Anticipations of the Accident: Modernist Fiction and Systemic Risk

John Dos Passos is a notoriously difficult writer to evaluate. His best-known works—namely, Manhattan Transfer (1925) and U.S.A. (1937)—are massive and forbidding. Experimental novels without protagonists, fractured by avant-garde narrative techniques, these texts offer few of the satisfactions of traditional fiction and sometimes seem as disorienting as the onrushing modernity that stands as their central subject. And then there's the thorny issue of the author's politics. Throughout his life, Dos Passos made no secret of his shifting allegiances. As a young man, fully committed to Socialism, he publicly defended Sacco and Vanzetti, wrote for the New Masses, and in 1928 made the obligatory pilgrimage to see the Soviet experiment in action. As an old man, he contributed to the National Review and endorsed Barry Goldwater for president. Barry Goldwater. For this apostasy, critics have consigned most of Dos Passos’ post-U.S.A. writings to oblivion.Filled with fresh insights and new information, the eleven essays contained in Dos Passos's Transatlantic Chronicling do full justice to this difficult writer's unique genius. In part, this volume seeks to cast new light on Dos Passos’ writing during the interwar period by decentering U.S.A., his masterpiece, and privileging Manhattan Transfer, as well as lesser-known works such as Rosinante to the Road Again (1922), In All Countries (1934) and The Garbage Man (1926). At the same time, the collection grapples with some big questions: What kind of writer is Dos Passos exactly? What is the relationship between his fiction and history? And to what extent do his political views shape his work?In response to the last of these questions, several of the contributors define Dos Passos as (to use his own term) a “chronicler”—a writer, in other words, committed to capturing what he called the “raw structure of history,” as opposed to imposing an abstract ideological agenda. Most of the chapters examine specific bits and pieces of this “raw structure,” everything from burial practices during the Great War to New York fashion customs in the 1920s, and consider their significance within Dos Passos’ allusion-saturated texts. The writer's relationship with Spain, both before and after the outbreak of war in 1936, emerges as a major focus as well.Coeditors Aaron Shaheen and Rosa María Bautista-Cordero have done an excellent job curating the collection—there isn't a single weak chapter—and with fewer than a dozen essays in a book of nearly 300 pages, each author has the room to fully develop an argument, a rare luxury in an edited volume. All the essays are well-written, dense in a good way, and mercifully free of theoretical opacity. Some are superb. These include Bautista-Cordero's important reevaluation of Adventures of a Young Man (1939), one of Dos Passos’ most maligned texts; Alberto Lena's illuminating comparison of Manhattan Transfer with King Vidor's silent film The Crowd; Lauro Iglesias Quandrado's meditation on the narratological “idiosyncrasies” displayed in Manhattan Transfer (his essay goes furthest in answering the big questions at the heart of this volume); Jessica E. Teague's detailed consideration of Dos Passos’ exposure to Soviet theater and his aborted ambitions as a playwright; and William Brevda's tour de force reading of straw hats and Arrow collars (exceptionally freighted signifiers, as it turns out) in Manhattan Transfer, the finest essay in the collection.My only disappointment: I wish the editors had included an essay on Three Soldiers (1921), an early milestone in Dos Passos’ development as a literary “chronicler” and one that would doubtless have yielded new meaning if addressed within the framework of this fine collection.

John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer (1925) is one of the first American novels to significantly engage the figure of the skyscraper in modern New York City. Throughout the novel, Dos Passos employs the physical and symbolic structure of the skyscraper to examine the effects of capitalism on the spaces of the burgeoning metropolis at the beginning of the twentieth century. In the text, Dos Passos utilizes skyscrapers to critique the capitalist and overly individualized spaces of the city and the dangers that these spaces pose to the novel’s characters. The critique in the text is compounded by the fact that Dos Passos’ characters find solace neither in the opening vertical spaces of the city nor in the public spaces of the street. In the end, the novel’s characters are faced with alienating and dehumanized spaces in the hostile and predatory metropolis.

Chapter 2 begins by testing the claims of prophetic insight with respect to the Great Crash that have been made for three novels of 1925. Most famously attributed to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, such prescient powers have also been assigned to two directly comparable, as well as contemporaneous, novels: John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer and Nathan Asch’s The Office. The chapter argues that claims of this kind are not without some underlying substance, to the extent that the novels in question simultaneously draw attention to the prospect of future crisis in the financial markets and acknowledge their own liability to be read in the aftermath of such an event. The chapter considers how Fitzgerald evokes a surprisingly broad array of aspects of American financial history past and present; how Dos Passos draws on a rhetoric of biblical prophecy and urban ruin; and how Asch channels an avant-garde aesthetic of speed and futurity—all to signal the US stock market’s persistent and ongoing propensity for violent boom and bust. The chapter subsequently explores the central role that the Great Crash played in Fitzgerald’s imagination in the 1930s, considering a range of nonfictional writings, as well as plans and drafts for unrealized projects, and focusing particularly closely on the intertwining of familial and financial anxieties in the classic post-crash story “Babylon Revisited” (1931). The chapter concludes by reflecting on the Wall Street Crash’s suggestively indirect depiction in Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night (1934) and Dos Passos’s The Big Money (1936).

Book reviews

The remarkable originality of Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer (1925) has been long recognized. From Sinclair Lewis's early appreciative essay onwards, the novel's significant advance over Dos Passos's three previous novels, its break with constricting convention, and its technical boldness have been repeatedly noted. Dos Passos's broad concern remains that of the traditional realist–the heavily itemized portraiture of urban social life–but in Manhattan Transfer that portraiture is energized and given fresh impact by new modes of description and new principles of narrative structure. These innovations have customarily been traced to the influence of modernist experimentation in the novel, and Dos Passos's debts to James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Marcel Proust have been established. Yet an explanation of Dos Passos's conception of form which confines itself to literary modernism alone must be regarded as incomplete. Dos Passos's heightened visual sense and the marked painterly and cinematic qualities of his work indicate that it is to the twentieth-century pioneers in the visual arts, as well as to the pioneers in fiction, that we must look for formative influences.Dos Passos enjoyed a lifelong interest in the visual arts. After Harvard he went to Spain to study architecture, and at one time as a young man he was unsure whether to choose fine art or literature as his main avenue of creative expression.

Walter Benjamin, Advertising, and the Utopian Moment in Modernist Literature Ben Moore (bio) In a well-known entry in Convolute G of the Arcades Project (“Exhibitions, Advertising, Grandville”), Walter Benjamin describes the violent impression made upon him many years before by an advertisement for Bullrich Salz seen on a streetcar in Berlin, as well as his loss of memory of all details of this advert and their sudden return in full force upon seeing a sign bearing the words “Bullrich Salz” in the window of a “miserable café” in the same city.1 No one since seems to have been able to locate the original advert—Max Pensky admits he spent ten years searching for it—but it is described by Benjamin as follows: In the foreground, a horse-drawn wagon was advancing across the desert. It was loaded with sacks bearing the words “Bullrich Salt.” One of these sacks had a hole, from which salt had already trickled a good distance on the ground. In the background of the desert landscape, two posts held a large sign with the words “Is the Best.” But what about the trace of salt down the desert trail? It formed letters, and these letters formed a word, the word “Bullrich Salt.” Was not the preestablished harmony of a Leibniz mere child’s play compared to this tightly orchestrated predestination in the desert? And didn’t that poster furnish an image for things that no one in this mortal life has yet experienced? An image of the everyday in Utopia? (Arcades, 174).2 A better translation of this final question, whose German original is “ein Gleichnis für den Alltag der Utopie,” is “A likeness for the everydayness of utopia?,” as provided by Susan Buck-Morss in The Dialectics of Seeing (1989).3 As well as “likeness,” Gleichnis can be translated as “image,” “allegory,” or “parable,” so the [End Page 769] precise nature of the link between the poster and utopia, which Benjamin in any case phrases as a question, remains open. It is the nature of this relationship, and where it might lead in terms of analyzing advertising in modernist literature, that I aim to explore in this article.4 Benjamin’s fragment has been analyzed by critics in various ways, including by Ruth Iskin as part of a discussion of late nineteenth-century poster design; the authors of Benjamin’s Arcades: An unGuided Tour, who read it as an “imitation of Proust” akin to surrealism in the way it tears objects from their normal setting and juxtaposes them with others in order to illuminate the everyday; Esther Leslie, who also reads it as a Proustian involuntary memory, which connects personal and collective history and is dependent on the modern city as a place of meeting points and thresholds; and Max Penksy, whose extended reading associates it with Benjamin’s Berlin texts of childhood memory, as does Leslie, and positions it as a combination of dialectical image and commodity image in which heterogeneous times “telescope together” and “intermingle image-contents of a primaeval past with those of a utopian future” (Buse et al., Benjamin’s Arcades, 113; “Geheimmittel,” 123).5 While I find these analyses useful, especially Pensky on the play of presence and absence in the passage, I want to move away from previous readings and instead take Benjamin’s fragment as a spur to explore what I would like to call the “utopian moment” in modernist literature. I focus not on Marcel Proust or French surrealist writing, but on a selection of English and American modernist texts concerned with urban life, in which advertising confronts city dwellers with something like the everyday utopianism Benjamin describes. The examples I choose come from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer (1925), Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), and Hope Mirrlees’s Paris: A Poem (1919). The politics of these texts varies (though it is worth noting that both Dos Passos and Wright were involved with communism at the time of writing), but all of them share the insight that when advertising suddenly and unexpectedly writes or rewrites the urban landscape, it turns language into a set of hieroglyphs...

This article explores the specificities and psychological effects of urban noise in John Dos Passos’ novel Manhattan Transfer. It seeks to elucidate how Manhattan’s soundscape is represented on the novel’s formal and content level and how it assumes an agency in its own right, when ceaselessly enveloping the novel’s characters. The city’s specific acoustic regimes, therefore, prove much more instrumental in constituting the characters as modern subjects than other sensorial dimensions. Within a thus enacted metropolitan panacousticon, the urban subject is crucially defined not only as a noise source in itself, but as always already overheard by a supposed other.

Although nature and culture may in principle be distinguished from each other, the very instant that natural phenomena are verbalized they seem to become suffused with cultural associations. This article looks at the evocation of nature in literary texts by John Dos Passos and Robinson Jeffers that envision the non-human environment in fundamentally different ways, yet both draw extensively on cultural discourse to describe it. My first text, Dos Passos’ novel Manhattan Transfer (1925), suggests that a distinction between nature and culture in the portrayal of the modern city is impossible to draw; the imagery of the narrative deliberately amalgamates that which is generated by nature and that which is constructed by culture. A great many poems by Jeffers, Dos Passos’ contemporary, seek on the other hand to express the diametrically opposite theme, namely that the natural world and human civilization are essentially disparate – to the detriment of the latter. A closer examination of the language of Jeffers’ poetry reveals, however, that such a distinction between the worlds of nature and culture is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to uphold.

Book reviews

"To Get to the Center"Recovering the Marginalized Woman in John Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer Paul Petrovic (bio) The towering cityscape in John Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer (1925) acts as an oppressive force that keeps citizens under continuous surveillance by the patriarchal authority of bourgeois capitalism. Although Jimmy Herf breaks from the dehumanizing control of New York City, most of the novel's female characters do not. Ellen Thatcher typifies the plight of these women in being a victim of a patriarchal surveillance that turns private suffering into a spectacle for public consumption. Controlling external forces are, of course, nothing new in naturalistic fiction, though, as Townsend Ludington argues, in Dos Passos's novels "not everyone is completely bound by an unrelenting determinism," Jimmy Herf being a prime example (39). In Claude-Edmonde Magny's reading, we identity with Herf because he rebels against and flees the forces that would bind him: "Jimmy is … the central character—the only character except for Ellen who is not peripheral, the only one in whose favor the author mobilizes our sympathy" (108). There is, however, another character who deserves our sympathy despite being peripheral—Anna Cohen. The daughter of Jewish immigrants, Anna earns her living variously as a taxi dancer, a lunch-counter waitress, a prostitute, and a seamstress. In all of these jobs, she is under the controlling surveillance of employers, mostly men, and even in her love affairs cannot escape patriarchal authority. In the novel's last chapter, she is badly burned in a fire in the dress shop where she works, an event that seems to signify her ultimate victimhood. Yet in the previous scenes in which she figures, Anna has revealed a growing resistance to the forces that would confine her, and even though she last appears only as an object of Ellen's meditation on the fire, that meditation prophesies the way horrific scarring may bring Anna economic power and free her from the male gaze. [End Page 152] Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish offers a lens through which to understand Anna Cohen's relation to the world of Manhattan Transfer. In tracing the history of judicial punishment from the early reliance on public torture and execution through the reforms in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to the current prison system, Foucault takes Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon (1787) as defining the modern "generalized model of functioning," or "way of defining power relations in terms of the everyday life of men" (205). Bentham's original Panopticon was a prison consisting of a central tower from which prisoners in a surrounding ring of cells could be continuously observed and studied. The genius of the design is that its power to discipline does not require an actual observer, only the visible presence of the tower in which the observer's presence cannot be verified: "Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so" (201). When this model was adopted by numerous other institutions and disciplines, the result was what Foucault terms the modern "panoptic society" (301) in which "surveillance" (217) is the primary "modality of power" (221). "Is it surprising," Foucault asks, "that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?" (228). The modern city is a sort of vast prison, a "carceral city" in which there is no central observer, only "a network of diverse elements—walls, space, institutions, rules, discourse" (308), all of which combine "to exercise a power of normalization" (308). Foucault's notion that "space" is an element in the power relations of the modern city finds support in the work of psychologist Steve Pile. "Space," Pile asserts, "is produced under the tyranny of these intersecting, aligned lines of Power: masculinity, the bourgeois family, and capitalism" (221). In Manhattan Transfer, who occupies what space is controlled by a masculine vision predicated on commerce and on the domination and segregation of the weak. Any movement away from this concept of the...

Unreal Cities East and West: Bely's 'Petersburg' and Dos Passos's 'Manhattan Transfer'

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Manhattan Transfer, John Dos Passos' first important study of urbanindustrial life, owes much to the machine-oriented aesthetic of Italian futurism and other modernistic movements in the visual arts. Utilizing techniques and modes of perception indigenous to the machine age, Dos Passos' sought to express the spirit, rhythms, and structure of modern reality in such a way as to evoke in the reader a sense of involvement and participation in the problems of contemporary society. In its visual directness and sensory immediacy, Manhattan Transfer suggests the influence of photography and the “lively arts” of film and vaudeville. In its overall pattern of compositional contrasts and oppositions, the novel resembles abstract painting and the montage structure of the motion picture. Basic to Dos Passos' outlook is a synoptic or visual concept of reality as a network of dynamically interacting parts. Only by viewing his world as a “system” in which nothing is fully comprehensible in isolation can man realize himself as a responsible individual and direct the energies of the machine toward socially desirable ends.

This essay explores a surprising route through which American modernism was reformulated internationally by a key writer of the young New York left, John Dos Passos, in the teens and twenties. It argues that Dos Passos's trips to Spain and the many publications that resulted from them provided the model for his ideal of an anti-nationalist, anti-capitalist literature of a diverse federation of autonomous communities. Against the vision of his father, who joined American imperialists in celebrating the Spanish-American War of 1898, Dos Passos sees Spain's imperial decline and national disintegration as a boon for its flourishing literature, and America's victory as another harmful blow to its culture. That is, he restages the war and inverts its impact through literary commentaries and translations. This inversion then informs several of his own works, too, including A Pushcart to the Curb (1922) and Manhattan Transfer (1925).

T HROUGHOUT HIS ACTIVE LITERARY LIFE John Dos Passos was intrigued by the pull of history on the mind of modern man. As a youth at Harvard he felt the fascination of Froude, Gibbon, and Pater; and in student essays he held up Renaissance culture and agrarian Spain as norms against which America's worship of industrial progress might be questioned. During the first decade of his literary career, however, the demands of historical understanding did not figure in his major creative work. His two antiwar novels, One Man's Initiation-I917 (1920) and Three Soldiers (1921), portray in the romantic vein the artist's alienation from society; Streets of Night (1923), begun while he was still an undergraduate, reflects the emotional consequences of his own childhood; and Manhattan Transfer (I925), written after he had heard the antihistoricist groan in Joyce's Ulysses, dramatizes urban estrangement through its esthetically discontinuous presentation of characters without personal histories. In USA the historical dimension first emerges in Dos Passos's work, both as a structural device and as a mode of comprehension. In this trilogy, which spans the years between the turn of the century and the economic crash of 1929, Dos Passos develops from youth to adulthood the lives of a series of interrelated characters, allowing the stream of events headlined in the Newsreel section to sweep them along. History as well as society becomes a protagonist. In the biographical sketches, history often speaks as the ironic chorus of conscience, in the voices of Debs, LaFollette, Veblen, and John Reed. In the biographies, however, history is all memory, studies of moral heroes who are actually noble losers, masterless men who, though not deceived by society, have nevertheless been defeated by the crushing might of historical events. Their lives sug-