Making It New: 1900–1945 409and the author then switches from the story of one to the story of the other. Each
chapter begins with passages of almost poetic prose, consisting of observations of
city life, slogans, snatches of dialogue, advertisements, or newspaper headlines.
These passages make it even clearer that this is a collective novel about New York
City – its superficiality, surfaces, immorality, and crushing mechanization – rather
than any individual. Dos Passos learned this disjunctive, disconnected narrative
technique in part from abstract impressionist painters – with their interest in the
power and perplexity of the present moment – and film directors like Sergei
Eisenstein and D. W. Griffith – with their development of rapid cutting and
montage. But it was, fundamentally, his invention, his own way of translating into
prose what he saw as the delirium and danger of modern life.
That came to full fruition in U.S.A. where, as Dos Passos puts it in a brief preface
to the trilogy, the author was intent on producing a new language. “Mostly U.S.A.
is the speech of the people,” Dos Passos declares. And that speech is meant to capture
the discontinuous movement of city life, the noise, pace, and claustrophobia of
modernity, the sense of many different messages, images, and impressions all
bombarding the consciousness at the same time. U.S.A. is, definitively, of and about
modern America. To be exact, it covers the period from 1900 to 1930, the period
which, Dos Passos felt, witnessed the emergence of modern American society.
Beginning roughly with the Spanish–American War of 1898 and ending with the
Wall Street Crash and its aftermath, it dramatizes the lives of a large array of
characters. Although several of these characters appear in all three novels, their
activities do not constitute a unified plot. As in Dos Passos’s earlier novels, they are
types rather than fully developed individuals and, rather than agents, they are sub-
jects; things happen to them, they do not so much have lives as destinies; acts,
emotions, ideas suddenly settle within them, then disappear, without their having
much to say in the matter. It is almost as if Dos Passos is anticipating the existentialist
belief that experience precedes essence – that existence is, in fact, no more than the
discontinuous flow of experience. But, unlike the existentialist, he has another,
social point to make. All the people in these three books are evacuated of character,
choice, and individuality precisely because they are social victims. They are destroyed
by a society that has become totalizing in its opposition to human freedom; they
are subjects because they are totally subjected beings. And this, Dos Passos insists, is
the social tragedy of our times.
Interspersed between Dos Passos’s panoramic account of his many characters are
other sections, using techniques specifically invented for U.S.A., that add to its
message and impact. One is called “Newsreel.” It is a mixture of newspaper headlines
and advertising slogans, snatches of political speeches and popular songs, all drawn
from the moment in social history that is being recorded in the main narrative. The
Newsreel is a verbal collage, a folk poem for industrial society, rehearsing in particu-
lar the war between capital and labor. And, just as it makes poems out of the public
experience of America, so Dos Passos’s second technical invention, “The Camera
Eye,” makes poetry out of the private feelings of the author at the time. In a charged,
lyrical prose Dos Passos recalls how he saw and reacted to the major historical eventsGGray_c04.indd 409ray_c 04 .indd 409 8 8/1/2011 7:53:55 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 55 AM