John Dos Passos
(John Roderigo Dos Passos, Chicago, 1896-Baltimore, 1970) American storyteller, prominent member of the so-called "Lost Generation", a heterogeneous group of authors that usually include poets like Ezra Pound and novelists like Ernest Hemingway and F.Scott Fitzgerald.John Dos Passos became famous above all for Manhattan Transfer (1925), a work that, with its panoramic and objective vision of the city, spearheaded an important urban trend in the contemporary novel.
John Dos Passos
Grandson of a Portuguese shoemaker and illegitimate son of a lawyer, he was educated in the maternal home.In 1917 he graduated from Harvard University, where he met intellectuals linked to the group "Harvard aesthetes." During the First World War he was an ambulance driver on the French front, an experience that provided him with material for his novel The Initiation of a Man: 1917 (1920).This was followed by Three Soldiers (1921), with which he achieved critical acclaim for his bitter antiwarism.
Both works are inscribed in the characteristic theme of the Lost Generation: although the individual is defended in rebellion, he ends up condemning him to failure.But in 1925 he published his monumental Manhattan Transfer , which due to its peculiar structure opened up a new way of writing and understanding the city: as a powerful organism and in a certain sense autonomous from the beings that inhabit it.
This narrative is made up of fragments that do not seem to be related to each other, and that belong both to the plot itself and to documents of the time (for example, newspaper headlines or popular songs).The novel relates multiple characters at first sight independent, but grouped in a context configure a multifaceted dimension. Manhattan Transfer frames a vision of New York at the beginning of the 20th century, abandoning the traditional characterological or psychological analysis of the characters for a more sociological and collective investigation.
The beings that inhabit the metropolis are almost inconsequential, conventional, and hardly have a novelistic nature in the ordinary sense, but they are gradually replaced by another more encompassing character: the city of New York itself, whose life passes by Through showgirls, workers, housewives, politicians, swindlers or achievers.All this through very short scenes, in compact and fast blocks that are recorded in the reader for their high plasticity and the deep realism or even naturalism, according to certain critics, implicit in them.
The technique is almost cinematographic, as if instead of the subjective consciousness of the narrator, the objective eye of the camera was the one that recorded the events, a procedure that was aptly called "camera-eye".Some episodes of the story may seem isolated, but then they unfold unexpectedly, a feature that prefigures the random and combinatorial structures of postmodern American narrative.An enduring metaphor, in short, about the dehumanized role of the growing urban monsters.
A subsequent project, the USA trilogy, would have similar goals, although it did not reach the insurmountable intensity of Manhattan Transfer .The trilogy was proposed to cover not the city, but the whole country, in the novels that compose it: Parallel 42 (1930), 1919 (1932) and El big money (1936), a cycle that covers the rise of North American pragmatism from the last decade of the 19th century to the Great Depression of 1929.
In this ambitious project, Dos Passos expressed a good part of the philosophy of history that the intellectuals of his country had shared during the period from 1920 to 1940.As early as 1926 he had published political articles with a rather left-wing vision; However, from 1930 on, he became disappointed until he became a conservative nationalist, nostalgic for a kind of mythical past in the United States, which he tried to recover in his later novels and essays.But such works did not reach (with the exception of his memoirs, Unforgettable Years ) the quality and importance of his urban cycles.
Comments
Post a Comment