[An] unanticipated glow of recognition comes over the [critic of Heinrich von Kleist, a German dramatist and short story writer,] who, reading leisurely as directed through E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime, discovers amid the likes of Harry Houdini, J. P. Morgan, and Henry Ford a black couple whose actions take on an increasingly deja vu aura. The two produce an illegitimate daughter which the mother, Sarah, buries alive. The protagonist family discovers and resuscitates the child and takes it in to live along with its mother. On the scene at the narrator's home arrives one Sunday the father of the child, one Coalhouse Walker, Jr., a proper and dignified ragtime pianist who, when refused an audience by Sarah, contents himself with genuflection at the cradle of his child and a few Scott Joplin rags at the family piano. The visits become routine, become a courtship of Sarah after the fact.

To the Kleist critic the problematic child is a familiar motif: Das Erdbeben in Chili, Der Findling; the name Coalhouse closely resembles the family name of Kleist's greatest fictional protagonist, Michael Kohlhaas; the courtship in reverse is reminiscent of the Marquise von O—. Thus, by the time the courtship between Coalhouse and Sarah is under way, Doctorow has signaled to us his familiarity with and, dare one say, indebtedness to the novellas of Heinrich von Kleist. Even the most skeptical must admit that the similarities transcend coincidence. In what follows the tactic becomes transparent: in Coalhouse Walker, Jr., Doctorow is presenting usan updated black version of Michael Kohlhaas, the sixteenth-century Brandenburg horse-trader who becomes the scourge of Saxony after a degenerate Saxon count makes him the victim of a practical joke. (p. 225)

The dominant theme of the Coalhouse episode, outraged innocence seeking to force justice upon an unjust world through terrorism, is likewise the dominant theme, overtones included, of Kleist's novella, not to mention certain public events in our own age. In adopting Kohlhaas as model Doctorow transforms the theme of class discrimination of the Reformation to that of racial discrimination in our era.

Doctorow evokes Kleist in Ragtime, not just the giants and freaks of the turn of the century. His strategy is legitimate and has a long tradition. By exploiting foreign literature of the past Doctorow exercises his license to fictionalize—even if it is with real personages; in doing so he also evokes in his readers an "anxiety of critical reception," a fear on our part that we might not be getting all of his signals, as if to balance off his own "anxiety of influence." All of this naturally calls into question the desirability and value of literary scholarship as it presently is practiced, as a dismantling and reconstruction of an individual work within all of the possible modes of allusion: synchronic (contemporary), diachronic (historical), metachronic (archetypal), literary (imaginative variations of the archetypal), and non-literary (documentary). The natural affinities among historical recurrences—to speak in Vico and Joyce's terms—are ultimately part of the rhetoric of fictional and biographical characterization, of a self's justification for its own vectors, of the not-so-unique individual's response to not-so-unique circumstances. We may find it quaint, elegant, or exhilarating to recognize Michael Kohlhaas in Doctorow's Coalhouse rather than Nat Turner, but it is one of Doctorow's Houdini-like elusions that such quivers of familiarity in his reader ultimately mean quite little to his novel's themes. (pp. 226-27)

Even when fiction and social history once again become distinct genres, Ragtime will survive as a sterling example of a work which finds several ways of mixing the two. (p. 227)