Polyphony and Totality in John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Manhattan Transfer begins with an individual searching for the center of New York, a metropolis of modern capitalism. Finding “the center of things” in the middle of chaotic fragmentation could be seen as a symbolic modernist search for the center in the center-less or multi-centered world of modernity. According to G. Lukàcs, this type of the seeker is essentially a problematic hero, a prototype of the novelistic protagonist. He defines the novel as a genre expressing a “transcendental homelessness” of the problematic hero. This transcendental homelessness has a family resemblance with “linguistic homelessness of literary consciousness” that M. Bakhtin proposes in his discourse on the language of the novel. The language of homelessness also wanders around the pages of the novel in the shape of images of fragmented languages, making up the polyphony of the novel. This essay analyzes Manhattan Transfer from the polyphonic totality, a shared perspective of Bakhtin and Lukàcs. The polyphonic totality indicates the very possibility of regaining the sense of totality in the fragmented modern society. Manhattan Transfer is an aesthetic reply of polyphonic totality to the commodity culture of infatuating fragmentation in New York.

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