"There Is No Right Life in the Wrong One": Drink and Abstinence in John Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer and U.S.A.

A contemporary critic once complained that the characters in John Dos Passos's U.S.A. "drink enough liquor to make this the most eloquent temperance tract since The Beautiful and Damned" (De Voto, 1936). However, he and other critics overlooked that not only the presence of drink is conspicuous but also its absence. 'Wet' and 'dry' heroes go both to 'hell;' yet the 'hell' of the latter is "icy" (Cowley, 1936). The 'wet' character typically lose their lives, while the 'dry' ones, despite all their success in society, lose their human souls. Consequently, if hardly anyone can find a way to live a meaningful life, something must principally be going wrong. In that John Dos Passos and Theodor W. Adorno seem unanimous: "There is no right life in the wrong one."
Moreover, Dos Passos draws on the ancient Jewish-Christian tradition, where wine and strong drink have always played a significant, life-affirming role. Thus, on an abstract level, Dos Passos associates drink with the ideal of a full and meaningful life. The link to the religious tradition, in turn, connects drink with Horkheimer's understanding of objective rationality. In fact, Dos Passos appears to act out, among other things through his representation of drink, what Adorno and Horkheimer analyzed as the roles and relationships of subjective and objective reason, and the mechanisms of the culture industry in modern societies.