THE PLURALITY OF CHRONOTOPES IN THE MODERNIST CITY NOVEL: THE CASE OF MANHATTAN TRANSFER A commonplace in critical readings of modernism

is the sense that modernist works are essentially protean. Modernism, according to Malcolm Bradbury, is less a style than a search for a style.1 This is apparent not just from its use of differing narrative modes (a shifting between narrator types) and different genres (story, free verse, essay and diary in one text), but also from its variety of fictional worlds.2 My aim is to take a closer look at the protean nature of modernism and to show that there is a logic underlying that polymorphism. I will argue that modernist texts are marked by a radical polychronotopical structure. According to Mikhail Bakhtin, chronotopes are images that integrate the temporal processes and spatial selections of a literary text.3 Time and space, two textual elements that are often considered of secondary importance to the interpretation of texts, are a mental unit that constitutes the backbone of the writing and reading processes. This shift in perspective allows Bakhtin to redefine literary communication in a revolutionary way. He no longer puts the emphasis of critical analysis on the narrative action, as had been the case in a long tradition of literary criticism. It is not the nature of the protagonist or the relationships between characters that are the faits primitifs of literary fiction but the chronotopic constructions that writers and readers associate with the text. Thinking of texts as catalysts for the creation of mental worlds opens up new possibilities for literary history, including the opportunity to study the archetypal operations of the imagination. The historical overview I will present in this paper shows that the representation of the modern world in literature depends on the authors aesthetic principles. The survey also sheds new light on the extraordinary heterogeneity of the modernist imagination during the interbellum. Manhattan Transfer, which is prototypical of this kind of modernism, presents an excellent example of the
1

Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, The Name and Nature of Modernism. In: idem (eds.), Modernism. A Guide to European Literature 1890-1930 (Harmondsworth, 1976), 29. Douwe W. Fokkema, Literary History, Modernism and Postmodernism (Amsterdam, 1984) , 27. See Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward a Historical Poetics. In: idem, The Dialogic Imagination (Austin, 1981 [1938]), 84-254. Bakhtin stresses that chronotopes should be understood as organizing centers that function as vehicles for the fundamental narrative events of the novel. (...) The chronotope, functioning as the primary means for materializing time in space, emerges as a center for concretizing representation, as a force giving body to the entire novel. All the novels abstract elements philosophical and social generalizations, ideas, analyses of cause and effect gravitate toward the chronotope and through it take on flesh and blood, permitting the imaging power of art to do its work. Ibid., 250

English Studies, 2001, 5, pp. 420-436 0013-838X/01/05-0420/$15.00 2001, Swets & Zeitlinger

MANHATTAN TRANSFER

workings of this imagination. It is a reservoir of world models culled from the history of the novel. 1. The Use of the Chronotope Concept in Literary Historiography Before I discuss some of the historical guises of the literary imagination since Romanticism, I want to emphasize that Bakhtins notion of the chronotope is ambiguous and that the debates surrounding it are far from over.4 Crucial to the chronotope concept, as I understand it, is the fact that it functions both on the level of small text units and on the level of an overarching world model. In simple terms, one might define the chronotope on the first level as a four-dimensional mental image, combining the three spatial dimensions with the time structure of temporal action. In many realist and modernist novels, for example, the image of the protagonist arriving in the big city is created through descriptions of urban space that contextualize the (temporal) process of the encounter with the metropolis. It is clear that any work of literature evokes several chronotopic images. Bakhtin points out that they usually appear in large numbers, which gives rise to the phenomenon of what we might call, in analogy with his notion of polyphony, polychronotopia.5 On the second level, a chronotope should be considered a texts fundamental image of the world. The dialogue between chronotopes, created in the text by its producer, causes the reader to experience one particular type of image as dominant and to select it as the overarching chronotope.6 The overarching chronotope plays an important part in the process of interpretation, because the nature of its spatial indications (an idyllic setting, a commercial-industrial environment, a desolate landscape, the simultaneous chaos of a city) and its specific vision of temporal processes (the cycles of nature, the historical development of society, the subjective moment, the discontinuous temporal experience of a dream or of intoxication) set the boundaries within which fictional events can take place. As a result, the kind of agent and action created in a narrative is al4

A catalogue of possible definitions can be found in Mitterands study on Zola, where four levels of chronotopicity are distinguished ranging from the theoretical levels of world views and of genology to the more textual levels of thematology and motif studies. See Henri Mitterand, Zola: L histoire et la fiction (Paris, 1990), 179 ff. See also Michael Holquist, Dialogism: Bakhtin and his World (London,1990), Darko Suvin, The Chronotope, Possible Worlds and Narrativity in: Jacques Bessire (ed.), Narratologie, Texte, Genre (New York, 1989), 3341 and Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford, 1990). Chronotopes are mutually inclusive, they co-exist, they may be interwoven with, replace or oppose one another, contradict one another or find themselves in even more complex interrelationships. Bakhtin, Forms, 252. For an account of the concept polychronotopicity, see Lynn Pearce, Reading Dialogics (London, 1994), 174. Within the limits of a single work (...) we may notice a number of different chronotopes and complex interactions among them, specific to the given work (...): it is common moreover for one of these chronotopes to envelop or dominate the others. See Bakhtin, Forms, 252. The hierarchy of chronotopes no doubt depends on the semantic hypotheses the reader connects with the text. The character system plays an important part in this process: secondary chronotopes linked to important characters are more likely to be associated with the texts fundamental world view than others.

421

BART KEUNEN

ways related to the world model it presents. To illustrate this argument, I will use the urbanization process as a touchstone and outline the way in which modern heroes deal with this symbol of modernization, by comparing a modernist text Manhattan Transfer with representations of the city in other novelistic prose. The hero of the modern city novel adopts several different guises, which can be considered homologous to different aesthetics in general and changes in chronotopic preferences in particular. The hero follows the changes in the world model and the aesthetic paradigms that emerge from the late eighteenth century onwards. 7 I will outline four kinds of heroes the romantic, the naturalist-realist, the aestheticist, and the avant-gardist and connect them with four types of overarching chronotopes (or world models): the idyllic, the documentary, the self-referential, and the hyperrealist. Whereas older texts are usually dominated by a single type of protagonist and chronotope, in Dos Passoss urban novel several kinds of heroes and chronotopes appear at the same time. For literature written since the interbellum it has become difficult, if not impossible, to determine what overarching chronotope dominates the narrative. A lot of high modernist texts are characterized by a radical pluralism with regard to world models. John Dos Passoss montage novel is an excellent example of the modernist attitude. Peter Brookers New York Fictions, one of the rare recent commentaries on Manhattan Transfer, states that a block of deterministic, naturalist narrative () runs in the novel beneath an accelerated, yearning impressionism.8 This argument concerning the protean style of the novel surely is in line with canonical interpretations but fails to grasp the complex juxtaposition of world models. I will show that the four world models mentioned earlier play a part in Manhattan Transfer. Although some critics tend to choose one of the world models as a point of departure for the formulation of semantic hypotheses, I intend to show that the simultaneous presence of the four major options of post-Romantic literature is the essential characteristic of this novel. Moreover, these world models are not merely juxtaposed; they are used to qualify and reorient each other. 2. Idyllic Chronotopes: The Heritage of Romanticist Movements In novels from the second half of the eighteenth century the development of the protagonist is closely tied to a world model dominated by an idyllic setting and cyclical time processes. Bakhtin calls this model the idyllic chronotope because it shows a grafting of life and its events to a place, to a familiar territory.9 Central to these narratives are the intimacies of life in a small community in the country or in a non-urbanized culture. The flight from the city to the country

8 9

In his Bildungsroman manuscript Bakhtin writes that in the eighteenth century novel a new kind of literature emerges, which expresses itself through a protagonist who evolves along with the chronotope. See Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism. In: idem, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (Austin, 1986 [1938]), 21. Peter Brooker, New York Fictions (London, 1996), 53. Bakhtin, Forms, 225.

422

MANHATTAN TRANSFER

house is a recurrent theme.10 Urban spaces can also embody the idyllic chronotope but only in urban milieus where cyclical regeneration takes place: intimate enclaves such as middle class houses, suburban villas, parks, and historical monuments.11 Other aspects of the city are avoided or function as symbols for banal and unaesthetic experiences. Urban modernization processes are associated with the downswing of cyclical time and described as phases of decay. In those cases the development of the protagonist is described as a process of resignation: he takes on the appearance of a victim who is forced to withdraw from a society plagued by modernization.12 Manhattan Transfer contains some faint traces of the Romantic aesthetic. The interaction between Jimmy Herf and Manhattan, for example, takes place, according to some critics, in a world marked by idyllic flight and decay. The fact that Jimmy flees the city in the final scene and that Stan Emery kills himself leads the critic John Wrenn to conclude that Manhattan is just a transit station in the lives of both characters.13 This romantic reading of the novel is supported by the characters deprecating descriptions of the city: this horrible city (174), a miserable existence in this epileptic town (193), this goddam town (174, 239, 247), this city is full of people wanting inconceivable things (262).14 The metaphors Dos Passos unleashes in connection with the mythical symbol of Nineveh also support this reading: Nineveh can obviously be linked with the idea of degeneration. Despite these elements it would be reductive to connect Manhattan Transfer solely with the idyllic chronotope. While in the Biblical context and in a lot of Romantic literature, Nineveh is a symbol of immorality, the city in Dos Passoss work is rather more associated with anomy, with the subjects estrangement from value systems. Manhattan Transfer anticipates the tendency that William Sharpe identified in the postwar urban novel: the Biblical frame of reference that informs most 19th and early 20th century treatments of the city persists, but now for a community of one. Even the most widely shared emblems
10

11 12

13

14

See Hartwig Isernhagen, Die Bewutseinskrise der Moderne und die Erfahrung der Stadt als Labyrinth. In: Cord Meckseper and Elisabeth Schraut (eds.), Die Stadt in der Literatur (Gttingen, 1983), 81, Jean Weisgerber, LEspace romanesque (Lausanne, 1978), 233, Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (London, 1957), 111 and Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London, 1973), 117 See Watt, The Rise, 181 ff. and Isernhagen, Die Bewutseinskrise, 82. One of the prototypical modern heroes is Goethes Werther, who mocks the bourgeois utilitarianism that characterizes city life. Another prototype is Matthew Bramble in Tobias Smolletts The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771), who is both fascinated and repelled by the ugliness and stench of the city. In The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History (Berkeley, 1998) Richard Lehan interprets modern urban literature in the light of a hostility towards the city that first arose during the Enlightenment. A nuanced critique of this historical hypothesis can be found in Georges Gusdorfs ideas on the emergence of hostility towards the city in pre-Romanticism. See Georges Gusdorf, Naissance de la conscience romantique au sicle des lumires (Paris, 1976), 375 ff. John H. Wrenn, John Dos Passos (New York, 1961), 121. In a reading that focuses on Jimmy Herf, Lehan concludes that Manhattan Transfer expresses radical disaffection with the city. Lehan, The City, 238. John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer (Boston, 1953).

423

BART KEUNEN

of urban destiny have become symbols of private alienations, personal fate.15 The reorientation of degenerative processes from an existential perspective is what makes Manhattan Transfer a modernist novel.16 In addition, the way in which Dos Passos describes conflicts between the city and the individual is far less mythically charged than in Romanticism. The city does not stand for mythical evil but is represented in concrete fashion, in line with what I propose to call the documentary chronotope. 3. Documentary Chronotopes: The Heritage of Realist-Naturalist Movements The plot of the realist novel is constructed around the development of the protagonist, who, in his struggle with the social world (often symbolized by the city) reaches maturity or resignation. The urban individual, for instance, is at the mercy of a superficial and often threatening city.17 The confrontation between the individual and the city often takes the shape of a tragic conflict, from which the individual barely escapes. The naturalist novel set in Chicago (Dreiser, Sinclair, Farrell) also emphasizes the struggle between individual and society and shows how the hero tries to rise from among the disenfranchised and impoverished masses, by mastering the relentless struggle for survival in the urban ghettoes.18 The difference with romantic representations of the city, however, is that the naturalist-realist novel is structured by specific spatio-temporal coordinates. Balzac, Zola and Gissing usually focus, not on idyllic community life or the flight from the city, but on the most advanced stages of modernization and the concrete spaces where this process takes place.19 Bakhtins work suggests that these particular chronotopic images can be analyzed as the reverse of the idyllic chronotope:
15

16

17

18

19

William Sharpe and Leonard Wallock, From Great Town to Nonplace Urban Realm: Reading the Modern City. In: idem (eds.), Visions of the Modern City (Baltimore, 1987), 28. The modernist approach to the city is two-pronged. On the one hand, modernist poets discern and register the blight of the metropolis. They have first-hand experience of the filth and chaos that stifle creative impulse and overwhelm the soul. On the other hand, however, (...) the modernistic effort is characterized by the will to survive, psychologically and aesthetically. See Kristiaan Versluys, The Poet and the City: Chapters in the Development of Urban Poetry in Europe and the United States 1800-1930 (Tbingen, 1987), 114. The realistic city of early 19th-century novels functioned either as a backdrop or an objective test to be passed or failed by the protagonist. It was presented in highly symbolic terms of success or failure. Diane Wolfe Levy, City Signs. In: Modern Fiction Studies 24, 1978, 73. See Watt, The Rise, 110 and Walter Gbel, Schreckbild Stadt: Chicago im naturalistischen Roman. In: Zeitschrift fr Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 48, 1982, 90-92. The individual was the person who must escape, or try to escape, from the repulsive and degrading mass. Gissing looked back to Dickens and recognised that he taught English people a certain way of regarding the huge city, but in Gissing himself, and perhaps in London by the 1880s, the paradoxical Dickensian movement of indignation and recognition had separated out into a simpler structure: indignant or repelled observation of men in general; exceptional and self-conscious recognition of a few individuals. Williams, The Country, 222. See also Joseph W. Beach, Manhattan Transfer: Collectivism and Abstract Composition. In: Allen Belkind (ed.), Dos Passos, The Critics and the Writers Intention (London, 1971), 59 ff. and William Greenslade, Degeneration, Culture and the Novel. 1880-1940 (Cambridge, 1994).

424

MANHATTAN TRANSFER

here the issue is primarily one of overturning and demolishing the world view and psychology of the idyll, which proved increasingly inadequate to the new capitalist world We get a picture of the breakdown of provincial idealism under forces emanating from the capitalist center.20 In his study of the Bildungsroman Bakhtin builds on this argument and points to the fact that the realist novel is capable of reading buildings, streets, works of art, technology and other social organizations as signs that refer to historical developments: the changing nature of people, the succession of generations and eras, class conflicts.21 This historical interest shows up in its most pronounced form in Zolas preface to the second part of Les Rougon Macquart, which explicitly declares his aim to illustrate historical developments during the Second Empire.22 In order to lend greater depth to his illustrations, Zola studied historical documents in archives, conducted interviews, and went exploring in Paris.23 It is with this kind of thoroughness in mind that I propose to call the realist-naturalist world models documentary chronotopes. The documentary chronotope differs from the idyllic chronotope in its reliance on cultural documents, rather than the cyclical processes of nature, the mainstay of the romantic movements. Documents are at the heart of naturalist world models, not because of their supposed mimetic references to social reality but primarily because they illustrate cultural history. Typically, the historically charged worlds of the documentary chronotope imply the presence of global historical processes. The social segments in the city novels of Zola, for instance (the world of fashion in Au Bonheur des Dames, small businesses in Le Ventre de Paris, the stock exchange in LArgent) are not just descriptions of customs and mores in contemporary Paris. They also serve as a synecdoche for the sum total of socio-historical developments.24 Realists and naturalists make heroic attempts (often through cycles of novels) to present the city at the cutting edge of historical development. Their documentary observations transcend the protagonists local set of problems. The city becomes a privileged symbol charged with information relevant to cultural theory.
20 21

22

23

24

Bakhtin, Forms, 234 The ability to see time, to read time, in the spatial whole of the world and, on the other hand, to perceive the filling of space not as an immobile background, a given that is completed once and for all, but as an emerging whole, an event this is the ability to read in everything signs that show time in its course, beginning with nature and ending with human customs and ideas (all the way to abstract concepts). Bakhtin, The Bildungsroman, 25. Ferguson rightly defines the overarching chronotope of the realist novel as the topos that infuses urban space with recognizable movements in history. See Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Paris as Revolution: Writing the Nineteenth-Century City (Berkeley, 1994), 225. See the introduction to La Cure. Emile Zola, Les Rougon-Macquart. Histoire naturelle et sociale dune famille sous le second Empire I, Ed. by Henri Mitterand (Paris, 1960), 367. Andr De Lattre, Le Ralisme selon Zola. Archologie dune intelligence (Paris, 1975), 19-23. See also Philippe Hamon, Introduction lanalyse du descriptif (Paris, 1981), 58-9. Because Lehan does not consider the narrative techniques of naturalism, his interpretation of the naturalist image of the city is too strongly marked by the romantic paradigm. See Lehan, The City, 63-8. See Volker Klotz, Die Erzhlte Stadt: Ein Sujet als Herausforderung des Romans von Lesage bis Dblin (Mnchen, 1969) 196. See also Karlheinz Stierle, Der Mythos von Paris. Zeichen und Bewutsein der Stadt (Mnchen, 1993), 121.

425

BART KEUNEN

Dos Passos certainly has affinities with the naturalist-realist interest in global historical processes, not just because his fiction, as Wrenn claims, is a successful fusion of fiction and documentary but mostly because he does not just present Manhattan as a grim nightmare; on the contrary, he goes out of his way to represent the city as a historically charged space.25 With unflagging attention to detail, the novel thematizes different aspects of city life: the constant flow of immigrants, the bustling commerce of retail and wholesale businesses, the growing pains of the city in real estate, construction, and architecture, the convolutions of the legal world, the contrasting worlds of artisans and artists, the glitter of the theater. In a sense, Manhattan Transfer continues to explore the documentary vein that Dos Passos struck in his play The Garbage Man (1923). The topos of the rag man is one of the most important vehicles of the documentary chronotope. He can be found, especially after the success of Felix Piats melodrama Le Chifonnier de Paris, in countless nineteenth-century realist novels, where he functions as an instrument to highlight lost illusions and the fate of social outcasts.26 In Manhattan Transfer, the narrator presents himself as an artistic Garbage Man. In the first chapters of the novel, for example, he is busily collecting the leftovers of everyday life in Manhattan. These commonplace occurrences are juxtaposed to emphasize the convergence and illustrative force of different lives in the city: a father who visits his wife after the delivery of their baby and celebrates the birth of his child in a bar; firemen rushing to a fire; a young man looking for a job; a waiter serving businessmen and actresses in a fancy restaurant; an ambulance chaser seeing his lunch ticket in a damage claim; children playing in a park; a suicide on the street; the owner of a deli waiting on customers; a ten-year-old boy arriving in the harbor with his mother on the Manhattan Transfer, etc. In short, the novel documents life in the city; it shows a series of synecdochal histories through the lives of its inhabitants. The modern protagonist typical of the naturalist-realist novel and its documentary chronotopes is the overdetermined individual, who crops up in Balzac, Zola, Dreiser and Gissing. Some of the characters in Manhattan Transfer belong to this category. Wrenn suggests that Dos Passos surpasses Dreiser in this respect because the characters in Manhattan Transfer have not the nerve to flout the forms and rules made by others or the strength of character to make their own places rather than passively allowing themselves to be molded to fit the institutions of their time.27 Specific techniques of the nineteenth-century novel, which tend to emphasize the determinis25 26

27

See Klotz, Die Erzhlte Stadt, 328. The documentary function of the topos is aptly described by Sergei Eisenstein, who connects Le Pre Goriot with Le Chifonnier de Paris. See Sergei Eisenstein, Lessen in regie (Nijmegen, 1985), 34. Wrenn, John Dos Passos, 126. Walcutt affirms this hypothesis: John Dos Passos is a tremendously significant figure in the development of naturalism, particularly as an end-point in the evolution of naturalistic forms. See Charles C. Walcutt, Dos Passos and Naturalism. In: Allen Belkind (ed.), Dos Passos, The Critics and the Writers Intention (London, 1971), 81 and also 85. In a similar analysis Lehan suggests that Dos Passos anticipates a sociobiological brand of determinism. See Lehan, The City, 241.

426

MANHATTAN TRANSFER

tic relationship between protagonist and chronotope, are recycled in Manhattan Transfer. One of those techniques is the birds eye view of the city, mostly provided through observations from an open window (13, 94, 185, 240, 372, 388). Another is the topos of the arrival in the city. Many realist novels use the image of the uprooted traveller who innocently enters the city. The arrival in Paris, Berlin or New York was a symbol of the encounter with historical developments that everyone could recognize and social tensions everybody could feel. The image of the confrontation became one of the most potent symbols of modern culture. In Zolas Le Ventre de Paris and Au Bonheur des Dames, Dreisers Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy, in films from the period between the wars (Ruttmans Berlin: Symphonie einer Grosstadt, Mays Asphalt, King Vidors The Crowd), and in Manhattan Transfer (3, 23, 67, , 276), the motif of the arrival in the metropolis illustrates the Big Confrontation between individual and city. A final technique to evoke the deterministic relationship between characters and social conditions is that of the street scene, which positions characters in spaces that emblematically suggest socio-historical processes (14, 23-5, 39, 42, 45, 83, 153, 241, ). Street scenes allow the novelist to suggest the violence of the modern metropolis through minimal means, such as the train rushing by on an overpass (13, 39, 40, 45). Although many passages in Manhattan Transfer justify our sense of a deterministic relationship between its fictional world and the characters who inhabit it, we should not reduce Dos Passoss approach to a purely naturalist mode. While the world of naturalist novels often comes with ready-made interpretations (by means of sociological or positivist-philosophical theories), in Manhattan Transfer interpretation is mostly left to the reader. As in other modernist novels the characters are not reduced to social or pathological conditions but are represented as complex individuals. As in Henry James or Andr Gide, it is not so much the contrast between individual and society that is involved but the opposition between psychological and social processes.28 The characters are not determined by their conflict with society but by their interiorized modernity. The focus on the processes of consciousness, a legacy of the aestheticist mode, puts the deterministic relationship between chronotope and character into perspective. Dos Passos uses the documentary chronotope mostly in order to give shape to the complex interaction between social and individual worlds. As a result, the question of causality rests with the reader. This tendency to grant the reader the liberty to interpret documentary chronotopes is also noticeable in the narrative macrosyntax. Here, too, Dos Passos applies the realist-naturalist world model with a great deal of nuance. In contrast to Zola, who devoted a different novel to every single aspect of modernity, Manhattan Transfer combines its metonymic documents within the boundaries of a single novel. The juxtaposition of various synecdoches makes for a different effect: it creates the impression that the historical reality to which the documentary chronotopes refer is no longer intelligible. History in Manhattan Transfer no longer has a center or a teleological direction.29 The text is still charged with historical time, but the meaning of its history has to be reconstructed by the reader.
28 29

See Fokkema, Modernism, 21. Isernhagen, Die Bewutseinskrise, 94.

427

BART KEUNEN

4. Self-Referential Chronotopes: The Heritage of Aestheticist Movements The third world model recycled by the modernist novel is the self-referential chronotope found in aestheticist texts. The central element in this model is subjective experience. The subjectivist mode was developed in symbolist poetry and lyrical prose (Baudelaire), in the aestheticist novel (Wilde, Huysmans, Rodenbach), and in impressionist prose (the Goncourts). Because these texts emphasize semantic material within the boundaries of the subject, their chronotopes might be called self-referential. The world is reduced to a series of impressions that are processed and stored in memory, from which they can be retrieved at will. Consequently, this world model has a specific spatio-temporal structure: its spatial coordinates are provided by subjective observation and/or recollection, while a personal or fictitious biography informs temporal progression. That this world model is very different from the romantic chronotope is clear from Bakhtins observation that a great deal of modern literature shows a preference for the interiorized idyll. He notes the pivotal role of Rousseau in this respect. Rousseau not only creates the idyllic literary world as a mimetic representation of the beautiful aspects of the everyday world; he consciously thematizes the idyllic as a subjective construction, as the material for constituting an isolated individual consciousness.30 Space often loses its natural and cyclical character in the process, to make way for an internal cyclicality of the recurrent and repeatable psychic processes of observing and remembering. It goes without saying that the biographical world matrix stands in stark contrast to the great city novels of realism. Aestheticist novels are marked by the rebirth of a character or an individual insight, by a dynamics contained within individual consciousness. The outside world is static and devoid of any supra-individual development. While in realism an individual grows through interaction with the city and undergoes a learning process, in aestheticist urban novels the confrontation with the city is limited to the observations and psychological processes of a monadic soul.31 A closer look at descriptions of the city around 1870 shows that the self-reflective chronotope became an important frame of reference in the nineteenth century. Michel Zraffa suggests that in realist and naturalist novels two semantic blocks appear next to each other and that one block illustrates the other. Descriptions of spatial locations function as illustrations of the narrative: they are meant to frame the plot and the psychological development of the characters. In aestheticist accounts of the city this approach gives way to a reprsen30

31

Bakhtin, Forms, 230. While the older idyll situates its protagonists in an idyllic chronotope, Rousseau creates isolated characters from an interior perspective (ibid., 231). Bakthins argument shows that the Bergsonian inward turn, which Lehan relates to modernism, in fact goes back to older literary forms (see Lehan, The City, 70-82). The physicist Ilya Prigogine rightly notes that the self-reflective world of the modern artist is as fundamental to modernity as the rational world constructions of the hard sciences: It has been noted before that space is characterized in many contemporary novels as the retreat of individuals into their own existence: contingent random, prison and refuge, reflection of an indifferent universe, homogenous and isotropic, a space considered suitable to function as modern humanitys world structure. Ilya Prigogine and Serge Pahaut, De tijd herontdekken. In: Michel Baudson, Tijd: De vierde dimensie in de kunst (Brussel, 1984), 30.

428

MANHATTAN TRANSFER

tation non descriptive de la ville.32 Representation becomes far less documentary and the distinction between narrative and descriptive blocks of information gradually dissolves to make way for a technique that creates a symbiosis of both elements: rather than separate the material universe of the city from the psychological universe of the characters, the writer tends to link the two. The characters themselves betray an urban environment, which in turn betrays them.33 In the psychological-realist novels of Henry James, for example, the deterministic relationship between documentary chronotope and character is replaced by a lived space with almost exclusively subjective connotations. The aestheticist turn in spatial imagery implies that writers no longer create spatial images divorced from the action of the novel but use descriptions to evoke the characters mental processes. Dos Passos applies this technique as a corrective to the determinism of the naturalist-realist mode. Although the self-referential chronotope is often used in combination with documentary chronotopes in Manhattan Transfer, there are also examples of outspoken aestheticism, as in this impressionist description of the interpenetration of the city and the individual:
He looked out through a drizzly rain at the gray wharfhouses and the waterfront buildings etched against a sky of inconceivable bitterness. A ruined man, a ruined man, he kept whispering to himself. At last the ships whistle boomed out for the third time. (...) Grey like a photograph the buildings of Manhattan began sliding by. Below decks the band was playing O Titin-e Titin-e. Red ferryboats, carferries, tugs, sandscows, lumberschooners, tramp steamers drifted between him and the steaming towering city that gathered itself into a pyramid and began to sink mistily into the browngreen water of the bay. (371)

Because of its powerfully self-referential nature, the world of aestheticist prose often comes down to the spatial projection of subjective values (emotions, ideas). The motto of the aestheticist hero is Baudelaires famous statement in Le Spleen de Paris: all these things think through me, or I think through them (for in the greatness of reverie, the self quickly loses itself!).34 He takes on the guise of an aesthetic observer, whose observations symbolically correspond to sub32

33

34

Michel Zraffa, Prsence de la ville dans lcriture du roman. In: Journal de Psychologie Normale et Pathologique 2, 1975, 194. Ibid. McLuhan sees a similar relationship between space and character in Flaubert. See Marshall McLuhan, John Dos Passos: Technique vs. Sensibility. In: Allen Belkind (ed.), Dos Passos, The Critics and the Writers Intention (London, 1971), 238-9. Charles Baudelaire, Le Spleen de Paris (Paris, 1958), 6. Using Jamess The Ambassadors and Joyces The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Wirth-Nesher shows that the self-referential gaze manifests itself in three ways: as the static view of the tourist, as the gaze of the aesthete (sensitive to the urban idyll of the sense), and the biographical vision of the city. See Hanah Wirth-Nesher, City Codes. Reading the Modern Urban Novel (Cambridge, 1996), 119, 125, 179. Her analysis can be read as a treatise on the heritage of the aestheticist world model within a tradition that, in Anglo-Saxon literary history, is too often lumped under the term modernism. In contrast, Wirth-Nesher limits her research to self-referential chronotopes and does not avoid the problem of overarching chronotopes. A similar approach can be found in Peter Bartas Bely, Joyce, and Dblin: Peripatetics in the City Novel (Gainesville, 1996).

429

BART KEUNEN

jective moods, often in the course of an existential crisis. In symbolist texts, for example, Paris is a world absorbed by expanding internal time (dure), a world in which most images are contaminated by spleen: foggy and rainy cityscapes, deserted streets, squares and parks, lonely figures against a dark background. This melancholic vision of modern experience finds its strongest expression in George Rodenbachs Bruges la morte (1892), in which the moribund, foggy city displays a medieval stillness that correlates with the suffering, the confusion, and sometimes the redemption of the main character. In contrast, for example, to the foggy cityscape in the opening passage of Dickenss Bleak House (1851/3), where the mist symbolizes the impenetrability of legal institutions to the average citizen, impressionist observations feed the internal reflections of the protagonist. Countless descriptions of the city in Manhattan Transfer, with their weather- and clair-obscur effects (e.g. fog, rain, and dusk: 3, 39, 45, 66, 78, 94, 116, 124, , 295), look like remakes of aestheticist landscapes. Many critics consider the aestheticist world model to be one of the basic conditions of the modernist novel. Maurice Beebe, for example, mentions the closed worlds of Modernist art.35 The modes of consciousness in Manhattan Transfer, however, are not entirely self-referential, because they are still primarily connected with the real world. The reason is that Dos Passos is mostly interested in modes of consciousness that are closely linked to the condition of modernity. He devotes attention to the position and experience of the individual among the masses (4, 14, 43, 54-5, 61, , 395), and he interrupts the apparently self-referential observations of urban flaneurs with references to modern and social aspects of the empirical world:
Dawn was sifting fine gray dust over the black ironcast city. Dutch Robertson despondently crossed Union Square, remembering Francies warm bed, the spicy smell of her hair. He pushed his hands deep in his empty pockets. He walked east past the hotel on Fifteenth. () A colored man was sweeping off the steps. Dutch looked at him enviously; hes got a job. Milkwagons jingled by. () He walked into the chilly park and sat down on a bench. There was hoarfrost on the asphalt. He picked up a torn pierce of pink evening newspaper. $ 500, 000 HOLDUP. (316-7)

The character wanders around in a desolate landscape, but he is not wallowing in the tragic world of the self-referential chronotope; he is confronted with a world larger than himself and with an experience of modernity that escapes his grasp. In Dos Passos the human condition is not just diagnosed as existential crisis but also and more importantly as an interaction between consciousness and social processes. The narrators descriptions of characters in their urban environment are striking in this respect.36 He frequently describes the routes they travel, interspersed with conversations between characters and interrupted by descriptions of visual and auditory impressions. In other words, the descriptions are neither objective nor subjective. As a result, the image of the city that is presented to the reader is highly fragmentary and cannot really be called docu35

36

Maurice Beebe, What Modernism Was. In: Journal of Modern Literature 3, 1974, 1073; see Astradur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca, 1990), 10. Klotz, Die Erzhlte Stadt, 334-5.

430

MANHATTAN TRANSFER

mentary, because it is so closely tied to the characters means of perception. Moreover, the city cannot be interpreted as a subjective projection either, because the narrator explicitly interferes and stresses the everyday experience of modernity. He interrupts the potential perceptions of the characters through references to the L roaring by (39, 40, 45), honking cabs, popular songs in a dance hall (218), newspaper headlines (50) or symbols of urban consumer society (45, 58, 113). By means of these narrative techniques Dos Passos emphasizes neither subjective identity nor documentary reality but subjective perceptions and the everyday dynamics of the modern world, as well as their interaction. The second strategy Dos Passos uses to relativize aestheticist experiences is found on the macrosyntactic level. Dos Passoss fiction, writes Volker Klotz, aims to prevent, by all means necessary, that the image of the city it presents will be regarded as his own or that of a privileged character.37 The overall structure of the text makes it impossible to focus on one of the characters individual worlds as the novels ultimate world model. 5. Hyperrealist Chronotopes: The Heritage of the Historical Avant-Garde Movements The final world model of the postromantic aesthetic was developed by the avant-garde movements that are sometimes subsumed under the term early modernism.38 The spatial and temporal dimensions of this model are characterized by discontinuity. It is a world in which the spatial and temporal continuity of ordinary empirical observation is distorted. In everyday perception, successive spatial impressions are linked by causal relations projected on an uninterrupted time axis. In the hyperreal chronotope, however, there is an attempt to link fragments of reality in a combination that is as complex and dynamic as possible. The world of the avant-garde is not a real world but a collection of reality fragments in an artificial collage. Through this process, the writer manages to create a sense of speed (futurism), intoxication (dadaism, unanimism), pathos (expressionism), or dreaming (surrealism), which makes the montageworld a realm of extraordinary, yet at the same time quotidian, experience, a world of hyper-real perception.39 In terms of temporal development, the hyperreal chronotope is characterized by the simultaneous or quasi-simultaneous presentation of different observational elements. Avant-garde manifestoes call this simultaneism (dadaism), parola in liberta (futurism), or Reihungsstil (expressionism). The central concept
37 38

39

Klotz, Die Erzhlte Stadt, 340. See Christopher Butler, Early Modernism: Literature, Music and Painting in Europe 19001916 (Oxford, 1994). In Simulations (New York, 1983) Baudrillard describes how the perception of the postmodern subject is determined by hyperreal transformations of everyday situations. He starts from the observation that hyperreality is no longer an artistic construct or an extraordinary experience linked to special circumstances and to gifted observers (aesthetes such as Aragon and Breton who make the Parisian shopping arcades into oneiric spaces). In the view of Baudrillard, the hyperreal has now become part of quotidian reality. My use of the term hyperreality refers to its original, historical meaning.

431

BART KEUNEN

is tempo. In this context, the topos of speed refers to the hypermodern aspects of the city (like the traffic at Berlins Potsdamer Platz), especially the potential of the industrial and commercial metropolis to generate a hyperreal intensity: The tempo is the primary symbol of the city: a placeless, exploding symbol that manifests itself as a spatial form in the spaceless Potsdamer Platz.40 There is great dynamic potential in an urban environment, because its multiplicity and fast-paced variety transcend ordinary modes of experience or make them seem inadequate.41 It becomes impossible, for example, to establish stable spatial coordinates in the middle of modern traffic. By making space appear to dissolve in a quick succession of observations, the avant-garde artist suggests a despatialized world or, in more modest manifestations, a world in which the intensity of extraordinary, chaotic spaces is highlighted. Avant-garde literature aims to represent this condition as faithfully as possible, without losing the actual experience of the city in the process of literary transposition.42 Manhattan Transfer contains two kinds of texts that are clearly inspired by historical avant-garde movements, more specifically expressionism and unanimism: the rhapsodic texts that open each chapter and a number of radical stream-of-consciousness passages. Some of the lyrical openings, as in the chapters Steamroller and Nineveh, evoke a hyperreal chronotope:
Dusk gently smooths crispangled streets. Dark presses tight the steaming asphalt city, crushes the fretwork of windows and lettered signs and chimneys and watertanks and ventilators and fire-escapes and moldings and patterns and corrugations and eyes and hands and neckties into blue chunks, into black enormous blocks. Under the rolling heavier heavier pressure windows blurt light. Night crushes bright milk out of arclights, squeezes the sullen blocks until they drip red, yellow, green into streets resounding with feet. All the asphalt oozes light. Light spurts from lettering on roofs, mills dizzily among wheels, stains rolling tons of sky. (112)

This fragment reveals a hyperreal world in which disparate spatial elements are so concentrated that ordinary spatial perception becomes impossible. The physical elements of the city are compressed at the speed of light, so that the reader is made to observe the city in a dream-like state or through a sense of intoxication. The same phenomenon takes place in a number of key passages in which the stream-of-consciousness technique is used to describe the intensity of the urban experience. The Rollercoaster chapter recounts Stan Emerys city walk and his eventual suicide (250-3) in a complex mixture of observations and reflections. In a comparable passage Jimmy Herf walks by the Woolworth Building (351-3) and appears to become absorbed in heavily distorted urban perception. These passages obviously rely on a number of mimetic references but filter their perceptions through the associations the characters make. Despite the influence of the hyperrealist imagination, however, these passages
40

41 42

Michael Bienert, Die eingebildete Metropole. Berlin im Feuilleton der Weimarer Republik (Stuttgart, 1992), 66. See Georg Simmel, Die Grostdte und das Geistesleben (Berlin, 1903). Manfred Smuda, Die Wahrnehmung der Grostadt als sthetisches Problem des Erzhlens. Narrativitt im Futurismus und im modernen Roman. In: idem (ed.), Die Grostadt als Text (Mnchen, 1992), 131-182.

432

MANHATTAN TRANSFER

are not as radical as their counterparts in expressionism, unanimism, and futurism. The rhapsodic introductions, for example, are heavily aestheticized: their visual sensuality strongly resembles the impressionist techniques of the Goncourt brothers. Although despatialisation and dynamics are clearly present in many descriptions of the city, in some places the novel shows a marked tendency towards sensorial aestheticization, as in some of the impressionist light effects (39, 94, 118, 217, 395) and climatic distortions (207, 298). We must conclude, then, that Dos Passos refuses to choose between a hyperrealist and a selfreferential imagination. Furthermore, he does not exclusively use stream-of-consciousness to serve excessive, hyperreal representations. The examples of stream-of-consciousness can just as easily be seen as evocations of the estranged consciousness of a self-referential world model. What is more, the elements in the characters strings of association are historically charged. While avant-garde movements and aestheticist writers like to disconnect their work from history, Manhattan Transfer succeeds in charging the processes of consciousness with historical experience.43 Isernhagen has rightly pointed out that the associations in the two mentioned examples of stream-of-consciousness literature are composed of the Leitmotifs of the text: they concentrate the complexity of the social and historical phenomenon of the city in a series of hyperreal processes.44 The described processes are not merely an evocation of an intoxicated or neurotic perception of reality but are construed as illustrations of the most important social events in the text. In the midst of a seemingly chaotic whirl of impressions, the ambitions of urban dwellers, architectural and technological highlights of urban culture, and the social struggle for life are all distilled into a discontinuous series of impressions. 6. Radical Polychronotopia in the Modernist Novel Polychronotopia lies at the core of nearly all modern novels. Bakthin noted that texts are chronotopic battlefields and that one of the chronotopes often tries to dominate the others. In premodernist texts it is usually possible to establish the hegemony of a particular world model. This is not the case in the modernist novel. Modernists advocate a postprogrammatic form of literary practice: they no longer draw on a universe dominated by a specific aesthetic program but on a world that cultivates the priority of independent intellectual judgments. Consequently, modernist authors allow themselves to thematize different world constructions at the same time and to look for combinations that are effective for the intellectual issue of their choice. In other words, modernism implies not so much a non-programmatic attitude as a metaprogrammatic stance. Proceeding from an Archimedean point of departure, several programs and corresponding world models are tested and often simultaneously put into position in
43

44

Graff rightly says that among the avant-garde and aestheticist movements nostalgia and hope are impossible because history has disappeared, replaced by an immanent present which is always, at every changing moment, the best of possible worlds. See Gerald Graff, The Myth of the Postmodern Breakthrough. In: idem, Literature Against Itself (Chicago, 1979), 59. Isernhagen, Die Bewutseinskrise, 98

433

BART KEUNEN

the same work. The culture-sociological explanation would seem to lie in the fact that modernist authors live in a post-programmatic culture, in which collective declarations of intent have lost their validity. The major modernists (Gide, Proust, Dblin, Musil, Joyce, Lawrence) can hardly be categorized under one paradigm or another. Their programmatic writings if they wrote any at all reveal a certain program-fatigue. The aesthetics of opposition (Lotman) that characterized the literary field since Romanticism is indeed still cultivated, but now it involves almost personal oppositions rather than group-specific aesthetic antagonisms. Manhattan Transfer conscientiously guards the heritage of Western literature since Romanticism, but at the same time it does not make any clear choices. Dos Passos either puts world models into perspective by giving his descriptions a hybrid character, or he juxtaposes an old-fashioned world model to another, competing model. In short, Manhattan Transfer by no means slavishly adopts the paradigms of the past. In addition, and this is perhaps its most important modernist intervention, the novel uses a macrosyntactic technique that makes the dominance of one or other chronotope impossible. The montage-structure of Manhattan Transfer radicalizes its polychronotopia.45 This is most clearly noticeable in the multiplicity of its characters, who move from one world model to the next. Considering the large number of characters and the absence of an overarching plot structure, this technique automatically creates a pluralistic universe. The very essence of montage is to represent discontinuous elements within the artificial continuity of narrative development. The composition of Manhattan Transfer clearly fits this description: it shows hardly any of the narrative characteristics of the realist-naturalist (linearity) or aestheticist novel (unity of the aestheticizing observer). Nevertheless, despite its pluralism the plotless structure of Manhattan Transfer explains something. In a sense, it follows the adage of Gertrude Stein: composition as explanation.46 The novel shows that Manhattan is a complex whole of overlapping plots (lives) and crossing paths. The different world models converge in a construction that reveals the complexity of the world. It is not a chaotic complexity but a complicated network of individuals, actions, observations, and situations. In this sense, the textual macrosyntax of the text explains the workings of modern consciousness: where chronology fails, consciousness is to order the material, and precisely in order to underline the important role of consciousness, the laws of chronology are violated.47 Manhattan Transfer
45

46

47

It is obvious that cinematographic montage strongly influenced the poetics of Dos Passos. Referring to Dos Passoss memoirs, Murray points out that Eisenstein and Dos Passos agreed thoroughly about the importance of montage. See Edward Murray, The Cinematic Imagination (New York, 1972), 168. Gertrude Stein, Composition as Explanation (London, 1926); see Klotz, Die Erzhlte Stadt, 472. See also Fokkema, Modernism, 15, 16: The major convention of Modernism with regard to the composition of literary texts is the selection of hypothetical constructions expressing uncertainty and provisionality. (...) The composition of the text is very much determined by the opposition of conscious deliberation on the one hand, and action dictated by the natural and social environment on the other, with an obvious preference for the first. Fokkema, Modernism, 30.

434

MANHATTAN TRANSFER

shows that the world can no longer be unequivocally understood and that the representation of epistemological processes may be our only recourse. Like other modernists, Dos Passos focuses on a semantic universe that centers around the notion of awareness, which includes detachment and observation.48 This modernist tendency is closely related to the decline of the cult of genius. The twentieth-century cultural producer indeed still claims a role as autonomous producer (he hardly has a choice, since the literary system is in fact an autonomous field of practice) but no longer positions himself as a prophet propagating a superior lifestyle. The enlightened commentator in naturalism, the allegorical discoverer of correspondences in symbolism, and the futurist master of life become anachronisms, because twentieth-century culture seems to be a complex whole of networks that refuses to be transposed into some kind of comforting artistic order. Manhattan Transfer reflects a typically modern mode of self-questioning that, according to Mike Featherstone, has also been noted by sociologists. The heroic self-affirmation vis--vis objective culture of which, among others, Simmel and Weber dreamed (and of which the romantic hero is the prototype and the realist, aestheticist, and avant-garde heroes are variations) is no longer a priority, since our culture has been split into shards and is rendered ever more complex by the increasing influence of consumption practices, by the diversification of social life, and by the growing complexity of the economic world.49 Whereas coping with objective culture seems to be the central problem of aesthetic programs from romanticism to expressionism, the heterogeneity and complexity of the late-capitalist world has become the source of epistemological doubt. This altered situation may explain why the literary world takes on the form of multiple chronotopes. After all, literary communication that emerges during a time in which cultural answers and strategies can no longer be unambiguously formulated or programmed cannot function anymore as a cultural alternative for the non-literary world, for modernity. In this situation, programmatic aesthetics and their world models are more likely experienced as pretentious dogmas that oversimplify the position of art in its complex environment. The modernist montage, in this cultural situation, functions as an antidote to myth,50 not just to the myths we encounter in everyday life, but also to those in literature. Naturalist realism uses the idea of determinism as a mythical construction to cure modern humanity of myths such as the American Dream; aestheticism uses the image of the artistic prophet to struggle against the power of modernization processes. Modernism does not use alternative myths to destroy the myths of modernity. On the contrary, it deploys a method that allows the reader to doubt his own representations, to see them as mere constructions. Dos Passoss modernist montage novel, like Ben48 49

50

Fokkema, Modernism, 34. In a certain sense Manhattan Transfer prefigures the human condition in the contemporary mediatized and globalized culture; it points to the fact that culture fails to provide us with a single taken-for-granted recipe for action [and thereby] introduces difficulties, mistakes and complexity. Mike Featherstone, Undoing Culture (London, 1995), 5. See Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, 1989), 164.

435

BART KEUNEN

jamins Arcades Project, can be seen as an attempt to construct out of the decaying fragments of the cultural images of modernity a world that is as complex as our own.51 Algemene en Vergelijkende Literatuurwetenschap Universiteit Gent Rozier 44 9000 Gent, Belgi BART KEUNEN

51

I wish to thank Gert Morreel for his critical comments during the writing process.

436

Copyright of English Studies is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.