The Individual vs. Society
GIFFORD, DON
The Individual vs. Society OCCASIONS AND PROTESTS By John Dos Passos Regnery. 323 pp. $4.95. Reviewed by DON GIFFORD Department of English, Williams College The dust jacket of this volume...
...There calls, he assumes, should lead us back from academic and literary complexities to the simple verities: Jefferson, the frontier and the Bible...
...it helps very little to be told that "individuality is freedom lived," since that leads to the circular assertion that to be free we must be individuals and to be individuals we must be free...
...Thus, the rejoinder to the question "What is freedom...
...This is classic demagoguery, resting an argument on a final appeal to deep-seated prejudice...
...Much the same can be said about U.S.A...
...The hollowness is extended when this circle is defined as the "good" and projected into conflict with "evil,' the oppressions of "the militarized industrial nations" which have rendered the modern world "a chamber of horrors.' Dos Passos' sense of evil appears to hinge on the assumption that the inevitable impulse of society is to suppress liberty and to oppress the individual...
...Even if one grants Dos Passos' argument that "underneath" words such as liberty "are still sound," one can demand that he, as a writer, reinvigorate their soundness, not by an appeal to a democratic unconscious but by actively involving the old and dusty words in a style or a metaphor or a context of ideas which can knock off the dust...
...This hollowness stems initially from Dos Passos' failure to dehne "liberty" and "freedom...
...In Three Soldiers (1921) Chris_field, Fuselli and Andrews, the three, are intended to represent, on three social levels, individuality in the American Expeditionary Force...
...In this development Dos Passos has overlooked the fact that man at war with society is man divided against himself-man spurning the context which alone can help him make himself into an individual...
...III, "That Something More Than Common...
...the book itself belies this announcement...
...Only a strangely two-dimensional 20th-century vision could so easily overlook "the dark Satanic mills" and the mutinies at the Nore which were also part of the social climate of the 1790s...
...A further hollowness is to be found in "the leap of faith'' which we must take...
...This is "settled theory," and the attempt to disguise these occasions and protests as unsettling questions is an attempt to distract the reader, to prevent him from glimpsing the hollowness at the theory's core...
...The essays are grouped in three sections: I, "Certain Fundamentals...
...Briefly the theory asserts that personal freedom and individual liberty constitute the highest good, and that this good is under attack by evil in the form of institutional authority in mass society (big government, big labor, big business, etc...
...A similar hollowness infects the language of the essays when the crisis of definition occurs...
...The aim would not be to answer the question but to defeat the questioner...
...The natural man's immediate contact with "facts and experience" will educate him provided he is not infected by the "slogans" invented by "Bossmen" and intellectuals and liberals...
...The novel's inventive attempt at form partially obscures the essential simplicity of its presentation of life-as-war: sensitive man vs...
...The novels focus on the individual in conflict with, and ground down by, mass society...
...Dos Passos remarks that words such as "liberty, fraternity and humanity are old and dusty and hung with the faded bunting of a thousand political orations, but underneath they are still sound...
...But Chrisfield and FuseIli, the plain men, are at best shadow-characters, and the triple focus breaks down into a single focus on Andrews the artistic temperament, oppressed and defeated by "modern militarized society" with its Bossmen and YMCA slogans...
...III , some sort of synthesis, an extension of principles and examples toward moral and social transcendence...
...The polemics attempt to generalize that dramatic individual into all mankind, and to generalize mass society into all oppression...
...He then asserts that way down deep we know what these words mean, even if we can't define them articulately...
...Finally, the theory asserts that the individual must "struggle against oppression," against "the daily exploitation of everything that is worst in human nature which forms the surface of our national life," and that collectively "we have to take the leap of faith...
...The natural man should learn from "the teachings of history"-which, here, means the results of combat between man and his society-and apparently should invest his faith in a mystical, nostalgic populism which is sacrosanct and clearly beyond the reach of a review or a reviewer...
...Reviewed by DON GIFFORD Department of English, Williams College The dust jacket of this volume announces that its 24 essays are intended to raise questions, not to present "settled theory...
...Dos Passos defines faith as "whatever conviction produces a feeling of participation in a common enterprise...
...The essays were written between 1936 and 1964, and while they are not organized chronologically, Dos Passos clearly intends the selection to answer critics of his "shift to the Right" by underscoring his personal 30-year record of consistency...
...These sections suggest the progression of a syllogistic form: I, statement of basic principles...
...To implement his "settled theory" Dos Passos calls for "a fresh political vocabulary," together with a renewed attempt to "form for ourselves an accurate picture of the society in which we live...
...The development from Three Soldiers to Occasions and Protests reflects a variety of attempts to generalize the artist-individual, his requirements and conflicts, from a personal ethic into a social ethic, (and latterly the attempt to decorate this social ethic with a patina of American history...
...beneath its splendid formal patterns lurks the same simple and potentially hollow equation...
...The theory may be negative and anti-theoretical, but it is set in concrete and has been since its emergence in Three Soldiers in 1921...
...This equation seems to derive from a 1920s concept of the artist as the special and exceptional individual who is exceptionally susceptible to oppression, singled out by society-as-fate to be ground down...
...Modern technological society with its impersonal, largescale institutions and its population pressures obviously does oppress us, and obviously gives us occasions for protests, but to mistake those occasions for "evil" (and the protests for prophecies) is to attribute moral value to that which is morally neutral, and is about as sensible as calling the jungle evil because its patterns of predation are impersonally destructive...
...What Dos Passos apparently neglects in the later novels and in the polemics is the obvious truth that a dramatic example is not the equivalent of a general statement...
...would be: "Deep in yourself, you as an American must know instinctively...
...The answer is complex...
...The question remains: Has Dos Passos' "drift to the Right" been paralleled by his decline from novelist of stature into polemicist...
...In "England Under a Labor Government: 1947," Dos Passos retraces in the 20th century the steps of a late 18th-century journey which Jefferson made to England Modern England to Dos Passos "regulations...
...that is, one would judge "faith" not by its content (the in what the faith is invested), but by its subjective results (presumably in some form of crusade...
...But these verities as they filter through Occasions and Protests are subject to curious distortions...
...But at its core, Dos Passos' "settled theory" is bitterly anti-intellectual-it postulates a "natural man" who shares "certain simple realities which are universal to all men...
...and in the form of "the prescriptions of doctrine" (Communism, liberalism, conformism, etc...
...callous society...
...This progression in the book's structure implies that it was Dos Passos' intention not just to raise questions, but also to articulate a "settled theory...
...II , examples of those principles in action in portraits of minor saints, such as John W . Davis, and minor devils, such as Adlai Stevenson...
...But this too has the ring of a nostalgia asserted, not of an idea or a value defined...
...18th-century England to Dos Passos' Jefferson apparently was some sort of well-kept park...
...II , "The Leaders and the Led...
...We are told similarly that "the Bible was the mould of Lincoln's intellectual formation" and that Lincoln was "in that sense the best educated man in the United States...
Vol. 48 • March 1965 • No. 6
