The more educated a feller is the more use he is to his class.
John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer masterfully illustrates an epoch of American history pregnant with big ideas, yet held in a chokehold by capitalist expansion and international conflict. As America struggled to accept urbanization and mass immigration, forces such as nationalistic tension, anti-communist hysteria and cosmopolitanism rent holes in the narrative of stoic American isolationism. With Manhattan Transfer Dos Passos synthesized these conflicts through the experiences of those affected by them at all social strata.
Within Dos Passos’ hypermediated, dizzying portrait of New York, we find these people acutely aware of the contentious times in which they live, as if all of history were up for grabs. The pressures of global conflict, epidemic and financial instability were the lingua franca of the day. For an era of such unqualified conservatism and faith in the free market, it’s fascinating to realize that nowadays one would be hard pressed to find the same fluency of ideas, however basic, being discussed among workers and socialites alike!
In a time of political paranoia, extraordinary renditions, secret prisons, with torture an open question codified into law, it’s refreshing to see that there were times in American history when so many people risked everything to say no, when so few would say anything at all! Unlike fellow traveler Edward Bellamy, Dos Passos trades in neither nostalgia nor nihilism allowing his frank evaluation of possibilities that make Manhattan Transfer a conflicted take on the promise of the American Dream.
3 responses to “The burthen of Nineveh.”
how easily i forget that i read manhattan transfer in the spring of 2000. i guess barthes was right. there is nothing outside the text. insightful comparison blackmail. the contrast is truly saddening.
the more i think about it, the more i remember that the panics that preceded the great depression really tested capitalism as a form of political economy. in the meantime, and especially in the past 35 years, the private sector has come to represent such large portions of what were once public goods that it’s hard to imagine public solutions for these problems. problems like subcontracting local, state and federal bureaucracy. i think that the impoverished public imagination is due more to the triumph of rightwing ideology and the failure of the left to respond than anything else. like most socialists, i’m sure dos passos had no idea that things could be worse! [cue spanish civil war.]
unrelated postscript, x‑ref sidebar: mika miko = yessssssss.