410 Making It New: 1900–1945that bear down on the lives of his characters. Along with these two kinds of narrative
intervention, there is also a series of sections titled “Biography.” These are
brief, socially charged accounts of major public figures of the time, such as Henry
Ford, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Rudolph Valentino. All three innovations – Newsreel,
Camera Eye, Biography – are, first of all, devices for highlighting the general social
significance of an individual’s experience. The Newsreel gives us the crude public
image of that experience. The Camera Eye supplies the author’s own immediate
sense of socially important events. The Biography gives us the individual experience
of a socially significant public figure. Dos Passos does not stop there, however,
since he is not simply trying to show the reader that the public life is inseparable
from the private, as if they were equals. He is, in addition, trying to suggest that –
in an urban environment such as that of U.S.A. – the public life dominates and
controls the private. He is repeating the point made in his portrait of his evacuated
characters: modern society overwhelms the individual. So, the Newsreels present the
reader with all the images that bombard the consciousness in the city; they simulate
an urban world that is indigestible, indecipherable, and so uncontrollable. The
Camera Eye sections show us a mind struggling gamely, but with a sure sense of
defeat, to deal with its new surroundings; tellingly, it is a mind reduced to the status
of a recording instrument, reflecting rather than managing and directing events.
The Biography series, in turn, shows us people reduced to a media stereotype or
social role; here, the person becomes the public image as we watch. What Newsreel,
Camera Eye, and Biography tell the reader, in short, is what all the characters in
U.S.A. also do: that America has become a total institution, a prisonhouse for the
mind as well as the body. While proclaiming allegiance to the principles of
individualism and freedom, “the speech of the people” reveals the subtext that
Americans have become little more than cogs in a machine.
During the 1920s and 1930s Dos Passos aligned himself politically with the left.
He became disillusioned with communism, however, and broke completely with
his left-wing friends and allies at the time of the Spanish Civil War. His later fiction,
such as the trilogy District of Columbia (1939–1949) and the novel Midcentury
(1961), continue his stylistic innovations but show an increasingly conservative
political stance. He was always, first and last, an individualist concerned with the
threat to the individual posed first, as he saw it, by capitalism and then, in his
later work, by communism. To that extent, he belonged in the American Adamic
tradition, with its commitment to the primacy of the individual, the supreme
importance of the single, separate self.
Consistently, Ernest Hemingway (1898–1961) belonged to that tradition too. For
Hemingway, as for many earlier American writers – Thoreau, for instance, Cooper
and Twain – the essential condition of life is solitary, and the interesting, the only
really serious business, is the management of that solitude. In this respect, the first
story, “Indian Camp,” in his first book, In Our Time (1925), is exemplary. Young Nick
Adams, the protagonist, witnesses a birth and a death. The birth is exceptionally
agonizing, with the mother, an Indian woman, being cut open by Nick’s father
and being sewn up with a fishing line. And the death too is peculiarly awful, theGGray_c04.indd 410ray_c 04 .indd 410 8 8/1/2011 7:53:55 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 55 AM