მითოპოეტიკური ქრონოტოპი ჯონ დოს პასოსის რომანში მანჰეტენ ტრანსფერი

აბსტრაქტი

სტატიიდან აღებული ავტორის ინგლისურენოვანი რეზიუმე:

Key words: mythopoeic chronotope, urban aesthetics, polychronotopia, polymor- phism, synoptic novel.

The purpose of the present paper is to apply the Bakhtinian concept of chronotope to the structure of John Dos Passos’s city novel Manhattan Transfer. The paper discusses the forms of fictional representation of New York in the novel and complex time-space interrelations shaping its polycronotopical structure. It also analyzes Dos Passos’ fragmented urban imagery and poetics, innovative writing techniques and devices the writer uses in order to create imaginary urban vision of New York City within the confines of his experimental narrative; it explores the ways in which the novel represents the consciousness of its fictional characters in relation to modern city.

irakli cxvediani Within the context of the twentieth-century, modernist perspective, the city is at once sordid, corrupt, ruinous, terrible, contaminating, and still a place of wonders, magic, marvels, and “reality” in all its most startling and surprising manifestations. The city with its “treelessness”, and its “unnatural, too-human deadness”, with its dangerous “lack of the human in the too-human” became humanity’s new nature, and the conscious substance of modernist novelistic discourse. The reading of the city in local as well as universal terms may be regarded as prototypical and paradigmatic for literary modernism. Being the conscious substance of modernist discourse, the city was understood as real and ‘unreal’, historical and transhistorical at the same time.

One finds variant representations of this vision in the Dublin of James Joyce, in the New York of John Dos Passos, and, appropriately modified, in the work of T. S. Eliot etc. Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer, an experimental narrative that takes as its subject the quintessential material city of modernism, New York, is paradigmatic example of modernist urban aesthetic philosophy and critical ideology. Manhattan Transfer, Dos Passos’ third novel and gateway to the panoramic U.S.A. (1930-1936) trilogy, isolates the city of New York as a symbol for this phase of history: the embodiment of a “sanitary civilization of a scientized New World Order,” a world that had enslaved itself to a debilitating industrial system.

Dos Passos’s novel supports the premise that the totality of the modern city, like the totality of American history itself, had grown beyond human comprehension. Dos Passos’s New York is a massive urban palimpsest riveted by industrial imagery and criss-crossed by the multiple frenetic rhythms of intercepting lives. But while Manhattan Transfer lends itself to a collectivist vision where individuals are less the central concern than the city itself, Dos Passos’s New York also reveals the beauty of this megalopolis in the opening decades of the century through evanescent moments of epiphany. Dos Passos attempted to negotiate his own fascination-repulsion relationship with New York as a symbol of modern urban history.

In chronicling the life of New York-as- civilization, Dos Passos’s pronouncements on the fate of the city rest on both a synchronic and diachronic historical sense that aimed to “create characters first and foremost, and then to set them in the snarl of the human currents of their time, so that there results an accurate permanent record of history.” In representing the urban reality of Manhattan within the confines of an experimental narrative, Dos Passos isolates the soul of American culture by revealing – or approximating – the material reality of the American city so as to capture and record the fleeting moments of modernity. New York, a city-as-culture is given shape in the structure of the city’s streets, bridges, sidewalks, and neighborhoods, which together impose dichotomies between ethnicities and classes of people.

The city is thus both a geographic locale as well as psychic location, the center of an American landscape. Organic structure gives way to a new vocabulary of the senses contained within an architectonic form. But at the center of this landscape lies an elusive and threatening city of “signs.” Of course the valency of Dos Passos’ logic of visual form is compounded by the novel’s radical questioning of the notion of an ordered urban space (as a function of civilized order), indeed the idea of an attainable “center.” As one character notes, “the manheten transferi terrible things about having New York go stale on you is that there’s nowhere else.

It’s the top of the world.” Neither Dos Passos nor his artist, Jimmy Herf could establish roots amid the choking undergrowth of the city from within – New York emerges as a point of transit and port of entry into the darkened soul of America. The phase of history that Dos Passos documents is expansive. Manhattan Transfer is the opening chapter of Dos Passos’s natural history of urban America. It encompasses the first twenty-five years of New York’s history in the twentieth century. As we enter the novel, New York of the gaslight era is being transformed by the Greater New York Bill (1898), immigrants are pouring in from rural districts and from Europe.

As Dos Passos intends, the experience of modernity that is New York is as phantasmagoric as it is beautiful: the city overwhelms and kills minor characters, as it does in case of Bud Korpening and Stan Emery, sometimes paralyzes them spiritually as it does Ellen Thatcher, or drives them out, as it does the newspaper man and failed artist, Jimmy Herf. As Dos Passos was well aware, the vision of the myth-maker is synchronic, the artist creating archetypal characters who exist in timeless world and complete ever recyclable actions. By contrast, the historian’s vision is diachronic, recording more than creating human existence through the (dis)continuity of temporal sequence.

Manhattan transfer embodies both visions – its structure invariably sets up the tension between the synchronic and diachronic poles of the novel. Manhattan thus becomes a metaphor for an intangible “center of things”. The mythic idea of Manhattan, which runs counter to the city’s diachronic realities, is sustained by a longitudinal view; consequently, this reading of the metropolis situates the consciousness of the city within the context of a transhistorical continuum. Dos Passos himself compared New York to a “badly drawn cartoon”, a kind of “Babylon gone mad.” New York appeared for Dos Passos an immense panorama full of shadows and industrial imagery, but also a vital metropolis that reminded him of “Ninevah and Babylon, of Ur of the Chaldees, of the immense cities which loom like basilisks behind the horizon in a Jewish tales…” In Manhattan Transfer, Dos Passos juxtaposes these historic (diachronic) and mythic (synchronic) aspects of New York as a city in history.

Dos Passos’s New York is viewed, on the one hand, as a city in history, metonymically embodying a whole phase of American history and culture – the first two decades of the twentieth century; on the other hand, it is viewed as a city placed in the transhistorical continuum, a kind of palimpsest in which one language is scribbled on another; the author thus creates a kind of mythopoeic chronotope embodying all cities of all times; historical/ objective time is spatialized, i. e. it is abolished in favor of mythic eternity or, rather, all times meet in the eternal present. In other words, this paper attempts to reinterpret the ways in which Dos Passos juxtaposes historic/diachronic realities and mythic/synchronic dimension of New York as a city in history, eventually unifying the two contrasting poles into his synoptic vision of the city as embodied in the complex chronotopic configurations.

Manhattan Transfer, which is prototypical for extraordinarily heterogeneous modernist imagination, is essentially protean, marked with polymorphism and irakli cxvediani polychronotopical structure, i.e. it is a battlefield of different chronotopes, evoking several chronotopic images. The dialogue between chronotopes understood as a text’s fundamental image of the world, causes the reader to experience one particular type of image as dominant and to select it as the ‘overarching chronotope’. Manhattan Transfer, as a paradigmatic modernist novel, is a battlefield of a number of ‘overarching chronotopes’ or, in other words, it is marked with polychronotopia.

One of these chronotopes – the mythopoeic chronotope – envelops or dominates the others, in the final analysis shaping all narrative discourse and complex polychronotopical structure of the novel.

გამოქვეყნებულია ჟურნალში „სჯანი“, ტ. 21 (2020), გვ. 81–105. ნაშრომის გახსნა