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The Lively Art of Manhattan Transfer

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

E. D. Lowry
E. D. Lowry*
Affiliation:
Dunbarton College of Holy Cross, Washington, D. C.
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Abstract

Manhattan Transfer, John Dos Passos' first important study of urbanindustrial life, owes much to the machine-oriented aesthetic of Italian futurism and other modernistic movements in the visual arts. Utilizing techniques and modes of perception indigenous to the machine age, Dos Passos' sought to express the spirit, rhythms, and structure of modern reality in such a way as to evoke in the reader a sense of involvement and participation in the problems of contemporary society. In its visual directness and sensory immediacy, Manhattan Transfer suggests the influence of photography and the “lively arts” of film and vaudeville. In its overall pattern of compositional contrasts and oppositions, the novel resembles abstract painting and the montage structure of the motion picture. Basic to Dos Passos' outlook is a synoptic or visual concept of reality as a network of dynamically interacting parts. Only by viewing his world as a “system” in which nothing is fully comprehensible in isolation can man realize himself as a responsible individual and direct the energies of the machine toward socially desirable ends.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 84 , Issue 6 , October 1969 , pp. 1628 - 1638
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1969

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References

1 John Dos Passos, “Translator's Foreword,” Blaise Cendrars, Panama (New York, 1931), p. vii.

2 John Dos Passos, The Best Times (New York, 1966), p. 130. See also George Knox, “Dos Passos and Painting,” Texas Studies in Lit. and Lang., vi (Spring 1964), 22–38.

3 “Initial Manifesto of Futurism,” in Joshua C. Taylor, Futurism (New York, 1961), p. 124.

4 Matthew Josephson, Life Among the Surrealists (New York, 1962), p. 188. See also Frederick J. Hoffman, The Twenties, rev. ed. (New York, 1965), pp. 285–299.

5 “Homer of the Trans-Siberian,” Orient Express (New York, 1927), p. 165.

6 John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer (New York, 1925), p. 365. Parenthetical page numbers in the text refer to this edition.

7 John Dos Passos, “Foreword,” John Howard Lawson, Roger Bloomer (New York, 1923), p. vi. Lawson's New Playwrights Theater combined the techniques of popular theater with a radical political content.

8 “Satire as a Way of Seeing,” Occasions and Protests (Chicago, 1964), p. 21. Dos Passos' essay first appeared in 1937.

9 Rosa Trillo Clough, Futurism (New York, 1961), p. 53. For early indications of Dos Passos' later methods, see Kenneth Holditch, “One Man's Initiation: The Origin of Technique in the Novels of John Dos Passos,” Explorations of Literature, ed. Rima D. Reck (Baton Rouge, La., 1966), pp. 115–123.

10 Vladimir Pozner, “L'écrivain devant l'actualité: John Dos Passos” (interview), Les Nouvelles Littéraires, 5 Sept. 1936, p. 6.

11 Lectures in America (Boston, 1957), p. 196.

12 E. E. Cummings: A Miscellany Revised, ed. George J. Firmage (New York, 1965), p. 112.

13 Sergei M. Eisenstein, Notes of a Film Director (Moscow, n.d.), p. 163. The cinematic aspects of Manhattan Transfer have been studied by Georges-Albert Astre, Thèmes et structures dans l'œuvre de John Dos Passos, i (Paris, 19S6), 156—200. See also Claude-Edmonde Magny, L'Age du roman américain (Paris, 1948), pp. 117–158.

14 Theory of Film (New York, 1960), p. 255. My treatment of the street film is based on this work.

15 The Best Times, p. 132.

16 V. I. Pudovkin, Film Technique and Film Acting (New York, 1960), p. 130.

17 Kenneth Macgowan, Behind the Screen (New York, 1965), p. 239; John Dos Passos, “The Writer as Technician,” American Writers' Congress, ed. Henry Hart (New York, 1935), pp. 78–82; John Dos Passos, “Introduction,” Three Soldiers (New York, 1932), p. viii.

18 Sergei M. Eisenstein, Film Form (New York, 1957), p. 133, hereafter cited as FF.

19 The Brown Decades, 2nd rev. ed. (New York, 1955), p. 34.

20 See my article, “Manhattan Transfer: Dos Passos' Wasteland,” Univ. of Kansas City Review, xxx (Oct. 1963), 47–52.

21 “Man With a Chronofile,” SalR, l (1 April 1967), 14.

22 Orient Express, p. 165.

23 “Initial Manifesto of Futurism,” in Taylor, Futurism, p. 128.

24 Udo Rukser, quoted in Hans Richter, Dada (New York, 1965), p. 101.

25 The Best Times, p. 180.

26 Richter, Dada, p. 57.

27 Quoted in MacKinley Heim, John Marin (Boston, 1948), p. 28.

28 “Technical Manifesto,” quoted in Taylor, Futurism, p. 13. Sergei M. Eisenstein, The Film Sense (New York, 1957), p. 34, stresses audience participation in the film.

29 “A Speech on Robert Frost: A Cultural Episode,” Robert Frost: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. James M. Cox (New York, 1962), p. 156.