The Forgotten Modernist
As I was watching some clips of the Trump inaugration, I was thinking about who could possibly artiscally encapsulate the tumult and disorder of our current moment. Who immediately came to to mind was the Lost Generation’s lost legend John Dos Passos. Specifically, his magnum opus, the U.S.A. trilogy, is uniquely suited to depicting his turbulent age as well as ours. The U.S.A. trilogy is composed of The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936) and aspires to be the Great American novel. Formally, it is composed of four distinct modes of storytelling: (1) storylines recounting the fates and fortunes of twelve American characters; (2) newsreel sections which interpolate news quotes, popular lyrics, and other cultural detritus; (3) camera-eye sections which mimic the cinema; (4) and mini- biographies of famous historical figures like Theodore Roosevelt and J.P. Morgan. The style and form of this trilogy conveys the dynamism and movement of America during both the Gilded Age and our Internet Age.
I’ve been entertaining some theories as to why Dos Passos faded into relative obscurity. Some argue that his irrelevance is due to his later rightward shift to supporting Barry Goldwater after witnessing his friend being killed by the Soviets in Spain. Others argue that his work is simply too difficult and inaccessible compared to Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and even Faulkner. Personally, I agree moreso with the this later formulation. Indeed, much of the trilogy is meandering stream-of-consciousness and free indirect discourse. Sentences start and stop without punctuation or capitalization and the pages themselves are rife with formal and stylistic flourishes. Suffice to say, it is not a “beach read.”
Dos Passos, however, still retains a knack for pithy one-liners. In his Theodore Roosevelt mini-biography, he writes a one-sentence paragraph which simply reads: “Czolgocz made him president.” Very cheeky, indeed. More notably, he concludes the end of his “Unknown Soldier” story with the one-sentence paragraph: “Woodrow Wilson brought a bouquet of poppies.” At the time of writing the trilogy, Dos Passos was still a staunch leftist and his prose reflects his cynical perspective on American politics and its leaders, such as Woodrow Wilson. Nowhere is this more evident than in the section pertaining to the Sacco and Vanzetti executions. He writes “All right we are two nations. “ Yes, he concludes the U.S. is irredeemably reactionary.
It is difficult to say anything meaningful and concise about the trilogy because of its encyclopedic nature. That said, a confrontation with its difficult prose style will reward the contemporary reader who wishes to revisit some other tempestuous moments in American politics. So, to conclude, I will merely leave the reader with a quotation from The 42nd Parallel about the wonders of walking the streets at night. Let us hope that this bizarre trilogy can help guide us through our own very bizarre moment in history.
