No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Literature reflects a fascination with the enigma of man's identity. Who am I? What am I doing? Where am I going?—these questions recur, are answered, and yet require always re-asking and new illumination. Contemporary fiction projects man's quest for identity against the background of a fragmented and confusing world where the need for self-definition grows urgent because the social supports of the past are weakened and the opportunities for new and strange definitions in the present are enlarged. In a world that exhibits instability as a norm and social fluidity as an ideal, no clearcut self-image can emerge and receive assuring consent. The search for identity in modern literature takes on the form of a pursuit—a curious pursuit, because the object is often undefined and unvisualized. Joyce's Bloom wandering the maze of Dublin streets, Camus' Meursault arrested in the blaze of Algerian sun, Saul Bellow's Henderson invading untrampled African jungle, crying “I want, I want,” but unable to articulate a predicate—these characters are impelled by a sense of inner void to pursue their identity as whole and self-conscious beings. Undefined to themselves they are all “strangers” seeking the touchstone of some objective reality that can validate their existence or of some assertive self-knowledge that can acquaint and unite them with themselves. The image of man as divided and a stranger recurs in the looming novels of the century, in the works of Proust, Kafka, Camus, Joyce, and Virginia Woolf; it is beautifully crystallized in the recognition scene at the end of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past as the hero's revelatory self-encounter. The failure of Proust's narrator to recognize his image in the mirror, his sense of masquerade and strangeness, the jading of his sensibilities as all seems degraded and lost, and then the unexpected swift revelation which unifies and gives meaning to his life—these have become recurrent experiences in contemporary fiction as it tries to illuminate the jagged course of man's search for identity in the modern world.
1 Marcel Proust, “The Past Recaptured,” Remembrance of Things Past (New York: Random House, 1934), ii, 1031 ff.
2 John Dos Passos, “The Big Money,” U. S. A. (New York: Modern Library, 1937), p. 197. All subsequent references to the books of the U. S. A. trilogy are to this edition.
3 The 42nd Parallel, p. 224.
4 Modern psychology has placed great stress upon the psychological importance of a secure home and a childhood sense of belonging for the development of a strong sense of identity. The inverse relationship between homelessness and the lack of a sense of identity has recently been re-explored in an interesting study by Helen Merrell Lynd, On Shame and the Search for Identity (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1958). See particularly pp. 43 ff.
5 John Dos Passos, Chosen Country (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1951), p. 30.
6 John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1925), p. 67.
7 Note the other revealing titles: Manhattan Transfer, U. S. A., District of Columbia, and among the non-fiction, State of the Union.
8 The 42nd Parallel, p. 173.
9 John Dos Passos, Streets of Night (New York : George H. Doran, 1923), p. 75. Compare with Manhattan Transfer, p. 79.
10 John Dos Passos, “Adventures of a Young Man,” District of Columbia (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952), p. 26. Published originally in 1939. All subsequent references are to the combined edition of 1952.
11 See Chosen Country, pp. 31 f. and Manhattan Transfer, pp. 78 ff.
12 Nineteen-Nineteen, pp. 9 ff.
13 John Dos Passos, Most Likely to Succeed (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1954), pp. 54 and 150.
14 The 42nd Parallel, p. 369.
15 Nineteen-Nineleen, p. 72. 16 K The 42nd Parallel, p. 177.
17 Streets of Night, compare pp. 140 f. with p. 198.
18 Martin Kallich, “John Dos Passos: Liberty and the Father-Image,” Antioch Review, x (Spring 1950), 99–106.
19 See Charles Bernardin, The Development of John Dos Passos, unpublished doctoral dissertation (University of Wisconsin, 1949), which infers from its biographical data that Dos Passos loved and admired his father.
20 The Big Money, p. 462.
21 The 42nd Parallel, p. 108.
22 Ibid., p. 81.
23 See Streets of Night, pp. 65, 39, and 220.
24 The apposition between bourgeoise intellectual and work-ingman, as defined by Marx and taken over by the intellectual, is pivotal to the radical picture of society. Self-vilification by the intellectual runs through Dos Passos' novels, as it does through his early critical writings. The reasons why the American intellectual was attracted to the worker and why he was willing to debase himself and exalt the worker in his stead are neatly summarized by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in his book, The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), as he points out how the “worship of the proletariat becomes a perfect fulfillment for the frustration of the progressive” (p. 46).
25 Michael Gold, “A Barbaric Poem of New York,” New Masses, ι (August 1926), 25–26.
26 The interplay between the uniquely personal and the social motives that lies behind a decisive social commitment is traced by Arthur Koestler in his autobiographical Arrow in the Blue (New York: Macmillan, 1952) pp. 99–100. The recognition that personal, perhaps even neurotic, reasons force the decision does not invalidate the worthwhileness of the social cause.
27 Compare Manhattan Transfer, pp. 345 f.; Streets of Night, p. 124; and Adventure of a Young Man, p. 133.
28 John Dos Passos, First Encounter (New York: Philosophical Library, 1945). Published originally in 1920 as One Man's Initiation—1917. “ 'Have we the courage, have we the energy, have we the power? . . .' ” Martin queries, and the answer is, “ 'No … we are merely intellectuals. We cling to a mummified world. But they have the power and the nerve. . . . The stupid average working-people'.” p. 155.
29 John Dos Passos, Three Soldiers (New York: The Modem Library, 1932), p. 221. Published originally in 1921.
30 This fictional pattern is based upon his own experiences and those of many subsequently famous contemporaries who volunteered for service (for example, Robert Hillyer, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Edmund Wilson, Malcolm Cowley, Archibald MacLeish, Ε. E. Cummings). The incident in which the hero is censured for writing home critical or pacifistic letters (Dick Savage and Jay Pignatelli) is based upon his own experience. John Andrew's internment is based upon the experience of Ε. E. Cummings, who describes this situation in The Enormous Room.
31 Manhattan Transfer, p. 120.
32 See Camera Eye (44) in The Big Money, pp. 29–31.
33 John Dos Passos, In All Countries (New York: Har-court, Brace, 1934), p. 11.
34 For a social and aesthetic explanation of this dehumanized quality, see Blanche H. Gelfant, The American City Novel (Oklahoma: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 19S4), pp. 159166.
35 The relationship of social tensions to personal dissociation is a salient point in my chapter on Dos Passos in The American City Novel, pp. 133–174.
36 Chosen Country, see p. 38 and in passing, Chapter I, called “The Little River Rubicon.”
37 See Gelfant, The American City Novel, pp. 159–162.
38 John Dos Passos, The Great Days (New York: Sagamore, 1958), p. 311.
39 Lancaster's island-hopping in the Pacific (pp. 111–156) follows and condenses Dos Passos' report of his tour of the Pacific in Tour of Duty (Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 1946), Parts i and ii. The section on post-war Europe and the Nuremberg Trials in The Great Days, pp. 213–237, also follows the itinerary, and repeats verbatim certain passages, in Tour of Duty, Part in.
40 Suicidal thoughts occur to several of the generic heroes. Roland Lancaster almost gives in to his suicidal impulse. Wenny in Streets of Night of course does kill himself.