John Dos Passos:
The Novelist as Social
Historian
Dr. A. P. Trivedi
Exploring American
social history has been one of the most absorbing and exciting features of Das Passos’ writings. His ambition to encompass in fiction the
whole history of his time inspired him to remain a continuously inventive
writer and led him to engage in a ceaseless literary quest. He turned to
examine the social currents in American culture that produced the new form of
novel and demonstrated, with laudable success, how the novelist can willingly
become, without neglecting the literary aspects of his craft, a social
historian; how he can become as much the centre of
attraction as the thing he is reporting on. He thought that the best writers of
fiction are those who are gifted with the capacity for tremendous ploughing up of the past and present. In a sense, they can
be even superior to historians in making people and events seem real and vivid.
Dos Passos
felt that in the career of every great writer there comes a point, which he must recognize like a call of conscience, when he must get
down to writing about the whole truth. He thought that only a great writer
could mould human perception through new modes of communication. That is
exactly what Edmund Wilson thought when he said that the function of the artist
is “to make people see things in a new way, and, therefore, precisely to modify
their consciousness, to make them give things new value”.1 A writer
in Dos Passos’ view is essentially a builder, an architect,
who is to be careful in his choice of material and technique. “Good writing,”
he said, “ has got to be stripped naked. Like in good
architecture, every inch must have something functional to do, must be an
integral part of holding the building up. That doesn’t cut out decoration at
all; it just means that every bit of decoration must mean something”. 2
A writer, who seriously
wanted to be “the architect of history,” naturally turned to formulate new
techniques in order to help shape the contemporary opinion and build up a programme for the conservation of his country’s moral and
spiritual resources which he considered to be the main task of a social
historian. He wrote:
I think there is such a
thing as straight writing … the mind of a generation is its speech. A writer
makes aspects of that speech enduring by putting them into prints. He whittles
at the words and phrases of today and makes of them forms to set the mind of
tomorrow’s generation. That’s history. A writer who writes straight is the architect
of history.3
For this, only an
artistic temperament is not enough. There is a prior requirement of a perceptibility, an insight into the relations of things,
and an inventive synthesising ability. The writer
must possess an exceptional sensitivity to his environment and a feeling for
the need to activate his fellow-men. Only then the works of art can affect the
course of social history. If we think of art as a meaningful arrangement of
truth and think of its effects as a heightening of the awareness of that truth,
then the writer must evolve all appropriate formal pattern
for his writings. Offering his credo that would be valid for all serious
writing, Dos Passos wrote:
The first duty of a man
trying to plot a course for clear thinking is to produce words that really apply to
the situations he is trying to describe. I don’t mean a fresh set of neologisms
devised. Only through a fresh approach, may be through a variety of approaches,
can the terms through which we try to understand the events that govern our
lives be reminded to the point of ringing true agaln.4
The search for order and
a meaningful pattern is then the primal artistic concern as manifested in all
Dos Passos’ major works. Underlying his search for an
artistic pattern, there has been a search for order in a society beset by chaos
and incoherence. A work of art is for him a product specific to the modes of
living in a given society. He, therefore, sees a dialectical relationship
between form and content, between the work of art and society.
Dos Passos
seems to agree with Balzac who said that the role of the novelist should be
that of a secretary who writes down what society dictates to him. Balzac
thought that a novelist, by making a selection from the important social events
of his time and by presenting a true picture of the world in which his
characters live and struggle, could go much deeper into social reality than the
historian. Dos Passos had the necessary insight into
and knowledge of the events in the national life, he knew the historical
background of the change of social temper. Max Lerner considers him as one of
the few contemporary novelists “who are truly literate” and well-equipped for
exploring their potentials for perception and expression. Lerner writes about
Dos Passos. “He knows things. He knows the force of
institutions and mass ideas. He knows by what impulsion people are moved; he
knows what are just things in a social system and what
things are derivative; he knows the ways and speech of the common people. He is
part of the
The question of the
relation of fiction to history came to Dos Passos specially from his reading of Gibbon whose approach to
history and to social evolution – to view the whole fabric of civilization as
part of a great, continuous process – led him to adopt the same approach to his
art. When Jay Pignatelli,
the central character of his novel, Chosen Country, plans to work on a
book entitled, Decline of The West, “only more
like Gibbon than Spengler” he simply reveals his
author’s attitude towards Gibbon’s sensitivity to social change. Further more,
Dos Passos was more impressed with Gibbon’s history
than with the unwritten one of his own generation, and like the young boy in Chosen Country he
was willing to overtax his eyes” to “read the fine print of Froude”
because of fascination with his biographies (the raw material of history in the lives of great men).
Dos Passos’
veneration of Thorstein Veblen
and the Spanish novelist Pio Baroja
relates his own philosophy of literature which considers the function of the
novelist and a social scientist as one, that is “to put the add test to existing institutions,”
to “peel the onion of doubt” and “to ponder the course of history.” Veblen as social scientist and Baroja
as novelist have much in common. Dealing with Baroja’s
concept of art as social criticism, Dos Passos
concludes that “in the end it is rather natural history than dramatic creation” 7 that is very near the
highest sort of artistic creation. Dos Passos always
interpreted the American history and character in terms of his art. The term
“architect of history,” therefore, “defines” says John H. Wrenn,
the dual intention, artistic and historical of Dos Passos
“persistent criticism of people and events. All of his art is criticism, and
all of it is historically oriented”.8 “History”, Dos Passos observed,
“is continually being remade to suit the mood of the present and the immediate
past.” He considered history more alive and more interesting than fiction
because “a story”, in his opinion, “is the day dream of a single man, while
history is a mass invention, the day dream of a race.” A
valid work of history, according to him, “permanently enriches the national
consciousness” by providing us “some standard to measure ourselves”.
9
From the point of view
of experiments in form and structural devices, Manhattan Transfer is the first important
novel that has transmuted many of the themes in sociological criticism and
historical interpretation of events. The imaginative freshness and trailblazing
originality of the book is manifest everywhere. It does not follow the
conventional narrative pattern. Here the writer is seen at his best developing
a new form for his fiction as a vehicle of social commentary. Since the novel
is intended a reportage of life in a big American city, he has attempted to
record the fleeting world the way the motion picture film records it. By
contrast, juxtaposition and swift movements of scenes or moments, the author
has built reality into his own vision. And he has done it so efficiently that
he is never at a loss to people his world, and already his world has come to an
existence of its own in the reader’s mind.
Manhattan Transfer presents an excellent
image of metropolitan life, “perhaps the best that has ever been achieved”
10 by an American novelist.
The Camera Eye of the novel ranges restlessly across the city and catches
glimpses of urban life in most of its various aspects. There is the city with its crowds,
skyscrapers, dance-halls, lunch rooms, renting apartments, tenement fires, dice
games, beggars, criminals, vagabonds, thieves, pimps, whores, prostitutes,
homosexuals and perverts. Through a kaleidoscopic succession of scenes, in
which a huge number of sketchily drawn characters from nearly every social
stratum of the city are fleetingly glimpsed, we are made familiar with
distinctive modes of living and patterns of behaviour.
Men and women from various walks of life, with their racial conflicts and other
social dimensions, suggest only multiplicity, anonymity and scatteredness,
all characterizing the urban milieu. But in telling their stories, there is no
trace of any continuous story; there is no narrative in the ordinary sense of
the word. All scenes and episodes are broken and scattered. It is a kind of
patchwork technique by which
the writer manipulates his material and weaves a pattern of life that is
immediately suited to his task and purpose – to expose the conditions of urban
life.
The emptiness of society
and culture as revealed through individual lives is put in contrast with the
massive details used to portray the external appearance of the city. Through a
kaleidoscopic use of words and symbols, the author brings to the reader’s mind
a world of an immense and puzzling variety of things and material, making him
suddenly feel that his senses are all but directly in touch with the actual
life. And the actual life that the author is depicting in Manhattan Transfer
is that of instability, of hectic movement and of dizzying sensations. In
the dazzling pace with which events and scenes pass before our eyes, there
presides a historical consciousness of a more haunting, more implicable movement, revealed through various symbols and
images.
The
The style of
Dos Passos’
canvas in U. S. A. is very large and his method correspondingly bold and
strenuous. Its subject matter is the whole nation, “the speech of the people”. 12 As a work of fiction, it
illustrates the qualities of the country it has taken as its theme and has
rightly been called “a metaphor for its subject”. 13 Its three volumes lay
bare a full cross-section of American life during well over a third of the
century, revealing its dismay, decay and disease as the writer saw it. Their titles suggest
what he wishes to do. The first volume, The 42nd Parallel, begins with
an exploratory journey around the country. It shows how Americans lived their
lives during the thirty years preceding World War I, and how the whole complex
of American life, under its economic imperialism and the lure of big business,
prepared to rush into the great world crisis. The second volume, Nineteen Nineteen, deals with the total impact of the war and
war culture on American mind. And the final volume, The Big Money, carries the story through
the 1920’s and into the 1930’s, the period of boom capitalism. Taken together, these
three novels, then, cover the entire war experience – before the war, during
the war and after the war – “raising the experience of an era and a
civilization to the level of a symbolic form”. 14
Since Dos Passos was quite willing to take a long look at the world he
lived in and the historical forces that shaped it, he drew his characters from
a variety of backgrounds. They are shown moving through broad areas of time,
through a variety of social milieus and historical experiences, and their
actions are seen against a sweeping historical background which is intended to
represent a documentary rather than fictional truth. Their life stories furnish
very important material from the standpoint of social history and the
novelist’s vision of the forces that shape it. Here we get a picture of the vast and intricate pattern
of American life, its shifting trends and its moral dilemmas.
The fictional characters
in these novels do not have, as in Manhattan Transfer, a centralized
plot but each one of them has a continuous and complete history from childhood. Each tells us something
different about society. The narrative method employed to deal with the stories
of these characters is something like the sociological survey technique. This
has enabled the writer to cover the whole information about a particular
character with astonishing rapidity and ease. A detailed biographical chronicle
of each character is furnished accurately as a complete case history. And when
these men and women are finally brought together, the readers realize that what
they have been witnessing throughout is the making of contemporary American
society. 15
In order to give his
portrait of a nation the fullest possible depth and scope, Dos Passos introduced along with the fictional narrative,
several novel devices such as the “Newsreel”, “Biography” and “Camera Eye.” The
“Newsreel” and “Biography” have been used to pinpoint the actual historical
moment and illuminate the author’s meaning. The ‘Newsreel” is introduced at
intervals, sandwitched in between the sections of the
life histories of various fictional characters. Made up of newspaper headings,
speeches and snatches of popular songs, the newsreel sections depict a picture
of the mass consciousness, furnishing a backdrop against which the individual lives
are enacted. Having both fiction and atmospheric value, they serve as a means
to establish the climate of opinion by recording the political and historical
events, social catastrophe and casual human happenings, scandals and crimes,
all of which help the author in presenting the chronicle of humanity at work.
The effect of such a device is to make the past appear suddenly and sizzlingly actual.
The second device
comprises a series of interspersed biographies of eminent contemporary
Americans. The biographies of these outstanding men, who summed up and
expressed in their lives the main forces of their time, show how they all are
hampered, stunted or perverted by the same commercial society in which all men and women
including the fictional characters of the novel are submerged. Most of these
biographies deal with the lives of men who were among the heroes and martyrs of
the working class movement, who looked around, thought critically and developed
their abilities to restore the meaning Americans had lost. The brief sketches
of these men have a profound symbolic meaning for the author; they enable him
to link himself most closely with their ideals and establish their judgement and ideological value systems inside his fiction.
Finally, there comes the
device of the “Camera Eye” that turns the searchlight of the author’s own
intense brooding gaze at various events and lives being described. This device
has a formal and structural value that helps the author in extending the
intended meaning to the outermost limits of suggestion. Here the author is
“plunged into the contrary kind of experience, that which starts in the
subconscious, in the complex self-awareness of the individual”. 16 Incidents used in these
Camera Eye passages are mostly autobiographical and come out of the author’s
own stream of consciousness. It is a sort of subjective response of a solitary
observer to what is going on in the world at large. In these sections the
author lets his mind wander over his own past in order to show his relationship
to the America he is writing about.
With all these
structural devices then. Dos Passos is able to offer
his vision of social history, interpreting and potentially altering, in a
redemptive manner, its meaning within American experience. These particular
devices have intensified his power of observation and understanding, giving him
greater sensitivity to the world and people around him. As a novelist of
society, Dos Passos wanted to achieve the highest
degree of objectivity by withdrawing himself as narrator and allowing the
events to speak for themselves. The reportorial techniques of his novel, the
mixture of real and fictive persons, all speak for his need to keep his link
with actualities on the pain of being lost in the world. That is what Arthur Mizner finds in his writing. He says:
Most of the time,
however, Dos Passos is a social novelist and the
social novelist is completely unacquainted with this thin-skinned and
tingling-fingered death’s head in glasses. It is difficult not to feel that Dos
Passos is a man who found himself confronted by two irreconcilable
senses of life, his personal and public, and resolved his difficulty by an act of the will,
forcing his main attention onto a rigidly public sense of life and allowing his
personal sense its expression only on limited occasions, in a form that
carefully separates them from the central activity In his fiction. 17
The role of an artist
who wants to deal with social history should be to relate what we see to what
has gone before in history and to what may be expected to come after. He should
be able to discover the results of ideals in contemporary society and trace
them to their sources with bold imaginative expression. Does Passos looked, of course, at the world that was passing but
his observations proved to be of considerable importance for others who were
trying to understand the dilemmas of modern life. His deep interest in people
and a curiosity about life have always been at the centre
of his artistic creation; his passion for innovation, for discovery, has always
had a sharp edge. This is what has kept him moving on. The novelist who is so
deeply conscious of the human condition has surely a great historical mission;
and if he succeeds in his
mission, he cannot but accentuate and intensify man’s awareness about his
relationship to his times. In Dos Passos’ opinion,
this attempt, the enlargement and modification of human awareness, is an
essential function of art.
1 Edmund Wilson, “Are Artists People?” The New
Masses (January 1927), p. 8.
2 Quoted in Herbert Gold, “The Literary Lives or
John Dos Passos.” Saturday Review V. 1 (Sept.
11, 1973), p. 34.
3 Dos Passos,
Introduction, Three Soldiers (New York: Modern Library, 1932). pp.
VII-VIII.
4 Dos Passos, Foreword to
William F. Buckley Jr’s Up From Liberalism (First
Honour Book Edition, 1965), pp. VII-VIII.
5 Max Lerner, Ideas are Weapons: The History
and Uses of Ideas (New York: The Viking Press, 1939), p. 288.
6 Dos Passos, Chosen
Country (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1951), p. 422.
7 Dos Passos. Rosinante to the Road Again (George H. Doran
Co., 1922), pp. 93-94.
8 John H. Wrenn, John Dos Passos (Bombay:
Popular Prakashan, 1961), p. 149.
9 Dos Passos, “A Great
American.” New Masses (December, 1927).
10 Harry Hartwick, The
Foregrounds of American Fiction (New York: American Book Company, 1934).
pp. 284-85.
11 Max: Lerner, Ideas are Weapons: The History and
Uses of Ideas (New York: The Viking Press, 1939), p. 286.
12 Dos Passos. U. S. A.
(The 42nd Parallel) (New York: The Modern Library. 1937). p. IX.
13 Leo Gurko, “John Dos Passos’ U. S. A.: A 1930’s Spectacular” in David Madden, ed., Proletarian
Writers of the Thirties (London: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1968), p. 48.
14 Robert B. Spiller, The Third Dimension (New
York: The Macmillan Co., 1965), p. 165.
15 See Edmund Wilson, “Dahlberg,
Dos Passos and Wilder”. The Shores of Light (New
York: Farrer, Straus and Young. Inc. 1953), p. 448.
16 Robert Spiller. The Third Dimension. p.
164.
17 Arthur Mizner, Sense
of Life in the Modern Novel (London: Heinemann, 1963), pp. 148-49.