Historical fiction now represents only our stereotypes about the past, never the past itself.

Evidence

Loon Lake much more obviously deploys the strategies of the pastiche (most notably in its reinvention of Dos Passos); but Ragtime remains the most peculiar and stunning monument to the aesthetic situation engendered by the disappearance of the historical referent. This historical novel can no longer set out to represent the historical past; it can only “represent” our ideas and stereotypes about that past (which thereby at once becomes “pop history”). … If there is any realism left here, it is a “realism” that is meant to derive from the shock of grasping that confinement and of slowly becoming aware of a new and original historical situation in which we are condemned to seek History by way of our own pop images and simulacra of that history, which itself remains forever out of reach. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 94

Categorization

• DEFINE: Gives a concrete definition of pastiche in action: Ragtime’s reinvention of Dos Passos. Also essential to the reader’s parody/pastiche distinction.
• XREF: The ‘Plato’s cave’ figure for seeking History through pop images recalls White Noise’s and Baudrillard’s simulacra discussions, and the reader’s own cognitive mapping project.
• SEED: Doctorow as test case for whether postmodernism is a totalizing cultural dominant: is Ragtime a style he chose or a condition imposed on him?