In the Prologue of the novel, The 42nd Parallel, we get two pages of paragraph-long sentences, mixed with random punctuation, and no clear sense of a narrator/speaker. I would like to pay particular attention to the last paragraph in the prologue which reads:
“U.S.A. is the slice of a continent. […] U.S.A is … a public-library full of old newspapers and dogeared history books with protests scrawled on the margins in pencil. U.S.A. is the world’s greatest rivervalley fringed with mountains and hills, U.S.A. is a set of bigmouthed officials with too many bank accounts. U.S.A. is a lot of men in their uniforms buried in Arlington Cemetery. U.S.A. is the letters at the end of an address when you are away from home. But mostly U.S.A. is the speech of the people.” (xiv)
I came back to the prologue after I had read the chapters and recognized that it can stand as a template for both Mac as well as any common working man in America. The last paragraph struck me as the most important to the prologue because it sums up the United States of America succinctly: it’s good and it’s bad.
When it opens by saying “America is the slice of a continent”, it renders America’s geographic size as a piece, which connotes the image of something small. Immediately, America’s grandiloquence is reduced to lesser significance. The paragraph then goes on to explaining the U.S.A in numerous terms: capitalistic (holding companies), judicial (laws), economy (stock quotations), entertainment (moving picture theaters), geographically (mountains and hills) and education (history books). All these aspects of America make it big and important – especially because we boast we are the best in many of these areas.
I find particular interest in the line “a public-library full of old newspapers and dogeared history books with protests scrawled on the margins in pencil”. Despite boasting of being the greatest country in the world, those within the confines of America’s borders have protested and rebelled almost since the founding of our nation. If the nation is so great, why dissent?
The dichotomy of America’s greatness/awfulness is further exemplified with the contrast of the big mountains and hills embracing America’s beauty, and then these beautiful lands being controlled by officials with too much money. This image is also further complicated by those who die for economic and social freedoms that aren’t really freedoms when we look at the working classes who are constrained by the upper class.
As I am reading the novel, I realize this is precisely what America is about: constrained freedom. You have the opportunity the work wherever and for who ever for how ever long with what ever skills, yet you can still live a life of total poverty. As Mac’s Uncle, Tim O’Hare repeats “It’s the fault of the system…And who gets the fruit of our labor, the goddamn business men” (10).
I struggle to make sense of the last line “But mostly U.S.A. is the speech of the people”. In regards to the novel’s plotline as well as the characters we meet within it, I would say that despite America’s harsh treatment of it’s working class, we still bleed and scream USA USA USA every chance we get. At sports games, in schools, in war. Despite how much we bleed, how much we sweat, at the end of the day, “USA!” is the speech of the people.
I really appreciate the close attention to this key final paragraph. I like how you trace the shifting meanings here as DP defines American by space / geography, by its sense of natural beauty, by its war dead, by its economy, etc. That key description of protests scrawled on the margin, though, it most important as it is in many ways dissent that defines America. As we talked about in class, this intro feels a bit triumphal–as though the author is about to show us, through his novel, the true speech of American. But everything in the novel itself seems to show division: there are few authentic relationships, few representations of speech that seem anything but rhetorically suspicious, few moments of genuinely engaged conversation between two people. In that sense, the intro seems fundamentally ironic as this Whitmanesque hero gets case out onto the open road with no saving vision and only a knee-jerk patriotism–as you suggest, chanting USA mindlessly might be the real speech of the people, and it certainly seems so as DP charts the ways in which nationalist thinking and shallow patriotism stifle dissent at the novels’ end.