‘This man is looking for a gesture’: John Dos Passos’s Transcultural and Transnational Views about History and Literature in "Rosinante to the Road Again"

Abstract

This interdisciplinary essay analyzes John Dos Passos’s travel book Rosinante to the Road Again (1922) from a Jamesonian perspective, focusing on the implicit dialectical interaction between creativity and the totality of history, the role of the modernist utopian illusion and the quest for return to an Edenic past, the cosmopolitan expatriate individual as a fundamental part of a historical context, and the implications of the literary form in relation to a concrete textual tradition or movement. For this purpose, the analysis draws on Jameson’s The Modernist Papers and The Political Unconscious to establish a dialectical criticism that investigates how the literary form is engaged with a material historical situation. Therefore, the Spanish socio-historical reality depicted in Rosinante becomes a symbol of Dos Passos’s search for the return to the mythic Arcadia. In his transcultural and transnational quest for the Spanish gesture, Dos Passos was searching how to define his own unstable hybrid modernist identity in the context of Spanish history and literature. As a result, Rosinante becomes a sort of paradigmatic modernist epic in which the American writer experiments with the literary motif of the journey as a form of self-exploration. His temporary expatriate condition, and the reality of being an American with Portuguese roots, determined his need for a more Edenic and epic culture far from the limitations of the American urban industrialization and materialism.