"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.

"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?

See--and hear--the U.S.A.

Serious novelists were confronted with a problem after the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses. Joyce had taken all the techniques of fiction, including some newer ones, such as what has been labeled "stream-of-consciousness," ratcheted them all up a notch, and produced a magic mountain of a novel--a Matterhorn that would loom over the rest of twentieth-century fiction, daring other writers to construct a more massive monument, challenging readers to scale it. And that was the problem, in both senses. Ulysses is a magnificent achievement whose summit leads--nowhere. It is inimitable. And for readers, while most acknowledge its significance, I'd bet that fewer than 10% of the voters in that bookstore poll that made Ulysses the greatest novel of the twentieth century read it.

So what does a novelist do in the wake of Ulysses (the problem does not arise with Joyce's final, oneiric peak--perhaps chasm is a better word, Finnegans Wake, which despite its circularity of form, almost shouts, "Dead End!")? Hemingway grasps a flensing knife and cuts away everything but the bare essentials, the 10% of the iceberg that is visible on the surface. Faulkner takes stream-of-consciousness to new levels (the beginning of The Sound and the Fury), but then relapses into baroque mellifluousness, since unremitting experimentation does not sell (and even Joyce had to have a patroness). And beside the omnipresent shadow of Joyce's achievement lies the other white whale of American literature--"the great American novel." Enter John Dos Passos. What better way to harpoon the latter than by writing a massive, triple-decker novel about America itself over the past thirty years (the first part was published in 1930)? The result is U.S.A., a trilogy of novels I've been traversing for a while now, with rest stops in 17-century Maryland and the realm of film noir. It is a tour-de-force, a panorama worthy of its subject--and yet I can also see why the book is, compared to the best of Hemingway and Faulkner, virtually unread today--a real shame, since its very technique is a triumphant democratization of the main methods of modernism.

To spare my readers (I think there's more than one), I'm going to break this discussion, like the meta-novel itself, into three parts. I want to mention here that the Library of America edition of U.S.A. that I read is, like all their editions, a joy to read: suitably heavy, but not overly so; nicely sized so that it can be held in one hand without fatigue; easily legible (I had to buy another copy of The Sot-Weed Factor since my original paperback copy's print was made for eyes 35 years younger than mine); printed on acid-free paper (so it will never take on that brownish-yellow tinge that made that paperback even more unreadable); and with just enough notes to explain obscure references, as well as a helpful chronology of the historical period covered. Superb value for the money.