American writers in the first half of the twentieth century were faced with a world of uncertainty, alienation and a departure from traditional belief systems. They literally lived within a social and economic “Wasteland” brought on by an era of rapid industrialization and shifting social and political conventions. They were impacted by philosophical questioning and reframing of fundamental belief systems in every field by people like Nietzsche, Darwin and Marx. These modernist writers struggled to confront this rapidly changing landscape, which was marked by these radical shifts in thought and behavior, but also by the profoundly shaping events of two world wars and a depression. These devastating events and intense social and cultural shifts left writers to chronicle the despair and alienation which was experienced as a result. Authors and poets were equally challenged to rethink or reconsider the purpose and significance of their field of discipline as well. Writers of this era began to experiment with the use of language with a two fold mission: to carefully consider the purposeof their art, not only in using it to entertain or creating a cathartic experience, but using their texts as active agents to effect change and renew optimism, by shaping readers ability to perceive or experience.
In the 1930’s American author John Dos Passos authored a series of novels which would become know as the U.S.A. Trilogy in which he explored social and political ideas and conventions, but he did so while using the words and the various styles of language to actively engage the reader, forcing the reader’s attentiveness to the details of both the technicalities of the written word presented on the page, while prompting the reader to consider the intent and veracity of those very words.
The very first page of the novel The Big Money suggests to the reader that they must be observant of the use of language in this novel, as in the sentence “He began to feel cold and sick and got back to the bunk and pulled the stillwarm covers up to his chin” (Dos Passos 1). Throughout the novels in the trilogy, Dos Passos regularly uses this form of collapsing language – compounding words that are not traditionally combined - to draw attention to the actual words and highlight their meanings and implications. In his essay, “Art as Technique” Viktor Shklovsky argued against the ease with which people pass over words and the concepts that they convey. He pointed that the problem was “Complete words are not expressed in rapid speech; their initial sounds are barely perceived” (Shklovsky 15) The casual ease of dismissal of language and the ideas it represents was troubling to the group of literary critics known as the Russian School on Formalism. They recognized the danger in becoming immune to language through overexposure. Shklovsky wrote that “Habitualization devours work, clothes, furniture, one’s wife and fear of war” (Shklovsky). He implied the danger of losing the experience of perception is not limited to small objects or trivial concerns, but is an all encompassing threat which distorts the reader’s ability to receive and process. He promoted the technique of “defamiliarization” or making a familiar object seem new and strange. He suggested that “A work is created “artisitically” so that its perception is impeded and the greatest possible effect is produced through the slowness of the perception” (Shklovsky 19).
By collapsing words Dos Passos aimed to slow the reader’s sense of perception, causing them to focus more carefully on the individual words and their implications –emphasizing the importance of what they represent. In the example of word collapsing from page one of the novel, the significance of the words collapsed is not great, but serves to prepare the reader for the use of experimentation in language present throughout the body of the series. Other examples within the trilogy indicate a desire to draw attention not only to the subject of the passage, but also the mode of representation. In the excerpt “The Body of an American” Dos Passos collapses longer grouping of words and the frequency of collapsed words is so densely employed in the passage as to foreground the language. He successfully draws the reader’s eye to the page and pricks the consciousness. The passage reads:
“Whereasthe Congressoftheunitedstates by aconcurrentresolutioadoptedon
the4thdayofmarch lastauthorizedthe Secretaryofwar to cause to be
brought to the unitedstatesthe bodyofan
americanwhowasamemberoftheamericanexpeditionaryforcesineuropre
wholosthislifeduringtheworldwarandhisidentityhas
notbeenestablished for burial in the memorialampitheatreofthenational-cemetaryatarlingtonvirginia.” (Dos Passos, Heath 1676).
This section is very difficult to cipher and requires concerted effort on the part of the reader to separate words to reveal the meaning. The fluidity of the phrases also indicates an automatism and callousness of an announcement of this nature devoid of emotion or respectful personalization. Shklovsky made a point of indicating how people can become defamiliarized from the trivial to the profound like the “fear of war” and its horrific results, and these lines certainly convey that.
The segment from “The Body of an American” is also a helpful example in illustrating the stratification of language used by different segments of society. The language is identifiable as a professional stratification, but even within the designation of professional, the jargon is specifically characteristic of “officialese.” Officialese is defined as “the pompous, wordy, and involved language typical of official communications and reports.” (officialese, 1). Another use of professional language within the text is the term “Taylorism” which is the scientific management of engineering production which achieves the optimum level of efficiency possible. This use of language is impactful within the body of the novel because it effects characters and plots in pursuit of the capitalistic ideal.
The format of the novels is broken up into four types: narratives, biographies, Camera Eye and Newsreels. Dos Passos demonstrated the heteroglossia which Mikhail Bakhtin discussed in “Discourse in the Novel”, by expressing several different types of language coexisisting within the novel as spoken by various characters through their narratives. Dividing the novel in this way allowed Dos Passos to explore a multitude of language styles and varied forms of professional language (which has been discussed), journalistic, stream of conciousness, and slang. Dos Passos uses each of these varied forms to critique social ideology with which he disagreed.
The portions of the novel entitled “Camera Eye” employ stream of consciousness, which was a fairly new literary technique in the 1930’s. The first examples of this type of writing appear around 1915 in a series of novels by Dorothy Richardson, and the technique was also used by writers like Joyce, Woolf and Faulkner. It is clear though, that Dos Passos pioneering use of this technique was meant as yet another method of defamiliarizing or revisioning events and ideologies to help the reader gain a different perspective. Stream of consciousness method was presented in concert with the narratives and biographies to emphasize elements within the novel. But the stream of consciousness episodes also “implicate the narrator in the narrative, serving to underscore his moral commitment to the act of writing” (Doctorow X).
The Newsreels, as mentioned above helped set the tone, incorporating events significant to the live of the characters or the propulsion of the plot line. The story line of Charley Anderson who is involved in Florida real estate is validated, as the headlines from Newsreel LXI tout “TOWN SITE OF JUPITER SOLD FOR TEN MILLION DOLLARS” AND “like Alladin with his magic lamp, the Capitalist, the Investor and the Builder converted what was once a desolate swamp into a wonderful city with a network of glistening boulevards” (Dos Passos 272). These headlines take on special meaning for the reader who has learned that these real estate dealings are tainted by political corruption and price manipulation. He used lyrics from songs or advertisements to chronicle shifting social attitudes and set the tone for the text. They were also used by Dos Passos as indicative of the sensationalistic and sometimes false information which was disseminated as credible news. Again the various sections of the novel work together to help the reader gain knowledge which enables them to realize a sense of unreliability and artifice which is present in the newspapers, forcing the reader to question what certain images or words signify to them rather than simply accepting what they are exposed to.
The ideas which Shklovsky posited, which had an incredible impact on the writing of modernist writers including Dos Passos are still pertinent today. The modern equivalent of habitualization could be desensitization. It is common to hear people complaining about the children being desensitized to violence on television and through exposure to television programming, but we find these effects everywhere in our day to day lives. In “The Body of an American” Dos Passos chose to explore a most significant and grievous situation, the death of a soldier protecting his country. Today, as our country is involved in wars in two different countries we face similar situations of returning fallen soldiers. During the administration of President George W. Bush photographic images of the returning coffins were banned. There was a great outcry by many Americans who argued that failing to make these images available made the deaths of these soldiers an abstract concept, making it difficult to understand the ultimate price of war quantified by. The issue was revisited when President Obama assumed the presidency in 2009, and the ban was repealed. Media outlets clamored to photograph and publish the first images of the coffins carrying the bodies of Americans, but as the weeks went by the demand for and publication of such photos has diminished greatly.
It is necessary in defamiliariztion to continually innovate new techniques or develop new methods which will again heighten the perceptive ability of the reader or audience. This progression is evident especially in the entertainment industry which has continually pushed against standards in television, feature films and publishing, We are a media and information based society which is constantly exposed to ever increasing methods intended to shock and unsettle. This ratcheting up of images and actions with the intent of capturing attention can be seen all around us from clothing advertisements to music lyrics advocating sexual experimentation. The most extreme image of this intentionally provocative and unsettling in recent memory was the videotaped beheading of American of a young American man in 2004. Despite its shocking nature and profoundly disturbing nature, this incredibly heinous act is something that easily passes out of our consciousness as we move on with our day today routines. Just as the body of the young soldier described in “The Body of an American” the young man’s experience and his identity is lost to us. Do you remember his name?
Did it prick your conciousness?
Nick Berg - Murdered May 7 2004
Works Cited
Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Discourse in the Novel.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Rivkin. Malden: Blackwell, 2004. 674-685.
Dos Pasosos, John. The Big Money. Boston: Mariner Books. 1933.
Dos Passos, John. “The Body of an American.” The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Vol. D. Ed. Paul Lauter. Boston: Houghton, 2006. 1676-1680.
“Officialese”
Shklovsky, Viktor. “Art as Technique.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Rivkin. Malden: Blackwell, 2004. 15-21.
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