaday literary genius hack. —Doctorow, Jack London, Hemingway, and the Constitution The completed struggle for survival and legitimacy in any historical novel must take on the character of destiny in the reader’s consciousness and in the historical present. One way to contextualize and contest Puzo’s picture of the Corleone hegemony in The Godfather is by way of contrast with another historical novel, E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime (1975), which is as self-reflexive and multidimensional in its portrayal of American immigration and evolving power and authority as The Godfather is monolithic. What happens when The Godfather or by extension any bestselling novel is placed into dialogue with its elite fictional twin? What can be learned by examining the novel against Ragtime, asking what Puzo was doing and what he was eliding or refusing to comment upon? The goal is not to use Ragtime as a club with which to beat The Godfather in a canonical versus popular mimetic stakes game but to articulate the full range of issues that both novels confront about American immigration , assimilation, and the family. A larger goal is to discuss how paradigmatic popular and elite fictions presume to disclose about the representations of these subjects. Taken together, Ragtime and The Godfather are the most powerful late-twentieth-century statements about an 209 210 Chapter 7 earlier European immigration, an American epic subject that has heretofore not created the fictional or critical climate for excitement that the tropes of Indian removal, slavery, women’s roles and rights, and the frontier and its mythos have fostered in the last few decades. Puzo and Doctorow both write when the melting pot had long been accepted as a controlling American myth, but actually both novels appeared when deep divisions within America contested such a myth: differences between black and white, parent and child, young and old, civilian and military, men and women, establishment and counterculture. The Godfather and Ragtime relentlessly cover the same terrain from different viewpoints and fictional objectives. The Godfather exemplifies the motions of popular fiction, while Ragtime shows how popular fictions are created and how they work. Puzo creates an ur-father for the twentieth century. Doctorow dismantles and reconstitutes the very notion of a patriarchy. Puzo drives the hard fact of “killing a man” as inaugurating and incorporating a line; Doctorow’s new hard fact is “creating an image ” as the father, the immigrant, is made up of broken initiatives and American reconditioning of the figure. Puzo offers the truly strong man as immigrant protagonist creating his own history. Doctorow makes history itself his protagonist, the goal of characters being to point themselves along its lines of force; the immigrant becomes metaphorical and universal. Both novels imply historical forgetting, but only Doctorow makes it the moral subject of his own acknowledgment. The whole structure of The Godfather is about erasure of acts in favor of their forgetting. Puzo’s family truly becomes “Our Gang,” the prototypical mob family in American fiction . Doctorow’s Our Gang image concludes his book in the immigrant socialist-turned-movie producer’s Beverly Hills intimation of the Little Rascals , a willed melting pot group of kids for popular consumption that belies the violence of Ragtime’s story and the victims strewn over its pages. Ragtime’s deep ironic image of Our Gang ends the individualized suffering tale of immigration as we know it. Puzo renders a historically capped figure, the heroic capitalist, and fantasizes him as unremitting patriarchal hero. He sketches lightly in a popular form of the realist-naturalist novel. Doctorow appropriates that precise form for an ironic rendering backed by a liberal commitment to history’s victims and threads his narrative through a postmodern depiction of the birth of the replicated image culture. Puzo’s novel drives through modern America without giving notice that a popular culture exists, although becoming a great artifact and product of that culture. The Godfather gives no sign that whole eras of history...

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