The protagonist of Manhattan Transfer is New York, a city that appears in its pages as a cruel and frustrating ant-hill, where egotism and hypocrisy hold sway and where greed and materialism suffocate the altruistic sentiments and the purity of the people. In this powerful and cold novel which at all times appeals to the intelligence of the readers — not to their heart or their feelings — there are dozens of characters but none of them is attractive, no one who might merit envy or respect. Those who do well are professional rogues or repugnant cynics and those who fail are weak and frightened people who have already defeated themselves through their lack of conviction and laziness, before the city in turn squashes them.
But although the particular individuals of Manhattan Transfer are too blurred and rapidly sketched to live on in the memory — not even the two most recurrent and best drawn characters, Ellen Thatcher and Jimmy Herf, escape this rule — the great collective character of the city of New York is admirably portayed through the vignettes and cinematographic sequences of the novel. Turbulent, impetuous, full of dynamism, of strong smells, life and violence, a modern Moloch which feeds off the lives that it swallows without trace, New York with its garb of reinforced cement, its caravans of clattering vehicles, its rubbish, its tramps, millionaires, cheery women and crooks, is depicted as a modern Babylon. Babylon out of man’s control, propelled by its own dynamism along an unstoppable path towards something that we foresee can only be a disaster. The flight of Jimmy in an unknown direction at the end is almost a premonition of the catastrophe which, sooner or later, awaits what he calls the ‘city of destruction’.
When John Dos Passos wrote Manhattan Transfer at the beginning of the 1920s, it was his intention to criticize, in a raw, realist novel, the capitalist system and its putative child — urban, industrial civilization — in the city that symbolized all of these aspects. His intention is very clear in the diligent rationalism of the book, in its lack of spontaneity, sentimentalism and mystery. But outside this conscious will of the author, a different impulse emerged, the novel took another turn and it
became in the end a pointilliste and somewhat mythical work in which, in an atmosphere laden with pessimism, the stage of concrete and steel becomes humanized, takes on an intensity of life and an underlying personality which it seems to have absorbed from the paltry and inconsistent marionettes whom it also displaces as the main protagonists in the narrative. Written under the strong influence of Joyce, who had made Dublin a city-character, Manhattan Transfer is one of the few novels which, like Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin, deserve to be called collective. In this novel, the hero is not an individual, but a crowd, a gregarious being, made up of many faces and events which the narration, thanks to its skilful and effective technique, brings together as parts of an indissoluble form.
Now, after fifty years of being used by countless novelists, the techniques employed by Dos Passos seem familiar and even conventional to us. But when he published Manhattan Transfer in 1925, they were daring, imaginative and were a real revolution in narrative form. One of his most industrious disciples, Jean-Paul Sartre — who, without Manhattan Transfer and the USA trilogy The 42nd Parallel, 1919 and The Big Money, would not have written Roads to Freedom the way he did — said of its author, quite correctly: ‘Dos Passos has invented just one thing: an art of narration. But this is enough to create a universe.’
The art of Dos Passos consists of a series of techniques aimed at making the realist illusion persuasive, communicating to the reader the sensation of being directly confronted with life, the objective world of what is narrated, without the mediation of literature and of the author. The whole of the novel is made up of a series of pictures, some very brief, like fleeting film images, which combine in a great mosaic: the protoplasm of New York. Each vignette is a slice of life of some character, which begins and ends arbitrarily without the whole episode coming to an end, so that the reader feels at once close to but also distanced from the men and women that file incessantly through the book. Unable to concentrate on or get inside any of the characters, the reader feels somewhat bewildered and confused by the lively, dispersed nature of the tale which conceals a very rigorous order and intention: to describe not the parts, but the whole, that great plural being in which the parts give glimpses of the whole.
Collage had been invented years before in painting but Dos Passos was the first to make it into a narrative technique in Manhattan Transfer. The method would later be perfected in the USA trilogy. Headlines
and fragments of newspapers, advertisements and street signs, slip into the narrative, to fix the historical moment, to outline the social context of an episode and, in certain cases, to reveal the final outcome of some character whose good or bad fortune has given him the doubtful honour of appearing as a mention in a newspaper.
The novel starts at the beginning of the century and ends in the middle of the 1920s. The reader feels this quarter century pass without any sense of continuity, like a long and intricate panoramic shot of subtly worked images. These were also the years in which cinema had, for the first time, become a major influence and Dos Passos was one of the first narrators to make skilful use of certain filmic narrative resources and techniques in literary narrative (although curiously in Manhattan Transfer, where the whole of New York appears, there is not a single scene that takes place in a cinema). This can be seen in the visual nature of the descriptions, the pliable, sensuous feel of the whole book and, above all, in the structure of montage, which is very similar to that of a film. The treatment of time in the novel comes out of a cinematographic rather than a literary tradition; there is a delicate transposition from one genre to another which Dos Passos achieved with total success. In each scene, there are temporal and spatial ‘silences’, which occur without warning, moments and places silenced by the narrator, violent hiatuses of minutes or hours, of a few yards or long distances, which are not narrated, not mentioned, in the way that a film cuts from one image to the next and the characters can have changed age or setting without the spectator becoming confused or the narration losing its fluency. These jumps in time or in space are worked into the narrative of Manhattan Transfer with great mastery so that the reader scarcely notices them. But he does notice, on the other hand, how well they work in the narration: the pace that they set, the sensation of movement, of life developing, of time without pauses, and also the condensation that this technique permits, the density and the authenticity of life that is being narrated.
Dos Passos’s novel also gives the impression of being a symphony because within it, as in a vast and ambitious musical composition, certain beings and themes are hinted at, disappear and then reappear, connected to other themes within an integrated and synthetic movement which, at a given moment, is presented to us as a compact and self-sufficient world. In this world, noise and music play a major part. Speech defines the origins and the education of the characters, with
their rich ethnic diversity, their slang and their professional and social codes. Fashionable songs and dances appear from time to time as landmarks which define the period of the scenes, enliven the atmosphere and help to strengthen the impression that the ‘real’ world is being presented.
The objectivity of the narration is almost absolute. Dos Passos, who was a great admirer of Flaubert, once stated that he also had a passion for the mot juste and in this novel, the precision of the language is almost infallible and is one of the ways in which the impersonal appearance, the self-sufficient nature, of the fiction is achieved. I say ‘almost’ because in some episodes there is at times too brusque a change of point of view in the narration — we notice that the perspective changes from one character to another — which, for an instant, jeopardizes that Flaubertian imperative of the invisibility of the narrator. (It is enough for the attention of the reader to be distracted for one second from what the novel is narrating to how it is being narrated, for the obstructive and disappointing shadow of the narrator to appear.) But these are scarcely furtive shadows within an extraordinary novelistic construction in which both the language and the organization of the tale mutually support and enrich the composition of the fictional world.
Few modern novels demonstrate as clearly as Manhattan Transfer the propensity of narrative fiction to offer a ‘total’ vision of the world. This is a desire to extend itself, to grow and multiply through descriptions, characters and incidents in order to exhaust all the possibilities, to represent its world on the largest and also the most minute scale, at all levels and from all angles. A successful novel is like an iceberg: only part of it is revealed, but in such a way that the reader’s own imagination can complete the picture. But a few novels, the greatest achievements of the genre, works like War and Peace, Madame Bovary, Ulysses, In Remembrance of Things Past, The Magic Mountain, seem to us, thanks to their extraordinary ambition, their fantastic scope, to have achieved that utopian design inherent in the art of the novel, of having described a world, a story, in a total way, both intensively and extensively, qualitatively and quantitatively. This novel by Dos Passos belongs to this illustrious list of omnivorous works.
The vastness of the world that unfolds before our eyes is sometimes dizzying. The hundred or so characters that move through its one hundred and thirty episodes represent crowds, humanity itself
fighting — usually in vain — to get on, to become rich, to attain some form of happiness or simply to exist in a powerful and indifferent city which is also, for them, a great prison of steel and asphalt. Bankers, union men, lawyers, actresses, thieves, murderers, businessmen, journalists, tramps, doormen, rub shoulders, meet and part company on its pavements, as if in an immense kaleidoscope which shows us the seething life of the city. The novel keeps us mainly on a surface reality, showing us the scenes, what people are doing and hearing, what they are saying, but from time to time it also introduces us to the intimate life of their thoughts, their fantasies, their dreams and visions. These brief incursions into subjectivity are welcome because they add touches of delicacy and poetry, even of madness, to a text whose realist harshness and dryness sometimes leaves us breathless. Fantasy often invades the characters before some catastrophe, like the vision that assails the parricide Bud Kopening before he commits suicide or the dream of the poor seamstress Anna Cohen — of the revolutionary Red Guard parading down Fifth Avenue — before the fire consumes and disfigures her.
A novel fails or is successful on its own terms — through the strength of its characters, the subtlety of its plot, the elegance of its construction, the richness of its prose — and not because of its view of the real world. However, all fiction, however self-sufficient and resistant to exterior reality, has powerful and unbreakable links with that other life, the one that is not created by the magic of fantasy and the literary word, but life in the raw, lived and not invented. In artistic terms, one does not need to compare ‘fictional’ and ‘real’ reality, because in order to judge if a novel is good or bad, a work of genius or mediocre, it is not necessary to know if it was faithful or unfaithful to the real world, if it reproduced or invented it. It is the intrinsic power of persuasion and not its documentary value that determines a fiction’s artistic worth.
However, a book like Manhattan Transfer cannot be judged solely from a literary perspective, as the polished artistic product that it undoubtedly is. Because the novel, as well as being a beautiful lie that distances us from the real world, is also a parable that is determined to elucidate and educate us in a critical fashion, not about the world we are reading, but about the world that we inhabit in our reality as readers. This book is the best example of what Lukács called critical realism, fiction which is an instrument of analysis, a dissection of the
real world and a denunciation of the myths, fraudulence and injustices of history.
What remains, almost sixty-five years after its publication, of the accusations and warnings that Manhattan Transfer made about New York? Capitalism went through the crisis that the novel anticipates — the crash of 1929 — and survived it, just as it survived the Second World War, the Cold War and the disintegration of the European empires and it is today in better health than ever. It is not capitalism but socialism which seems in decline today on a world scale. But the book was not wrong in pointing to the Achilles’ heel of industrial capitalism, that it makes men more prosperous but not happier. It suppresses poverty, ignorance, unemployment and manages to ensure a decent standard of living for most people. But today, as in the years that preceded the Great Depression, when Dos Passos wrote his novel, in New York, London, Zurich or Paris, in all the citadels of industrial development, the prodigious development of science, opportunities and comfort have not made women less tense or anguished than Ellen Thatcher in the novel nor have they rid innumerable men of the same corrosive feeling of emptiness, of spiritual frustration, of leading an insufficient, petty, directionless life that torments Jimmy Herf and causes him to run away.
Will modern civilization, which has conquered so many challenges, be capable of overcoming this one? Will it also find a way of enriching men spiritually and morally so that not only the great demons of material need are defeated but also egotism, solitude and ethical dehumanization which are continual sources of frustration and unhappiness in societies with the highest standards of living on this planet? While industrial and technological civilization does not give a positive answer to these questions, Manhattan Transfer, as well as being one of the most admirable works of modern fiction, will continue to be a warning hanging, like a sword, above our heads.
London, 22 May 1989