What is U.S.A. anyway?
Prior to the Table of Contents of The 42nd Parallel is a paragraph that is a metaphor lover’s delight. For all those wondering what the U.S.A. in this trilogy of book is, that one single paragraph might well satisfy. Just a sampling of the highlights:
“U.S.A. is the slice of a continent…a group of holding companies…a set of bigmouthed officials with too many bank accounts…but mostly…the speech of the people.”
The Camera Eye
Each of the entries in the trilogy feature sections called “The Camera Eye” in which the language suddenly becomes much more freewheeling, the language more metaphorical and the composition more stream-of-consciousness. The lack of traditional punctuation to allow for the replication of thoughts unbroken by logical application of the rules of written communication:
“that doubt is the whetstone of understanding is too hard hurts instead of urging”
Randolph Bourne
Real-life historical figures pop up throughout the novels, not as characters interacting in the narrative, but through reference and mini-biographies. Some of these figures are very well-known such as Edison and Henry Ford, while others are like Randolph Bourne, a radical writer mostly famous today for one singular metaphorical observation which has become quite relevant again in the 21st century:
“War is the health of the state.”
"The Bitter Drink"
Thorstein Veblen was already dead by the time Dos Passos was writing and yet he still remains the greatest economic thinker America has ever produced. Because he was writing when American was a producer economy and he was writing about the America as a consumer economy—at the turn of the 20th century—he was, of course, ignored, ridiculed and given none of respect awarded inferior minds long forgotten. Dos Passos compares him to Socrates and his end by way of consuming hemlock:
“Socrates asked questions, drank down the bitter drink one night when the first cock crowed, but Veblen drank it in little sips through a long life in the stuffiness of classrooms, the dust of libraries, the staleness of cheap flats such as a poor instructor can afford.”
Anti-Immigration Sentiments Never Die
The portrait of the U.S.A. in the early part of the 20th century as captured by Dos Passos is sometimes painfully familiar. Especially in one of those stream-of-consciousness Camera Eye moments capturing the zeitgeist of one of those fairly predictable spikes in anti-immigrant sentiment that sweeps across some living here. Important to note that here the sentiment was not directed to those coming from south of the border.
“America our nation has been beaten by strangers who have turned our language inside out who have taken the clean words our fathers spoke and made them slimy an foul”
