From Constantinople to the South Caucasus: Deciphering the urban landscape in John Dos Passos’s travel memoir “Orient Express”

Abstract

This article examines a highly-regarded but little-studied work of the major American novelist John Dos Passos, the travel memoir Orient Express (1927), the account of a 1922 journey from Constantinople, through the South Caucasus and through Iran and Iraq to the Levant. Situating Orient Express within the development of Dos Passos’s distinctive brand of experimental, modernist prose culminating in the U.S.A. trilogy (1930–1937), attention is drawn to the visual and auditory landscapes of the text. Dos Passos’s use of various modernist devices in his portrayal of Near Eastern cities — including the use of overlapping perspectives, interacting planes of light and color, the observer-in-motion and the superimposition of real and imagined city landscapes — approach what has been termed the “proto-cubist” or “proto-expressionist” effect typical of his urban American novels. Orient Express is also characterized by its unique auditory landscape, a patchwork of overheard speech which prefigures Dos Passos’s mature conception of a fragmentary, “objective” art in which authorial agency consists primarily in ordering various strands of external discourse. These verbal and material planes, image and history, intersect in a crucial meditation on material artifacts abandoned by their owners in the wake of the Red Army’s invasion of Georgia, which reflects a conception of the “the writer’s vital role in opposing the dehumanizing impact of mechanization,” and provides important context for the much remarked-upon transition in Dos Passos’s political views toward the end of the 1930s.