A Novel Like A Documentary

chapter 6
“A Novel Like a Documentary Film”: Cinematic

Writing as Cultural Critique in John Dos Passos’s
Manhattan Transfer
“Hollywood [. . .] is probably the most important and the most difficult

subject of our time to deal with. Whether we like it or not it is in that great
bargain sale of five and ten cent lusts and dreams that the new bottom level of
our culture is being created,” John Dos Passos observed in 1945 (“Note on
Fitzgerald” 343). Twenty years earlier, he had already explored the cultural
centrality of the cinema and urban mass culture in his modernist novel
Manhattan Transfer. The novel simulates cinematic aesthetics and samples
mass media, yet retains a conceptual distance to the cultural practices it
describes, mimics, and satirizes. The chief strategy that Dos Passos uses in
Manhattan Transfer to critically refract popular mass culture is the evocation
and subsequent dissolution of immediacy effects, as this chapter shows.
By imitating cinematic techniques, such as montage structure or doc-
umentary style, the novel on the one hand minimizes the visibility of the
narrator and creates an urban world that seems recorded rather than
imagined. Confronted with a narration that describes settings and actions
in great sensory detail yet refrains from offering interpretative guidance in
the form of exposition or commentary, the readers have to infer the
significance of the depicted events and the interior lives of the characters
from the presented particulars. Using the strategy of “showing not telling,”
the novel seems to allow the readers to witness observations and experi-
ences firsthand rather than to offer them a fictional representation of social
reality. Whether the narrative relates the external details of a scene,
a character’s sensations, or the flux of their thoughts – the intended effect
is always that it has taken dictation and documented what happens with as
little narrative interference as possible. Whitman would have been
delighted about the semblance of immediate recording that Dos Passos’s
covert narrator and sampling of mass media items such as song lyrics, ads,
or news articles creates.
At the same time, the novel continually disrupts this very impression of
immediacy, prompting the reader to focus on mediatory processes. The
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144 Cinematic Technique and Cultural Critique
surprising narrative shifts produced by the text’s multiple focalization,
collage technique, and disjunctive montage structure move processes of
observation, narration, and interpretation to the center of attention. By
first creating the illusion of documentary reporting through the imitation
of mass media discourse and the formal strategies of the cinema and then
rupturing this effect, the novel renders its representational strategies highly
visible. Dos Passos appropriated cinematic reality effects in Manhattan
Transfer thus both to create a lifelike portrait of early twentieth-century
urbanity and media culture and to comment critically on the mediated
quality of modern life.
Yet some of his early readers simply equated the novel with the media it
simulated and failed to note how carefully Dos Passos reworked filmic
techniques to develop new literary strategies that could adequately capture
and critique American popular culture. For Allen Tate, for instance,
Manhattan Transfer was simply “a breathless movie scenario” (161). Like
Whitman’s early critics who mistook the immediacy effects of his poetry
for a lack of literary sophistication, some of Dos Passos’s early readers felt
that the novel’s vivid assimilation of mass media discourse compromised its
literary quality. Marshal McLuhan, for one, felt called upon to defend
literature from the incursions of popular culture. He complained that the
reader of Manhattan Transfer “is not required to have much more reading
agility than the reader of the daily press. Nor does Dos Passos make many
more serious demands than a good movie” (“John Dos Passos” 148).
Because he identified the novel with the media it samples and imitates,
McLuhan missed the text’s satirical and critical take on popular mass
culture.
For other contemporaneous readers, however, the cinema analogy pro-
vided a productive hermeneutic framework that helped them to explore
and appreciate rather than to dismiss a text that challenged their inter-
pretive standards and reading routines. They compared Dos Passos’s
formal experiments to the cinema to highlight the novel’s innovative
style and to gauge which cultural significance its departure from the
narrative conventions of realist literature possessed. In particular the
quick pace of the novel’s succession of relatively short scenes, its inter-
weaving of parallel storylines, and the notable absence of intervening
transitions reminded critics of the tempo, composition, and editing pat-
terns of early film. Sinclair Lewis praised Dos Passos, for instance, for
“omitting the tedious transitions from which most of us can never escape”
by employing “the technique of the movie, in its flashes, its cut-backs, its
speed” (5, 6).1 Because the narrative foregrounds sensory impressions and
Cinematic Technique and Cultural Critique 145
desists from overtly guiding the reader through interpretive or evaluative
comments as it describes a diverse array of characters and incidents, critics
felt that reading the novel was akin to watching a film. “It is a rush of
disconnected scenes and scraps, a breathless confusion of isolated moments
in a group of lives, pouring on through the years, from almost every part of
New York,” D. H. Lawrence describes his reading experience. “Broadway
at night – whizz! gone! – a quick-lunch counter! gone! – a house on
Riverside Drive, the Palisades, night – gone! But gradually you get to
know the faces. It is like a movie picture with an intricacy of different
stories and no close-ups and no writing in between” (75).
In Lawrence’s account, the novel resembles on the one hand an early
documentary city film in which bustling street scenes rapidly follow one
another, compelling the viewers to continually adjust their focus to keep
track of the crisscrossing movements and the simultaneously unfolding
action. On the other hand, the assertion that the novel is “like a movie
picture with an intricacy of different stories” is more suggestive of the cross-
cutting editing style that D. W. Griffith popularized in his narrative feature
films of the 1910s, such as Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916).2
Yet the “intricacy” with which Manhattan Transfer interpolates numerous
parallel storylines with brief self-contained sketches as well as with samples
from mass culture, such as songs or advertisement slogans, exceeded any-
thing that American film offered at the time. In historical hindsight, it is
easy to see that the novel’s mosaic narrative form and its blending of
a documentary aesthetic with modernist strategies of defamiliarization
anticipated the montage style of the Russian cinema of the late 1920s and
1930s, particularly of Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, and prefigured
the European and American city symphony films of the 1930s, such as Fritz
Lang’s Metropolis (1926), Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphonie einer
Großstadt (1927), King Vidor’s The Crowd (1928), or Vertov’s The Man
with a Movie Camera (1929).3
But although the formal innovations of Manhattan Transfer surpassed
the cinematic practice of the time, film provided Dos Passos with an
indispensable representational model as he worked to develop a mode of
writing that would allow him to describe and critically reflect on the
experience of living in a modern metropolis and media culture. Dos
Passos adopted from the cinema the technique of documentary recording
(on the level of narration) and the principles of montage and cross-cutting
(with regard to the novel’s structure) to represent the vast scope and
bewildering complexity of city life as well as to dramatize the dwarfing
effect that urban mass culture had on individuals: “The artist must record
the fleeting world the way the motion picture film recorded it.” Dos Passos
described his compositional principles: “I started a rapportage on
New York [. . .] but there was more to the life of a great city than you
could cram into any one hero’s career. The narrative must stand up off the
page” (“What Makes a Novelist” 272). Dos Passos’s comment suggests that
his appropriation of cinematic technique was motivated by the novel’s
urban subject matter and by an intention to instill his text with documen-
tary objectivity and vivid lifelikeness. These qualities were to produce
a sense of immediacy that would render the fictional world palpable for
the readers as if the text possessed a plastic pop-up effect. “The narrative
must stand up off the page.”
And indeed, as many critics have noted, the features of Manhattan
Transfer that are most reminiscent of film, that is, the novel’s montage
structure and documentary style, are also those qualities that enable the
text to capture the particularly modern features of the city – its accelerated
pace, the immensity yet compression of urban space, its ethnic diversity
and thronging crowds, its rapidly moving traffic, overwhelming visual
clutter, and disorientating vertical organization. “It was a technical trick,
but it was a perfect marriage of material and manner. It was a panorama of
New York composed of rapid flashes, casual, vivid, intense,” an early
reviewer remarked on Dos Passos’s use of filmic strategies. “The indivi-
duals who jumped on to and off the screen were brilliant sketches, but it
was the conglomerate massed impression, which gave the essence of
a metropolis, that made Manhattan Transfer unforgettable” (Butcher 82).
The reviewer regards Dos Passos’s imitation of filmic technique as an apt
representational choice because she considers the cinema the most modern
and urban medium and sees it offering a repertoire of successful strategies
to represent city life.4
Such a “mimetic interpretation” of the novel’s form, as Hartwig
Isernhagen has dubbed this line of reasoning, relates the novel’s structure
and style to both its urban content and to cinematic strategies of repre-
sentation, presupposing that a collection of discontinuous snapshots can
best represent the diversity of the city’s public and private places, popula-
tion groups, and cultural spheres (132). Extended to the level of character-
ization, this approach often detects parallels between the fragmented
character of urban space, the novel’s narrative discontinuities, and the
psychological and physical disintegration of the protagonists.5 Hence the
novel’s form is thought to mirror the make-up and functioning of the city
environment it depicts – and by extension also to reflect the larger socio-
cultural developments of modernity that find their concretized expression
Manhattan Transfer’s Documentary Aesthetics 147
in the crowds, buildings, traffic, commerce, and the material and political
culture of Manhattan. The city serves in the novel, Blanche Gelfant asserts,
“as a huge symbol of twentieth-century historical tendencies,” such as the
dissolution of traditions and communal bonds, an increasing acceleration
and mechanization of life, consumerism, and a widespread sense of isola-
tion and disaffection (134, 21).
Although a reading that ties the “cinematic” features of Manhattan
Transfer to its urban theme seems entirely valid to me, I also think
that the novel reworks cinematic representational strategies not merely
to document early twentieth-century urban culture, but also to expose
how this culture represents itself and how the discourses and practices
of consumerist mass culture, in particular, contribute to a capitalist
hollowing out of humanist values and democratic practices. Manhattan
Transfer imitates and undoes the reality effects of film to direct the
reader’s attention to the processes of (perceptual, discursive, and
technical) mediation that shape their understanding of both the lit-
erary text and of the urban culture it depicts. By continually building
up and rupturing immediacy effects, the novel confronts the readers
with the text’s representational strategies and their own analytical
routines. As a result, patterns of literary and mass media communica-
tion that have become naturalized to the point of passing unnoticed
are made visible again as forms of mediation. In other words,
Manhattan Transfer offers experiences of representational immediacy
that feed into an awareness of mediation and facilitate a critical
reappraisal of mass media discourse and its sociopolitical matrix.
Manhattan Transfer’s Documentary Aesthetics

To create a portrait of urban life that feels lifelike to the readers, Dos Passos
emulates the facticity of documentary film in Manhattan Transfer. The
novel uses an approach of “showing not telling” to produce the impression
that it offers a disinterested camera-like recording of events and hence an
objective and truthful representation of urban modernity. The difference
between showing and telling, Peter J. Rabinowitz explains, is “a difference
in presentation: showing is a relatively unmediated enactment or drama-
tization of events, while telling is a mediated report on them” (530). Since
both modes are forms of literary representation, they are, of course, both
mediated. Yet the uncommented dramatization of events in the text
(“showing”) is geared to minimize the reader’s awareness of the act of
narration and thus serves to create an effect of immediacy.
Manhattan Transfer features an undramatized narrator who does not
participate in the story he tells and who refrains from any comments that
would draw attention to his presence and his mediation of the story to
create the impression of documentary reporting. (The novel, in other
words, has a covert extra-heterodiegetic narrator). Like a camera that
records a given scene but remains invisible for the spectator who later
watches the filmed images, the narrator is effaced as an instrument of
mediation. He remains imperceptible for the reader. In this way, the
strategy of “showing not telling” adds to the text’s desired immediacy
effect.
The novel begins, for instance, with this narrative fragment:
The nurse, holding the basket at arm’s length as if it were a bedpan, opened
the door to a big dry hot room with greenish distempered walls where in the
air tinctured with smells of alcohol and iodoform hung writhing a faint
sourish squalling from other baskets along the wall. As she set her basket
down she glanced into it with pursed-up lips. The newborn baby squirmed
in the cottonwood feebly like a knot of earthworms. (3)
Done! We have reached the end of the first of the novel’s 136 segments.
After an interstice, the narrative continues with a different scene that is set
in a different locale and involves other characters. We now are presented
a ferry ride towards Manhattan: “On the ferry there was an old man
playing the violin. He had a monkey’s face puckered up in one corner
and kept time with the toe of a cracked patent-leather shoe” (3). In both
scenes, the external aspects of the situation are described in detail. Close
attention is paid to sensory impressions, but no interpretation of the
reported details is given. If we wish to probe a character’s emotional state
or attitude, we have to infer it from the presented external particulars. The
nurse’s distaste for her work, for instance, is dramatized in her gestures and
mimics. Her body language reveals her repulsion. She tries to keep the baby
as far away from her as possible and grimaces when she looks at it. Her
negative attitude is clearly perceptible to the reader, but it is not made
explicit or explained in the text. We are not told what she feels or thinks,
and we are not given any background information that would explain her
frustration in this particular moment or the reasons for her holding a job
that she dislikes.
Even when the narrative does not limit itself to reporting the outer view
of a scene but dips into the inner experiential reality of a character, it tends
to retain its documentary air. Emotions typically are not addressed or
reflected upon but registered and recorded in the form of bodily response.
When Bud Korpenning, the central character of the second fragment,
arrives in Manhattan, for instance, we are told of his excitement and
apprehension and his resolution to quell his nervousness solely in terms
of sensations and gestures: “He walked between two coal wagons and out
over a dusty expanse of street towards yellow streetcars. A trembling took
hold of his knees. He thrust his hands deep in his pockets” (4).
Descriptions of this sort move from the outside to the inside of
a character. Yet since the feelings are not directly named or explained by
either the characters or the narrator but their presence and significance only
implied in the recounting of physical sensations, the narrative assumes
a documentary quality. It seems to merely report what is happening.
This narrative strategy of setting a mood or characterizing a figure
through showing rather than telling resembles cinematic narration in
that it relies on the presentation of external details and the dramatization
of interior processes. Unless they use voice-over narration, films have to
rely on mise-en-scène (elements in front of the camera such as props,
lighting, or the actions of the figures), as well as the cinematographic
framing of shots (aspects such as camera angle and distance), and editing
to create atmosphere, to convey a character’s personality, or to express
emotions and ideas. Likewise, in Manhattan Transfer, the narrative evokes
mood, setting, character, and theme through the detailed sensory descrip-
tion of scenes rather than through explicit reflective or evaluative com-
mentary. In Dos Passos’s words, Manhattan Transfer is a “novel full of
snapshots of life like a documentary film” (“Contemporary Chronicles”
239).6 Although it is a work of fiction, the novel’s unobtrusive narrative
voice creates a semblance of factual recording that associates the text with
the truth claims of the documentary – the genre traditionally thought to
provide accurate and reliable representations of social reality because its
accounts are supposedly based on objective observation and impartial
reporting. As Peter Lee-Wright points out, “Documentary traditionally
stood at the apex of the factual pyramid, the fully filmically realised
statement of the actual” (92).
The covert mode of narration that Dos Passos uses to documentary
effect in Manhattan Transfer differs markedly from earlier forms of realist
writing. The difference becomes readily perceptible when one compares
the opening of Dos Passos’s novel to the beginning of an exemplary
naturalist novel, published in 1900, that prefigures Manhattan Transfer’s
concern with the environmental determination of character. Theodore
Dreiser introduces the protagonist of his novel Sister Carrie in the first
paragraph in this way: “She was eighteen years of age, bright, timid, and
full of the illusions of ignorance and youth” (1).7 This overt evaluation of
the character’s personality is followed by a more extended comment in the
next paragraph: “When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of
two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she
rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse”
(1). With these opening statements, the narrator hands the reader a map of
the terrain to be traversed in the course of the novel. We now know which
theme this narrative will pursue and what its moral parameters are.
Manhattan Transfer, by contrast, keeps the readers deliberately uninformed
and guessing about the psychological make-up of the characters or the value
scheme of the narrator. We find out who is who, how people and events are
interrelated, and which significance they carry in the overall composition of
the novel, as we go along. As we read the first 100 pages or so of the novel, we
cannot even predict which of the multitude of introduced characters will
assume greater importance in the narrative scheme of things. Of the figures in
the first segment, for instance, it is not the nurse but the baby who turns out to
be a major character – Ellen Thatcher, who becomes a celebrated actress but
petrifies emotionally as her success (on stage and with men) increases and she
gives in to the materialist surface orientation of Manhattan’s upper crust.
Of course the narrative does not leave the readers completely to their
own devices but directs their understanding of the presented situations and
characters through the use of figurative speech and rhetorical figures, the
manipulation of orthography and punctuation, and the graphic layout of
the text. In the first segment, for instance, two similes guide the reader’s
interpretation of the passage by making the nurse’s disgust palpable. The
crib she holds is like “a bedpan,” the baby “a knot of earthworms.” The
striking similes reinforce the unpleasant quality of the presented situation
and enrich our understanding of the nurse’s unverbalized attitude. They
help to set a mood. Yet in comparison with an explicit explanatory state-
ment, the similes leave a greater degree of interpretive leeway for the
readers since they possess greater indeterminacy.
Manhattan Transfer’s narrative mode of “showing not telling” thus
requires a degree of imaginative and interpretive input from the readers
that contemporaneous reviewers often found extraordinary and disturbing.
While they accepted dramatization as an apt representational choice for
films, they considered it inappropriate for literary texts. By the time
Manhattan Transfer was published, the classical style was in place in
American cinema (Thompson, “Classical Style” 159), and viewers had
learned to invest filmic representational strategies (such as point of view
shots, eyeline matches, and reverse angle cutting) with narrative meaning.
If shown, for instance, a sequence of shots that first present a person
looking in a certain direction and then an object, most viewers would
automatically make a connection between the two shots and assume that
the second shot depicts what the person in the first shot sees. If the object
looks realistic and looms large, the person looking at it must be physically
close to it. If the object has distorted proportions or blurry features,
chances are that it is imagined or remembered rather than observed.
Once representational conventions have become naturalized, experienced
film spectators make these types of interpretive inferences without con-
scious effort. The viewers do not focus on filmic technique or their own
input in narrativizing the presented images but become immersed in the
depicted reality. As a result, the presentation feels immediate.
In a novel, the same principles of objective recording and dramatization
may generate a contrary effect for readers unfamiliar with the use of these
strategies in a literary text. These readers may expect the text not only to
report but to interpret and evaluate narrative events for them. Hence when
they read a text that is devoid of psychological or moral explication, they
may miss a dimension that they would not expect of a film. The text
deliberately seems to withhold information and insight it could offer.
Although realist novels had already begun to reduce narrative commentary
by the 1920s (Fluck, Das kulturelle Imaginäre 264–65), “showing” had not
yet become the privileged representational strategy in American fiction.
Accordingly, many of Dos Passos’s early readers were irritated that
Manhattan Transfer required of them a heightened interpretive effort
without providing any overt guidelines for how to proceed (in the form
of exposition, summary, or comment).
Critics objected that the novel’s emulation of documentary film nega-
tively affected its literary quality. For them, the reality effects of Manhattan
Transfer were so strong that they felt that the novel offered a direct and
truthful record of modern city life but lacked literary refinement. They
reprimanded Dos Passos for the “machine-like objectivity” his novel
possessed (Murray 172) because it depicted events as a camera would –
indiscriminately recording the surface details of a given scene. Readers
protested that Dos Passos had chosen “to become a mere instrument for
registering impressions [. . .]; to discard no episode, however trivial, since
the sensitized plate records them all with a mechanical impartiality” (Stuart
65).8 Reminiscent of the negative reviews that Whitman’s “photographic”
catalogue technique initially garnered, this criticism equated the “cine-
matic” style of Manhattan Transfer with a lack of selective focus, over-
arching design, and psychological insight. “For in aping the methods of the
cinema, Dos Passos neglects to exploit the unique advantages of fiction –
chief of which perhaps is its ability to probe character from the inside and
in depth,” a critic complained. “Dos Passos too often focuses his prose-
camera on externals; his impressionistic descriptions, even when they
become subjective, remain almost wholly on the sense level” (Murray 176).
While these critics noted the influence of film on the documentary
poetics of Manhattan Transfer, they failed to recognize that Dos Passos’s
“cinematic” novel did not eschew literary devices or dismiss questions of
interiority but invented new narrative techniques to portray how the
combined pressure of mass media, consumer culture, and urban living
conditions eroded established concepts of individuality. Manhattan
Transfer is a fictional “rapportage,” to use Dos Passos’s term (“What
Makes a Novelist” 272), that appropriates the immediacy effects of doc-
umentary film to expose the thoroughly mediated character of modern life,
as the next section explains.
Shifting the Focus: The Novel’s Fictional Rapportage

of Mass Media and Consumer Culture
Manhattan Transfer simulates the reality effects of the medium most
closely associated with urban modernity, the cinema, to document the
disorienting and disabling impact that the increasing homogenization and
commodification of human experience in the wake of the emergence of
mass media and capitalist consumer culture could have on individual lives
and American society at large. By applying its mode of seemingly unme-
diated recording or “showing” not only to the representation of outer
circumstances but also to the depiction of the characters’ thoughts and
emotions, the novel disregards the traditional distinction between external
conditions and internal states, and by extension between public and private
spheres. Subjective impressions, memories, and fantasies are reported as
matter-of-factly and with supposedly as little narrative intervention as the
particulars of time and place. Through this narrative strategy, the text blurs
the differences between reality levels, undercutting its own documentary
approach, to show how the discourses and practices of mass culture shape
the interior lives of the characters. In Manhattan Transfer, subjective
experience is inextricably tied to but also threatened by the products of
media culture. The inner lives of the characters are saturated with the
slogans and images of mass communication and streamlined through the
materialism of an age of “conspicuous consumption,” to use Thorstein
Veblen’s term.9 Reworking the immediacy effects of documentary film, the
Dos Passos’s Portrait of Mass Media Culture 153
novel discloses the vulnerability of the individual to the homogenizing
pressures of modern society to suggest that the only chance left for self-
determination at this historical moment lies in an increased awareness and
deliberate manipulation of mediatory processes.
Key for the novel’s intervention in mass media culture is the text’s
handling of narrative perspective and its sampling of popular culture. The
narrative filters the story through the consciousness of multiple characters
without coming to rest in any privileged point of view. The pluralization of
the novel’s perspectives serves to validate individual sensibilities at a time
when the status of the individual was radically redefined through the rise of
mass production and consumption, rapidly increasing city populations, and
the concomitant dissolution of Victorian social mores. Yet while Manhattan
Transfer affirms subjective experience, the novel also dramatizes how perva-
sively a logic of commodification and mass mediation informs modern
urban life by incorporating into its narrative a plethora of media cultural
samples, including song lyrics, newspaper articles, and commercial signs.
“Steamroller,” the last chapter of the novel’s first section, offers
a representative example of this strategy. The chapter opens with
a segment that describes a pivotal moment in the life of Jimmy Herf, the
most prominent character in the novel besides Ellen Thatcher.10 We meet
Jimmy outside a cemetery where a steamroller is paving a new street (112).
As we follow him on his walk over the (symbolically apt) “new road” (112),
we find out that he has just attended the funeral of his mother and is trying
to come to terms with her death. Of course, none of these facts are stated
explicitly in the text. Instead, the narrative invites the reader’s inferences as
it oscillates between an external and internal focalization of the scene.11
After an introductory passage that describes the bleak generic landscape,
which reflects Jimmy’s mood, the narrative turns inward:
He yanked off his black necktie and put it in his pocket. A tune was grinding
crazily through his head:
I’m so tired of vi-olets
Take them all away.
There is one glory of the sun and another glory of the moon and another
glory of the stars: for one star differeth from another star in glory. So is the
resurrection of the dead . . . . He walked on fast splashing through puddles
full of sky, trying to shake the droning welloiled words out of his ears, to get
the feeling of black crêpe off his fingers, to forget the smell of lilies.
I’m so tired of vi-olets
Take them all away. (112)
The passage briefly reports Jimmy’s actions, then moves into a representation
of his thoughts. Jimmy’s stream of consciousness is marked by an absence of
personal observations, however. Quotes from a popular song and a sermon
take the place of private reflection and keep the reader guessing whose funeral
Jimmy attended and how he feels. His emotional state is evoked through an
enumeration of unpleasant physical sensations that externalize his unarticu-
lated feeling of grief, before another fragment of direct thought follows in
a reprise of the song lyrics.
Although the degree of insight into the character’s consciousness varies
throughout the passage and the scene is focalized in turn by the narrator
and by Jimmy, the changes in psychological distance and mode of pre-
sentation from sentence to sentence (combining surface narration, thought
report, and direct thought) do not affect the documentary quality of the
text.12 Even though it represents subjective experience, the narrative retains
the semblance of reportage by means of two strategies that invest it with
a sense of immediacy: the narrative either creates objective correlates for the
character’s emotions in the description of the setting or of physical sensa-
tions and thus minimizes both the mediating consciousness of the char-
acter and the felt presence of the narrator, as we have already seen in earlier
examples, or it takes the opposite course and uses internal focalization and
stream of consciousness technique, pretending to offer an exact transcript
of the character’s thoughts and sensations without the intervention of
a narrator. Both of these strategies create the impression that the character’s
experience is reported directly. They possess the immediacy effect of mere
recording.
Yet the experiential reality that the text seems to document immediately,
with only minimal interference by a narrator, is thoroughly mediated. The
larger cultural question that the novel’s mode of “showing” and “rappor-
tage” raises is how to assert individual experience at a time when the heavy
mediation of modern life erodes the distinction between personal narrative
and dominant cultural discourse. While the novel’s documentary approach
and attendant immediacy effects hold out the promise of offering
a transparent and authentic record of social reality, the represented sub-
jective experiences and scenarios negate the possibility of a return to a less
mediated social life and environment.
The symbolic setting of the “Steamroller” scene suggests as much. As
Jimmy continues his walk, he symbolically ascends a hill, but instead of
finding a comforting pastoral idyll, as the initial sentences of the
description seem to suggest, he faces a landscape inscribed by consumer
culture:
The road climbed a hill. There was a bright runnel of water in the ditch,
flowing through patches of grass and dandelions. There were fewer houses;
on the sides of barns peeling letters spelled out LYDIA PINKHAM’S
VEGETABLE COMPOUND, BUDWEISER, RED HEN, BARKING
DOG . . . And muddy had had a stroke and now she was buried. He
couldn’t think how she used to look, she was dead that was all. (113)
Just as Jimmy’s mind is preoccupied with the repetition of remembered

phrases, the landscape is dominated by commercial signs. The typeset of
the text graphically expresses their intrusive character. Studded with adver-
tisements, the land does not offer a return to an Edenic state of untainted
nature and unmediated experience. Instead, the advertised brand names
take the place of the typical farm animals that we expect to populate such
a rural scene: “RED HEN, BARKING DOG” (cf. Geyh, “Cities of
Things” 432). In this setting, Jimmy remains cut off from his feelings.
By dramatizing Jimmy’s emotions in the depiction of the setting while
reporting and directly citing his thoughts, the passage tentatively suggests
that the sensory engagement with the world and an associative mental
processing of experience may provide viable strategies to cope with an
unsettling and potentially overwhelming situation. When Jimmy finds
a way to directly interact with his surroundings, the memory of his mother
returns. The encounter with a song bird transforms the scene for him:
The minute rusty bird flew ahead, perched on a telegraph wire and sang, and
flew ahead to the rim of an abandoned boiler and sang, and flew ahead and
sang. The sky was getting a darker blue, filling with flaked motherofpearl
clouds. For a last moment he felt the rustle of silk beside him, felt a hand in
a trailing lacefrilled sleeve close gently over his hand. (113)
Through the interaction with the bird, the landscape gains in comfort for
Jimmy. It no longer appears barren, decayed, modern but assumes the soft
and ornate quality of his mother’s Victorian dress. The memory of his
mother infuses Jimmy with a sense of increased virility and determination.
He notices signs of spring and life’s new beginnings at this crossroad
moment in his life. “He walked faster. The blood flowed full and hot in
his veins. The flaked clouds were melting into rosecolored foam. He could
hear his steps on the worn macadam. At a crossroad the sun glinted on the
sticky pointed buds of a beechsapling” (113).
In this segment, observer and observed, memory and perception, inter-
ior and exterior are inseparably merged. The narrative does not reduce the
represented world to its surface aspects, as Dos Passos’s early critics
claimed, but suffuses the scene with the sensations, emotions, and thoughts
of the character. This is a typical strategy for the novel as a whole, as
Blanche Gelfant points out: the setting “is dramatized as an inner experi-
ence. The emphasis is therefore not upon the facts of perception: it is upon
the fact of perception” (17). The fusion of interior and exterior reality
through the externalization of subjective states and the shifting focalization
serves to affirm individual sensibilities and the direct physical interaction
with the world at a cultural moment when individuality and the possibility
of relating to the world in a noncommercial way was under threat of
erasure. As numerous critics have noted, the steamroller that gives the
chapter its title and opens the scene is a menacing symbol for the trans-
formative power of modernity and the pressure it exerts on people. The
commercial signs that encroach on the scene reflect the extent to which
materialist principles have saturated American society.13 With the help of
its documentary style and internal focalization, the novel expresses
a valuation of subjective experience that is typical for the modernist search
for new forms of authenticity in the wake of modernization processes.14
Yet, at the same time, the scene does not celebrate the inner life as a refuge
into which the besieged members of modern society could retreat. Jimmy’s
mind and psyche are not separate from or unaffected by public discourse.
The song text and sermon are as much part of his thoughts as his memories
of his mother. The private experience of the character is culturally
mediated.
The composition of the segment dramatizes this point through repre-
sentational strategies that break the passage’s immediacy effect and bring
processes of mediation into focus, such as when the layout of the song
lyrics and sermon draws the reader’s attention to the graphic arrangement
of the text on the page. On the one hand, the representation of the song
lyrics strives towards immediacy in that the spelling of “vi-olets” suggests
an intonation that is typical of words sung rather than written. The text
seems to offer a direct transcript of Jimmy’s inner speech. Yet set off
visually from the previous description, the song lyrics appear as an alien
element inserted into the text and highlight the materiality of the printed
page. The same holds true for the spelling of the ads in caps. The
presentation of the remembered sermon works differently but creates
the same self-referential effect. Because it graphically blends in with the
rest of the prose and is not announced by quotation marks or any tags,
such as “he thought,” the quote from the sermon is likely to surprise the
reader who will expect that the shift back to prose after the song lyrics
signals a return to the familiar narrative voice. The need to contextualize
the quote and to decide whether it should be attributed to a character or
the narrator increases the reader’s awareness of the text’s representational
strategies.
The novel embeds its immediacy effects in strategies that highlight
mediatory processes to depict how the characters’ sense of individuality is
hollowed out by the permeation of their thoughts and emotions by mass
media discourse. Regardless of the level of income or education, the
political conviction or moral integrity of the characters, the pattern
remains the same throughout the novel: media images of fame and success
(often transmitted through movies or newspapers) and snippets from
popular culture (such as emblematic song lines) shape or even replace
unique individual aspirations, desires, or hopes. In Manhattan Transfer,
the inner life has become generic.15
A representative example is James Merivale, who personifies opportu-
nism and an obsession with material success and social standing, and who
functions as a contrasting foil to his cousin Jimmy Herf, who refused to
follow James’s career path in an act of youthful rebellion (119–21). When
James envisions his future, his thoughts mix not only with lines of songs
and newspaper headlines, but his success fantasy also includes reporters
taking photographs and writing articles about him. He imagines this scene:
But if you will allow me a few serious words on this festive occasion
(flashlight photograph) there is a warning note I should like to sound . . .
feel it my duty as an American citizen, as president of a great institution of
nationwide, international in the better sense, nay, universal contacts and
loyalties (flashlight photograph) . . . . At last making himself heard above the
thunderous applause, James Merivale, his stately steelgray head shaking with
emotion, continued his speech. (386)
Media presence is an integral part of James’s vision of himself as

a successful businessman. It defines his life as admirable and worthy. Yet
the speech James makes up is a mosaic of empty phrases. The fantasy seems
generic rather than individual.
This pattern holds up across the spectrum of characters. When the
working class characters Bud Korpenning and Anna Cohen, for exam-
ple, fantasize about their future, they dream, like James, of being at the
center of the crowd’s attention. But whereas James, who lapses into his
flight of fancy during his first visit to a prestigious private club and
who actually stands a chance of making a name for himself in the
business world, the fantasies of disenfranchised characters like Bud and
Anna simulate popular movies and are detached from the actual lives
they lead. On the brink of suicide, Bud imagines, for instance, “riding
in pinkplush in a white carriage with Maria Sackett by his side through
rows of men waving cigars, bowing, doffing brown derbies, Alderman
Bud riding in a carriage full of diamonds with his milliondollar bride”
(125). The daydream sounds like a movie scene and is completely
unattainable and removed from the lived experience of Bud who, on
the run from the police after killing his abusive father, has descended
into suicidal paranoia. Likewise, when Anna imagines a possible future
with her boyfriend Elmer, an idealistic labor organizer, she pictures
a tacky film scenario in which the communist revolution features as
a festive parade and her lover looks like a movie star (397).
The emptying out of interiority that accompanies the replacement of
personal experience with ready-made media images also plays a pivotal role
in the storylines of the novel’s two central characters, Jimmy and Ellen.
When Jimmy resigns from his job as a journalist, he experiences a new
sense of possibility. Yet even in this moment of euphoria he feels that the
mass media completely usurp his inner life. He walks “through the city of
scrambled alphabets, through the city of gilt letter signs” (351). Jimmy’s
subsequent stream of consciousness is made up of ad slogans and the
sensationalist and sentimental newspaper coverage of several murders he
has read:
Express service meets the demands of spring. Oh God to meet the demands of
spring. No tins, no sir, but there’s rich quality in every mellow pipeful. [. . .]
The Yonkers gang left him for dead on a bench in the park. They stuck him
up, but all they got was a million words. . . . “But Jimps I’m so tired of
booktalk and the proletariat, cant you understand?”
Chockful of golden richness, spring.
Dick Snow’s mother owned a shoebox factory. [. . .] Dick Snow stayed
behind emptying his gun into the dead man. In the deathhouse he met the
demands of spring by writing a poem to his mother that they published in
the Evening Graphic. (352)
In this interior monologue there is hardly any interiority left. It is not the
private memory of his wife Ellen (who addresses him as Jimps), but the
remembered ad that gets a line to itself and thus is singled out for attention.
Jimmy’s mental space is filled with the proliferating commercial signs and
stories of mass culture. The only way for him to respond creatively to this
situation is to recombine the found phrases of the ads and news articles or
to appropriate their power through parody.
To express his feeling of loss at the end of his marriage and job, Jimmy
does not reflect on his feelings but makes up a mock newspaper article that
plays on the Red Scare (which was described in an earlier chapter):
Where in New York shall I bury my twenties? Maybe they were deported
and went out to sea on the Ellis Island ferry singing the International. The
growl of the International over the water, fading sighing into the mist.
deported
James Herf young newspaper man of 190 West 12th Street recently lost his
twenties. Appearing before Judge Merivale they were remanded to Ellis
Island for deportation as undesirable aliens. The younger four Sasha
Michael Nicholas and Vladimir had been held for some time of the charge
of criminal anarchy. (353)
Although this is an obvious parody and the reader may laugh, there is
little comfort in it for the character. The satiric imitation of generic
conventions, the play with representational formats may bring a sense
of relief but it offers no livable alternative for Jimmy. Although he may
mock its consumerist, sensationalist, sentimental, and xenophobic
aspects, Jimmy cannot step outside the mass culture he is part of. He is
saturated with it to the point that his ideas and emotions take the shape of
its products.16 Accordingly, the passage ends with Jimmy feeling that
“print itches like a rash inside me. I sit here pockmarked with print”
(354). The simile and metaphor are revealing: what usually would be on
the outside, a reaction on the surface of the skin, has been internalized.
The rash is inside him. Mass (print) culture has taken over his private
thinking and feeling.
The novel’s collage style, the integration of ads, song lines, and news
items into the stream of consciousness of the characters, and the often
formulaic quality of their ambitions and movie-like fantasies emphasize
that much of the identity and experience of these figures is shaped by their
response to urban mass culture. The mediatory processes involved in the
absorption of the images and language, the ideas and values circulated by
such mass media as the press and the cinema are presented as a central
element of urban life.
While most characters cannot dissociate themselves from the barrage of
images, signs, and slogans they encounter daily, the text as a whole offers
a larger perspective. It seeks to open up an imaginative space in which
dominant cultural practices and paradigms (including the distinction
between objective and subjective, individual and mass, elite and popular
culture) can be reconsidered. Integral to this effort is the text’s ironic
twisting of its own documentary poetics. The striking fantasy of Jimmy’s
disembodied travel through Manhattan’s “scrambled alphabets,” for
instance, blends first and third person narration in a way that reveals the
fictional character of seemingly factual statements and thus undercuts the
text’s documentary quality:
He dropped sickeningly fortyfour stories, crashed. And suppose I bought
a gun and killed Ellie, would I meet the demands of April sitting in the
deathhouse writing a poem about my mother to be published in the Evening
Graphic?
He shrank until he was of the smallness of dust, picking his way over crags
and bowlders in the roaring gutter, climbing straws, skirting motoroil
lakes. (353)
The obvious mismatch between the factual tone and the fantastical
nature of the reported events introduces narrative unreliability into the
text. By interspersing Jimmy’s excited, almost delusional inner speech
with these apparently factual but unbelievable statements, the passage
associates the truth claims of the text with the truth claims of the
yellow press, which have set Jimmy’s mind on edge, and consequently
disposes of both. The basic features that conventional documentaries
depend on for their effect of verisimilitude – a reliable narrator and
a clear separation between fact and fantasy – are absent. Instead the
reader encounters a parody of mass media discourse on the level of
content and an ironic play with the conventions of documentary
reporting on the level of narration and focalization. The novel thus
stimulates a fresh perception of the products and media of mass culture
that it cites.
Narrative Montage: Making Sense of Urban Culture

Manhattan Transfer’s stylistic and narrative innovations allow the novel
simultaneously to unfold immediacy effects that offer the readers a visceral
experience of urban culture and to employ strategies of defamiliarization
that highlight the necessity of a distanced reflection on this cultural matrix.
The novel’s formal experiments render the mediated quality of modern
metropolitan life palpable for the readers while they affirm the creative and
self-reflexive role that literary representations of social reality can play for
an imaginative and critical reappraisal of mass media culture. Central in
this respect is the montage-like narrative structure of Manhattan Transfer
that enables the novel to dramatize the accelerated pace, fragmented
nature, and sensory overstimulation characteristic of urban culture while
prompting the readers to consider anew the social costs of city life and mass
media culture, as this section argues.
Manhattan Transfer’s Montage Structure 161
The structural organization of the novel according to the principle
of montage is the most obvious instance of its imitation of cinematic
strategies. The term montage can be used to describe the novel’s
narrative mosaic of vignettes and discontinuous, elliptical plotlines –
for instance, the relation between the chapter titles, the italicized
lyrical passages that introduce each chapter, and the narrative frag-
ments within a given chapter. It can also be applied in the narrower
sense of collage to the novel’s reproduction of such diverse text types
as news articles, ads, song lyrics, letters, encyclopedia entries, invoices,
or store signs. As a compositional principle, montage allowed Dos
Passos to people his narrative with an unusually large cast of characters
without having to integrate their multiple perspectives and storylines
into a continuous linear narrative. It made it possible to add self-
contained episodes or to cut plotlines short without risking the loss of
narrative coherence. It freed him from the constraints of narrative
chronology and made it possible to order the text according to the-
matic or more freely associative criteria. It allowed for the omission of
exposition and transition and thus for a compressed presentation of
events and a rapid narrative pace.
These qualities made montage ideally suited for the representation of
modern urbanity, as many critics have noted.17 The multiplication of
characters and perspectives enabled Dos Passos to describe characters
of widely differing economic, ethnic, professional, and political back-
grounds and thus to draw a democratic portrait of the city’s population.
This structural affirmation of diversity fits the novel’s thematic concern
with such issues as racism, cultural pluralism, gender politics, and class
divisions.18 By presenting individual figures as part of crisscrossing paths
and channels of trade and communication which the characters are only
partially aware of, the novel addresses the shifting relation between indi-
vidual and collective in an urban environment. The montage structure
permits the novel to suggest complex networks of relations and to convey
a sense of contingency, instability, and unpredictability. At the same time,
the narrative structure recreates for the reader the perceptual and psycho-
logical experience of living in an environment that multiplies observers and
things to be seen by bringing together masses of people and cramming
objects into limited space – the chaotic traffic, crowded sidewalks and
tenement houses, clutter of signs and billboards typical of the time imme-
diately come to mind. Manhattan Transfer thus uses its kaleidoscopic
narrative structure to represent the complexity and bustle of urban life at
the beginning of the twentieth century.
Through montage Dos Passos creates an analogy between urban and
narrative space. He translates prominent qualities of city life into condi-
tions of the textual environment. In particular the narrative disjunctions,
compression, and swift tempo dramatize the sense of disorientation, per-
ceptual overload, and acceleration as well as the general cultural destabili-
zation that characterized modern urbanity for many city dwellers in the
first decades of the twentieth century. As the readers navigate the narrative
terrain, they seem to viscerally experience urban life rather than to read
a fictional account of it.
The absence of transitions in particular contributes to this immediacy
effect. It speeds up the narrative flow and increases the informational
density of the text while also multiplying the gaps in the temporal and
spatial weave of the novel’s fictional world. The readers typically find
themselves in the middle of a narrative situation, then move across an
interstice to the next scene, inferring thematic as well as temporal and
spatial connections. The narrative segments rarely open with statements
that would place us in time, space, or narrative sequence, such as “Ellen was
sitting beside her father on a bench at the Battery” (62). Instead, the scenes
typically begin with indefinite pronouns that keep the readers guessing
who the characters are and in which part of town or year the events take
place (Clark, Early Fiction 120).19 As we move from fragment to fragment,
the narrative discontinuities keep us speculating. We have to orient our-
selves by paying attention to detail, noticing the particulars of the scene,
interpreting gestures and actions, and integrating the new episode into
what has come before. In this respect, our active grappling with the textual
clues resembles the character’s search for coherence in their complex and
chaotic urban world. D. H. Lawrence describes the effect of verisimilitude
and immediate participation that this correspondence may create for the
readers: The “confusion is genuine, not affected; it is life, not a pose. The
book becomes what life is, a stream of different things and different faces
rushing along in the consciousness, with no apparent direction save that of
time” (75–76).
In presenting disjunctive sequences of moments rather than tracing
continuous developments, the novel stresses the experience of the present
over the past and future.20 The montage structure invests the narrative
with a temporal immediacy that is reminiscent of the continual now of
a projected film that unfolds as we are watching so that the events on
screen, which were recorded earlier, seem to be happening at the very
moment of our viewing. As a result, the narrative possesses “something like
the flicker of the early silent movies. We pass from the midst of one
situation to the midst of another” (Beach 63). Granted, a narrative mon-
tage in a text functions differently than a film montage. In a film, the
duration of a shot dictates the duration of the spectator’s view of a scene.
The editing and assembly of the shots into a sequence therefore establishes
a perceptual tempo and rhythm for the viewer. A text cannot direct the
pace of the reader’s perceptual processes in the same way. The reader is free
to extend or exit the narrative present – she can pause, go back and reread
sentences, fast forward by skimming the text or jumping ahead.
Nevertheless, the novel’s emphasis on the present moment and the narra-
tive momentum that Manhattan Transfer gains because of its disjunctive
structure approximate the effect of filmic montage.
Dos Passos called this effect “simultaneity” and linked it to both cine-
matic montage and to cubist and futurist innovations in literature and the
arts. “The Italian futurists, the Frenchmen of the school of Rimbaud, the
poets who went along with cubism in painting were trying to produce
something that stood up off the page,” Dos Passos observes. “Simultaneity,
some of them called it. That excited me. Why not write a simultaneous
chronicle? A novel full of snapshots of life like a documentary film”
(“Contemporary Chronicles” 239).21 The principle of montage enabled
Dos Passos, in other words, to break up the chronological order and
narrative linearity of the plot by intersecting the various storylines in
constantly new ways thus multiplying their interrelations and compressing
their temporal and spatial relations to the point where the narrative
segments coalesce into an impression of a simultaneous presence rather
than a sequence of disjointed moments and discontinuous processes.22
The montage structure of Manhattan Transfer thus produces an impres-
sion of temporal immediacy and allows the readers to experience the quick
unpredictable flux of city life in their grappling with the disjunctive and
disorienting composition of the narrative. The same strategies that seem to
place the readers in the midst of the narrated events, however, also work to
distance them from the depicted urban mass culture when they draw
attention to the text’s narrative techniques. The gaps in the temporal,
spatial, and narrative sequence require from the readers a degree of close
observation and imaginative conjecture, of attentiveness and conceptual
openness that contrasts sharply with the complete absorption of most
characters in the ready-made images and slogans of mass culture.
For Dos Passos, attentiveness or a “state of unpreoccupied alertness” and
the abandonment of “preconceived notions” were prerequisite for
a creative response to reality (“What Makes a Novelist” 273). With regard
to the writing process, he stressed, much in line with Stein’s insistence on
the “present immediacy” of observation and representation, the necessity
to disconnect from prior experience and to conceive of events as if seeing
them for the first time: “The literate man tends to believe that when he has
named, labeled and pigeonholed some event [. . .], he has disposed of it. He
is likely to apply the label before he has really observed the object,” Dos
Passos pointed out. “To observe objectively a man has to retain something
of childhood’s naïve and ignorant state of mind. [. . .] The first-rate nove-
list like the first-rate scientist must be obsessed by his own ignorance. This
conviction of ignorance is the first step towards understanding.
Astonishment strangely quickens the senses” (“What Makes a Novelist”
273). Accordingly, not-knowing is key for the reader’s experience of
Manhattan Transfer. The method of montage is used to disorient the
readers, startling them into a new awareness of the urban culture they
read about and possibly also live in – a strategy that Eisenstein later
radicalized for political purposes in his shock aesthetic of montage (cf.
Lowry 1635). Like other modernist artists and writers, Dos Passos uses
defamiliarization as a means to break out of the mold of perceptual
routines and cultural traditions that are felt to interfere with a direct
engagement with the world as it presents itself in the current moment.
Dos Passos’s use of montage in Manhattan Transfer works in opposite
directions at once: it breaks up narrative cohesion and the linear logic of
cause and effect, and it creates new forms of coherence based on associa-
tion, juxtaposition, multiperspectivity, and simultaneity. In the chapter
“Went to the Animal Fair,” for instance, which is positioned in the middle
of the novel and in which the plotlines of several major characters intersect
as they spend an evening at the same restaurant, the narrative moves from
table to table, detailing in its consecutive segments not just the different
conversations that go on simultaneously but also how the characters
perceive each other across the room, and what they think and feel about
each other. The chapter thus creates a kaleidoscopic portrait of the situa-
tion that exceeds what any single figure knows and experiences. The scene
is never seen at once in its totality but builds up accumulatively as the
narrative switches among the different tables and patrons, moving between
several character-focalizers and changing from external to internal focaliza-
tion. The organization of the narrative as a montage fragments the world
the novel describes, and it reorders the segments to forge new connections.
It formally reproduces an experience of disintegration, while it attempts to
create a sense of temporal presence and experiential immediacy. As such,
the novel’s montage structure possesses the double-edged thrust so char-
acteristic of modernism – it disposes of aesthetic conventions and cultural
traditions to invent new forms of representation that promise a more
adequate expression of current realities.
In his essay “Towards a Definition of American Modernism,” Daniel
Singal has proposed that modernism is best understood as an attempt to
respond to the modern experience of destabilization by developing new
forms of synthesis and order. Although crisis, breakdown, and rupture are
frequently seen as the hallmarks of modernism, the concern with disin-
tegration is only one side of the modernist project. The other side is the
complementary effort to devise alternatives to established ordering sys-
tems, such as dualist thought, by creating new forms of integration.23
Singal cites as examples for the “integrative mode” of modernism (12)
such diverse phenomena as cubism, cinematic montage, and a preference
for paradox, ambivalence, and simultaneity (13–14). These processual
modes of synthesizing leave the rigid binaries of Victorian thought behind
and strive to order the complex flux of reality without stabilizing it (14).
They generate meaningful interrelations but avoid closure. Order and
knowledge are established but remain relative and transitory (15).
In Manhattan Transfer, the montage structure multiplies the possible
interrelations between the narrative segments and thus produces a form of
coherence that remains indeterminate and requires the reader’s collabora-
tive effort (cf. Lowry 1636). Unlike the fashion magazine that Ellen works
for, the novel does not try to “make every reader feel Johnny on the spot in
the center of things” (368).24 The text does not project a definite normative
understanding of the world it represents, just as it does not privilege any
particular perspective. Instead, the nonlinear montage continually sug-
gests, attenuates, and reestablishes connections. Because these interrela-
tions are implied rather than stated, it remains up to the reader to make
inferences and draw conclusions. As we relate the fragments of the first
chapter to one another, for instance, several overarching themes emerge.
The chapter’s segments tell us of: a commuter ferry landing in New York
City; a maternity ward nurse who dislikes her work; a young man’s arrival
in New York; a mother who rejects her baby; a young father who bonds
with another father (a German immigrant) only to be ripped off by him; an
orthodox Jew who is enticed by a glamorous Gillette ad to shave off his
beard and his wife’s horrified reaction. Taken together, the fragments
suggest such overarching themes as arrival (in life, in New York City, in
American mainstream culture); the clash between dreams of success and
upward mobility and the experience of being unemployed, taken advan-
tage of, rejected; or the forming and breaking of emotional, social, and
cultural ties. Nine pages into the novel, the possible connections between
characters, events, places, and moments already multiply. The method of
montage thus produces a form of knowledge that is relational and proces-
sual rather than stable and given. It accumulates, or, as the title of the novel
suggests, it remains in transit.
In Manhattan Transfer, narrative coherence emerges primarily as a result
of the reader’s interpretive efforts. The montage’s narrative disjunctions
invite our inferences and bring processes of mediation and interpretation
to the center of attention, making us self-reflexively aware that the meaning
of the parts and the shape of the whole emerge as a result of our imaginative
conjectures. Unlike the novel’s characters who are reduced to regurgitating
the empty phrases and mass-produced products of commercial (media)
culture because their desire for public recognition and economic success
makes it impossible for them to retain a creative perspective on the
discourses that engulf them, the readers experience considerable leeway
in responding to the novel’s montage sequences. Manhattan Transfer does
not offer a ready-made panoramic vision of urban life, but incites the
readers to construct a shared world out of its fragments and multiplying
perspectives. The dislocations created by the novel’s montage structure
facilitate an altered perception of the represented social life that may
become the basis for a critical reflection on static models of reality as well
as on cultural practices that serve to streamline our ambitions and dull our
imaginative powers.
To conclude, in Manhattan Transfer Dos Passos samples mass culture
and appropriates and parodies cinematic techniques, such as montage
structure and documentary style, to create a portrait of modern media
and consumer culture that feels real to the readers but that also enables
a renewed critical understanding of the portrayed discourses and social
realities. His fictional “rapportage” of city life produces strong immediacy
effects through the strategy of “showing not telling,” which effaces the
narrator’s mediation of the story, and through the impression of temporal
presence that the novel’s montage structure generates. Even such
a perceptive reader as D. H. Lawrence was so taken with the novel’s air
of immediate reporting that he passed over Dos Passos’s literary strategies
and simply reviewed the novel as a “very complex film” (76). Describing
the novel’s reality effects, he likened Dos Passos’s compositional process to
the unselective mechanical recording technologies of the phonograph and
film camera: “If you set a blank record revolving to receive all the sounds,
and a film-camera going to photograph all the motions of a scattered group
of individuals, at the point where they meet and touch in New York, you
would more or less get Mr. Dos Passos’ method” (75). Yet, obviously, Dos
Passos did not give an impartial record of his observations of city life in his
novel. He wrote a work of fiction whose style and form rework cinematic
techniques to create immediacy effects that render the represented urban
space and media culture palpable to the readers.
At the same time, Dos Passos continually undercut the reality effects of
his novel to dramatize the thoroughly mediated character of modern life.
Manhattan Transfer uses several strategies of defamiliarization, such as
narrative disjunctions, shifting focalization, and the blurring of reality
levels, that alert the readers to the multiple ways in which their under-
standing of the text and of the portrayed social realities is mediated. The
representational opacity of the text thus reinforces the cultural critique that
the novel articulates on the level of characterization and plot. While the
characters remain inundated with mass media discourse, the text’s distan-
cing effects open up an imaginative space for the reader to grapple self-
reflexively with both the novel’s experimental style and the consumerist
mass culture it represents.
Although Dos Passos simulates and ruptures cinematic immediacy
effects in Manhattan Transfer to expose the psychological and social costs
of modern media and consumer culture, he presents literature as a vehicle
of cultural critique that is not exempt from the pressures of modern
urbanity but part of the media culture it appraises. The novel incorporates
the discourses of mass culture into the text on a number of levels: through
the direct citation of its products (newspaper items, commercials, song
lyrics, the names of film stars), by using stock characters culled from the
movies and the theater while following the plot conventions of such
popular genres as “bedroom farce,” “transvestite comedy,” and “melo-
drama” (Lowry 1629–30), and by formally imitating the representational
strategies of the cinema. Permeated by popular culture, the novel situates
itself and, by extension, literary culture within a media ecology that is
dominated by mass media discourse and commercial interests. Manhattan
Transfer’s engagement with popular culture thus reveals as inadequate
critical constructions of modernist literature in the vein of what Andreas
Huyssen has called “the discourse of the Great Divide” which defines
modernism as a form of elitist cultural practice that constituted itself in
opposition to modern mass culture (viii; cf. Danius 28–48). Rather than
dismiss mass culture, Dos Passos deliberately appropriates mass media
discourses and techniques in the service of literary innovation and cultural
intervention.
To date, there is no critical consensus on how the development of
literary and film cultures intertwined in the first decades of the twentieth
century. Critics have proposed different models to account for the cross-
fertilization between literature and the cinema. Some accounts stress the
beginnings of film in vaudeville entertainment culture and suggest that
aesthetic commonalities between film and literature are a result of a shared
sociocultural matrix rather than of any direct exchange. The two media
“are linked less by any simplistic model of causality, than by a general
horizon of technologization and mass production,” Colin MacCabe asserts
for instance (“On Impurity” 19). Likewise, David Trotter proposes in
Cinema and Modernism that we “substitute for the model of an exchange
of transferable techniques the model of parallelism. In my view, the
literature of the period and the cinema of the period can best be understood
as constituting and constituted by parallel histories” (3). While Trotter’s
insistence on the media-specific aspects of representation is well taken, his
proposed model of parallelism seems of little help for studies of intermedial
appropriation, as exemplified by Dos Passos’s reworking of cinematic
techniques, since the defining characteristic of parallels is that they do
not intersect. My readings of Stein and Dos Passos suggest that modernist
texts can possess different relations to the cinema and that this diversity
precludes any monolithic explanation.25
The “cinematic” texts of Stein and Dos Passos engage film in different
ways. While Stein’s early portraits suggest a co-emergence and confluence
of modernist literature and film, Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer emulates
cinematic strategies and thus exemplifies film’s direct impact on literary
modernism. Though Stein and Dos Passos made different use of the new
medium, both writers drew on film to contextualize their formal experi-
ments and to think through the imaginative and critical role that literature
could play in a culture increasingly based on technologies of mass produc-
tion and communication.
For Stein’s and Dos Passos’s readers, a comparative media approach can
help to elucidate the innovative formal strategies these writers developed as
they sought to invest their literary works with greater representational
immediacy. The film analogy brings into focus the features of Stein’s early
portraits that define her work as original and avant-garde. Stein dispensed
with mimesis and used self-referential seriality as a compositional principle
to create a performative time-based mode of writing that is able to convey
both the present moment and the processual unfolding of experience. Stein’s
serial writing renders palpable a dimension of reality that traditional Western
thought and mimetic representation cannot grasp – the flux of a continually
emerging and dissolving present moment of time, experience, and significa-
tion. Through the insistent movement of their serial sentence permutations,
the early portraits keep us focused on the fleeting now that our consciousness
and language tend to arrest without fully inhabiting it. They highlight their
composition and medium and confront the reader with processes of repre-
sentation and reception to create an impression of temporal and perceptual
presence.
With regard to Dos Passos’s work, paying attention to the relation
between immediacy effects and the self-reflexive showcasing of mediatory
processes in Manhattan Transfer opens up a way to recognize and describe
the cultural critique that the novel’s experimental style and its appropria-
tion of cinematic aesthetics produce. Manhattan Transfer’s formal innova-
tions simulate the immediacy effects of documentary film to create
a lifelike portrait of metropolitan life, while they also distance the readers
from the represented urban mass culture by directing their attention to
processes of mediation on the level of the characters’ processing of reality,
of the narrative’s representation of fictive reality, and of the reader’s
construction of a shared fictional world out of the numerous narrative
segments and perspectives. The novel’s reworking of cinematic techniques
brings the immense scope, complexity, and rapid pace of urban culture
within the representational grasp of literature, and it enables a satirical and
critical perspective on consumerism and mass media discourse. The con-
sideration of cinematic references and imitation in modernist literature,
then, can deepen our understanding of the modernist quest for new forms
of representational immediacy that could offer an enabling response to the
pressures of modernization.

A Novel Like A Documentary

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A Novel Like A Documentary

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chapter 6

“A Novel Like a Documentary Film”: Cinematic

“Hollywood [. . .] is probably the most important and the most difﬁcult

Manhattan Transfer’s Documentary Aesthetics

Shifting the Focus: The Novel’s Fictional Rapportage

Just as Jimmy’s mind is preoccupied with the repetition of remembered

Media presence is an integral part of James’s vision of himself as

Narrative Montage: Making Sense of Urban Culture

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