Radicalism in Form and Content in Dos Passos’ The 42nd Parallel

 

 

     The three novels of John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. Trilogy on my shelves had not been opened in decades, but I was not the only reader neglecting their author.  As far back as 1961 critic John Wrenn opened his biography of Dos Passos by asking “What’s happened to John Dos Passos?” [1]  Many are now unfamiliar with the writer whom Sartre lauded as “the greatest writer of our time” and the work that Edmund Wilson said “may well turn out to be the most important that has yet been produced by any American of Dos Passos’ generation” [2].  A novel which was named to the Modern Library’s list of the one hundred most important novels of the twentieth century has for many little more than historical interest.

     Whatever his own merits, Dos Passos’ reputation may have suffered from a double-edged extra-literary handicap.  He was most certainly a leftist writer of the ‘thirties, though some critics strive to play down his political engagement [3].  Oddly, though vulgar Marxist criticism abounds today under a variety of methodological names and artists are held to a politically defined standard of behavior even in their personal lives, the proletarian novels of the Depression are at a discount in the literary marketplace, due in part to the tendency toward reductive simplistic portrayals by some leftist fiction writers.  Today’s taste is likely to reflect a counterbalancing preference for experimental avant-garde techniques such as those very different strategies employed by, say, Gertrude Stein, Vladimir Nabokov, and James Merrill.  A reader with a taste for elegant obscurity is unlikely to tolerate tales of put-upon workers. 

     Furthermore, Dos Passos’ innovations which so impressed early readers of the U. S. A. trilogy strike the twenty-first century reader as shallow.  To Alfred Kazin, who wrote the introduction  to my 1969 Signet classic edition, he was alone among his cohort in his exploitation of “radical technique, the language of Joyce, and ‘the religion of the word’” [3].  According to Kazin Dos Passos confronted the nastiness of modern capitalism not with social protest but with art.  His energy arises not from social protest and the hopes for a better world but from an aesthete’s Lost Generation “disenchantment” and a resulting retreat into aestheticism.  Similarly, he was primarily to Wrenn the creator of “brilliant technical innovations” [4].

     A contemporary reader may find it strange to see Dos Passos classed with Joyce as an experimenter.  It is true that The 42^nd Parallel is not a linear narration; it is, rather five people’s stories provided a chapter at a time, interspersed with brief biographies of culturally significant figures such as Debs, Big Bill Haywood, and Thomas Edison, and two other sorts of passages.  The first of these, “The Camera’s Eye,”  probably the basis for Kazin’s mentioning Joyce, contains autobiographical sketches done in a very loose stream-of-consciousness (all in lower case to emphasize the self-consciously experimental character of the writing).  The second, “Newsreel,” contains fragments from the Chicago Tribune interspersed with popular song lyrics and other materials, reminiscent of techniques in Eliot’s “The Wasteland” or Pound’s Cantos. 

     The principal characters are defined in terms reflecting economic class.  Thus Mac is a lumpenproletarian Wobbly with the interests of the entire working class in mind while J. Ward Moorehouse is a public relations consultant seeking only his own enrichment.  Likewise, most of the featured historical figures are politically significant: on the one hand there are two socialists (Eugene Debs under the title “The Lover of Mankind” and Big Bill Haywood) and two representatives of Progressive formations (William Jennings Bryan and Robert LaFollette).  Balancing these Americans who sought to benefit the masses are profiteers like the notoriously anti-union Andrew Carnegie and pioneer imperialist in Mesoamerica Minor Keith [5]. 

     While this arrangement of the text into four kinds of writing would ideally coalesce into a unified vision by the novel’s end, the memoirs (“The Camera’s Eye”) have very little relation to the main narratives and the “Newsreel” sections often seem even more tenuously linked to any governing pattern that would lend each fragment significance.  They sometimes approach incoherence in themselves.  Following the headlines “PLUMBER HAS HUNDRED LOVES” and “BRINGS MONKEYS HOME,” for instance, one reads “missing rector located losses in U. S. crop report let baby go naked if you want it to be healthy if this mystery is ever solved you will find a woman at the bottom of it said Patrolman E. B. Garfinkle events leading up to the present war run continuously back to the French Revolution.”  The verbal sequence scarcely seems to hang together. 

     The most consistent themes are clearly the injustice of capitalism and the appeal of the socialist alternative.  The reader might well regard Dos Passos as engagé.  He supported Sacco and Vanzetti and was active in the First American Writers Congress of 1935 which had been organized by the Communist Party-dominated League of American Writers.  His visits to first the Soviet Union and then later to Spain did sour him on Stalin’s Comintern, and though he then lived long enough to support Joseph McCarthy, Nixon, and Goldwater, there can be doubt about his active support for a revolutionary alternative in his youth. 

     Critics had, at least since Hauptmann’s The Weavers, questioned whether an entire class or nation can be a satisfactory narrative subject.  Balzac had sought to present an encyclopedic panorama of French society in his Comédie humaine, but his canvas was sufficiently large to allow an accumulation of complex and individualized portraits, while Dos Passos’ characters remain shallow, with neither any single portrait nor the group substantial enough to support novelistic length.  There is little structural patterning in the design of The 42^nd Parallel and indeed in the trilogy as a whole, little in the way of governing image systems or productive ambiguities.  Once Dos Passos’ formula is determined, its completion is largely a matter of filling in the blanks.  Such matters of aesthetic evaluation are not subject to positive proof; at best they accurately convey subjective impressions, but they are quite real in the reading experience and can be decisive in determining a book’s worth.

     The widespread opinion among critics that the quality of Dos Passos’ fiction declined after the U. S. A. trilogy is surely justified, but perhaps the author’s chef d’oeuvre itself may have been overvalued due to its once-fashionable combination of progressive politics and avant-garde literary technique (particularly when the technique is considerably more digestible than, say, Finnegan’s Wake).  Dos Passos deserves, without a doubt, a place among those writers of his era who took to depicting the lives of ordinary Americans.  Following the nineteenth century local color writers like Bret Harte and Sarah Orne Jewett and the next generation such as Sherwood Anderson and Edgar Lee Masters, an efflorescence of leftwing authors, many with Midwestern associations, succeeded.  Nelson Algren is quite correct when he said in 1951  “there has hardly been an American writer of stature who has not come up through the Chicago Palatinate.” [6]  Among the authors he may have had in  mind are Frank Norris 1870-1902, Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser, Floyd Dell, Jack Conroy, James Farrell, and Richard Wright.  While Dos Passos may no longer be considered an artistic genius, as some had thought when U. S. A. was first published, he has a secure place in an important lineage.  The 42^nd Parallel remains worth reading, though I am not motivated to reread its two companion volumes which seem to provide only more quantity of the same content. 

 

  

1.  John Dos Passos, p. 2.

2.  See Sartre’s "John Dos Passos and 1919," reprinted in Literary and Philosophical Essays (1955), translated by Annette Michelson, p. 103 and Wilson’s “Dahlberg, Dos Passos and Wilson,” The Shores of Light, p. 449. 

3.  Alfred Kazin, for instance, in his introduction to the Mentor paperback goes to lengths to defend Dos Passos against the charge of social conscience, saying that he is erroneously assumed to be a “left-wing novelist,” whereas he has in fact always been “detached from all group thinking.”

4.  The 42^nd Parallel, vi.

5.  John Dos Passos, p. 8. 

6.  Three innovators are also included: Thomas Edison, August Steinmetz, and Luther Burbank who might be taken to simply signify technical progress. 

7.  In Chicago: City on the Make, p. 11.  “There has hardly been an American writer of stature who has not come up through the Chicago Palatinate.”  Surely thinking of Frank Norris 1870-1902, Upton Sinclair 1878-1968, Theodore Dreiser 1879-1945, Floyd Dell 1887-1968, Jack Conroy 1899-1990, James Farrell 1904-1979, Richard Wright 1908-1960.  At the same time a cohort of leftist writers, mostly Jewish, such Michael Gold, Max Eastman, and Josephine Herbst, were active in New York City.

Food Taboos

 

     Among the magical strategies people have used to influence unpredictable and uncontrollable elements of life are the observation of taboos.  Often such rules govern the boundaries of the body, with anxiety focused around, on the one hand, materials cast out of the body such as  excrement and the trimmings of hair and nails and, on  the other, food, drink, and medicine taken into the body.  According to Frazer among taboos none “are more numerous or important than the prohibitions to eat certain foods.” (24)

     One of the most widespread food taboos is that against eating meat.  Often rational bases are provided for vegetarianism, and one may well justify a meat-free diet on the grounds of health or the prudent use of resources, though probably the most common explanation is ethical, based on a reluctance to cause pain to other living things.  This moral objection seems weak, though widespread.  Apart from salt everything we eat is organic, and if one does not kill animals, one kills plants.  Further, carnivorous animals are common and presumably blameless.  The necessity that life can live only on life is clearly encoded in nature and is thus for those of theistic sensibilities part of God’s way and for others simply natural.  Were I to die in an open field, in less than a minute insects would begin to gather to dine on my remains, to be followed by scavengers and immense populations of bacteria.  As long as one breathes, and indeed no less afterwards, the cycle of birth and death is inescapable. 

     Indeed, in general food taboos are fundamentally symbolic rather than functional, more likely to be justified by scriptural mandate rather than by practical motives.  Various degrees of vegetarianism are practiced by nearly all Jains and many Seventh Day Adventists, while about a third of Hindus eschew meat, as do substantial numbers of Buddhists and Sikhs, as well as some Rastafarians, Baháʼís, and members of the Nation of Islam.  Past vegetarian cults include Pythagoreans, Manichaeans, and Mazdakist Zoroastrians [1]. 

     Each of these sects could cite authority for their practice.  Some Christian vegetarians would point to Genesis 1:29–31 and Isaiah 11:6–9 as evidence that God originally prescribed vegetarianism (though their carnivorous confrères might counter with Acts 10:10-15 which seems to declare that no meat is ”unclean”).   Buddhist and Jain traditions are more decisive with explicit recommendation  of a meat-free regime, while the Hindu attitude characterizes a meat-free diet as characteristic of spiritual seekers and Brahmins [2].

     Among the best-known food taboos is the Jewish and Muslim prohibition against pork, based on Leviticus 11:7-8 [3].

And the swine, though he divide the hoof, and be clovenfooted, yet he cheweth not the cud; he is unclean to you.  Of their flesh shall ye not eat, and their carcase shall ye not touch; they are unclean to you. 8 And the swine, because it divideth the hoof, yet cheweth not the cud, it is unclean unto you: ye shall not eat of their flesh, nor touch their dead carcase.

     Though in modern times the threat of trichinosis is often alleged as the basis for the prohinition of pork, this motive is not asserted in antiquity.  Maimonides did seek to rationalize the rule, noting that swine will feed on garbage and even excrement, thus compromising a community’s hygiene standards, but did not mention parasites.  Historians have suggested that pigs were inappropriate and unsupportable in the nomadic pastoral lifestyle of the early Jews and, later, Arabic Muslims [4].

    In the Hebrew scripture the categorization of the animal is the critical point: the hog’s foot is divided in two, yet he does not chew the cud.  The structural rule – exclude the anomalous and exceptional – leads to the proscription  of rabbits, camels, horses, and rodents as well as pigs.  Carnivorous birds such as eagles and vultures are considered unclean as are sea animals that lack scales and fins such as oysters.  Insects are not allowed except for the four kinds specified in Leviticus 11:22.  Clearly the motive is cultural definition with an identity unlike that of neighboring peoples, roughly the same reason that the Satmar Hasidim who live ten miles up the road from my house wear payot as they take to be commanded in Leviticus 19:27. 

     The Muslim avoidance of pork surely imitated the Jewish rule, though most of the kashrut regulations were not adopted.  Condemned in the Koran [5], such meat had played only a small role in the diet of the Arabic-speaking people who first adopted Islam just as pork had been rarely consumed by the Jews.  Thus the rule aided cultural definition while at the same time associating the new cult with the prestige of the older religion without untoward economic consequences.

     The Hindu attitude toward cattle is, in a way, opposite.  While Jews and Muslims find hogs to be unclean, even disgusting beasts, Indians idealize cattle, worshipping Kamadhenu, the divine cow of whom every living animal is an incarnation.  Just as the early Arabic-speaking people did eat pork prior to Muhammed, ancient Indians ate beef.  In fact, beef was a prestigious meat in Vedic times, used for sacrifices and the reception of honored guests [6]. 

     Just as the myth of Abraham and Isaac marks the transition from human to animal sacrifice, the story of King Prithu signals the prohibition of beef while allowing the consumption of dairy products.  The Mahabharata [7] relates how this chakravarti, an idealized king as culture hero, succeeded to power at a time when sacrifices were neglected.  Pursuing the earth in the form of a heifer, he agrees to spare her life in exchange for her life-giving milk.

     Vegetables, too, are proscribed for some.  Certain Hindus avoid onions, garlic, and mushrooms, feeling that such foods are tamasic, that is, they induce inertia and are associated with ignorance [8], making the mind sluggish and retarding spiritual advancement.   

    Food taboos may be taken to elaborate extremes, some of which apply only to certain individuals or certain times.  For instance according to Frazer the Egyptian pharaohs ate no meat but goose and veal while Masai chiefs must restrict themselves to milk, honey and goat liver [9].  In Myanmar a popular poster warns against for apparently innocuous combinations such as jelly and coffee or pigeon and pumpkin which are thought to be dangerous, even lethal [10].      

     Cultural reasons alone explain the reluctance of most Europeans to eat insects or horse meat and of virtually all to eat dogs.  The primary significance of such taboos is always symbolic, though other factors may play a role.  Functions, distinguishing one’s group, health, natural pre-existing diet and economics may each play a role, but the fundamental important of food taboos is magical.  The fragility of such beliefs is suggested by the Hawaiian abandonment of taboos following the Battle of Kuamoʻo in 1819.  The indigenous people had already for several decades observed that foreigners who ignored their taboos suffered no ill effects, but many were still astonished when their royal family publicly flouted rules they had scrupulously observed for generations. 

      If food taboos may vanish rapidly, they have also considerable persistence.  Today, while many people continue to follow the traditional taboos they were taught by their parents, others have adopted new ones, which may be equally superstitious in spite of quasi-scientific justifications.  Those seeking to lose weight may seek to avoid fat, or sugar, or carbohydrates, when in fact what us required, according to most experts, is simply smaller quantities of an ordinary diet.  Salt is considered almost poisonous by some.  Avoidance of gluten is widespread as a glance at American supermarket shelves will confirm.  A genuine intolerance for gluten occurs with celiac disease which affects something like one percent of the population, yet a far greater share of Americans, some estimates suggest one-third [11], irrationally feel gluten is unhealthy. 

     Food taboos are generally symbolic in nature, yet they reinforce social realities like identity identification and differentiation whether one’s in-group is Orthodox Jews or New Age food faddists.  For believers they constitute a visible daily reminder of one’s faith while serving as a placebo to induce well-being.  More easily manageable than some human failings, dietary restrictions have proven satisfying and even therapeutic for many, though their efficacy, like all magic power, is entirely symbolic and psychological.   

 

 

 

 

1.  Pythagoras’ views are represented by Ovid in the Metamorphoses XV 60-142 while the Manichean attitude is contained in St. Augustine’s De Natura Boni. 

2.  See, for instance chapter 8 of the Lankavatara Sutra for a Buddhist source and verse 71 of Digambara Amritachandra’s Puruṣārthasiddhyupāya for a Jain authority.  Hindu reservations about meat are expressed in a number of texts, including the Shatapatha Brahmana and the Chāndogya Upaniṣad. 

3.  Repeated in Deuteronomy 14:8.

4.  See Marvin Harris, "6: The Abominable Pig" in The Sacred Cow and the Abominable Pig: Riddles of Food and Culture (1987). 

5.  See 2:173, 16:115, and 6:145.

6.  The Aitareya Brahmana, Book 7, for instance, provides details about such sacrifices. 

7.  In the Drona Parva (Book 7.69) and the Shanti Parva (29.132).  The story appears as well in the Vayu Purana and elsewhere.

8.  Manu 5.5

9. The Golden Bough, 177.

10.  Anders Sandberg and Len Fisher, “Never eat a Pigeon with a Pumpkin: a model for the emergence and fixation of unsupported beliefs,” presented at the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2023, reprinted in revised form as Chapter 30 in Food Rules and Rituals: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2023, ed. Mark McWilliams, p. 294-306.

11.  “One-Third of Americans Are Trying to Avoid Gluten—But Is It the Villain We Think It Is?,” News and Views (summer 2015), NYU Langone Health.

Meredith’s Poetic Novel: Diana of the Crossways

 

 

     My 1917 Modern Library edition  of Diana of the Crossways includes an introduction by Arthur Symons, the critic who shaped readers’ understanding of Symbolist and Decadent poetry.  He maintains that Meredith “breaks every rule” of novel-writing, that he is in fact “essentially a poet, not a novelist.”  To Symons Meredith has written “the most intellectual” English novels as he aims at “something which is the poetry of pure idea.”  He thus writes prose “as if it were poetry, with an endeavour to pack every phrase with imaginative meaning, every sentence, you realise, will be an epigram.”  For him “life recorded becomes, not a new life, but literature about life.” 

     This tendency is particularly pronounced in Diana of the Crossways as the title character is well-known for her epigrams and witty conversational sallies, many reported in the first chapter “Of Diaries and Diarists.”  In describing her, Meredith comments self-reflexively on his own use of such material. 

 

    Drolleries, humours, reputed witticisms, are like odours of roast meats, past with the picking of the joint. Idea is the only vital breath.  They have it rarely, or it eludes the chronicler. To say of the great erratic and forsaken Lady A****, after she had accepted the consolations of Bacchus, that her name was properly signified in asterisks “as she was now nightly an Ariadne in heaven through her God,” sounds to us a roundabout, with wit somewhere and fun nowhere.  Sitting at the roast we might have thought differently.  Perry Wilkinson is not happier in citing her reply to his compliment on the reviewers’ unanimous eulogy of her humour and pathos:—the “merry clown and poor pantaloon demanded of us in every work of fiction,” she says, lamenting the writer's compulsion to go on producing them for applause until it is extremest age that knocks their knees.  We are informed by Lady Pennon of 'the most amusing description of the first impressions of a pretty English simpleton in Paris'; and here is an opportunity for ludicrous contrast of the French and English styles of pushing flatteries—'piping to the charmed animal,' as Mrs. Warwick terms it in another place: but Lady Pennon was acquainted with the silly woman of the piece, and found her amusement in the 'wonderful truth' of that representation.

 

     The initial figure of speech compares wit to the scent of dinner on the fire specifically drawing attention to the ephemeral quality of both phenomena.  Meredith then begins with a variation of the modesty topos by declaring that, since such remarks can only be appreciated in lived experience, his project of recording them must fail.  To test this hypothesis, he proceeds to a particular bon mot concerning “the great erratic and forsaken Lady A****.”  The comment, as it turns out, depends for its effect, not on being present in person, but rather on the anecdote’s written form using asterisks.  Yet this, too, though it is worth recording apparently, he denigrates as possessing “wit somewhere and fun nowhere.”  He realizes his effect as he at the same time denies it.  The first three sentences have required the reader first to compare an impression of cleverness with a smell of dinner cooking, then with a breath.  Wine is allusively called “Bacchus,” asterisks are equated with stars, and drunkenness with theophany, surely a hefty burden of figures of speech for a few lines of prose. 

     He promises no more likely survival for the spirit of Diana’s next quoted witticism, that she must act the “merry clown and poor pantaloon demanded of us in every work of fiction.”  Here she highlights the art of her repartee with allusions to circus and commedia dell’arte performance.  She is said to find it “lamentable” that she must produce such “drolleries” until advanced old age, itself figured concretely as the time that “extremest age” makes the knees knock.  Thus, just as she is shown to be extra clever by her belittling her own conversational abilities, Meredith’s persona strengthens his case for her by denying that his repeating of such lines can have the effect they had when originally spoken.  Still, the author seems to be satisfied at the extent to which he has achieved his desired effect of convincing the reader of Diana’s verbal skills when he mentions another of her satirical comments, one recalled by Lady Pennon, and attests to its “wonderful” effect without even recording what she said.  Here the reader is expected to be impressed by precisely nothing. 

     Though the work scarcely shrinks from themes – it contains perhaps the most explicit feminist thinking of any fiction of its era – Meredith’s primary appeal is in poetry: synaesthesia, figures of speech, and fresh language.  Memories are said to be like cooking odors and asterisks like stars while old age is signified by knock knees and Diana resembles a circus clown.  Apart from the book-long associations of Diana Warwick with the divine huntress, this brief passage contains allusions to Dionysos, Ariadne, and Orpheus, and the theatrical figure of Pantalone.  (In the following paragraph Tacitus is quoted in Latin.)  This dense texture, replete with tropes, foregrounds the verbal medium with less emphasis on the semantic content.  

     After all, what the passage says is that is has no possibility of success, that writing cannot possibly reproduce the moment of lived experience, that in fact lived experience is ineffable and the writer can never hope to convey the feeling of narrated incidents.  Given that denial of language’s ability to mirror life, the writer entertains just as Diana did, by linguistic fireworks and puzzles.  Rhetorical devices such as allusions are showy artifices and every metaphor is a little riddle.  Diana of the Crossways is, as Symons says, “a poetic novel,” and its readers will enjoy the pleasures often associated with poetry.

     In fact Meredith was surely not indifferent to tendentious elements in his tale.  He is quite explicit about his analysis of women’s causes and these were very much in the air as women had, in the generation before the novel’s publication, gained rights to divorce, property ownership, and education, including the medical profession.   Furthermore, the book is in part a roman à clef based on a scandal involving the Honorable Mrs. Norton, Lord Melbourne, Sidney Herbert, John Delane, and others.  Yet these elements are, on every page of the novel, secondary to Meredith’s word-play and verbal ingenuity.  If it is impossible for us to understand Diana’s cleverness through retold anecdotes, we have before us Meredith’s wit, and that, of course, is all we need.