Abstract
Finnegans Wake responds to news scandal in part by liquidating literary character. If it is difficult to tell what scandal has occurred, it is even more difficult to say who was responsible for it. Joyce replaces char¬acter with conceptual category, overlapping sets of signifiers, and even, in his notebooks and from time to time in the Wake, symbolic figures or sigla. Joyce is singular in the extent of his liquidation of character. Most modernist novelists did not take such extreme measures in this regard. Instead of more or less abandoning it, they were forced to share the category of character within a media ecology where characters were repre¬sented with greater and greater profusion every day. This was a challenge of which Woolf was well aware, to return to her for a moment. In her ostensible disputation with Wells, Galsworthy, and Bennett, Woolf posi¬tions character as the primary and most necessary ground of modernist innovation.1 Woolf acknowledges “character-making power” as a central category of cultural production and represents the novel as “a very remark¬able machine for the creation of human character.”2 At first glance, she appears to treat the crisis of character to which modernism must respond as primarily a literary problem, suggesting of Edwardian novels that “in none of them are we given a man or woman whom we know.”3
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Notes
See Virginia Woolf, “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown,” in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume III, 1919–1924, ed. Andrew McNeillie (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), 384–389.
Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography (Cambridge: Exact Change, 1993), 71.
John Chamberlain, “John Dos Passos’s Experiment with the ‘News’ Novel,” New York Times, March 13, 1932, Book Review, 2.
E.L. Doctorow, “Foreword” to John Dos Passos, The 42nd Parallel (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), ix.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Revised ed. (London and New York: Verso, 1991), 33.
Melvin Landsberg, Dos Passos’ Path to U.S.A.: A Political Biography 1912–1936 (Boulder: The Colorado Associated University Press, 1972), 1.
Landsberg himself treats the Newsreels first in his analysis of U.S.A., lending them a kind of thematic priority despite his overt claims. In contrast, Donald Pizer treats the Camera Eye sections first in his discussion of the trilogy’s “modes,” and his reading emphasizes authorial matters accordingly. See Donald Pizer, Dos Passos’ U.S.A.: A Critical Study (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1988).
David Seed, “Media and Newsreels in Dos Passos’ U.S.A.,” Journal of Narrative Technique 14.3 (1984), 186.
Jean-Paul Sartre, “John Dos Passos and 1919,” in Literary and Philosophical Essays, trans. Annette Michelson (New York: Collier Books, 1962), 103.
Brian McHale, “Talking U.S.A.: Interpreting Free Indirect Discourse in Dos Passos’s U.S.A. Trilogy, Part Two,” Degrés 17 (1979), d8.
See also Brian McHale, “Talking U.S.A.: Interpreting Free Indirect Discourse in Dos Passos’s U. S. A. Trilogy, Part One,” Degrés 16 (1978), c–c7.
John Dos Passos, U.S.A. eds. Daniel Aaron and Townsend Ludington (New York: Library of America, 1996), 143. Subsequent pages references are given parenthetically within the text.
Robert Browning, “Two in the Campagna,” in The Poems of Browning, Volume III 1847–1861, eds. John Woolford, Daniel Karlin, and Joseph Phelan (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2007), 601–607.
Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach,” in The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. Kenneth Allott (London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1965), 239–243.
Juan A. Suárez, Pop Modernism: Noise and the Reinvention of the Everyday (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 81, 84.
Michael North, Camera Works: Photography and the Twentieth-Century Word (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 142.
Quoted in Townsend Ludington, John Dos Passos: A Twentieth Century Odyssey (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1980), 261.
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© 2011 David Rando
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Rando, D. (2011). Character. In: Modernist Fiction and News. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119666_4
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