The 42nd Parallel

http://www.hyperebaaktiivne.ee/2022/0...

Aitäh, Kirjastus Koolibri, raamatu eest!

John Dos Passos "USA triloogia I: 42. laiuskraad" on üks neist raamatutest, mida ma ilmselt kunagi poleks kätte võtnud, kui kirjastus seda mulle saatnud poleks. Ma ei olnud varem kuulnud ei romaanisarjast ega kirjanikust. Lisaks ei püüa kujundus eriti tähelepanu. Sisukirjeldus äratas aga huvi - paljude hinnanguil kõigi aegade suurim Ameerika romaan.

19. sajandi lõpp - 20. sajandi algus, Ameerika Ühendriigid. Mac, Janey, Ward, Eleanor ja Charley on ameeriklased, kes kõik püüavad leida oma kohta selles suures arenevas riigis. Nad vahetavad ameteid, elukohti, kaaslasi, reisivad ringi, vaid paar münti taskus, rabavad tööd teha, teenivad ja kaotavad raha. On üleminekuperiood, mil valitseb kapitalism, aga üle maa levib tööliste liikumine. Prinditakse lendlehti ja peetakse miitinguid.

Seda raamatut on raske kokku võtta, kuna oluline on üldpilt, mida kogu lugu tervikuna edasi annab, mitte see, mis täpselt kellegi konkreetse elus sünnib. Romaan jutustab USA arenemisest 20. sajandi algusaastatel. Tõdesin korduvalt, kui vähe ma Ameerikast tean ja tundsin, kuidas loetu mu maailmapilti avardab.

Teose ülesehitus ei ole sugugi traditsiooniline. Jutustavatele peatükkidele lisaks on nummerdatud "Kaamerasilm" ja "Ringvaade". Esimene esitab mingi episoodi mõttejoruna. Ei ole kirjavahemärke, tihti algab uus mõte enne kui eelmine lõpeb. Teine koosneb pealkirjadest, uudistekatketest ja lauluridadest. Ka selles jäävad tihti laused pooleli. Alguses oli veidi raske sisse elada ja tahtsin neist poolikute lausetega peatükkidest diagonaalis üle libiseda. Need on aga lugemist väärt, et saada aru, mis on päevakajaline või mis aastatest täpsemalt juttu on. Enamik uudiseid olid mulle võõrad, aga mõni tuttav oli ka - Titanic ja Robert Scott näiteks.

Veel on raamatusse pikitud peatükid, mis annavad ülevaate mõne kuulsa inimese elust surmani. Need lühikesed köitvad elulookirjeldused olid mu lemmikud. Jällegi oli mulle tuttav ainult üks nimi - Thomas Alva Edison. Teistest sain aru, et ju see mingi ajalooline suurkuju on, aga kuulnud neist polnud. Kauge maa see Ameerika ikkagi.

Suurema osa romaanist moodustavad tavainimeste lood - eri klassidest ning eri paigust meeste ja naiste argipäev. Alguses ei seo neid miski peale selle, et keegi ei suuda paigal püsida. Lõpupoole tegelaste rajad ristuvad vilksamisi. Ringi rändamist oli ohtralt: töö otsimist, leidmist, uue ja veel parema otsimist. Suhted ei ole püsivad. Otsused on isekad. Mees jätab abikaasa ja lapsed, et liituda kommunistidega. Naine ei kutsu venda külla, kuna too ei sobi seltskonda. Sõbrad tulevad ja lähevad, vabameelselt vahetatakse abikaasasid. Üheks läbivaks teemaks on töölisklassi liikumine, elagu sotsialism. Ka see kõik oli võõras, tegelaste käitumismallid ei tekitanud mingit samastumistunnet, aga nii-nii paeluv oli lugeda.

Raamatu tempo on kiire ja seda saadab kajana rahutus. Sel lool oli mingi müstiline jõud, hoog, mis tõmbas kaasa ja andis indu. Olin üllatunud, kui väga romaan mulle muljet avaldas. Võtan peagi kätte ka järje, et lugeda, mis saab edasi. Muide, üsna lõpus on üks üllatus varuks. Nimelt käib lehtedelt läbi üks eestlane. Mul iga kord süda hüppab, kui mõnes raamatus Eestit mainitakse.

its ok. interesting to get a perspective on a time period im not too familiar with.
The newreels were too chopped up and lacking context to add any value. the stream of concious "camera eye" sections were similarly valueless. but the prose sections, which make up the overwhelming majority of the book, are good.

I've always wanted to read something by Dos Passos but by signing on to the 42nd Parallel I am now committed to the other two of the USA trilogy, '1919' and 'The Big Money'. An interesting name Dos Passos and a title that always intrigued me--a line of latitude. I looked in vain for a direct reference to it in the book. It is true that 42N runs though a rather substantial swath of the USA perhaps the most E-W territory? According to Quora, 42N intersects 15 states (although 39 does too). Anyway Dos Passos was a contemporary of Hemingway and Fitzgerald and friends with Ernest at some point and he was at the time nearly as famous I believe. The 42nd Parallel deals with America (well the USA) from around 1900 to the US entry into WW1. A group of fictional characters, men and women, are introduced and their lives chronicled in random sections of varying length. None of these people are particularly memorable or fascinating but their paths begin to intersect at times and they are vehicles for Dos Passos' vision of an America beset by classism and labor strife. A number of random historical characters also earn short chapters including Robert LaFollette (Senator from Wisconsin), Charles Steinmetz, aka 'Proteus' in the book (a brilliant German-born mathematician and electrical engineer), and 'Big Bill' Haywood an important labor leader. The are two other unique literary devices are employed throughout the '42nd'--'Camera Eye' and 'Newsreels'. The latter are self-explanatory, headlines grabbed from the period, while the former is a sort of stream of consciousness, often vague and sometimes confusing. They are apparently autobiographical, some maybe not. But they begin to grow on you. By the way, the Dos Passos legacy is preserved by Longwood University in Farmville, VA that presents an annual Dos Passos Prize for Literature which is awarded to writers (especially less recognized) with a substantial body of work that 'that displays an intense and original exploration of specifically American themes, an experimental approach to form, and an interest in a wide range of human experience.' Could be a description of '42nd'! Some really great writers have won this including Russell Banks, Tom Wolfe, Shelby Foote, and Richard Powers. The award for 2022 was just given out--yet to an Uruguayan writer. Don't ask my why.

Having read hundreds upon hundreds of books, I can say without a doubt that I have never read anything like John Dos Passos's The 42nd Parallel, the first installment in his U.S.A. Trilogy. The book bounces between newsreel sections that read like sound bytes of today, stream of consciousness camera eye sections that feel like fly on the wall documentary, short biographies of celebrated figures from the day from Eugene V. Debs to Thomas A. Edison, Andrew Carnegie and Senator Robert La Follette, and interweaving fictional narratives. One reason for the title, it has been proposed, is that North American storms follow the 42nd parallel. And this makes sense as the characters move, generally from East to West (and sometimes back again), becoming more violent or weaker as they move along.

The book captures "the speech of a people" and the climate of an epoch, "a slice of a continent" Dos Passos declares in the Prologue. It is a story of a tumultuous time in the world, of labor uprisings, of violent revolutions, of the build up to the Great War (with the Spanish flu still to come), and of individuals whose paths cross, likely by chance, maybe by destiny.

We follow the characters from the East to the West, down to Mexico where revolution is brewing, to Wobbly meetings, shady dealings between representatives of industry and Big Labor; from Fargo to the Twin Cities to Mardi Gras in New Orleans; journeying with agitators, malevolent men of industry, women and men trying to get up in the world, some falling down, some getting back up, with prostitutes, drunks, heroes and cads. It's a motley crew of misfits at a time when stakes seemed so big, but whose lives seem so small against the backdrop of global events.

It's a shame that Dos Passos, a man who had a huge impact on writers and artists like Jean-Paul Sartre and Agnes Varda, isn't better known in his own country, that his personal political shift from leftist to Goldwater and Nixon Republican has come to overshadow his artistic output. I'm not sure I would have enjoyed the company of the elder Dos Passos, but this younger Dos Passos surely must have been a fascinating man, and I look forward to journeying on with him and the characters he created from The 42nd Parallel into 1919.

Did I just give this book 1 1/2 ? It looked like it and if so , that's what I want . with the exception of Hemingway and some Fitzgerald , I'm not found of writers of this period ( WW I and the Roaring 20s .

The characters were neither memorable or likable , which is a poor way to begin a trilogy . So given that I am no longer tied to a required reading list , I'll accept #1 as emblematic of the whole .

Un roman ca o orgă – multe claviaturi, fiecare cu partitura ei. Îmi amintește de Berlin Alexanderplatz a lui Alfred Döblin. După ce citești așa o carte - dacă mai și asculți toate cîntecele vremii referite din abundență(*), citești cel puțin de pe Wikipedia biografiile personajelor reale, cauți pe Google Map locurile prin care trec personajele fictive - te simți impregnat de spiritul american.
Stilistic n-am simțit nici o pală, dar și momentul de viață prin care trec este neprielnic receptării sensibile de subtilități. Poveștile personajelor fictive sînt însă foarte bine scrise, fie și numai pentru ele și aș continua cu celelalte două volume („Marile afaceri” și „1919”), pe care la un moment dat am zis că le abandonez, speriată de amploarea reflectării mișcării sindicale americane de la începutul secolului XX.

Prefața lui Radu Lupan – excelentă, profesionistă (o fi parte din teza de doctorat?).

(*) am gasit pe net un document care le inventariază, cu linkuri la inregistrări pe Youtube.

This first installment of the n  USA Trilogyn by John Dos Passos bounces between descriptions of the lives of several different fictional characters while abruptly inserting between these depictions nonfictional mini biographies of prominent Americans and short vignettes labeled as “Newsreel” (newspaper headlines, fragments of news stories, and song lyrics) and “The Camera Eye” (stream of consciousness thinking presumably by the author). The overall effect of reading through this hodgepodge of narrative styles is a reasonably thorough rendering of life in the United States during the beginning years of the 20th century prior to WWI.

The fictional characters seem to include an abundance of revolutionaries, communists, anti-war rants, Wobblies, and women who need to marry due to inconvenient pregnancies. Historians have depicted these sorts of characters as inconsequential discontents, so some readers today may be surprised that the author chose them to represent that era. I think people today do not realize how prevalent political and social discontent was at the time. It was a time that led to the progressive movement of the early twentieth century.

Another characteristic of these fictional characters which is probably less surprising—they all seem to have a hard time making ends meet and they all want to get more money. Another characteristic comes to mind—none of the marriages seem to be very happy. Also, single women are propositioned left and right (this is 100 years prior to #MeToo).

Over this coming summer I plan to read the next two installments of this trilogy—1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936). This first book was published in 1930. In case you’re wanting to know why this book is titled “42nd Parallel” you will want to read this

In my opinion the following isn’t a very good reason for the title, however I haven’t found anything better:

"... Also notable is obviously the title, decoded in a prefatory note in the first edition of The 42nd Parallel when it was published as a stand-alone novel in 1930; the title comes from an 1865 book, American Climatology, which suggested that North American storms followed the 42nd Parallel. The novel seemed to follow its characters as if they were so many storms crossing the continent" (Michael Denning, The Cultural Front, 190).

"Andrew Carnegie started out buying Adams Express and Pullman stock when they were in a slump;
he had confidence in railroads,
he had confidence in communications,
he had confidence in transportation,
he believed in iron.
Andrew Carnegie believed in iron, built bridges Bessemer plants blast furnaces rolling mills;
Andrew Carnegie believed in oil;
Andrew Carnegie believed in steel;
always saved his money
whenever he had a million dollars he invested it.
Andrew Carnegie became the richest man in the world
and died."

n  n
Andrew Carnegie

John Dos Passos had issues with his father. His father also had issues with him given that he had the audacity to swell the belly of HIS mistress. The elder Dos Passos was a distinguished lawyer friendly with the industrial capitalists. He made out their trusts, advised them, and made a heap of cabbage doing so. When his wife died he married John’s mother, but did not acknowledge John until he was 16. Needless to say this put a burr under the young Dos Passos’s saddle.

The 42nd Parallel is the first of three novels that make up the U.S.A. Trilogy. Dos Passos used his first few novels to rail against capitalism and showed sympathy for communism which did not have the stigma associated with it that came into play in the 1940s. I’m sure people would classify this as an anti-capitalist novel, but to me I thought it was balanced in showing what good people can do in a capitalist system, and also showing why communism was of such interest to American workers.

This novel had twelve characters that each get a chance to tell their story. I’m going to cheat and copy the explanation of the devices utilized by Dos Passos to construct this novel from Wikipedia.

The four narrative modes


In the fictional narrative sections, the U.S.A. trilogy relates the lives of twelve characters as they struggle to find a place in American society during the early part of the twentieth century. Each character is presented to the reader from their childhood on and in free indirect speech. While their lives are separate, characters occasionally meet. Some minor characters whose point of view is never given crop up in the background, forming a kind of bridge between the characters.

"The Camera Eye" sections are written in 'stream of consciousness' and are an autobiographical Künstlerroman of Dos Passos, tracing the author's development from a child to a politically committed writer. Camera Eye 50 arguably contains the most famous line of the trilogy, when Dos Passos states upon the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti: "all right we are two nations."

The "Newsreels" consist of front page headlines and article fragments from the Chicago Tribune for The 42nd Parallel, the New York World for Nineteen Nineteen and The Big Money, as well as lyrics from popular songs. Newsreel 66, preceding Camera Eye 50, announcing the Sacco and Vanzetti verdict, contains the lyrics of "The Internationale."

The biographies are accounts of historical figures. The most often anthologized of these biographies is "The Body of an American", which tells the story of an unknown soldier who was killed in World War I which concludes Nineteen Nineteen.

The blending of these modes is where Dos Passos brilliance really shines. I did not feel irritated at the switches between narratives, but read each new section with equal fascination. It was really a precursor to TV with, in this case, informative commercial breaks between sections of storyline.

”SIX UNCLAD BATHING GIRLS BLACK EYES OF HORRID MAN.”

This book is really about twelve people trying to make it in America. Some of them are capitalist and some are self proclaimed communists, but at the end of the day all the characters are concerned, primarily, about keeping a roof over their head and food in their mouth. To me a blending of communist and capitalist ideas comes as close to a perfect society as we can get. When I first discovered in Star Trek, as a young pup, that they didn’t use money anymore it was an intriguing concept to think about; an evolutionary thought. Contrary to what I had been taught, in an anti-communist environment, the will of the individual would be tempered under such a concept, and yet; on Star Trek these people I admired were individualistic and motivated to be successful. I also liked a world that would allow me to succeed even though I didn’t have any money because...well...I didn’t have any.

”GIRL STEPS ON MATCH; DRESS IGNITED; DIES.”

”Thomas Edison only went to school for three months because the teacher thought he wasn’t RIGHT bright. His mother taught him what she knew at home and read eighteenth century writers with him, Gibbon and Hume and Newton, and let him rig up a laboratory in the cellar.

Whenever he read about anything he went down in the cellar and tried it out.”

n  n
Thomas Edison

During the time period of this novel the labor unions were gaining strength helped of course by the horrible working conditions and low pay that the industrial tycoons of the day imposed upon the people. The concept of a happy worker is a productive worker was not even a sparkle in the eye of Carnegie or Rockefeller. They were more concerned about who could pile up the most money and labor, though necessary for them to become rich, was only notated on the deficit side of the ledger. There is such an anti-union sentiment in the country today, forgetting what wonderful advancements unions gave us, and also completely ignoring that the tycoons of today are the same as the tycoons of the 19th century. If unions are destroyed and laws are struck from the books intended to modify what seems to be the natural tendency of corporations (we learned they are people TOO) to exploit workers for the unmitigated ability to shower more money on the top 1%, the middle class as we know it is frankly doomed. For the sake of huge profits NOW corporations forget that people have to have money to buy the products they are producing. Paying people a wage that insures that they have money beyond just what they need to pay rent, food, and utilities means they can buy clothes they don’t necessarily need, impulsively buy Twenty Shades of Grey at the checkout stand, go to the movies, and buy that latest thingamagig. The money goes down and then it comes back up. Everybody needs skin in the game. If workers are merely subsisting it doesn’t take long for them to become disgruntled workers. Viva la Revolucion!

”COLLEGE HEAD DENIES KISSES.”

”The young man walks by himself, fast but not fast enough, far but not far enough (faces slide out of sight, talk trails into tattered scraps, footsteps tap fainter in alleys); he must catch the last subway, the streetcar, the bus, run up the gangplanks of all the steamboats, register at all the hotels, work in the cities, answer the wantads, learn the trades, take up the jobs, live in all the boardinghouses, sleep in all the beds. One bed is not enough, one job is not enough, one life is not enough. At night, head swimming with wants, he walks by himself alone.”

I remember when I felt that way. I was naive enough to feel that I could do everything. I didn’t have to choose. The world was my oyster to paraphrase some hack writer from England. To be successful of course, something I was also eventually concerned about which also jettisoned me out of the halycyon days of the book business, it did become necessary to choose, make concessions, and pick of path that would allow me to achieve some semblance of security. I got married and had kids and suddenly any reckless thought was carefully weighed and generally rejected in favor of the decision with less risk.

n  n
The Wobblies are coming!

One of the characters Mac finds himself caught on the treadmill trying to make more and more money to please his wife and kids. He enjoys his life despite the stress. His wife is pretty and the way she smells and feels when she is in his arms provides a comfort. His kids put a smile on his face. Money drives a wedge in his marriage and after one particularly bad fight he chooses to chuck it all and heed the call of the communist movement. He finds the cause exhilarating for a while, but ultimately discovers that trading his family for a larger cause is not as fulfilling as he hoped.

Dos Passos does play with the concept of “free love”, relationships between women, and the consuming passions of lust.

”After he’d given her a last rough kiss, feeling her tongue in his mouth and his nostrils full of her hair and the taste of her mouth in his mouth he’d walk home with his ears ringing, feeling sick and weak; when he got to bed he couldn’t sleep but would toss around all night thinking he was going MAD.”

”JURORS AT GATES OF BEEF BARONS.”

Watching these characters succeed and fail was actually inspiring to me. They are all hard working people trying to find their place in this world. The stream of conscious writing is not difficult to follow. The influence Dos Passos must have had on a whole host of writers before he was duck walked off stage in the growing anti-communist sentiment of the 1940s and 1950s, would make an interesting PHD paper for some earnest young person. I will continue with the rest of the trilogy in the early months of 2013 with great anticipation.

n  n
John Dos Passos

”While there is a lower class I am of it, while there is a criminal class I am of it, while there is a soul in prison I am not free.” Gene Debs

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