Manhattan Transfer , Spectacular Time, and the Outmoded

Carey James Mickalites

Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory,

Volume 67, Number 4, Winter 2011, pp. 59-82 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/arq.2011.0023

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 carey james mickalites

Manhattan Transfer, Spectacular

Time, and the Outmoded
The only substitute for dependence on the past is dependence on
the future.
John Dos Passos, “Against American Literature,” 1916

Mo d e r n s p e c t ac l e , l i k e m o r e t r a d i t i o n a l
historical forms—in which repeated rituals enact shared com-
munity values—organizes a public collectivity around its visual cen-
trality. But in following the temporal reproducibility of the commodity
form, capitalist spectacle during the second technological revolution
dramatizes the experience of the eternally new we customarily associate
with modernity, and infuses American literary modernism with unprec-
edented energies, electric flows, and promiscuous, nervous desires. In
its various guises—including advertising, photography, cinema, and the
dissemination of spectacular events in the popular press—spectacle also
performs and embodies the exponential reproduction of surplus for a
presumably collective vision. And in the sprawling historical diorama
of 1920s New York that is John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer, a jit-
tery fixation on spectacular pleasures of the now, strangely defined by
their future outmoded or obsolete status, expresses an epistemology of
public being and consumer citizenship that is central to the feeling of
temporal and historical dislocation operative within much of American
modernism.
In her study of cinematic time, Mary Anne Doane argues for two
key modalities of modernity that might be useful here: “abstraction/
rationalization and emphasis on the contingent” (10–11). The rapid
technological advance and economic expansion marking the dawn of

Arizona Quarterly Volume 67, Number 4, Winter 2011

Copyright © 2011 by Arizona Board of Regents
issn 0004-1610
60 Carey James Mickalites

the twentieth century opens the way for both the boom of early cinema
and contingency as a forcefully emergent cultural category, in which
change and the experience of time itself “[become] synonymous with
‘newness,’ which, in its turn, is equated with difference and rupture—a
cycle consistent with an intensifying commodification” (20). More
specifically, Doane distinguishes between the event and spectacle by
arguing for different relations to temporal contingency. Cinematic
spectacle, at least in its modernist heyday, emerges as one “attempt to
deal with the temporal instability of the image [which] involves not the
taming of the contingent, but its denial,” she argues. “Like the event,
spectacle effects a coagulation of time . . . . The event bears a relation
to time; spectacle does not. Spectacle is, as Laura Mulvey has pointed
out, fundamentally atemporal, associated with stasis and the antilinear”
(170). Further, “spectacle functions to localize desire, fantasy, and long-
ing in a timeless time, outside contingency. In this respect, spectacle,
in contrast to the event, is epistemologically reactionary, decidedly
unmodern,” whereas “the event comes to harbor contingency within its
very structure” (170, 171).
The operative modality of spectacle is, in part, its seeming denial of
contingency. But its apparent timelessness, its very “denial” of contin-
gency, is a relation to time. First, effecting a “coagulation of time” presup-
poses a relation between the spectacle and its temporal status, even if only
suggesting a false totality, an absolute present shaped around it. Second,
spectacle’s denial of its own contingency is part of its temporal structure
when this admittedly “unmodern” structure is seen in its modernist, com-
modified form, as repetitively new image-clusters signifying an ongoing
dream of capitalist growth. In its very “timeless time,” capitalist spectacle,
dependent upon twentieth-century visual technologies, stakes its thrill
on the cusp of its own flickering out of public existence, its impending
devaluation, or its future outmoded status. As such, spectacle marks a
temporal rupture; posing synchronic time in its localized “timelessness,”
in its necessary newness it also contains a diachronic rupture within
its structure. This internal rupture effect, or the radical simultaneity of
temporal contingency and a timeless present, significantly informs the
fascination and anxieties of modernism’s immanent relation to market
culture. By appearing as the radically new, the visual event marking the
present, any particular spectacle necessarily anticipates its impending
outmoded status. And John Dos Passos’ New York scene imagines the
 John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer 61

subjects of American modernism—with all their typological nervous

materialism—as suspended between those two moments.
Manhattan Transfer shows how collective and individual experi-
ences of time coalesce around capital’s systems of spectacular repre-
sentation. The novel reshapes realist narrative around the temporal
dream-world of spectacle as its own brand of modernism’s ambivalent
relation to mass culture. But, more to my point, Manhattan Transfer
builds its aesthetic around the impending outmoded status of the spec-
tacular display of surplus, and thus exposes a contradictory newness at
the heart of capitalist production and its culture of consumption. By
locating the public pleasures of the new within and against the mecha-
nisms of planned obsolescence, the novel generates a grinding histori-
cal friction constantly threatening to rupture the temporal and visual
veneer of spectacle’s appeals.
Perhaps because of this internal friction, earlier readers had trouble
situating the novel (and, indeed, Dos Passos altogether), along politi-
cal, sociological, economic, and aesthetic lines. Most of the early schol-
arly accounts divide into two major camps, wanting to align Manhattan
Transfer and its hefty follow-up, U.S.A., with either a Leftist politics
or a detached modernist aesthetics, with neither coming up fully satis-
fied. Both novels are explicit in their condemnations of (American)
capitalism—from the exploitation of labor to a disillusionment with
the empty promises of ads saturating the cityscape to the commodi-
fication of women—and both rely extensively on often mimetic rep-
resentations of popular culture, using newspaper and ad clippings and
cinematic technique to do that political work. If this apparent tension
no longer alarms us (think of the growing politicized popular culture
division of the Joyce industry), it secured Manhattan Transfer a place in
the Leftist-Modernist culture wars throughout the mid-century. So, for
instance, conservatives like F. R. Leavis and Edmund Wilson lamented
the novel’s attack on bourgeois capitalism, Leavis seeing in the novel
little more than propaganda in the service of “exhibit[ing] the decay of
capitalistic society” (72) and Wilson writing that Dos Passos’ “disap-
proval of capitalist society seems to imply a distaste for all the beings
that go to compose it” (32). That perception of social disgust also struck
a nerve, on the other hand, with Leftists, and John Aldridge, for one,
complained that Dos Passos lacked a clear, affirmative agenda that
would integrate his literary powers (Harding 105).1
62 Carey James Mickalites

While critical attention to Dos Passos remains relatively scant

(with most attention being accorded to U.S.A.), recent cultural stud-
ies approaches have injected a healthy dose of materialist rigor to our
assessment of his major work. Thomas Strychacz combines an astute
reading of Dos Passos’ wary negotiation with mass media as a source of
cultural and political power in U.S.A. with a welcome reflection on
the scholarly community’s tendency to see in the fiction “the totalizing
nature of mass communications” (121) against which it sets its critical
task. Focusing on Dos Passos’ use of “accommodatory strategies”—artis-
tically incorporating fragments from mass media so as to deny its total-
izing assumption—Strychacz rightly argues that such a strategy both
creates the text’s “radical instability” in its representation of “the every-
day carnival of American life” (141, 140), and betrays a fundamental
contradiction on which critical assessments of mass cultural hegemony
rest; if the capitalist media exercise a cultural totality, then there would
be no place from which to observe it, much less critique its influence.2
Other readings emphasizing the fiction’s cultural-historical work
pay attention to Dos Passos’ use of film techniques such as montage
to capture the disorienting spatial and temporal structures of modern
experience (Foster); the relevance of Bakhtin’s theory of the chrono-
tope to reading Manhattan Transfer as a kind of archetypal historical
documentary (Keunen); or to the novel’s investment in spatializing
time so as to counteract, in a Reader-Response approach, the violent
tempo of modern urban and technological experience (See). Providing
a critical intersection between Marxist cultural critique and poststruc-
turalism, William Brevda and Paula Geyh situate Manhattan Transfer
within an early twentieth-century shift from a commodity culture of
objects to one of the simulacrum, showing how characters negotiate
the city and their desires in relation to the newly pervasive electric
advertising signs that generated a kind of “urban mystification, causing
the city to be experienced as spectacle” (Brevda 82). Michael North’s
recent Camera Works thoroughly historicizes such arguments. Arguing
for the hieroglyphic functions of photography in the first half of the
century, North attends to “spectatorship,” to the historical shift toward
what Dos Passos called “an eyeminded people” so central to U.S.A. In
a move to which my own argument is indebted, North shows how the
novel is not only formally influenced by cinema and other mass visual
media, but that it foregrounds and critiques a sense of historical amnesia
 John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer 63

accompanying the revolutionary potentials inhering in an age of rapid

technological change (148–50).
As many of these recent arguments suggest, then, Dos Passos’ 1925
novel indexes the experiential thrills and anxieties associated with cap-
italist speculation, spectacle, and mass consumption, and senses in the
spectacular cityscape a dynamic charge that both stimulates and dis-
tracts a collective psychology. More specifically though, and where my
reading diverges from these recent approaches, I argue that Manhattan
Transfer pits the experience of spectacular time—both individual and
collective—between an electrifying introjection of spectacle’s energy
of the now and its corollary, necessarily impending, outmoded status
under the revolutionary production of the obsolete.3 This reading, then,
is dialectical, and seeks to revive the critical energies of modernism’s
market vision via two of Walter Benjamin’s most important theories for
understanding the experiential temporalities of technological moder-
nity: innervation and the outmoded.
Benjamin takes the concept of “innervation” from Freud’s under-
standing of internally-oriented nervous transfer and applies it to “a
technological public sphere surging with liberatory affective energies”
(Nieland 3), claiming that cinema has the capacity “to train human
beings in the apperceptions and reactions needed to deal with a vast apparatus
whose role in their lives is expanding almost daily” (“Work of Art” 108).
Benjamin understands this cinematic training, moreover, as collective,
revolutionary adaptation to the pulse of modern public life vastly quick-
ened by spectacle: “The aim of revolutions is to accelerate this adapta-
tion. Revolutions are innervations of the collective—or, more precisely,
efforts at innervation on the part of the new, historically unique col-
lective which has its organs in the new technology” (124), a technol-
ogy which, in turn, “aims at liberating human beings from drudgery” by
expanding their “scope for play” (124).4 That liberatory potential ema-
nating from technologically-stimulated, collective affects drives the jit-
tery playfulness and bacchanalian wanderings of Manhattan Transfer’s
jostling and episodic panorama, in which characters’ imaginative lives
are alternately infused with or depleted of spectacle’s affective energies
and promiscuous promises. But the real force of that spectacular vision
requires its modern economic antithesis, and the novel repeatedly jux-
taposes those liberating potentials with visions of waste, so that the
spectacles of today are always haunted by their obsolete material dead-
64 Carey James Mickalites

ness of tomorrow. Thus, while capitalist spectacle mediates social sub-

jectivity and gives public expression to commodity culture’s collective
wish images, those very images contain their own future obsolescent
or outmoded status. The novel’s radical vision of the future emerges
from this temporal dialectic, foregrounding the immanent pastness and
material limits of value built into the spectacularly new. The narra-
tive dynamic, organized around this tension, critically engages with
the ahistoricity promoted by spectacular time. The novel performs a
modernist pleasure of critique as the immanent counterpart to capital’s
spectacular public sphere.
Manhattan Transfer begins with birth and the language of a market
booming with fantastic economic speculation, and ends with a vision
of New York’s capitalist-cultural periphery inhabited by the chewed up
and wasted remains of the consumerist day. The novel figures the metro-
politan subject as suspended between these moments. We can begin in
medias res. The epigraph to the “Nickelodeon” chapter collapses future
and past within the concentrated spectacular field of vision offered by
the nickelodeon and stereopticon. Fleeting snatches of popular songs
and headline sensations index the collective memories and tinseled
fantasies within the technologically mediated public sphere:

A nickel before midnight buys tomorrow . . . holdup headlines,

a cup of coffee in the automat, a ride to Woodlawn, Fort Lee,
Flatbush . . . A nickel in the slot buys chewing gum. Somebody
Loves Me, Baby Divine, You’re in Kentucky Juss Shu As You’re
Born . . . bruised notes of foxtrots go limping out of doors,
blues, waltzes (We’d Danced the Whole Night Through) trail
gyrating tinsel memories . . . On Sixth Avenue on Fourteenth
there are still flyspecked stereopticons where for a nickel you
can peep at yellowed yesterdays. Beside the peppering shoot-
ing gallery you stoop into the flicker a hot time, the
bachelor’s surprise, the stolen garter . . .
wastebasket of tornup daydreams . . . A nickel before midnight
buys our yesterdays. (264, ellipses original)

A nickel buys the future in the form of a leisurely drive or a pack of

gum; a nickel buys the visual pleasure of the past contained in the pres-
ent. The “gyrating tinsel memories” are linked to advertisements for
 John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer 65

spectacles past, which have become the wasted “daydreams” and “yel-
lowed yesterdays” marking the temporal contingency of vision in the
spectacular landscape of commodity culture. I will unpack this passage
further, but here we do well to note that the nickelodeon’s image clus-
ters, featuring stale advertisements historically suspended within the
technological apparatus itself, expresses in proto-freeze-frame a tempo-
rality of the present structured on the commodity’s slipping into the
outmoded. Modernity is figured through the spectacular logic of the
now in tension with the immanent waste of the past.
Across the novel’s more expansive metropolitan landscape, we wit-
ness the public cultural imaginary shaped around the spectacular repre-
sentations of capital flux. Manhattan Transfer repeatedly juxtaposes the
visible spaces of surplus with the spectral sites of wasteful overproduc-
tion. Early in the narrative, Bud Korpenning, the novel’s foremost sur-
plus body, moves from Broadway through zones marked by the wasted
products of the recent past and into the suburban space of middle-class
consumption. Beginning his hopeless, eternal quest for work, he seeks
out the metropolitan “center of things”:

[He] walked down Broadway, past empty lots where tin cans
glittered among grass and sumach bushes and ragweed, between
ranks of billboards and Bull Durham signs, past shanties and
abandoned squatters’ shacks, past gulches heaped with wheel-
scarred rubbishpiles where dumpcarts were dumping ashes and
clinkers . . . until he was walking on new sidewalks along a row
of yellow brick apartment houses, looking in the windows of
grocery stores, Chinese laundries, lunchrooms, flower and veg-
etable shops, tailors’, delicatessens. (33, ellipses original)

Bud’s movement from the void-land where nature and the wasted
“signs” of commodity culture meet in the poverty invisible to a still-
spectacular center of capital both predates post-war urban sprawl,5 and
places that center of modernist epistemology in an uncanny relation to
its spectral waste.6
But while such visual linkages between surplus and its wasteland
across the liminal spaces of consumption are important, the text does
more than simply stage a return of capital’s repressed. Capital’s tauto-
logical system of representation publicly mediates the pleasures and
66 Carey James Mickalites

constraints of modern metropolitan subjectivity. For example, as Jimmy

Herf finds himself newly unemployed, Dos Passos foregrounds the role
that the spectacular legibility of capital plays in Jimmy’s attempt to read
the material conditions of his own consciousness:

Jobless, Jimmy Herf came out of the Pulitzer Building. He

stood beside of pile of pink newspapers on the curb, taking deep
breaths, looking up the glistening shaft of the Woolworth. It
was a sunny day, the sky was a robin’s egg blue. He turned north
and began to walk uptown. As he got away from it the Wool-
worth pulled out like a telescope. He walked north through the
city of shiny windows, through the city of scrambled alphabets,
through the city of gilt letter signs.
Spring rich in gluten . . . Chockful of golden richness,
delight in every bite, the daddy of them all , spring
rich in gluten. Nobody can buy better bread than prince
albert . Wrought steel, monel, copper, nickel, wrought iron.
All the world loves natural beauty. love’s bargain that suit
at Gumpel’s best value in town. Keep that schoolgirl complex-
ion . . . joe kiss , starting, lightning, ignition and generators.
(315, ellipses original)

The narrative and visual movement shifts from specific monuments of

capital investment to the jarring superlatives, the “scrambled alphabets”
of advertising slogans. In an inverse echo of the novel’s earlier descrip-
tion of Bud’s movement through the wasteland of yesterday’s com-
modities, this passage tracks Jimmy’s walk uptown in such a way that
electrifies its own novelistic temporality with the more dynamic spatial-
ization indexed by spectacle. This energized jarring marks a particularly
striking example of Thomas Strychacz’s observation about technique in
U.S.A.: “Dos Passos’ own work of estranging media material from its
original contexts allows that material, at times, to push forward its own
voice in all its rawness and raggedness and to proclaim an energy that
is not fashioned wholly through Dos Passos’s reworking” (140). Read
against the zone of poverty and labor through which Bud moves, how-
ever, that energy and the phallic centrality of the Woolworth building
are posited on the socio-spatial disavowal or spectralization of capital’s
wasteland. The material, social space of the city and of the novel is
organized around the relative value of the visible. As such, the novel
 John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer 67

visually articulates a dialectical relationship between abundance and

its impending waste, exposing the uncanny naturalization of spectacle,
which, in turn, defines a modern metropolitan epistemology.
It is on the grounds of that spectacular space-time logic, the delin-
eation of time by the text’s mapping it onto its respective public spaces
of consumption, where we can locate and understand the subject’s
public experience of the temporal. Dos Passos redefines the typological
nervous materialism of so much American modernism by insisting on a
subjectivity experienced on the cusp of the modern, or in other words,
always on the verge of becoming outmoded. The subject’s continuous
engagement with the “city of gilt letter signs” is one of the effects of
capital’s self-reflexive will-to-totality, and through these acts of reading
the consumerist public sphere, Manhattan Transfer shows modernist psy-
chology to be a function of the dynamics of capital. Dos Passos gives us a
new and improved, fictional version of Georg Simmel’s famously astute
understanding of individual metropolitan psychology, one founded on
“the intensification of emotional life due to the swift and continuous
shift of external and internal stimuli” (325).
The novel envisions this conscious interfacing with the flashes
of a fully mediated public sphere, first, through the dynamics of group
identification. For instance, a “great lady on a white horse”—a living
advertisement for Danderine shampoo—acts as a moving index of
experiential “publicness”in one of the novel’s more giddily optimistic
episodes.7 First at Lincoln Square and then at Thirty fourth Street, “a
girl rode slowly through the traffic on a white horse; chestnut hair hung
down in even faky waves over the horse’s chalky rump and over the
giltedged saddlecloth where in green letters pointed with crimson, read
danderine ” (129, 135). The repetition in plainly descriptive prose
anticipates Guy Debord’s claim that “the world we see is the world of
the commodity” (29). The repetitive description suggests the social
centrality of spectacle (and the fixation it begs) and dramatizes the way
that the experimental modernist text is always-already infused with the
flashy and fleeting tautological language of the brand name. Reading
the spectacular signs of consumer space opens the way for interpella-
tion as the subject negotiates its own position in relation to the social
signs of surplus. Or, “throughout the novel,” as Paula Geyh similarly
argues, “the thoughts of the inhabitants of a textualized Manhattan . . .
are caught up in such vignettes and are intertwined with this welter of
68 Carey James Mickalites

discourses and signs” (428). Thus, while the characters of this spectacu-
lar city-text are “compulsive readers and consumers,” as A. C. Goodson
points out, it is not so much that “the word made sign invades their
inner lives” (99) as that their inner lives are already fully constituted in
the dynamic public spaces of spectacle.
Dos Passos plays on this important historical-stylistic mediation
of modernism and mass marketing on the social-psychological level
when, for instance, the dashing young Stan Emery and Ellen Thatcher
playfully imitate the brand’s chanting slogan. In jest with Ellen Stan
chants, “With rings on her fingers and bells on her toes, And she shall
make mischief wherever she goes” (133); he later chants the slogan
again, to himself, but in the ad’s own language: “And she shall cure
dandruff wherever it grows” (135). The variations only serve to illus-
trate, rhetorically, the resilience of the brand name’s rhythm, especially
when its own repetition sings a mythic song of eternal renewal. Stan’s
mocking twist on the language leaves intact the power of spectacle to
shape the public around itself. His playful revision of the slogan that is
attached to the Danderine Lady underscores the tautology that Debord
expresses when he claims that “the only thing into which spectacle
plans to develop is itself ” (16), and his compulsive, mimetic mockery
highlights the role of that tautology in shaping the public imagination
of American modernism.
Ellen’s private response to the public spectacle—the Dander-
ine lady—is erotically symptomatic of this very tautology. She later
tells Stan that the Danderine lady “impressed [her] enormously” (133,
emphasis added), and immediately after that first sighting of the living
ad, the narrative tracks her movement to the park. There, she becomes
the object of two sailors’ gazes, and the continuous, filmic movement of
the narrative passes swiftly from the Danderine lady to Ellen’s stroll in
close third person. The visual transition, a narrative montage, generates
a visual transference of the impressive force of the spectacle acting on
Ellen to her own affective response to being the object of the sailors’
fetishistic, consuming gaze where, as Janet Casey has shown, the novel’s
formal montage “both enables and reflects” its representation of Ellen
as commodified woman (117): “she could feel their seagreedy eyes cling
stickily to her neck, her thighs, her ankles” (Manhattan Transfer 129).
The fixation on individual body parts/objects to which a greedy gaze
“cling[s] stickily” corresponds to the Danderine lady—“with rings on
 John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer 69

her fingers and bells on her toes”—and the erotic investment in the
relative value of those parts. Ellen participates in the kind of group
psychology Freud describes, in which “identification endeavors to mold
a person’s own ego after the fashion of the one that has been taken as a
model” and whereby “the ego assumes the characteristics of the object”
through its introjection (Group Psychology 47–49). The narrative move-
ment similarly throws the relation of ego and object into question; to be
“impressed” by spectacular capital, according to the logic of the narra-
tive, is to become its (eroticized) object. But to do so requires, first, the
introjection of the identificatory “model.” Ellen’s anxious reverie in the
spectacular space of public desires, then, both situates Freud’s psychoan-
alytic model firmly within a discursive network of consumer desire and
points up and contextualizes the strange circularity operative in Freud.
The circular logic of this psychological investment in commercial
spectacle expresses the latter’s eternal recurrence of the new. That new-
ness, on which the spatial and visual force of spectacle is posited, neces-
sarily represses its own temporal contingency, which is in turn figured in
the liminal and spectral site of capital waste through which Bud moves
in his effort to get to “the center of things.” Manhattan Transfer’s psy-
chological temporality depends on the contingent status of commod-
ity-value, in that newness is equated with compulsive repetition and
constituted against the pastness, or outmoded status, contained in and
yet suspended by spectacle.
That is, while the material remains of surplus and commodity that
structure the temporal contingency of value are spatially repressed, the
strange temporality of the spectacular commodity form also organizes
memory and the subject’s sense of its own history and future. Relegat-
ing memory to the laws of the commodity triggers a sense of anxiety in
which the impending outmoded status of advertising spectacle appeals
and give public expression to the subject’s own imminent death. Follow-
ing his mother’s funeral, the young Jimmy Herf wanders the suburban
fringes in an effort to forget the auditory, olfactory, and tactile sensa-
tions associated with the ritual. The landscape of barnside advertising
displaces memories of his mother with their own decay; human mortal-
ity translates into the historical diachrony legible in the ad-promises
of yesterday. The narrative traces Jimmy’s movement out of a densely
populated suburban sector, and the changing visual landscape parallels
the flux and forgetting of childhood consciousness:
70 Carey James Mickalites

on the sides of barns peeling letters spelled out lydia

pinkham’s vegetable compound, budweiser,
red hen, barking dog . . . And muddy had had a stroke
and now she was buried. He couldn’t think how she used to
look; she was dead that was all. (109, ellipses original)

The catalogue of particular advertisements followed by ellipsis produces

a rhetorical effect of infinite sameness, the ellipsis functioning as mate-
rial substitute for an infinitely interchangeable series of ads continuously
plastered over the ruins of yesterday’s commodified daydreams. More to
the point, though, that sense of elliptical infinity depends on its con-
tradictory relationship with the “peeling letters,” themselves a kind of
social text spelling out the decay operative within commodified desire.
The additive conjunction links those peeling letters to the bare finality
of death by way of forgetting. Memory is displaced by the continuous
process of spectacle slipping into the past, illustrating Dos Passos’ later
complaint of “an idiot lack of memory” in a society, as Michael North
puts it, whose “visual images are so powerful that they actually sup-
plant authentic memories, leaving the modern audience with a kind of
amnesia” (148–49), as well as Debord’s claim that spectacular events
“are quickly forgotten, thanks to the precipitation with which the spec-
tacle’s pulsing machinery replaces one by the next” (114).8 Thus, the
concluding copular, unpunctuated clauses straying from standard edited
English—“she was dead that was all”—signal the arrest of memory as it
congeals around the bare acknowledgment of mortality, and Dos Passos’
text conflates this psychological tension with the temporal succession
of commodity spectacle destined to peel away. Spectacle’s own revolv-
ing and fatal limits interface, on the text’s episodic visual landscape,
with the boy’s reified experience of death.
Jimmy’s grim experience of death on the margins of the consumerist
landscape is a far cry from the innervating effects of publicly mediated
desire in the steamy “center of things,” but I’d like to push this think-
ing on death and commodified desire further, and to do so precisely by
bringing mortality to bear on the novel’s electrifying thrill of the now.
If, as Tim Armstrong has argued, the accelerated experience of
modernity gave rise to pseudo-medical conditions like neurasthenia—
George Beard’s term for “nervous exhaustion” due to a failure to adapt to
rapid technological change (Armstrong 17)—then Dos Passos locates
 John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer 71

the experiential dynamics of such a pathological modernity squarely

within the anxious exuberance of 1920s urban American consumer-
ism.9 A stage actress down on her luck, Ruth Prynne leaves the doctor’s
office, where she’s been receiving experimental X-ray treatment for an
ailing throat that might indicate cancer, and feels her body and mind
anxiously charged by the twinned forces of advertisements for bodily
renewal and medical statistics signaling death. She runs into fellow fail-
ing actor, Billy Waldron, who mentions bouts of melancholia and neur-
asthenia, and warns her about X-ray treatment possibly causing cancer.
Traveling to another engagement on a subway packed with the spectral
bodies of the crowd and a series of “sourcolored advertisements” for
laxatives, the repetitive rationality of medical statistics echoes in Ruth’s
consciousness:

Cancer he said. She looked up and down the car at the joggling
faces opposite her. Of all those people one of them must have
it. four out of every five get . . . Silly, that’s not
cancer. ex-lax, nujol, o’sullivan’s . . . She put her
hand to her throat. Her throat was terribly swollen, her throat
throbbed feverishly. Maybe it was worse. It is something alive
that grows in flesh, eats all your life, leaves you horrible, rotten
. . . The people opposite stared straight ahead of them, young
men and young women, middleaged people, green faces in
the dingy light, under the sourcolored advertisements. four
out of every five . . . A trainload of jiggling corpses.
(266, ellipses original)

Statistical knowledge renders the body uncanny; self-knowledge is

conditioned by an abstraction and rationalization of impending threat.
Further, the visual trajectory creates an anxious dissonance between the
uncanny relation with the statistical body and the ads offering to purify
that same body, and leaves the subject suspended between certainty
and uncertainty. Mark Seltzer describes this disjunctive dynamic as “the
conversion of individuals into numbers and cases and the conversion
of bodies into visual displays” in a social control mechanism linking
statistics and surveillance (100), which, in the spaces of public con-
sumption, “has the effect of inciting and directing that consumption”
(114). The statistic, in other words, directs the subject’s knowledge of
72 Carey James Mickalites

itself to a quantifiable threat met with a set of medical conditions, link-

ing health to consumption in order to better direct the latter. In the
shifting visual movement from the ads to the desperately felt threat of
illness, the text describes the uncanny effect of introjection in defining
the anxious consumer-subject.
But if the ads here work together with a statistical threat in direct-
ing Ruth’s self-consciousness, they also act as an important economic
trope for bodily waste management and the promise of personal puri-
fication and renewal. Dos Passos juxtaposes the pervasive threat of
cancer—visually troped by the trainload of consumer corpses—and the
equally pervasive ads for laxatives. Addressing the constipated subject
suffering from “the nervous pace of modern society,” which Roland
Marchand points out as a common theme of 1920s health-oriented ads
(225–26), those for laxatives of course appeal to the body’s failure to rid
itself of waste, but they also express Freud’s theory of a miserly bodily
economy: constipation as hoarding. Recall that, early on, Freud theo-
rized the infant’s feces as its first gift, a relinquishment signifying com-
pliance, and later on extended that to an economy that equates money
and feces, financial habits with bowel movements.10 The laxative ads’
promised relief and bodily renewal, according to this logic, appeal to
bodily expenditure and so rhetorically associate expenditure through
consumption directly with the bowel movements of a healthy body.
Finally, the healthy relief of constipation also suggests a form of control
over contingency. In light of Ruth’s uncanny experience of her body
according to statistical margins and the ads’ appeals to bodily waste
management, the text dramatizes a sense of displacement of the mar-
ket’s own systemic fluctuations onto the private, natural body. Caught
up between the threatening sweep of statistical illness and the con-
tingency that defines both the body’s inner economy and the market
culture in which it moves, Ruth’s sense of her self is haunted by con-
sumer capitalism’s rationalized waste and the logic whereby spectacular
renewal relies on planned obsolescence.11
And yet, even as the novel tends to figure capitalist subjectivity
as caught in the grips of a corporate advertising machine ever-attuned
to fears of mortality and the temporal limits of the body, Dos Passos
also strikes a more optimistic note, one emanating from the clashing
temporalities of the spectacular present and the wasted past and future,
between innervation and the outmoded. That optimistic note charges
 John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer 73

the affective spaces of public consumption with radical futural poten-

tial inhering in the contradictory temporalities of modern consumer
capitalism.
First, we should recall that the novel critiques the political econ-
omy of consumption by pinning it to the pervasive force of commodity
spectacle and its repetitive dream of an eternal present, understanding
an inflated American materialism as banking on its own temporal total-
ity and historical amnesia. Dos Passos brings this generalized critique of
spectacular market culture to bear specifically on the uneasy historical
conflation of the language of liberal humanism in its American form
and the “free” market of monopoly capital, merging the words from
the Declaration of Independence—“Pursuit of happiness, unalienable pur-
suit” (327)—with the jolting, dreamy experience of seeing our private
desires spectacularized on the public stage. Frustrated with newspaper
work, love, and the city, a maturing Jimmy Herf wanders at night down
South Street, still hearing the clicking of typewriters, and “obsessed” by
an unnamed skyscraper from which the commodified sirens, “Faces of
Follies girls, glorified by Ziegfeld, smile and beckon to him” (327). He
endlessly circles the building in a hallucinatory trance, looking for the
entrance:

Every time he closes his eyes the dream has hold of him, every
time he stops arguing audibly with himself in pompous reason-
able phrases the dream has hold of him. Young man to save
your sanity you’ve got to do one of two things . . . Please mister
where’s the door to this building? Round the block? Just round
the block . . . one of two unalienable alternatives: go away in a
dirty soft shirt or stay in a clean Arrow collar . . . What about
your unalienable right, Thirteen Provinces? (327, ellipses orig-
inal)

In Jimmy’s anxious state, an American dream of continuous pursuit

becomes a Kafkaesque nightmare, an endless failure to find the entrance
to a materialistic American freedom to buy; that is, the freedom to
choose across a range of brands offering the same thing.12 The unalien-
able rights of American humanism, fully engrossed by the market,
translate into a binary logic in which the political ideal of liberated
being means having or not having the right collar. Such a reification
74 Carey James Mickalites

of liberalist ideals under the magical promises of the commodity-spec-

tacle, conflated under the logic of an endlessly receding object of desire,
dramatizes Debord’s stinging summation of a totalizing bourgeois com-
modification of history: “The triumph of irreversible time was also its
metamorphosis into the time of things, because the weapon that had
ensured its victory was, precisely, the mass production of objects in
accordance with the laws of the commodity. The main product that
economic development transformed from a luxurious rarity to a com-
monly consumed item was thus history itself ” (105).
But it is also precisely this late into the game of Manhattan Transfer
where we begin to see an optimistic dialectical force unfolding from the
ideology of the “free” market. In other words, the passage not only sig-
nals the capitalist production of a reified dream temporality, but it also
exposes the unremitting pressure of past dreams and a revolutionary
future contained in the ever-present emptiness of spectacular capital.
We can begin, again, with Benjamin, and this time his theory of collec-
tive wish images, where an historical ideal and the inadequacies of the
current state of production meet in the material present. In “Paris, the
Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” Benjamin describes the revolu-
tionary function of collective images within capitalist production:

Corresponding to the form of the new means of production,

which in the beginning is still ruled by the form of the old
(Marx), are images in the collective consciousness in which
the new is permeated with the old. These images are wish
images; in them the collective seeks both to overcome and to
transfigure the immaturity of the social product and the inad-
equacies in the social organization of production. (4)13

We might read, in Jimmy’s schizophrenic dream-state centered around

the “tinselwindowed skyscraper” (327), Benjamin’s collective image, itself
“permeated with the old,” reified language of liberal humanism and the
ever-new, repetitive language of an Arrow advertisement. However, Benja-
min’s description and Jimmy’s dream—both representative of the congeal-
ing effect commodification has on an historical ideal—are in themselves
limited. As Karen Jacobs points out, collective wish images “prepare the
ground for revolutionary awareness, requiring mediation by concrete mate-
rial forces to be reconstellated into properly dialectical images” (215).
 John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer 75

How does Manhattan Transfer’s mimetic representation of the con-

tradictory forces of 1920s capitalist production—forces constitutive of
the spatial and temporal epistemologies of its subjects—express the rev-
olutionary potential inhering in the “concrete material forces” of his-
tory? First, as with Joyce’s Ulysses, the novel infuses traditional literary
realism with spectacular journalese in creating jarring juxtapositions
and uncanny narrative temporalities of spectacular images denying his-
tory yet haunted by the future. Against the organic, naturalized flows
of capital ideologically corresponding to the sun rising or setting over
Wall Street, the narrative is built around the momentary spectacles of a
Danderine woman, a vaguely recalled Ziegfeld performance, or a series
of laxative ads, all set against the tin can disjecta marking the temporal
and spatial limits of spectacular surplus. The narrative thus inhabits
a capitalist historicity in which “we begin to recognize,” as Benjamin
observes, “the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they
have crumbled” (Charles Baudelaire 176).
The novel’s repetitive foregrounding of spectacular contingency
performs a modernist brand of critique similar to Benjamin’s fascina-
tion with the immanent ruins of bourgeois monuments, and brings that
sense of a futural rupture to bear on the structures of a bloated Ameri-
can capitalism. By insisting that the outmoded structures the promises
of the present, Dos Passos writes a repressed materialism into the plea-
sures and promises of the present and thereby envisions the uncanny
temporality of capitalist modernity’s public culture. My focus on the
novel’s uncanny disjunctions, as they’re organized around commodified
time, then, reverses readings like that of A. C. Goodson, who claims
that “restoring [the novel] to the expanded horizon of metropolitan
modernism means recognizing the way the modernist text inhabits
and naturalizes the alien element that is mass culture” (92). The novel
inhabits a space where mass culture is already naturalized; it works to
denaturalize and defamiliarize by foregrounding the temporal limits of
its commodity-saturated collective space.
So, for instance, in a passage at the novel’s conclusion that echoes
Bud Korpenning’s passage through the liminal zones of capital waste,
marking a textual return of the materially repressed, Jimmy Herf aim-
lessly wanders away from the consumerist dream world of the shift-
ing “center of things,” where yesterday’s objects of value become the
ruins structuring the contradictory present and past of spectacle. Again
76 Carey James Mickalites

unable to remember anything, wondering if “this is amnesia” or mad-

ness (359), Jimmy “walks on, taking pleasure in breathing, in the beat
of his blood, in the tread of his feet on the pavement, between rows of
otherworldly frame houses” (360), the pulsing familiarity of his body
contrasting with the predictable monuments of suburban sprawl now
defamiliarized. Then,

Sunrise finds him walking along a cement road between dump-

ing grounds full of smoking rubbishpiles. The sun shines redly
through the mist on rusty donkeyengines, skeleton trucks,
wishbones of Fords, shapeless masses of corroding metal. Jimmy
walks fast to get out of the smell. He is hungry . . . . At a cross-
road where the warning light still winks and winks, is a gasoline
station, opposite it the Lightning Bug lunchwagon. Carefully
he spends his last quarter on breakfast. That leaves him three
cents for good luck, or bad for that matter. (360)

The sun rises over the expelled waste of yesterday’s surplus, illumi-
nating the constitutive ruins marking bourgeois time. And here, as in
the scene of Bud’s squalid entry into the city, Dos Passos does the work
of “reconstellation” (Jacobs) that Benjamin calls for by emphasizing
the radical temporal contingency that mutually imbricates “wishbones
of Fords” with the Woolworth building, ruins with monuments. But
it’s just as important to stress that this is not a static portrayal, much
less some grim, outlying perversion of Wall Street figuring a mournful
fall into the wastelands of modernity; rather, Jimmy’s careful expendi-
ture leaving him a few pennies for good luck or bad transfers the dis-
avowed irrationality of inflated investment capital to a conscious play
on chance. Dos Passos mediates the piles of rubbish and the flash of
spectacle, dynamically synthesizing them into the play of chance and
the potentialities of the future.
Manhattan Transfer draws on the energies of the second techno-
logical revolution, the thrills of speedy new modes of transport and the
booming availability of new mass produced goods, yet insists that it is
precisely in such a period of expansion and excess that, as Hal Foster
puts it, “the outmoded [is] brought to consciousness as a category” (165).
The surreal landscape through which Jimmy passes, in fact, suggests a
critical intersection with Benjamin’s interest in a surrealist outmoded,
 John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer 77

the use of “the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings,” aging
photos and fashions, objects of the recent past which, through their
embodiment of loss in the ahistorical temporality of capitalism, might
“bring the immense force of ‘atmosphere’ concealed in [them] to the
point of explosion” (“Surrealism” 181–82). Hal Foster’s reading of surre-
alist art in light of Benjamin’s interest in the outmoded provides a useful
summary here, one we can extend to Dos Passos’ narrative constellation
of capital’s artifacts marking the temporal flows of capital and condition-
ing metropolitan subjectivity. “The surrealist outmoded,” Foster argues,
“posed the cultural detritus of past moments residual in capitalism against
the socioeconomic complacency of its present moment” (159), allowing
for “a twofold immanent critique of high capitalist culture”:

On the one hand, the capitalist outmoded [ranging from nine-

teenth century panoramas to leftover fashions to obsolete
machines] relativizes bourgeois culture, denies its pretense
to the natural and the eternal, opens it up to its own history,
indeed its own historicity. In effect, it exploits the paradox that
this culture, under the spell of the commodity, has any history
at all. On the other hand, the capitalist outmoded challenges
this culture with its own forfeited dreams, tests it against its
own compromised values of political emancipation, techno-
logical progress, cultural access. (162)

The dreamscape of Dos Passos’ city-text is perpetuated by the prom-

ises of consumer capital, of staying “in a clean Arrow collar” in order
to uphold Enlightenment political liberties. But, at the same time, the
spectacular visual referents that index Manhattan Transfer’s spatial and
temporal epistemology, from skyscrapers to stereopticons, are repeatedly
juxtaposed with, and haunted by, the skeletal remains structuring com-
modified time. The novel’s chronology of these objects slipping into
the past, structuring psychic and collective economies around contin-
gency and loss along the way, thus offers a modernist critique on these
very grounds, challenging a jumpy, anxiety-ridden capitalist desire of
the present by way of its own disavowed, “forfeited dreams.” Dos Passos
renders conscious the outmoded waste that is internal to the repetitive
production and consumption of the new, posing that consciousness as a
radically excessive alternative to capitalism’s total reification of mind.
78 Carey James Mickalites

We can now return briefly to the fragmented nickelodeon passage

with which I began my discussion of Manhattan Transfer. “A nickel
before midnight buys tomorrow” and “our yesterdays” (264), and frames
the epigraph’s image of the “flyspecked stereopticons.” The outmoded
technology (the stereopticon) is appropriately marked with shit, making
it a figure both for obsolescence in the face of cinema’s more immediate
forerunner and for yesterday’s spectacles in the present field of vision,
capital’s “yellowed yesterdays.” Benjamin’s wish images as embodiments
of a collective desire to overcome the limits of the current mode of
production are figured here in terms of the promises of consumption,
ever opening out to the future; purchasing a newspaper or a day’s ride
out of the city is an investment in time itself. But the experience of the
present and its disavowed outmoded future meet in the “wastebasket of
tornup daydreams.” A depressing picture, no doubt, but the image also
tears at the cultural fabric in which the promises of political, social,
and individual emancipation seem otherwise constrictingly interwoven
with the dreamscape of the spectacular commodity form. If the perva-
sive historicity of bourgeois culture is an eternal present with its eyes
on the immediate future, then the spectacles marking that historicity
also announce their own temporal limits. And this is where Dos Passos’s
narrative incorporation of the collective wish images of democratic uto-
pias becomes radically dialectical: if the spectacular present contains
its own future outmoded status, then such a temporal epistemology of
consumer capital also allows for, and perhaps is necessary to, a future
past tense in which past utopias unfold into the future.
University of Memphis
notes
1. For useful summaries of the early critical receptions of Dos Passos’ work,
particularly his major novels Manhattan Transfer and U.S.A., see Casey 1–58; and
Harding 103–09. Much criticism on Manhattan Transfer from the 1940s through
the 1970s, that does not centralize the politics of the aesthetic, concerns itself with
questions of form and liberal-humanist morality or character. See, for example,
Kazin; Gelfant; Lowry; and Colley, who observes the centrality of motion to Man-
hattan Transfer’s formal technique, but argues against its dialectical potential (49);
my argument directly opposes such a reified view.
2. In another, albeit implicit, argument on cultural reception and response,
Casey’s gender study of Dos Passos situates him in relation to other male American
modernists like Hemingway and Fitzgerald, to argue that Dos Passos, while accord-
 John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer 79

ing little recognizable agency to women, nevertheless employs figures like the com-
modified woman as a site from which to negotiate and critique the imbalanced
power structures of capitalism. My reading of the character Ellen Thatcher as object
of the male capitalist gaze is similar to Casey’s argument. But rather than emphasiz-
ing the text’s “exposure of the inequities of the American social system” (114) and
its reliance on unequal gender relations I argue for the novel’s interest in the tempo-
ral dialectics of spectacle and its potential for creating new collective affects.
3. While the terms “obsolete” and “the outmoded” certainly overlap and con-
dition each other, there is a crucial ontological difference: obsolescence refers to use
or function, as when older technologies are so superseded that they can no longer
be used or replaced. The outmoded adds to this the fluctuating social inscription of
exchange value and fashionable taste, so that an outmoded technology might retain
its earlier function but lag behind the current, preferred versions.
4. Nieland reads modernism’s public life in light of Benjamin’s sense of inner-
vation (2–5).
5. Guy Debord critically notes this late capitalist geography, in which “capital
is no longer the invisible center determining the mode of production. As it accu-
mulates, capital spreads out to the periphery” (33).
6. We might also compare this to the passage in The Great Gatsby where Nick
Carraway describes the wasteland between West Egg and New York. Invisibly link-
ing the two zones of fantastic consumption “is a valley of ashes–a fantastic farm
where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens, where
ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a
transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the
powdery air” (27).
7. The term “publicness” is Nieland’s (1–2).
8. See also Godden, who asserts tersely, “amnesia has always been one of the
staples of a successful commodity culture” (4).
9. For a fuller discussion of Beard, neurasthenia, and late-nineteenth century
medical technologies, see Armstrong 3, 5, 17–18.
10. On the child’s fecal gift economy, see Freud’s Three Essays 52. Freud first
(1908) speculates that the fecal-gift transfers to money in “Character and Anal
Erotism” 49, and in 1916 develops the theory further in “On the Transformation of
Instincts” 168–70.
11. Nujol advertising and the company’s history offer a curious subtext to
the ads’ presence in the text and Ruth’s response. An ad from 1917 figures the
aging body as site of obsolescence requiring commodity intervention. It features
an elderly woman, describes aging as a “heavy burden” when faced with constipa-
tion—which I associate here with the body’s obsolescence—and claims Nujol to be
“an efficient substitute for the mucus which exhausted nature no longer provides”
(Standard Oil).
80 Carey James Mickalites

12. Horkheimer and Adorno also famously make this observation on the ide-
ologies of American consumer choice. Writing that “marked differentiations such
as those of A and B films, or of stories in magazines in different price ranges, depend
not so much on subject matter as on classifying, organizing, and labeling consumers
. . . . Everybody must behave (as if spontaneously) in accordance with his previously
determined and indexed level, and choose the category of mass product turned out
for his type” (123), they conclude by arguing, “freedom to choose an ideology—
since ideology always reflects economic coercion—everywhere proves to be free-
dom to choose what is always the same” (167). While Manhattan Transfer certainly
narrates this kind of consumer coercion, the novel challenges that total reification
of public life and private desire that Horkheimer and Adorno so pessimistically and,
ultimately conservatively, envision.
13. In Benjamin’s complex oeuvre, and in this passage in particular, there is a
problematic tendency to rely on a naive Jungian universal category of the collec-
tive unconscious defined by static archetypes acting as stable signifiers. However,
as Buck-Morss points out, “the images of the unconscious [in Benjamin] are . . .
formed as a result of concrete historical experiences, not (as with Jung’s archetypes)
biologically inherited” (278).

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