From Vorticist Dreams to Futurist Nightmares: John Dos Passos’s Novels of the 1920s

Abstract:While long having noted John Dos Passos’s early fiction’s debt to Italian Futurism, critics have paid scant attention to the author’s interest in English Vorticism. In his best-known novels of the 1920s—One Man’s Initiation, Three Soldiers, and Manhattan Transfer—Dos Passos pits the two avant-garde movements against each other. Drawing on theories of violence by Hal Foster and other critics, I argue that Vorticism’s insistence on controlled movement frequently and unwittingly gives way to Futurist chaos and dispersal—just as the characters in these three novels, often in the very attempt to maintain equilibrium at high speeds, spin self-destructively out of control. Those who do survive the speed and violence of modern life risk a different form of death, one in which their souls are gutted and replaced with a mechanization that makes them a physical and spiritual threat to others who come within their orbit.