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.