The Wrong Bird, and What is Allowed to be Fictional

So there I am, reading chapter 10, when all of a sudden Doctorow starts talking about the Eskimos eating auks and fulmars. Then he mentions auklets. My bird brain immediately starts nitpicking.

There are no, and never have been, auklets on the East Coast.

In fact, there are only two birds that could be called "auks" in the Atlantic Ocean, and one of them (the razorbill) can't really be described as "small and inoffensive", leaving us with only one possibility for what Doctorow is referring to: the dovekie (Alle alle), which is technically neither an auk nor an auklet. Sure enough, there is an Inuit dish that involves packing hundreds of dovekies into sealskins and letting them ferment, as mentioned in Ragtime.

But who calls the dovekie an auklet?

Near as I can tell, one source. From 1919, which based on ngrams is about the time that the word "auklet" really caught on in literature. This particular source only uses the word "auklet" once, while the rest of the time it uses the term dovekie. The autobiography of Peary's assistant, Donald Baxter MacMillan, uses the terms little auk, dovekie, ice bird, rotch, and bullbird, but not auklet.

So take that, E.L. Doctorow! You used the wrong name for the bird!

...but why the heck am I more hung up about the word auklet (putting my obvious ornithological obsessions aside), than, say, the fact that Freud and Jung take a boat together through the Tunnel of Love? What if E.L. Doctorow actually had his taxonomy straight and meant to have west coast seabirds getting eaten by Eskimos in Greenland? Is that more implausible than anything else in the book?

Well, not really. But it would definitely seem to be more fictional, since it doesn't appear intentional.

If Doctorow has a historical figure do something we have no proof they ever did, it's part of the story. He's in full control of the characters' actions. The places they go actually exist. The cars the ride in are the kind of cars people would have ridden in (fun fact: electric cars were actually pretty common before gasoline engines got quiet and efficient enough to be practical). There's plenty of real history (Stanford White's murder, Evelyn Nesbit having a connection to anarchists, views on unions, etc) thrown in to fit the story we know--Ragtime could have happened, it's just in between the parts of history that got written down.

Auklets (real auklets, not dovekies) on the east coast would be perfectly fine if this were surrealist or alternate history. But since everything else is (reasonably) tightly conforming to the real world, it would just seem out of place. With historical figures, Doctorow can say "Yeah, I'm making this stuff up, but it could have happened," but auklets on the east coast would be "Oh, and by the way--I'm disregarding some aspects of nature, just 'cause."

This might just be my science fiction brain talking, but it seems that the author can make up anything that truly matters to the story, while passing details have to stick closer to fact. The line between fiction and BS lies in whether or not the made-up stuff is gratuitous.

I apologize to anyone who is a fan of surrealism.

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Miscellany:

• Taxonomy tip: Fulmars look like gulls, but aren't actually related to them. Alcids (auks, auklets, murres, guillemots, puffins, etc) look nothing like gulls, but are pretty closely related to them.
• Don't look up pictures of dovekies. If you do, you will never be able to forgive Peary, Father, and the Eskimos for being heartless killers.
• The described way of killing "auks" is probably accurate. I mean, you'd die too if a giant hand wrapped around you and stopped your heart from beating. It's like the five point palm exploding heart technique for birds.
• The Eskimo dish involving pickled "auk" is called kiviaq.