The Cinematic in the Travel Narratives of John Dos Passos And
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THE CINEMATIC IN THE TRAVEL NARRATIVES OF JOHN DOS PASSOS AND GRAHAM GREENE A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAIʻI AT MĀNOA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN ENGLISH DECEMBER 2014 By Jocelyn S. Cardenas Dissertation Committee: Subramanian Shankar, Chairperson Wimal Dissanayake Paul Lyons Glenn Man Jonathan Morse John Rieder Peter Hoffenberg Keywords: John Dos Passos, Graham Greene, travel narratives, cinematic ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This study is dedicated to my five children: Joel, Izaak, Aaron, Noah, and Leah, who each had their own favorite films as children. Watching their favorite films over and over and over and over again made me understand what they loved about their films. To this day, we continue to talk about films. My deepest appreciation goes to Teresa Lane for her help on the Catalan and Spanish translations and to Dr. William Foltz, David French, and Ms. Janis Marchant for their comments on the study. Hearty thanks to Moses who taught me to value the Intermission and, lastly, to the tin man who walked me down the yellow brick road and over the rainbow. i ABSTRACT The aim of my dissertation is to analyze a relationship between travel narratives and film. The study utilizes the formalist approach and focuses on literary travelers John Dos Passos (1896-1970) and Graham Greene (1904-1991), who traveled between the 1920s and 1960s publishing narratives based on their peregrinations. I apply close reading and analysis to Dos Passos‘s Rosinante to the Road Again (1922), Orient Express (1927), In All Countries (1934), Brazil on the Move (1963), and Easter Island: Island of Enigmas (1971); and, Graham Greene‘s Journey without Maps (1935) and The Lawless Roads (1938). I propose first, that the cinema impacts the way Dos Passos and Greene look at and record the world; second, that their assemblages of cinematic visual and aural sequences deepen a reader‘s perception of space, loosening the reader‘s identification with the protagonist; and third, that a focus on space helps change the reader into a cinematic spectator who develops an experience that is the spectator‘s alone freed from the experience of the protagonist to form what Evelyn Waugh considers a unique form of narrative that the cinema contributes to literature. Briefly, in Chapter 1, my dissertation provides a review of the scholarship on travel writing literature and includes a review of the studies done on Dos Passos and Greene in terms of their relationship with film. Chapter 2 focuses on the visual cinematic devices found in the travel narratives, while Chapter 3 addresses the aural devices. Chapter 4 concludes the study with a discussion on the significance of the cinematic and their implications in travel narratives. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ....................................................................................... i ABSTRACT .............................................................................................................. ii CHAPTER 1 TRAVEL WRITING AND THE CINEMA ......................................... 5 Introduction ............................................................................................ 5 Scholarship and Travel Writing .............................................................. 6 Travel Writing ............................................................................. 6 Travel Writing and the Cinema .................................................... 10 Dos Passos and the Cinema .......................................................... 18 Greene and the Cinema ................................................................ 21 A Biographical Newsreel Montage: Dos Passos and Greene .................. 24 Conclusion ............................................................................................. 39 CHAPTER 2 THE VISUAL MISE-EN-SCÈNE AND MONTAGE ........................... 44 Introduction ............................................................................................ 44 Visual Mise-en-scène in Dos Passos and Greene ..................................... 46 Framing Shots and Angles ............................................................ 47 Depth of Field .............................................................................. 51 Lighting ....................................................................................... 60 Visual Montage in Dos Passos and Greene ............................................. 64 Cross-cut ..................................................................................... 65 Jump Cut ..................................................................................... 68 Flashback, Flash-Forward, and the Subconscious ......................... 82 Conclusion ............................................................................................. 88 iii CHAPTER 3 THE AURAL MISE-EN-SCÈNE AND MONTAGE ........................... 92 Introduction ............................................................................................ 92 Aural Mise-en-scène in Dos Passos and Greene ...................................... 92 Diegetic Sounds ........................................................................... 94 Parallel and Contrapuntal Sounds ....................................... 94 External Ambient Sounds ................................................... 100 Nondiegetic Sounds ..................................................................... 110 The Internal Sounds of the Monologue Interior .................. 110 Offscreen Ambient Sounds ................................................. 121 Aural Montage in Dos Passos and Greene .............................................. 124 Diegetic Sounds ........................................................................... 125 Onscreen Sound Bridge ...................................................... 129 Conclusion ............................................................................................. 132 CHAPTER 4 CONCLUSION: THE CINEMATIC TRAVEL NARRATIVE ........... 136 Introduction ............................................................................................ 136 The Visual in the Cinematic Travel Narrative ......................................... 138 The Aural in the Cinematic Travel Narrative .......................................... 145 Conclusion: A New Habit of Narrative .................................................. 150 ENDNOTES ............................................................................................................. 154 WORKS CITED ....................................................................................................... 159 iv CHAPTER 1. TRAVEL WRITING AND THE CINEMA Introduction The aim of my dissertation is to analyze a relationship between travel narratives and film. The study utilizes the formalist approach and focuses on literary travelers John Dos Passos (1896-1970) and Graham Greene (1904-1991), who traveled between the 1920s and 1960s publishing narratives based on their peregrinations. I apply close reading and analysis to Dos Passos‘s Rosinante to the Road Again (1922), Orient Express (1927), In All Countries (1934), Brazil on the Move (1963), and Easter Island: Island of Enigmas (1971); and, Graham Greene‘s Journey without Maps (1935) and The Lawless Roads (1938). I argue that the cinema impacted the way in which Dos Passos and Greene looked at and recorded the world and that their design and assemblages of visual and aural sequences deepen a reader‘s perception of space. The result is a shift in the reader‘s identification with the protagonist to the setting in the story. The cinematic reproductions of the setting help to loosen the reader‘s experience from the experience of the protagonist, creating a unique cinematic narrative that transforms a reader into a spectator of travel narratives. This chapter presents a review of selected scholarship on travel writing and segues into a review on the scholarship that examines a relationship between travel writing and the art form, the cinema. A scholarly review of Dos Passos and Greene and their relationship to the cinema follows. Lastly, I provide a biographical montage of both writers that places them into their social and historical context. The biographical 5 montage is presented like a Newsreel highlighting the important events in the lives of both literary travelers. A Review of Scholarship on Travel Writing Travel Writing Literary scholars Elizabeth Bohls and Ian Duncan‘s Travel Writing 1700-1830: An Anthology examines the formalistic changes during the early modern period of English travel writing. In the eighteenth-century, travel writing often incorporated historical anecdotes, advice, and descriptions of the manners and customs of the people, and topographical and ethnographical descriptions alongside ―the fictional elements of plot and narrating persona‖ (Bohls and Duncan xxii). Any delight in the representation of travel ―was to come from acute observation and judicious reflection, rather than from the kind of autobiographical material that . [was] more conventional in nineteenth- century travel writing‖ (Bohls and Duncan xxiii). The increased value of the subjective experience in the late eighteenth-century writing also helped to stimulate ―formal and stylistic innovation‖ (Bohls and Duncan xxiv) in the genre. Barbara Korte, in her English Travel Writing: From Pilgrimages to Postcolonial Explorations observes that English