American Styles in USA
The four aesthetic modes of Dos Passos’s U.S.A. provide the trilogy with a variety of
perspectives on America and American life. The Newsreels, The Camera Eyes, the Narratives,
and Biographies each serve to represent different facets and perspectives of America. However,
these perspectives are carefully constructed and are not meant to provide an unfiltered view of
America; the four modes constitute “an intellectualization of the raw material of American life
into a made artwork of great complexity and intricacy” (Pizer 56). Donald Pizer’s use of
“intellectualization” is essential because Dos Passos – through a process of parody and narrative
manipulation – moulds the raw material it into a new form, which reflects back on the original
material. The resultant material is fragmented, representing the alienation present in U.S.A.’s
America. However, U.S.A. works to draw together these disparate fragments in order to create a
connected whole. This whole is certainly not homogenous, as the alienation and fragmentation
demonstrate, but there is a shared history, geography, present, and future. The theory of this
essay relies on the anthropologist Benedict Anderson’s idea of “imagined communities”:
“nations, as modern social formations, were imagined communities, communities whose
imagining was mediated by (and made possible by) the communicative processes and effects of
print capitalism and imperial bureaucracies” (Irvine 124). U.S.A. does not promote capitalism
and is critical of imperialism and the bureaucratic process, but the notion of a connected
community joined together through different media and events is present in U.S.A. It is through
the four different modes that Dos Passos simultaneously critiques, fragments, and draws America
together. Across America there is a diversity of perspectives and opinions, and Dos Passos’s
socialist perspective is all too clear at times, but U.S.A. recognizes the shared stake that all
Americans have in the land they occupy.
Dedora
2
The Newsreels in U.S.A. function as a commentary on actual newsreels through a selfconscious rendering of newsreel techniques and content. Dos Passos’s Newsreels share many of
the same techniques with their source medium through the use of “dislocation and discontinuity”
to structure and layout the information being presented (McCabe 12). Furthermore, both types of
newsreels share a similar function in the real world and in U.S.A.’s fictional world: “The
Newsreels locate the historical background for the action of the trilogy; they provide its setting;
they generate atmosphere; they indicate the passage of time in the world and in the text” (Marz
94). On a basic level, Dos Passos’s Newsreels serve to place the other modes within the larger
scheme of a teleological world, which is similar to the purpose of real newsreels and how they
reported world events to Americans.
Charles Marz asserts that the Newsreels chronicle “the voices of the public sphere” and
contain the “most banal, most impersonal, most mechanical registration of persons and events in
the trilogy” (95). The Newsreels contain elements of the public sphere and discuss events
disconnected geographically and politically from the individual reader. “Newsreel XXXVII”
demonstrates the impersonal and distant events that people are exposed when viewing newsreels:
“SOVIET GUARDS DISPLACED … MACKAY OF POSTAL CALLS BURLESON
BOLSHEVIK … REINFORCMENTS RUSHED TO REMOVE CAUSE OF ANXIETY” (69798). The last headline from this passage is particularly alienating because it provides no real
information about who is sending the reinforcements, what the anxiety is, and where the situation
is occurring. Pizer connects this alienating and distancing effect to how Dos Passos selected
headlines that “were indeed obscure to a 1930s reader” (80). The use of obscure headlines
serves to heighten the disconnect between world events and the reader. The Newsreels then,
Dedora
3
working away Marz’s assertion that they deal with the impersonal and banal, can be read as a
parodic manipulation of the heartlessness of real newsreels.
The view that Dos Passos’s Newsreels are parody is common amongst criticism of U.S.A.
According to Gretchen Foster, “Dos Passos’ newsreels parody the self-serving propaganda
handed out by the actual newsreels of the 1920s … as they document and comment on an era”
(190). This parody is done through the fusing of “violent contrasts into dynamic montage”; the
cinematic technique of montage was commonly used in early avant-garde cinema and involves a
series of different angles and shots that are combined together to create a new image in the
human consciousness. “Newsreel XIX” represents an example of this parody through its
treatment of America’s announcement to join World War I. The Newsreel contrasts the
disparate fragments of the financial, politics, patriotism, and racism in relation to wartime
America:
U. S. AT WAR
UPHOLD NATION CITY’S CRY
Over there
Over there
at the annual meeting of the stockholders of the colt Patent
Firearms Manufacturing Company a $2,500,000 melon was cut. The
present capital stock was increased. The profits for the year were 259
per cent
JOYFUL SURPRISE OF BRITISH
The Yanks are coming
We’re coming o-o-o-ver
PLAN LEGISLATION TO KEEP COLORED PEOPLE FROM
WHITE AREAS. (312-13)
This Newsreel represents how “a particular item or song lyric can stand in clear ironic
relationship to the bulk of other items in a Newsreel” (Pizer 82). In U.S.A., there is a clear
Dedora
4
undercutting of the newsreel medium and the information they present. However, they form a
substantial part of U.S.A. and serve an important role in the modern world.
Marz claims that the Newsreels present the “most banal, most impersonal, most
mechanical registration of persons and events in the trilogy” (95); however, there is a human
element to some of the stories within the Newsreels, which are not satirized. Certain sections of
the Newsreels contain elements capable of connecting a distant and unknowable human
population. Actual newsreels were able to reach large amounts of people, being played before
films, and it is through the human element of stories and exposure through the medium that an
imagined community is created. “Newsreel IX” contains a human-interest story of trapped
miners and demonstrates the real emotions they go through:
I am not afraid to die. O holy Virgin have mercy on me. I think my time has come. You
know what my property is. We worked for it together and it is all yours. This is my will
and you must keep it. You have been a good wife. May the holy virgin guard you (101).
This Newsreel demonstrates that real or fictional newsreels can provide more than information
about disconnected and alienating world events. Newsreels can contain snippets dealing with
powerful stories of human life, which have to be filtered out from the fragmented chaos of
parody and alienation. The emotional impact of “Newsreel IX” creates a sense of human unity
through the recognition of shared fears and hardship.
The Camera Eye sections of U.S.A. are recognized as the most ambiguous mode used by
Dos Passos. Pizer asserts that The Camera Eyes are “a coherent autobiography” of Dos Passos,
as they are an “account of Dos Passos’ inner life” (57). Dos Passos has stated that The Camera
Eyes contains “bits of my [Dos Passos’s] experience” and function as “a way of draining off the
subjective” from the rest of U.S.A. (qtd. in Hock 21). However, knowing Dos Passos’s life, and
Dedora
5
that the Camera Eyes can be considered autobiographical, is not necessarily essential to read
U.S.A. If the reader does not know that The Camera Eyes are autobiographical, and that the
personal information in them is that of the author, the notion of draining off subjectivity has to be
questioned. For Justin Edwards, The Camera Eyes are a very intimate and personal account
within U.S.A. and “depict the consciousness of the individual subject, expressing the thoughts,
emotions and perspectives” (247). Problematically, Edward ties these thoughts and expressions
to Dos Passos, but his identification of the individual consciousness within The Camera Eyes is
essential for understanding them and their relation to U.S.A. as whole.
The Camera Eye mode is the only mode written in a first person narrative voice. Within
the Narratives and Biographies a third person narrator is dominant. For Stephen Hock, The
Camera Eye provides “a glimpse of the position that Dos Passos presents as the most deeply felt
of all, because it represents his own subjective position within the world that he describes only at
a distance in the other sections of the text” (21). However, Hock’s assertion, and the other critics
from above, is problematic when the language and use of perspective in The Camera Eye is
examined. An example of the individualistic nature of The Camera Eyes is “The Camera Eye
(26)” with its first person perspective on the labour movement:
we couldn’t get a seat so we ran up the stairs to the top gallery and looked down
through the blue air at the faces thick as gravel and above them on the speaker’s stand
tiny black figure and a man was speaking and when ever he said war there were hisses
and whenever he said Russia there was clapping …
afterwards we went to the Brevoort it was much nicer everybody who was
anybody was there and there was Emma Goldman eating frankfurters and sauerkraut and
Dedora
6
everybody looked at Emma Goldman and at everybody else that was anybody and
everybody was for peace …
and we had several drinks and welsh rabbits and paid our bill and went home, and
opened the door with a latchkey and put on pajamas and went to bed and it was
comfortable in bed (301-302).
The issue in “The Camera Eye (26), and others, is that the first person narrative voice is limited
to expressing observations of the exterior world. Instead of capturing a subjective and
opinionated view of the world, “The Camera Eye (26)” only captures sounds of clapping, images
of faces, food, and drink. The only personal expression is directed at an inanimate object and not
the political movement: “it was comfortable in bed.” The Camera Eye sections cannot express a
subjective perception of the world because they function similar to a mechanical camera.
The words used in the title of The Camera Eye sections cannot be ignored when
examining The Camera Eyes. The use of “camera” denotes a recording of the exterior world,
while “eye” invokes the lens in the camera. In opposition to this analysis, Pizer points to “The
Camera (28)” as containing the “the variations of style used for the expression of the interior
self” (58). In order to come to this conclusion, Pizer focuses on “personal images that are knitted
together by a parallel rhetorical form” (369); however, the essence of The Camera Eyes is the
images. In “The Camera Eye (28)” the speaker experience the death of his mother and father,
yet the first person voice does not express any emotion: when his father dies the narrator states,
“I walked through the streets full of fiveoclock Madrid seething with twilight in shivered cubes
of aguardiente redwine gaslampgreen sunsetpink tileochre
eyes lips red cheeks brow pillar of
the throat climbed on the night train” (369). Pizer is able to read poetic meaning into this
Camera Eye, but the subjectivity rests within the reader and how she/he decides to understand
Dedora
7
metaphors, symbols, and rhetorical form. The Camera Eye sections only provide a sense
perception of the world and not an emotional rendering, as seen in how the response to death is
only a description of Madrid. The Camera Eyes attempt to understand the world through a
method similar to a camera. This method is closer to an unmediated vision of events than the
third person narration of the Biographies and Narratives. The result, in relation to the work as a
whole, is an individual view of the world, but it is only individual to a certain extent. The
imagistic recordings function to unite people around perception of sound and images. In Madrid
or at the socialist meeting, every person present shares in the same sounds, smells, and sights,
which creates a unity of people in spite individualistic leanings.
The Narrative sections function to place characters within the larger forces of the world.
The Narrative sections – unlike the ambiguous The Camera Eyes that are not labelled as
belonging to one person – are each clearly labelled according to the character the particular
Narrative functions around. The Narratives, for Edwards, are relatively free of “authorial
intrusion” as they “simply report on the actions and thoughts of the characters” (249). This
technique serves to “achieve the highest degree of objectivity” because the characters become
the “medium through which their stories receive expression” (Gelfant qtd. in Edwards 249). The
narrator is not all knowing and only provides the emotions and thoughts of the character that
each Narrative is named after. This technique serves to demonstrate to the reader the isolation of
the characters in the world because they are left wondering, like the reader, the motivations of
other characters. The use of multiple narratives and the authorial controlled third person narrator
is essential because it provides a diversity of unique, but isolated, perspectives. The interaction
of characters demonstrates this point, and particularly how Mac, Moorehouse, and Janey all meet
in Mexico because the oil crisis. Mac goes to Mexico for the revolution, while Moorehouse and
Dedora
8
Janey go because of the American capitalist concerns surrounding the Mexican oil industry.
During this interchange, under Mac’s Narrative, Moorehouse and Janey are alienated and
“looked scared to death” (276) when presented with a form of entertainment that Mac enjoys.
The intrusive narrator only serves to heighten each character’s isolation from others. The
characters only have access to their own thought, and through the controlling narrator the reader
is limited to the thoughts, motivations, and emotions of a single character.
The isolating nature of the Narratives opens up a discourse on how the Narratives
function to reflect and connect American people. The Narratives are not a “representative
sociological spectrum of American life,” as they lack “a farmer, factory worker, businessman, or
professional” (Pizer 64). The limited source of the characters that the Narratives follow is
representative of the limited third person narrative style. A dialogue by the character Richard
Ellsworth Savage functions to demonstrate the thematic and stylistic purpose of the Narrative
sections:
He wished he had a great many lives so that he might have spent one of them with Anne
Elizabeth. Might write a poem about that and send it to her. And the smell of the little
cyclamens. In the café opposite the waiters were turning the chairs upside down and
settling them on the tables. He wished he had a great many lives so that he might be a
waiter in a café turning chairs upside down (695-96).
Savage’s dialogue represents the significance of a limited narrator because he recognizes the
limits of experience and the ability to experience the way other people live. Savage has limited
experience in life, and the narrative structure mirrors this through its isolated viewpoint. For
Pizer, the Narratives are further limited because the characters are only representative of
“prototypes in Dos Passos’ own experience, and Dos Passos recasts the lives of his prototypes
Dedora
9
into narratives” (Pizer 64); however, the limitation, of the narrow spectrum of society from
which the Narratives are pulled, is not full. While Savage is limited in his outlook on the world,
and the reader is limited by Dos Passos’s use of a limited third person narrator, there is an
interaction with the whole spectrum of the American populous. Through the main Narratives,
the whole spectrum of America is shown from the Farmer to the East coast, and while the
perspective is always limited, there is an interaction between the Narratives and every facet of
America. This demonstrates how a very limited basis for character selection has the possibilities
to show an entire country. The use of an intrusive narrator, that can only provide information on
one character’s interior life at a time, functions to demonstrate the isolation of individuals.
However, the irony is that through this isolation there is still a national connection as characters
continually interact with the world and people around them. The fact that Dos Passos selects a
very specific group of characters for the Narratives who are able to connect with nearly every
facet of American life demonstrates the strange vision of unity Dos Passos has of America.
The Narratives are representative of regular Americans and they work in tandem with the
Biographies that represent famous Americans. Unlike the Newsreels and The Camera Eyes, the
Biographies are labelled similar to the Narratives. The Biographies provide an alternate
perspective of America, as compared to the Narratives, through the use of public figures
involved in politics, business, science, the arts, and journalism. However, this perspective is
problematized by Dos Passos’s treatment of biographical techniques and the figures. According
to Pizer, Dos Passos “had available to him in the 1920s an emerging convention for the kind of
biography he wished to write” in the works of Lytton Strachey and Thomas Beer who
“popularized the ironic impressionistic biography in which a seemingly miscellaneous body of
biographical detail produced a devastating reversal of received opinion about a major public
Dedora 10
figure” (75). U.S.A.’s Biographies function to revaluate historical personages and their relation
to American society.
The Biography “The Happy Warrior” demonstrates this revaluation, but also functions to
connect these historical personages to American values and life. The Biographies
simultaneously isolate the figures from regular Americans while demonstrating the figure’s
social significance in relation to American society. Teddy Roosevelt, “The Happy Warrior,” had
a large impact on American society: he promoted nationalistic causes and was “an unapologetic
imperialist who called his domestic program ‘the New Nationalism’” (Leach 11). Roosevelt was
involved in the formulation of the imperialistic American project as he “sent the Atlantic Fleet
around the world for everybody to see that America was a firstclass power” (Dos Passos 483-84).
Roosevelt was a mover of world events, and Dos Passos provides a particular lens into this
personage, but guides the interpretation of Roosevelt by using statements such as “righteousness
was his by birth” (480), he “stoutly maintained that white was white and black was black” (482),
and he “left on the shoulders of his sons the white man’s burden” (485). These statements
provide the ironic undermining that, according to Pizer, occur in Dos Passos’s biographies and
function to revaluate Roosevelt’s contribution to American society. However, Dos Passos also
demonstrates that Roosevelt is still an American by revealing his homey nature as “a rancher on
the Little Missouri River” (481), how he patriotically made sure “Old Glory floated over the
Canal Zone” (483), and how he liked having “pillowfights with his children” (485). The
Biographies serve to examine the movers of American society, but never separates the figures
from America itself.
The end result of the four different modes is U.S.A. Taken as individual modes they
appear as fragmentary and represent the alienating nature of life in Dos Passos’s America.
Dedora 11
However, the sections invariably work in unison to draw together the disparate parts of America
into a form of unity. From the lowest figure to the president of America, a tenuous union
between people is formed. It is through the Newsreels and Biographies, which are inherently
ironic in order to critique the source forms and content, that this union is possible. People such
as Roosevelt, Wilson, and Jack Reed are re-evaluated, but in doing so are placed into the same
events that the characters in the Narratives experience. The Newsreels function to connect
people across the nation through the propagation of shared events and common values. While
many of these values are constructed by the media and then embodied by the American people,
there is still that union. The Camera Eyes serve to tie all these points together because they are
an individual’s recordings of the world, but it is a world that is shared in perception.
Works Cited
Dos Passos, John. U.S.A. New York: Library of America, 1996.
Dedora 12
Edwards, Justin. “The Man with a Camera Eye: Cinematic Form and Hollywood Malediction in
John Dos Passos’s The Big Money.” Literature Film Quarterly 27.4 (1999): 245-54.
Foster, Gretchen. “John Dos Passos’ Use of Film Technique in Manhattan Transfer and The
42nd Parallel.” Literature Film Quarterly 14.3 (1986): 186-194.
Hock, Stephen. “‘Stories Told Sideways Our of the Big Mouth’: John Dos Passos’s Bazinian
Camera Eye.” Literature Film Quarterly 33.1 (2005): 20-27.
Irvine, Judith T. “Language and Community: Introduction.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology
6.2 (1996): 123-25.
Leach, Eugene E. “1900-1914.” A Companion to 20th-Century America. Ed. Stephen J.
Whitfield. Malden: Blackwell, 2004.
Marz, Charles. “Dos Passos Newsreels: The Noise of History.” Studies in the Novel 11 (1979):
194-200.
McCabe, Susan. Cinematic Modernism: Modernist Poetry and Film. Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 2005.
Pizer, Donald. Dos Passos’ U.S.A.: A Critical Study. Charlottesville: Virginia UP, 1988.