Manhattan Transfer and the Metropolitan Subject

A. C. GOODSON Manhattan Transfer and the Metropolitan Subject . . . What a dignified and serious city! Not at all a metropolis, not at all modern, as I had feared, but a princely residence of the seventeenth century , one that had only a single commanding taste in all things— Nietzsche, from Turin, 1888 (Banville 23) The book's covers are an icon: steamships, sailboats, tugs against a background of skyscrapers. The style of the piece—watercolor or gouache—owes something to John Marin and other American painters working off the New York skyline in the period. But the picture-puzzle treatment, with irregular cut-outs patched in white, is unique to the artist, the author of Manhattan Transfer. He is assembling the puzzle, trying to make the view come together. White patches rhyme with the sails of a boat in the harbor, with the prow of another arriving in the corner. These blanks lie in the same plane as deep blue, pink and green, as much a part of the picture as warehouses, smokestacks . A plane of light and color, the covers herald the world's second metropolis, as a newspaper will call it on the morning Bud Korpenning arrives by ferry, taking in something like this view. His circulation dramatizes the incessant motion of the metropolitan elements. The prospect before him as he lands, a watery mirage, reflects its shimmering flux. The book's image repertory, what Bud and others see, is its most radical and convincing feature, the source of its enduring interest. Its verbal pictures can be assimilated to modern art that its author knew and perhaps drew on in his mind's eye (Spindler 392-400). These give Manhattan Transfer its period flavor but hold up the story at every turn. The author's gallery ofurban images afflicts the narrative developArizona Quarterly Volume 56, Number 1, Spring 2000 Copyright © 2000 by Arizona Board of Regents issN 0004- 1610 QOA. C. Goodson Cover image of Manhattan Transfer (1925) . Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Manhattan Transfer91 ment of the book, plunging us into the perspectival vertigo of Dziga Vertov's man with a movie camera (Berger 17). What Jack Kerouac would dismiss as "Dos Passos' old camera eye" has been an issue for his readers, for reasons spelled out telegraphically in Kerouac's journals: November 30, 1949. People aren't interested in facts, but in ejaculations. That is why straight naturalism fails to express life. Who wants Dos Passos' old camera eye? Everybody wants to Go! So must the author, oblivious to all petty details, huffing and puffing in the heat of his fiery soul, go! (59) The documentary effect of Dos Passos' slide show works against the going of Manhattan Transfer. His snapshots of street life, of store windows and hoardings—signs and symbols of modernity—rivet attention like the metropolitan spectacle, turning readers into tourists. Typically associated with the points of view of individual characters, and integral to the story in this way, these pictures add up to an album of city life that competes with it for attention. So long as the story is the point, Manhattan Transfer will be read as a specimen of an older literary naturalism. Populated with types whose hopes are defeated in advance, it can look to conventional readers like a familiar parable of the dark Satanic mill of city life. Yet Dos Passos' "old camera eye" can be defended on other grounds, as an innovative intervention in the dreary round ofnovelistic naturalism . The book's brand of urban realism, descending from Crane's Maggie , a GiW of the Streets, is more imaginatively invested in the metropolitan world than Kerouac, an escape artist, can see. Its image repertory characterizes the metropolitan subject in the visual vocabulary ofurban experience. Dos Passos' picture show has something in common with the evocations of Alfred Stieglitz's Camera Work, which are not ordinarily naturalistic. Against the background of the experimental visual idiom of the period, Dos Passos' intentions in Manhattan Transfer appear essayistic more than novelistic. His camera eye captures the metropolitan scene in sketches reminiscent ofGeorge Grosz, the urban satirist whom Dos Passos introduced to an American audience (Grosz). Manhattan Transfer provides a model...