Saturday, August 11, 2007

"The Speech of the People"

When James Joyce created for Ulysses his modern analogues to Homer's Odysseus, Penelope, and Telemachus, he intended them to be, if not anti-heroic, then at least a-heroic. The modern Ulysses, Leopold Bloom, is Dublin Jew, who suffers from his countrymen's prejudices; his wife, Molly, is anything but faithful; and Ulysses's "son" is, at this point, an artist manque, whose last name (Dedalus) only hints at his vocation. The political aspect of Joyce's decision to treat characters of this social stratum (lower middle-class) is that his main characters are of the people: not royalty nor aristocrats. However, the manner in which Joyce describes their thought processes (except perhaps Molly Bloom's) is such that the book becomes a coterie experience; while democratic in spirit, it is anti-democratic in execution.

In U.S.A., John Dos Passos gets around this modernist dilemma by concentrating the least readily intelligible texts into "The Camera Eye" sections, and even those are far more comprehensible than, say, the "Proteus" section of Ulysses (which nevertheless contains such immediately beautiful sentences as Stephen's wondering "Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount Strand?" "Ineluctable modality of the visible" indeed). By allowing his characters their own language in free indirect discourse when describing their actions, Dos Passos fulfills the definition that he sets out in the preliminary section he wrote for the novels when they were finally published together, also called "U.S.A.": "But mostly U.S.A. is the speech of the people." And their speech is human, sometimes all too human. But as Hemingway observed, "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn," and the demotic strain of Twain is fulfilled in the works of both Hemingway and Dos Passos.

However, U.S.A. is also a vast novel of political ideas about American history, much more overtly so than most works by Hemingway or Faulkner. The first character we meet, Mac, becomes involved in the labor movement, as does Mary French, the last character we read about some 1200 pages later. Labor is constantly exploited by capital; America was hoodwinked by the mendacious Woodrow Wilson into entering the Great War; the laws and ideals of America are constantly bent by those in power: these themes are hammered home again and again over the course of the work. Although the impending Stock Market Crash of 1929 looms in the minds of readers as they approach the end of the saga, it is the trial and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti that are crucial to the best characters in the book.

"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake," complains Stephen in Ulyssses. And while Irish history permeates the fabric of Ulysses, Joyce presents no over-arching theory about it, as Tolstoy does at the end of War and Peace. Is history affected by great individuals, such as Napoleon, or are even they moved by intransigent forces? After finishing the novel, readers of U.S.A. can come away with the impression that all the characters have been swept along, except for the few who valorously labor against the system; however, the biographies that Dos Passos interjects into the flow show that individuals can make a difference, for good and ill. There is so much here, so much in this novel that especially now needs to be remembered, beyond the triumphs of its methods.

Note: One of the few examples of another author's adapting the methods and form of U.S.A. is the sf novel Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner, which won the Hugo Award in 1968. In this near future dystopian novel, Brunner substitutes for Dos Passos's Newsreel sections the SCANALYZER, providing an "INdepth INdependent INmediate INterface" between the reader and "the happening world." Brunner also quotes tellingly from Marshall McLuhan at the beginning of the novel:

A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.

No comments: