John Dos Passos (1896-1970)

John Dos Passos

(1896-1970)

- His three volume sequence of novels The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), The Big Money (1936) - published together in 1937 as U.S.A.- is a vast experimental project that is an expression of the 1930s in all its complexity. He uses there juxtaposition, rapid cutting, fragmetation, owing a good deal to the cinema techniques of Eisenstein and Griffith. Other devices : simultaneity, pluralized narration, the intersection of documentary material with personal stories.

- These methods helped to shape U.S.A in the interest of tracing the growth of the history of the United States from its optimistic and progressive hopes at the turn into the 20th century, through the crisis year 1919, when Woodrow Wilsons hopes began to fail, and so to the crass materialism of the 1920s. It covers the dying of the progressive impulses that had animated early 20th century America, the move from simple to complex capitalism, from a production to a consumption economy, from innocence to modern experience.

- the background material is divided into : Camera Eye, Biography, Newsreel. These make out the external framework to maintain unity of impression. The structure is meant to develop theme through the organization of the materials within each of the three books of the trilogy.

The 42nd Parallel - covers the history of the nation from 1900 to 1917 tracing the rise of the big business and economic imperialism through the Biography and Newsreel sections using the fictional lives of his characters to demonstrate the effects of these conditions on the invidual. The heme approached is the social, economic and political organization of a nationt that is in the process of separating the upper and lower classes by an ever widening gulf.

  e.g : The Biographies - mythical social types destroyed : Andrew Carnegie, a sample of those who profited by the advance in technology and who except in time of war, liked to endow institutions to promote universal peace.

The Camera Eye sections : focus on the growing consciousness of the writer. They record an increasing awareness of the social and economic problems besetting the nation.

The Newsreels - touches on all the stages of this theme : class struggle, separation of the two extremes of the social and economic ladder, indeces of the accumulation of political power by the upper classes.

Nineteen Nineteen - focuses on the war and its martyrs and profiteers.

The Big Money - covers 1920-29, the chronicle of Americas failure in the post-war period. That failure is presented through the unabashed pursuit of wealth, prestige and power at the expense of political freedom, equality of economic opportunity and human dignity.

  Tone : ironical, iconoclastic; patterns of speech and habits of minds are highlighted as representing the Machine (American contemporary society) type of relationship.

represented by :

*J.Ward Moorehouse - acid portrait of the American businessman, in dilligent service of the Machine; typical mind patterns and clichs : strenuous life, a lovely girl falls in love with him, desire to be a song writer, the rich girl who uses him.

*Eleanor Stoddard - parasitic search for security, taking without giving, surrender to the Machine.

*Ben Compton - honest fighter against the machine.

  Conclusions : Dos Passos did not see the novel as a linear structure, moving by progression of character and incident, but as a montage of people and activities The classical syntagmatic novel structure is repalced by series of paradigms to convey atmosphere.

- it is montage punctuated with spotlighted stills of the heroes of American culture in the Biography sections ; the Newsreel sections also get vivid montage representing the external world.

- His comparison between the new novel structure and a tableau clarifies his intention : I have paid a good deal of attention to painting. The period of art I was very much interested in at that time was the 13th and the 14th centuries. Its tableaux with large figures of saints surrounded by a lot of little people just fascinated me. I tried to capture the same effect in words. The little people who occupy the major part of the narratives - Eleanor Stoddard, Janey Williams, Charley Anderson, J.Ward Moorehouse are intended to contrast the saints of the Biography sections - Eugene V. Debs, Luther Burbank, Bob La Follette and the sinners - William Randolph Hearst, Henry Ford, Theodore Roosevelt. This structure helps to offer the sense of life in motion interrupted in its flux only by the stable and central figures of genuine American heroes.

- the narrative method and authorial choice in the trilogy must be seen in light of Dos Passos aim of creating a new kind of fiction to couple history with fiction, to keep up a contemporary commentary on historys changes, always as seen by some individuals ears, felt through some individuals nerves and tissues. (J.Dos Passos in Statement of Belief, Bookman, 68, Sept. 1928, p.26)