Friday, August 10, 2007

"U.S.A." 2

One of the central ideas of modernism is the fractured nature of modern life, the loss of an organic unity both in reality and in art. "These fragments I have shored against my ruins," as T.S. Eliot says in The Waste Land. The three novels of John Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy (The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money) are written in a set of deliberately fragmented sections, representing the overt discontinuities of American life. These are

  • The NEWSREEL. This title is somewhat anachronistic, since the first "newsreel" in the novel deals with events at the beginning of the twentieth century, when newsreels per se did not exist; it is also inaccurate, since a newsreel is made up of moving images, and Dos Passos presents us with snippets of texts from newspapers, popular songs, speeches, press releases, and slogans ("BONDS BUY BULLETS BUY BONDS"). These snippets can sometimes form a larger pattern (the lyrics to an entire verse from a song will be spread throughout one newsreel), but more often, when taken together, evoke a comprehensive mood of the period--a mood that Dos Passos himself selects. You soon get the impression that Dos Passos has a thesis behind the details that he chooses; someone could very well select other details and claim that they were equally representative of the period. There are 68 of these over the three volumes, the last entitled WALL STREET STUNNED.
  • The Camera Eye. This section is closest to the stream-of-consciousness techniques that Joyce perfected in Ulysses. These are the supposedly unmediated thoughts of the narrator; they start in infancy and progress throughout the series. They are impressionistic, "poetic," and fairly opaque. There are 51 of these.
  • "Biographies," for want of a better word, since that's what they are--lives of people that Dos Passos deems important and representative, for good or ill, usually introduced by a descriptive noun phrase, such as TIN LIZZIE for Henry Ford, or ADAGIO DANCER for Rudolph Valentino. The cast of notables is easily divided into heroes, often inventors/scientists like Luther Burbank and Thomas Edison, political figures such as Eugene Debs, or thinkers like Thorstein Veblen, along with villains such as tycoons like Ford, William Randolph Hearst, and Samuel Insull, or politicians like Woodrow Wilson. About celebrated performers such as Valentino and Isadora Duncan he is mainly neutral. The two most moving biographies are the ones that conclude the last two volumes: THE BODY OF AN AMERICAN about the Unknown Soldier, and VAG, about an out-of-work "vagrant" hitch-hiking across America. What is interesting about these biographies is that they adopt the techniques of what would become known much later as "the new journalism": the application of fictional methods to non-fictional subjects. To me they are the most brilliant--and successful--sections of the novel.
  • Characters: these sections, taken together, most resemble a conventional novel, third-person narratives that trace the lives of twelve people throughout the series, each section introduced by that character's name and concentrating on him or her (CHARLEY ANDERSON, for instance). For example, there are 17 character sections in the last volume, covering four characters. Their lives can intersect, intertwine, collide, or just as often do not meet; sometimes a complete arc is described, while sometimes the story is broken off at what later seems at arbitrary point. For some of these we can assume the character will not change; with others, who knows?

In these sections Dos Passos comes up with his most conspicuous joining of modernism and democracy, one that I was surprised to find (while reading a book about film noir) that Jean-Paul Sartre praised. Dos Passos uses free indirect discourse in these sections to give the thoughts of his characters in their own words, without resorting to first-person narrative or stream-of-consciousness. Here is a paragraph about Mary French, one of the more heroic characters in the work:

She'd never been in Boston before. The town these sunny winter days had a redbrick oldtime steelengraving look that pleased her. She got herself a little room on the edge of the slums of Beacon Hill and decided that when the case [of Sacco and Vanzetti] was won, she'd write a novel about Boston. She bought some school copybooks in a little musty stationers' shop and started right away taking notes for the novel. The smell of the new copybook with its faint blue lines made her feel fresh and new. After this she'd observe life. She'd never fall for a man again. Her mother had sent her a check for Christmas. With that she bought herself some new clothes and quite a becoming hat. She started to curl her hair again.

The sentence "She'd never fall for a man again" is in Mary's words, as is the phrase, "quite a becoming hat." The other words and phrases are probably very close to Mary's thoughts, except perhaps for the description of Boston, but in Mary's case, they could be her words. The narrator's own voice only becomes plainly evident in these sections at such times of description, which can seem more highly charged, more "poetic," than the normal language of the characters. And the omission of hyphens from compound adjectives ("oldtime") and nouns is straight out of Joyce.

But what does this all mean?

No comments: