I, like most of us on the blog it seems, have been particularly interested in the Camera Eye and Newsreel sections of the novel. I want to look closely at these sections in particular between pages 203 and 209. Throughout the novel, these sections have conveyed a unique tone and composition distinct from the rest of the more traditional, prose narrative sections. The Camera Eye sections often avoid punctuation and capitalization, playing around with spacing and dialectal composition. It is in these sections that we seem to capture the real lives of the modern people, something De Passos is increasingly concerned with. In both sections within these few pages, it ends with a connection to routine: “the southeast wind that freshened every afternoon” “every morning they spread out the cod on the flakes.” People are creatures of habit, so I find the continued insertion of words like “every” and “always to have importance.
Contrasting these sections we have the Newsreels, news being not routine. My first reaction to these sections is how close they are grammatically to the previous sections. Instead of showing complete news clips, the text gives glimpses of information underneath a large title. It seems to critique the way in which American tend to get their news. Not often do we sit down and make an effort to understand what is happening, but we discover glimpses of it throughout the day; we skim newspapers, we mention tidbits in conversation. The way that we grasp this information seems to influence how we talk about our own realities (see Camera Eye) and so the writing styles are fractional and similar. These sections also seem to be influenced by the realities told within the prose sections of the novel. The Newsreel does not seem to be sufficient news information, but rather fragments what is memorable or relevant, which is often how we consume news. For instance, the section that begins “I am against capital punishment as are all levelminded women” makes the claim that women think it is wrong to murder, reminding us of Annabelle’s decision to abort her child and Ward’s grief about it. The Prince of Peace section also seems to draw a parallel between Andrew Carnegie, public figure, and Ward’s struggle for success. Both are in Philadelphia, and Ward’s increased need for financial success seems to be highlighted and critiqued when he is mirrored with Carnegie’s success, which the writer seems to portray arbitrarily: “…became the richest man in the world and died.” While the news given in these sections isn’t necessarily fake, it isn’t the full story either, but rather a projection of the reader’s own understanding of the world around them and what they choose to digest/
It seems like you have a few different ideas going here: the way the Camera Eye sections capture the flowing of human experience as it exists as a stream-of-consciousness, often limited by a moment. These sections capture the ephemeral nature of internalized subjective experience–how incoherent it is (and how incoherent, therefore, we all our in our internal lives). The sense of incoherence takes on a completely different sense when it reflects, as you note the shallowness that marks our consumption of the world in bits and fragments. Both sections convey a sense of surface over depth. Then you conclude with the interesting ways in which sections broadly call out to one another–the bio on Carnegie, for example, and Ward’s economic progress. We might also note the emphasis on the dangers of oratory and rhetoric in Big Bill’s bio as it then becomes a part of the narrative in a speech Mac attends. I think you could have really zeroed in on any of these things individually and really worked through them, but I like the broad set of interpretive possibilities that you suggest here.