John Dos Passos's Transatlantic Chronicling: Critical Essays on the Interwar Years

Abstract

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.