John Dos Passos’ novel Manhattan (1925) and the USA trilogy (1930-1936) forced critics of that time to write about experimental poetics unusual for the American literary tradition. The poetics of Dos Passos’ novels is characterized by compositional fragmentation and fragmentation, extensive use of montage, pictorial techniques, symbolic and allegorical images, miniatures-epigraphs, beginning chapters. She was akin to the search for European art at the beginning of the century, and in particular Cubism, the young Soviet cinema, especially the films of Eisenstein, whom Dos Passos met during his stay in the USSR in 1928; she used the experience of the innovative poetry of G. Apollinaire and B. Cendrars.
In his novel Manhattan, New York is being constructed, a huge concrete-steel city, a kaleidoscope of human destinies, faces, episodes. The city is full of noise, it is illuminated by advertising, car headlights; the urban landscape is masterfully managed by the author. Someone succeeds and makes a career, like lawyer George Baldwin; someone is unlucky, like actress Ellen Thatcher; someone seeks to escape from the stone embrace of a giant, like journalist Jimmy Herf, and someone throws himself in despair from the Brooklyn Bridge, like Beda Kopening. These and other destinies are presented in the novel on the principle of editing – alternation gives a new quality to the episodes, gives birth to new images.
Manhattan was the first novel in which the American writer Dos Passos consciously decided to turn the characterization, plot and setting into a montage document about the life of New York. D.W. Griffith, whose films Dos Passos admired, created a film montage around 1915. Griffith’s work, in turn, influenced Russian cinematographers, in particular V.L. Pudovkin and Sergei Eisenstein. Eisenstein wrote that Griffith’s main contribution to modern filmmaking was his “sequence of montage of parallel scenes intersecting with each other to form a new image and achieve a new intensity.”
Dos Passos’ own concept of editing arose quite accidentally from what he saw and heard before and during the 1920s. Much later (1967), he recalled that at the time he was writing Manhattan, he was impressed by Griffith’s editing in The Birth of a Nation, but could not remember if he had seen any Eisenstein films by that time.
Dos Passos’ theoretical knowledge of film editing may have been sketchy, but his interest in it and related trends in painting, such as Cubism and Futurism, was strong enough to encourage him to experiment in a way that no other writer tried in the 1920s. At the same time fascinated and repelled by the age of machines, wanting to somehow “justify the path of machines for man,” he began to see himself as a kind of movie camera, displaying and recording his time in a way that no novelist had done before. Thus, in Manhattan, he decided to write a completely new kind of novel.
Dos Passos replaces all traditional narrative connections with editing. He places images, characters and events side by side, leaving the reader to fill in the blanks. He uses provocative chapter titles that act as movie subtitles and create his own montage. The chapter titles not only form montages within their sections – the titles in each of the three sections also contrast with the titles in the other two.
In the first part we have “Ferry at the pier”, “Capital”, “Dollars”, “Track”, “Steamroller”. Dos Passos links these images into a series, like Pudovkin, to create the idea of a big city with its movement, power and ruthlessness. Next comes a contrasting lyrical section, which mixes nursery rhymes, slogans, songs, fire trucks and roller coasters. In combination with the “Five Legal Grounds” related to the divorce process, the titles of the chapters convey the fantasy of the city, its rapid movements, emphasized by the flow of failures, even ruin. Children’s songs themselves carry a warning about a catastrophe. “Long-legged Jack from the Isthmus” is experiencing forty days of rain. The title of the chapter, taken from the children’s song “Let’s go to the market to the beasts”, contains the chorus “and it was the end of the monk”, which takes on an ominous tone.
The final section opens and closes on an even more insistent note of doom, with chapter titles no longer from songs and stories, but from the Bible. Between these warnings are images of a large city that resemble the images from the first section, but now they are easier to identify. The third part partially confirms that the warnings relate to ringing triviality, aimless revolutions and excessive aspirations: “Merry Town”, “Revolving Door”, “Skyscraper” – and, finally, doom to death – “The Burden of Nineveh”. This mounting structure, which mixes and conflicts with itself, adds depth and breadth. Thus, the titles in the three sections work against each other in a dynamic montage, which once again resembles Eisenstein’s dictum: “editing is a conflict.”
The frames of the Manhattan montage permeate the entire book, defining its structure and meaning. It remains before our eyes in the excerpts of songs and poems included in the entire text, and, above all, in the scripted montages that introduce each chapter. These introductory passages use images of urban life to set the tone for each chapter and tell us something about the characters in the novel. The second chapter of Part II, “Long-Legged Jack from the Isthmus”, opens with a rather long and complex installation. “Noon at Union Place. Sale. It is necessary to close the trade. WE MADE A TERRIBLE MISTAKE. Kneeling on the dusty asphalt, boys clean laced shoes, half-boots, shoes, button-down shoes. The sun shines like a dandelion on the toes of cleaned shoes. “Right at the end, Mr., miss, madam, at the end of the store, a large batch of fantasy fabrics was received, of the highest quality, prices are out of competition… Gentlemen, Mrs., lady, prices are down!” WE MADE A TERRIBLE MISTAKE. It is necessary to close the trade.”
The repeated cry of “WE MADE A TERRIBLE MISTAKE” together with the sober voice of “We must close the trade” and “Sale” echoes both Ellen and Joe, and at the same time echoes all the other sales, mistakes and releases committed by characters whose stories run parallel in the novel. Just as Dos Passos intersperses their stories, he intersperses these phrases in this passage so that they become subtitles for small scenes in the montage, as well as for events throughout the novel. In each of the small scenes, youth, hope and salvation seem increasingly dim and unattainable. Shoeshine boys, young and hardworking, adorn their work with sunlight for a moment, but their chances of success are probably as fleeting and illusory as a sunny dandelion on a polished shoe. A young couple enjoying their hurried pleasure amid the bustle of the city, appears in all its bad taste under the merciless midday sun of the city.
This passage, along with all others like it, satisfies Eisenstein’s demand that the montage combine depicting individual frames into intellectual contexts that radiate meaning. Scenes from a New York street at noon force us to combine images of youth, hope, failure, fleeting fame and repeated defeat into a complex whole. This, in turn, expands its meaning to all those whom we see in the novel – the characters to whom they belong: struggle and hopes, sales and compromises, love and losses.
“Manhattan” is definitely worth reading, because this novel is ready to impress everyone with its cinematic composition and philosophy of life hidden in the momentary situations described by Passos.
Author of the article: Varvara Kartushina
