La ciudad enferma: Espacio, metáfora y mito en Manhattan Transfer, de John Dos Passos

Resum

Insofar as urban experience is inextricably related to contemporary Western culture, the study of literary urban representations becomes crucial in order to analyze the cultural and ideological zeitgeist of a particular age. Specifically, this article aims to explore the rhetoric of sickness in John Dos Passos� Manhattan Transfer (1925), from a symbolic and myth-critical perspective. It this regard, it should be born in mind the fact that American modernist literature is characterized by a generalized hostility towards urban spaces. Such hostility is especially obvious in texts focusing on New York City ��that most mythical of cities, [which] tends to emerge in recent literature as hellish, or at any rate murderous� (Oates 1981: 30). In Manhattan Transfer, New York is indeed represented as murderous, inasmuch as it is represented as the sick space of modernity. Such rendering of the city accounts for a relationship of symbolic continuity between urban spaces and urban communities. As this article examines, the modern city functions as an organizational system of human relations and, therefore, as the emblematic correlative of communitarian institutions. Arguably, Manhattan Transfer thus shapes a (mythic) sick space as the metaphorical extension of a sick urban community.