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TWILIGHT OF THE AVANT-GARDE: NATHANAEL WEST AND THE LIMITS OF MODERNISM

By

NATHANIEL ROBERT DEYO

A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT

OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2011

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© 2011 Nathaniel Deyo

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To my parents

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank all the teachers who have helped me cultivate a love of the

written word. In particular, I would like to thank R. Brandon Kershner and Susan

Hegeman; their guidance over the past two years has been immeasurably helpful. I

would also like to thank my friends for providing me with the moral support necessary to

complete any sort of major undertaking, academic or otherwise. But, above all, I want to

thank my parents, for without their unwavering belief in me none of this would have

been possible.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .................................................................................................. 4

ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................... 6

CHAPTER

1 INTRODUCTORY REMARKS .................................................................................. 7

2 MISS LONELYHEARTS‟S MODERNIST INVERSIONS ......................................... 17

3 A COOL MILLION, COMMODIFICATION, AND THE FUTURE (?) OF ART .......... 27

4 CONCLUDING REMARKS ..................................................................................... 36

LIST OF REFERENCES ............................................................................................... 42

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ............................................................................................ 44

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Abstract of Thesis Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the

Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts

TWILIGHT OF THE AVANT-GARDE: NATHANAEL WEST AND THE LIMITS OF MODERNISM

By

Nathaniel Robert Deyo

May 2011

Chair: Susan Hegeman Major: English

This paper seeks to position the work of Nathanael West with regards to its

relationship with the aesthetic ideologies of the modernist avant-garde. By looking

specifically at the way in which his work both borrows from and breaks with the

aesthetic practices of his modernist forebears, the paper works to argue that West‟s

literary output is of central importance for understanding both the collapse and ultimate

failure of the modernist project as well as the emergence of what is typically known as

“postmodernism.”

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CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTORY REMARKS

In his lifetime Nathanael West produced a literary oeuvre that, when taken as a

whole, adds up to less than 500 total pages. Consisting of four short novels (only two of

which—Miss Lonelyhearts (1934) and The Day of the Locust (1939)—are even close to

widely read) along with a handful of short stories, literary essays, and screenplays, his

corpus can hardly be said to stand alongside the great productive outpourings of the

grand titans of American letters. And yet, on the basis of just this slim collection of work,

Harold Bloom has declared West an American master on par with (or surpassing) the

likes of Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Pynchon and Bellow. In his characteristically

effusive-yet-backhanded style, Bloom writes that

To call West uneven is therefore a litotes; he is a wild medley of magnificent writing and inadequate writing, except in Miss Lonelyhearts which excels The Sun Also Rises, The Great Gatsby, and even Sanctuary as the perfect instance of a negative vision in American fiction. The greatest Faulkner, of The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Absalom, Absalom! and Light in August, is the only American writer of prose fiction in this century who can be said to have surpassed Miss Lonelyhearts (1)

This is certainly high praise from a critic who typically reserves these sorts of

blandishments for the more respectable and well-heeled authors of the Western Canon,

but it gets to the heart of one of the central paradoxes of West‟s work, which is that, like

The Velvet Underground in the 1960s, his critical reputation as a central figure in the

cultural history of 20th century America far outstrips the actual impact he may have had

in his own lifetime.

Which is to say that West‟s critical fortunes were not always as great as they are

today. When he died in 1940, he did so unread and, despite glowing notices by writers

like William Carlos Williams, underappreciated. This all began to change in the late

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1950s and early 60s when he became something of a cause célèbre among postwar

American critical establishment, finding particularly strong champions among the so-

called New York Intellectuals and other critics whose bylines regularly appeared in the

Partisan Review, among them Leslie Fiedler1 and Norman Podhoretz. Seeking a

genealogical ancestor for the sort of existentialist-minded, mostly Jewish, writers who

emerged in the postwar era (Roth, Bellow, Salinger), they turned to West and found an

author who‟s sensibilities seemed to conform perfectly to their own. A raft of critical

appreciations and exegeses of West‟s work then began to appear and his reputation as

a central figure in the development of 20th century American literature (which holds to

this day) was functionally secured. Despite local differences in focus and inflection,

most of these studies (helpfully anthologized in collections edited by West‟s biographer

Jay Martin as well as the aforementioned Bloom) faithfully till fundamentally the same

ground. In each West is unfailingly read as a deeply cynical proprietor of black comedy

whose satirical focus is the depredations of a universal condition humaine. For instance,

W.H. Auden, to cite but one particularly well-respected authority, saw West‟s novels as

the expression of a unique form of spiritual and existential despair which he fittingly

termed “West‟s Disease.” Of the novels themselves, he argues that they are to “be

classified as Cautionary Tales, parables about a Kingdom of Lies as the Father of

Wishes” and that “Shakespeare gives a glimpse of this hell in Hamlet, and Dostoyevsky

has a lengthy description in Notes from the Underground, but they were interested in

many hells and heavens. Compared with them, West has the advantages and

1 Fiedler‟s piece on West in Waiting for the End is taken by many to be ground zero for the West revival.

The critic Jonathan Raban, for instance, has written that “If Nathanael West did not exist, then Leslie Fiedler would probably have had to invent him.” (Raban 215)

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disadvantages of the specialist who knows everything about one disease and nothing

about any other” (43). While the tone here is decidedly more apocalyptic than many of

the more measured appreciations of West from the period, its focus on the existential

and trans-historical dimensions of the works (comparisons to Shakespeare and

Dostoyevsky) are characteristic of the general approach.

Perhaps the most curious element of these studies on West from the 50s and 60s,

however, is their repeated assertions that West is fundamentally to be understood as an

a- or un-political writer. In some of the pieces this serves as an incidental observation,

but in others it is repeated and emphasized with the insistence of a drumbeat.

Illustrative here are essays by Daniel Aaron (“Late Thoughts on Nathanael West”) and

Norman Podhoretz (“Nathanel West: A Particular Kind of Joking”). Podhoretz in

particular is very clear on this point, writing that

West was one of the few novelists of the 30s who succeeded in generalizing the horrors of the depression into a universal image of human suffering. His „particular way of joking‟ has profoundly unpolitical implications: it is a way of saying that the universe is always rigged against us and that our efforts to contend with it invariably lead to absurdity. (155)

and later referring to The Day of the Locust as “his very apolitical last novel” (158). He

also goes to great lengths to differentiate West‟s writing from the work of the “radical

press” and from “official” leftism in general, claiming that “Nothing could be farther from

the spirit of his work than a faith in the power of new social arrangements or economic

systems to alleviate the misery of the human condition” (154). Though somewhat less

obvious in his distaste for overtly “political” art, Aaron also works very hard to set up the

opposition between West‟s ironic detachment and “dogmatic” radicalism of the Popular

Front, the American Communist Party and other portions of the “doctrinaire” Left:

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Being a radical in the 1930s did not necessarily mean that one had to write ritualistic proletarian novels or Whitmanesque exhortations to revolt. . . . [West‟s] dark vision of society, [his] twisted wry comedy, [his] recognition of an ineradicable evil denser and more durable than the capitalist blight, violated the spirit of Socialist Realism. It was all well and good to depict the hells of bourgeois capitalism, imperialism, and fascism, but in the last reel, the glow of the Heavenly City had to be revealed. . . . For this reason. . .the Movement never took West to the bosom. In misconstruing his humor and failing to explore his baleful Wasteland, it committed both a political and an aesthetic blunder. (62)

And then, just in case you have missed the point, he ends the essay by flatly declaring

that, in West‟s novels, “the real culprit is not capitalism but humanity” (68).

Of course, as these few selected quotes hopefully make clear, these claims for

“apoliticality” seem to themselves bespeak a well-defined political ideology. And indeed,

as several studies of recent years (including Thomas Hill Schaub‟s American Fiction in

the Cold War (1991), Frances Stonor Saunders‟s The Cultural Cold War (1999) and, in

a slightly more theoretical register, Fredric Jameson‟s A Singular Modernity (2005))

have shown, the purportedly “non-ideological” or “un-political” ideal espoused by the

anti-Communist Left in the 50s and 60s was itself little more than a thin cover for what

was in fact a profoundly ideological program, both aesthetically and politically. But, then,

one does not even really need rigorous ideological analysis in order to see the

reactionary positions latent in much of the thought associated with this particular cohort-

-a simple survey of the last half century of American history alone will suffice. Just a few

short years following the heyday of the Partisan Review many of the writers and

thinkers associated with it (including the aforementioned Norman Podhoretz) would go

on to lay the foundations for a political movement responsible for far more naked

“politicization” and ideological partisanship than anything the American Left has cooked

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up in generations2. I am speaking, of course, of neoconservatism, and I would hope its

record over the last three decades can be left to speak for itself.

When read in light of this somewhat sordid intellectual history, the West “revival” of

the 50s and 60s suddenly begins to look a lot less like an innocent, disinterested re-

discovery of a lost American literary treasure and a lot more like a move driven fully as

much by ideology as by genuine artistic appreciation. Indeed, if one wished to be totally

reductive and cynical about it, one could posit that the whole reason the postwar literary

establishment chose to canonize West is that his abject cynicism and apparent

suspicion toward all things “political” provided them with a useful cudgel with which to

rain blows down upon the proletarian “kitsch” of the Popular Front and other “populist”

strains of literary and cultural productions. If so inclined, one could then go on to posit

that West‟s continued presence as a quasi-central figure in the canon of 20th century

American literature is attributable to the continued dominance of what Jameson has

termed the ideology of “late modernism,” which primarily defines itself via a preference

for the ironic and the aesthetic over the nakedly “political,” in certain corners of the

academy even today.

The only problem with such a move is the fact that West ultimately proves quite a

bit harder to nail down than all that. Which is to say that when read closely enough, the

novels themselves begin to reveal a number of elements that seem to resist easy

assimilation into the “apolitical ironist” portrait of West painted by Podhoretz and his

cohort. Beginning in the 1990s a number of studies of West (including among them full

2 Indeed, in one of those ironic twists which history alone is able to produce, Podhoretz‟s own son John

has, over the last decade and half, produced a body of cultural criticism (published in such neoconservative organs as Commentary, The Weekly Standard, The National Review and The New York Post) that is well-nigh Stalinist in its conflation of aesthetics and ideology, and which is certainly infinitely more “political” than anything found in the contemporary mainstream Left.

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books by Rita Barnard (1995) and Jonathan Veitch (1997), as well as book chapters

and journal articles by a number of other critics) emerged which sought to bring to light

just these “political” elements of West‟s writing as a means of “correcting” the

longstanding image of West discussed above in order to bring West‟s work “up to date”

for a generation of scholars and critics raised on Marxism and cultural studies.

Essentially reversing the reductive concluding statement of Aaron‟s “Late Thoughts”

essay, these works of criticism seek to return West‟s novels to the historical context of

the Great Depression from which the postwar writers had worked so hard to cut them

loose. Instead of construing the target of West‟s baleful satire as some sort of trans-

historical “human condition,” Barnard et al. read in his work a critique of the elements of

advanced capitalism—reification, commodification, consumerism, mechanization, and

the emergence of mass culture and what Horkheimer and Adorno famously termed the

“Culture Industry”—which were first beginning to poke their heads through the soil in the

20s and 30s. West is thereby cast as something like a prophet of the consumer- and

image-driven society that fully emerged in the postwar era and in which we continue to

live.

This reading has quite a lot going for it. Many of the aforementioned studies are

quite convincing—Barnard‟s book, in particular, effectively employs a wealth of historical

research and keen textual analysis in stating its case—and the idea of a political, anti-

capitalist West is in and of itself rather appealing. But before offering a ringing

endorsement of this view, one would do well to remember the sobering reminder with

which Jameson brings the curtain down on The Political Unconscious:

But at this point, we must restore Benjamin‟s identification of culture and barbarism to its proper sequence, as the affirmation. . .above all of the

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ideological dimension of all high culture. . . . Benjamin‟s slogan is a hard saying, and not only for liberal and apoliticizing critics of art and literature, for whom it spells the return of class realities and the painful recollection of the dark underside of even the most seemingly innocent and “life-enhancing” masterpieces of the canon. For a certain radicalism, also, Benjamin‟s formulation comes as a rebuke and a warning against the facile reappropriation of the classics as humanistic expressions of this or that historically “progressive” force. (Political 299)

This warning, it must be said, can be applied just as much to the blackly comic novels of

Nathanael West as it does to the “life-enhancing” canonical masterpieces that Jameson

is primarily concerned with. Despite their success in historicizing West‟s novels and

situating them within the political and economic context of the Depression, these

“progressive” readings of his work finally come up short when it comes time to deal with

the relentless irony that subsumes so much of his oeuvre. For all their faults and

suspect ideological motivations, one thing the early postwar appreciations of West got

right was to characterize his work as unrelentingly pessimistic when it comes to

concrete political programs and the possibility of radical social transformation. West‟s

“particular brand of joking” mangles everything it comes into contact with, the

downtrodden masses fully as much as the worst excesses of capitalism. In his hands,

the poor and the exploited are transformed into horrific, caricatured grotesques whose

plight fails to ever evoke genuine pathos or sympathy, and who seem poised to at any

moment coalesce into the despotic mass of a homegrown fascism. Any apparently

progressive or anti-capitalist drift within his work is ultimately short-circuited by this

failure to imagine any form of genuinely positive social change.

This is a tendency of which West himself was well-aware, if his oft-quoted lament

to Malcolm Cowley is any indication:

I write out of hope for a better world—But I‟m a comic writer and it seems impossible for me to handle any of the „big things‟ without seeming to laugh

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or at least smile. . . . What I mean is that out here we have a strong progressive movement and I devote a great deal of time to it. Yet although this new novel is about Hollywood, I found it impossible to include any of those activities in it. . . . When not writing a novel—say at a meeting of a committee we have out here to help the migratory worker—I do believe it. But at the typewriter by myself I can‟t. I suppose middle-class upbringing, skeptical schooling, etc. are too powerful a burden for me to throw off—certainly not by an act of will alone. ALAS! (Barnard 156)

The question, then, is just what is the politically-inclined reader to do with such a

muddle? Barnard chooses to argue that buried in the unrelenting bleakness and

violence of West‟s narratives there is an ever-so-faint glimmer of utopian desire, but she

is ultimately less-than-convincing on this front. A different tactic might be to assert that

West‟s radical negativity can in itself be construed as a genuinely political “act” in its

own right, that his relentless irony and skepticism should be read as a call for some

form of political change that goes well beyond anything currently on the table. Such an

argument, however, would almost certainly lead into the briar patch of those old debates

over irony and commitment3. No doubt such debates can be useful and productive, but

it would seem preferable to keep them to the side for the time being.

A third approach, however, might be to re-align the entire discussion so as to

make the primary concern not politics or ideology as such, but the politics and ideology

of literary form. Which is to say, rather than interrogate West‟s texts for programmatic

political positions (either reactionary or progressive), it may prove most useful and

productive to ask about their aesthetic politics, specifically in regard to their relationship

with the ideology of the modernist avant-garde. This would allow one, then, to re-

position those phenomenal processes of advanced capitalism thematized so thoroughly

3 If one did wish to dive into that particular briar patch, though, the best place to start would almost

certainly be Wayne Booth‟s A Rhetoric of Irony, still perhaps the most complete book ever written on the subject.

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in West‟s novels (commodification, reification, mechanization) in terms of their impact

on such aspects of modernist ideology as the possible and potential autonomy,

authenticity, and revolutionary potential of artistic and aesthetic practice. When one

approaches these texts from this particular angle, it becomes increasingly clear that

while West‟s work can seem somewhat confused and ambivalent when it comes to

politics, its message regarding aesthetics is crystal clear. Above all else, these novels

dramatize the irredeemable failure and total collapse of the modernist aesthetic

program.

Strangely, this particular aspect of West‟s novels has gone largely un-mentioned in

much of the existing body of West criticism. Many critics, on both the right and left, point

out that West spent time in Paris during the heyday of the European avant-garde and

are quick to note the influence of Surrealism and Dada on his work and leave it at that.

Thomas Strychacz, in his book Modernism, Professionalism and Mass Culture (1995),

deals more explicitly with West‟s critical relationship to modernism, but mostly restricts

his area of focus to modernism as a social institution rather than as an aesthetic

ideology. A sharper and more sustained inquiry can be found in Karen Jacobs‟s The

Eye’s Mind: Literary Modernism and Visual Culture (2001). In a chapter on The Day of

the Locust, Jacobs writes of the novel‟s protagonist Tod Hackett that “his unique

position as an artist enables him to foreground a still more fundamental conflict in the

novel, between the postmodern character of the dominant image culture and the central

assumptions of aesthetic modernism” (247) and that

The frustration of Tod‟s desire violently to possess and break through the feminized, autonomous images of mass culture, I will argue suggests a diminished role for the modernist observer: confronted by a world of images which is apparently governed by its own laws and resists incorporation by a

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dominating gaze, Tod‟s failure to create a master image which stands outside the image culture indicates the foreclosure of “outside” as a viable cultural location. (Jacobs 248)

These observations are absolutely on point, and begin to get at the critique of

modernism lodged in the heart of West‟s entire corpus. Jacobs, however, focuses her

investigations solely on The Day of the Locust (1939), West‟s last completed novel.

While that novel certainly has many interesting things to say (as she points out in detail)

about the role of the artist in an age of mass produced images, it contains much less

direct engagement than the two novels that preceded it, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) and

A Cool Million (1934). It is in these two novels that West‟s agon with modernism is most

thoroughly and fruitfully acted out, and it is on these novels that this paper will be

focused. The goal here, finally, will be to explore the specifics of West‟s engagement

with the ideologies and practices of modernist art in each in order to work out the wider

aesthetic and ideological implications of his critique.

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CHAPTER 2 MISS LONELYHEARTS‟S MODERNIST INVERSIONS

The most obvious starting point for any discussion of West and his complicated

relationship with the aesthetic ideology of the modernist avant-garde is his 1933 classic

Miss Lonelyhearts. His most well-known and well-regarded work, the novel, which

chronicles in episodic fashion the misadventures of its titular pseudonymous advice

columnist in Depression-era Manhattan, is also home to the most complex and

ambivalent engagement with modernist aesthetics in his corpus. As we will see below,

the novel‟s immediate successor, A Cool Million, express a fairly clear and straight-

forward repudiation of the various assumptions and principles that undergird the project

of modernism. Miss Lonelyhearts, on the other hand, presents a much cloudier picture.

In fact, at first blush, the novel appears quite modernist indeed. It seems a solidly

crafted expression of those great modernist themes of urban anomie and existential

angst, its desperate and downtrodden characters (Miss Lonelyhearts himself fully as

much as those who write to him for advice) easily slotting alongside Munch‟s screaming

homunculus and Woolf‟s suicidal Septimus Smith as emblems of 20th century anguish.

Similarly, in terms of stylistics, it seems to bear an obvious debt to European avant-

garde movements such as Surrealism and Dada. The novel is loaded with imagery and

descriptions that at first glance appear straight out of something by Breton, Magritte or

Bunuel. Indeed, the novel appears to be just the sort of attempt at “translating” the

thematic and aesthetic concerns of the European avant-garde into an American idiom

that the New York Intellectuals and other early critics of West took it to be.

And yet, despite these apparent affinities with the main streams of modernism, the

novel also at times seems to take a deeply skeptical view of a number of modernism‟s

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assumptions and pretensions. More specifically, it spends a great deal of time satirizing

the belief in art and literature as possessing genuinely revolutionary or transformative

power—what Jameson refers to as a belief in the utopian dimension of the Absolute—

which is so central to nearly all properly modernist and avant-garde artistic programs,

from Dada and Futurism to Pound and Eliot. The novel seems to express a deep

suspicion of such a belief at a number of instances. One such instance is the scene in

which Miss Lonelyhearts runs into some friends of his—never named—at Delhanty‟s,

the run-down speakeasy where a good portion of the novel‟s action takes place. When

he first comes upon them, they are complaining about female writers and we are told

that “some one [then] started a train of stories by suggesting that what they all needed

was a good rape.” After recording two of these stories—one of which tells of a writer

who “went literary” and “began writing for the little magazines about how much Beauty

hurt her and ditched the boy friend who set up pins at the bowling alley” and who,

because of this, was gang-raped by some “guys on the block”—West‟s narrator breaks

in and tells us that

Miss Lonelyhearts stopped listening. His friends would go on telling these stories until they were too drunk to talk. They were aware of their childishness, but did not know how else to revenge themselves. At college, and perhaps for a year afterward, they had believed in literature, had believed in Beauty and in personal expression as an absolute end. When they lost this belief, they lost everything. Money and fame meant nothing to them. They were not worldly men. (14)

What we see here, then, is a perfect encapsulation of a sense of absolute

disillusionment with the failure of art and literature to live up to the lofty ideals which the

aesthetic ideologies of modernism and the avant-garde grant them. The belief in

“Beauty and in personal expression as an absolute end,” held as emblematic of little

more than collegiate naiveté, is here shown to have curdled into virulence and

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ressentiment. Having been let down by the failure of literature to live up to its promises,

these men are able to find solace only in violent revenge fantasies in which the

modernist elite suffer the ugliest sort of degradation imaginable. To say that this is a

bleak portrait of the young, ostensibly “literary” cohort circa 1934 would be an

understatement.

Further shots are fired in the novel at the idealized modernist vision of art as

revolutionary or transformative by Shrike, Miss Lonelyhearts‟s abusive editor and bête

noire. Shrike is an ironist extraordinaire, one who relentlessly needles Miss

Lonelyhearts and works to systematically deflate the last of his meager hopes and

dreams. This mostly takes the form of a relentless, satiric mockery of the notion that

there is any way out of the suffering and alienation of life in the modern metropolis.

Objects of his scorn include religion (the narrator explains at one point that Shrike has

taught Miss Lonelyhearts “to handle his one escape, Christ, with a thick glove of words,”

(33)), primitivism, tourism, and, most importantly for our current discussion, art itself.

The first instance of Shrike‟s mockery of the artistic ideal comes in the novel‟s opening

chapter. As Miss Lonelyhearts sits hunched over his typewriter attempting in vain to

respond to the desperate advice-seekers who write to him, the narrator tells us that

Before he had written a dozen words, Shrike leaned over his shoulder. “The same old stuff,” Shrike said. “Why don‟t you give them something new and hopeful? Tell them about art. Here, I‟ll dictate:

“Art is a Way Out.

“Don‟t let life overwhelm you. When the fresh paths are choked with debris of failure, look for newer and fresher paths. Art is distilled from suffering. . . . Art is One of Life’s Richest Offerings.” (4)

The prophetic pronouncements on art‟s revolutionary potential that can be found in any

of the myriad manifestoes produced in the modernist period are here transformed into

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the banal, clichéd blandishments typical of a newspaper advice column. This particular

rhetorical trick is a favorite of Shrike‟s and he repeats it in a more extended form when

he visits Miss Lonelyhearts after he falls ill with a mysterious, debilitating illness. As

Miss Lonelyhearts lies sick in bed, Shrike begins to describe, in parodic detail, a number

of “methods of escape.” After quickly running through a couple of the more traditional

examples of such methods (namely, a “return to the soil” in the form of manual farm

labor along with a journey to the exotic world of the “South Seas”), he switches gears

somewhat and turns his attention first to Hedonism

You dedicate yourself to the pursuit of pleasure. No over-indulgence, mind you, but knowing that your body is a pleasure machine you treat it carefully in order to get the most out of it. Golf as well as booze. . . . You fornicate under pictures by Matisse and Picasso, you drink from Renaissance glassware, and often you spend a night beside the fireplace with Proust and an apple. Alas. . .the day comes when you realize that soon you must die. You keep a stiff upper lip and decide to give a last party. You invite all your old mistresses, trainers, artists and boon companions. The guests are dressed in black, the waiters are coons, and the table is a coffin carved for you by Eric Gill. (34)

And then to art

Art! Be an artist or a writer. When you are cold warm yourself before the flaming tints of Titian, when you are hungry, nourish yourself with great spiritual foods by listening to the noble periods of Bach, the harmonies of Brahms and the thunder of Beethoven. . . . Tell them to keep their society whores and pressed duck with oranges. For you, l’art vivant, the living art, as you call it. (34)

The art and culture of modernism suffer here a double rebuke. On the one hand, the

totems of the modernist canon (Picasso, Matisse, Proust) are transformed into symbols

of an empty, hedonistic decadence and thus stripped of anything resembling genuine

aesthetic weight or revolutionary power. On the other, the principle of autonomous

artistic practice itself, so central to the modernist aesthetic ideology, is once again

relentlessly mocked and a faith in it is figured as a hopelessly naïve fantasy on par with

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the belief that one could escape to the South Seas and live in a thatched hut and marry

“the daughter of a king” (33). In both cases, the ostensibly anti-bourgeois rhetoric of

modernist high culture is filtered through the reified language and empty promises of the

pleasure industry, and in this way the scene pre-figures a theme—the colonization of all

aspects of modern life, including the supposedly autonomous spheres of art, nature and

the unconscious, by the logic of commodification and consumerism—which will be

central to West‟s later novels.

But, more pointedly, as Thomas Strychacz points out in an essay on the novel,

Shrike‟s parodic mockeries “savage the literary and artistic figures we might expect

West to emulate” in such a way “that canonical figures of high culture are made into

common currency” (176). In other words, the aesthetic ideology being lampooned in the

above cited passages is exactly that which underwrites the various modernist artistic

and literary practices that we identified earlier as West‟s primary ostensible influences.

As such, Shrike‟s searing critique of artistic pretension thus forces us to reconsider

those elements that were previously read as straight-forward examples of West‟s avant-

garde tutelage (the surrealistic flourishes, the thematic of existential angst, etc) and to

interrogate them in light of this critical, anti-modernist stance. And indeed, such a

reconsideration proves eminently useful, as once one begins to look at these

theoretically modernist elements a little closer they begin to take on a different cast.

This is particularly true of the quasi-surrealist imagery that adorns the text in a

number of places. While the images themselves are clearly influenced by surrealist

practices, the charges and valences they carry are all out of whack with surrealism‟s

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stated ideals. Consider, for instance, this passage, in which West describes a walk

taken by Miss Lonelyhearts through a small park on his way to Delhanty‟s:

When Miss Lonelyhearts quit work, he found that the weather had turned warm and that the air smelled as though it had been artificially heated. . . . He entered the park at the North Gate and swallowed mouthfuls of the heavy shade that curtained the arch. He walked into the shadow of a lamp-post that lay on his path like a spear. It pierced him like a spear. . . . The gray sky looked as if it had been rubbed with a soiled eraser. It held no angels, flaming crosses, olive-bearing doves, wheels within wheels. Only a newspaper struggled in the air, like a kite with a broken spine. (5)

In surrealism proper, the bizarre images and dreamlike juxtapositions arise out of a

desire to break through the bonds of rationalism and realist description in order to locate

what Breton famously referred to as the “marvelous.” Aesthetic automatism, the

surrealist technique par excellence, was designed, in Breton‟s words, “to express—

verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner—the actual functioning of

thought” (26). By bringing the associations and desires typically buried deep in the

unconscious to light intact and unfiltered by rationalization, the surrealists sought to

project a world beyond the day-to-day drudgery of modern existence. The surrealist

project was thus, like all genuine modernist and avant-garde movements, fundamentally

utopian in its stated goals and desires. It is precisely this dimension that is absent from

West‟s texts. The above passage is rife with what Rosalind Krauss, following William

Rubin, has called “irrationally conceived metaphoric images” (Originality 91), but instead

of opening onto the marvelous or the libidinal, West‟s imagery seeks only to emphasize

the drab deadness of the scene. Thus the sky is noted for its total lack of irrational or

religious content, while the description of the lamppost that becomes a spear and

“pierces” Miss Lonelyhearts effectively reduces both object and person to the depthless

planarity of mere shadows on the ground. What we witness here is a deflation of figural

23

language, the effect of which is not to invest the real with strange associations and

mystical charges, but to drain it even more completely of all life or energy.

This fact is made even clearer when one turns to West‟s treatment of objects and

commodities in the novel. A large part of the Surrealist project was an attempt to reclaim

the alienated objects of consumer society. As Breton himself states on the first page of

the first Manifesto, “Man, that inveterate dreamer, daily more discontent with his destiny,

has trouble assessing the objects he has been led to use, objects that his nonchalance

has brought his way, or that he has earned through his own efforts, for he has agreed to

work, at least he has not refused to try his luck (or what he calls his luck!). (3). This

reclamation project was typically accomplished by wrenching these objects (think of

Magritte‟s bowler hats or the readymades of Duchamp) out of the sphere of commodity

circulation and imbuing them with the libidinal charge of unconscious desire. The goal

here, as with Surrealist practice in general, is to break the iron chains of bourgeois-

capitalist rationalism and reach the marvelous, and, just as with the “irrationally

conceived metaphoric images” above, West inverts the polarities here as well—where

the Surrealists sought to invest objects and commodities with new life, West reduces

living beings to dead objects. Thus, for instance, we are told that Miss Lonelyhearts‟s

heart is a “lump of icy fat” and a “time bomb,” while his friends in the bar are

transformed into “machines for making jokes” (“A button machine makes buttons, no

matter what power used, foot, steam, or electricity. They, no matter what the motivating

force, death, love or God, made jokes” (15)—even language and discourse themselves

are rendered as the products of alienated labor), and, late in the novel, his on-again, off-

again girlfriend Betty dissolves into the party dress she is wearing: “She had on a light

24

blue dress that was very much a party dress. . . . He begged the party dress to marry

him, saying all the things it expected to hear, all the things. . .that went with strawberry

sodas and farms in Connecticut” (54-6). Rather than free commodities from their

alienating surroundings, West‟s text extends the alienating reach of commodity logic

into the sphere of subjectivity and subsumes his characters within it.

The result of this reduction of human subjects to the degraded objects of

consumer capitalism is the degradation of subjectivity itself. This, in turn, has

consequences for that other apparently classically modernist aspect of the novel, that

being its ostensible expression of the great Modernist themes of urban anomie and

existential angst. Such feelings or emotions require a centered, fully constituted subject

to be experienced or expressed. They require, that is, a personal and subjective depth

that is missing entirely from West‟s flattened, objectified characters. Instead, what at

first appears to be the expression of deep anguish turns out instead to be a simple and

blank sort of anhedonia. This is as true for Miss Lonelyhearts himself, who is so

deadened to any and all deep emotional feeling that “like a dead man, only friction could

make him warm or violence make him mobile” (19), as it is for the novel as a whole.

Indeed, the process of reading the novel itself seems to double as a demonstration of

just this weakening of pathos and affect. When one opens the novel and encounters the

first of the bleakly pathetic letters sent to Miss Lonelyhearts, one‟s initial reaction is

shock and empathy. But as one reads on, and as the letters pile up, the shock wears off

and one becomes as desensitized to the suffering on display as Miss Lonelyhearts

himself. The pathos drains away, leaving behind only a calcified irony incapable of

registering any genuine sympathy. Indeed, by the end of the novel, even death seems

25

to have lost its powerful charge, as can be seen in the deadpan manner in which Miss

Lonelyhearts‟s apparent murder at the hands of a poor cripple with whose wife he slept

is recorded:

While they were struggling, Betty came in through the street door. She called to them to stop and started up the stairs. The cripple saw her cutting off his escape and tried to get rid of the package. He pulled his hand out. The gun inside the package exploded and Miss Lonelyhearts fell, dragging the cripple with him. They both rolled part of the way down the stairs. (58)

The book thus ends with both a bang and a whimper. Whether Miss Lonelyhearts has

actually been killed we are never told for sure, as the book cuts off at this arbitrarily

chosen point part of the way through a description of the scene. Mortal struggle is here

rendered in the terms of Chaplin-esque physical comedy, and the entire scene is

defused of any genuine shock or emotional heft. The conclusion comes as little more

than a randomly selected terminus, as if the recording apparatus was simply shut off

mid-scene.

This disintegration of the centered subject and the consequent weakening of

pathos puts us back squarely in the region of the fault-line between modern and

postmodern where Jacobs located West‟s work. Indeed, in his now-canonical mapping

of the postmodern totality, Jameson identified a “waning of affect” of the sort we see in

West as being a constitutive element of the collapse of modernism into its putative

sequel1. Miss Lonelyhearts may then be most productively read as a testing of the limits

of modernism, one that ends up inverting a of number modernist aesthetic practices and

in the process perhaps inadvertently ends up charting modernism‟s ultimate decline and

failure along with the emergence of a nascent version of what would come to be known

1 See Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capital. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.

26

as the postmodern. The novel does not spend a great deal of time exploring the

historical forces that may have caused this collapse of the modern, but it does allude to

two. The first, as briefly discussed above, was the imperial extension of the reifying

processes of commodity logic into ever further spheres of daily existence, including the

formerly autonomous region of artistic production in which modernism had established

its home base. The second, which is intimately bound up with the first, is the rise to

dominance of mass produced cultural products the so-called “culture industry” and the

subsequent colonization of dreams and the unconscious, which were the lifeblood of

surrealism and (supposedly) the last remaining enclaves of wholly authentic,

uncorrupted thought and expression. In A Cool Million, his next novel, these themes will

be brought to the forefront. The critique of commodification comes to occupy a more

central thematic concern in the novel and the unexpected reversals of modernist

techniques that define Miss Lonelyhearts’s aesthetic program become outright

disavowal.

27

CHAPTER 3 A COOL MILLION, COMMODIFICATION, AND THE FUTURE (?) OF ART

A Cool Million is far and away the strangest and most perplexing of the three

novels produced by West during his mature period. The novel, a vicious parody of

Horatio Alger stories in which its plucky young male protagonist Lemuel Pitkin is beaten,

battered and literally “dismantled” (he loses an eye, a leg, his teeth, and his scalp) on

his way to becoming an unwitting martyr for a homegrown fascist movement led by a

monstrously folksy Calvin Coolidge doppelganger named Nathan “Shagpoke” Whipple,

is both more radical in its experimentation and cruder in its presentation than either Miss

Lonelyhearts or Day of the Locust. This radical crudeness has led many critics to

dismiss it as a crass and simple-minded failed experiment unworthy of standing

alongside the supposedly sharper and more artful satire of the other two novels. While

there is a certain degree of truth in many of these criticisms (no one would ever mistake

A Cool Million for a great “work of literature” as such), they ultimately sell the novel

much too short, for what it lacks in artfulness it makes up for in sheer forceful

strangeness, and for that it deserves to be taken quite seriously. In fact, its formal

rejection of the artful and the literary can perhaps best be read as being part of a more

general engagement with questions regarding the role of art and the possibility of

genuine, authentic artistic expression in the age of mechanical reproduction and

widespread commodification that run throughout the entire novel. Indeed, it is the

reifying, dehumanizing logic of commodification, and not the banal evil of Whipple‟s

fascism, which serves as the novel‟s true antagonist and the object of its sharpest

satire. It is on this aspect of the novel that the following reading will focus most, as it is

here that the whole question of West‟s relationship with the aesthetic ideologies of

28

modernism comes into sharpest focus. As we shall see below, the novel presents a

baleful vision in which the reign of commodity logic made the sort of genuine, authentic,

original aesthetic expression upon which modernism is prefaced all but impossible.

Before getting to that, however, some historical context is necessary. For it must

be said that West did not conjure ex nihilo these specters of “consumer society” and

widespread commodification. As Warren Susman effectively argues in his seminal

Culture as History, the 1930s represent something of a historical fulcrum point, as

America began to transition from a producer-oriented economy to a consumer-oriented

one. He writes,

Simply put, one of the fundamental conflicts of twentieth-century America is between two cultures—an older culture, often loosely labeled Puritan-republican, producer-capitalist culture and a newly emerging culture of abundance. . . . My work on the 1930s led me increasingly to probe the question of a world somehow suspended between two quite distinguishable systems and ways of life. The crucial and perhaps climactic stage of that battle. . .was fought in the 1920s and 1930s. (xx)

Barnard picks up on this notion as well. Building from Jean Baudrillard‟s claim that the

crisis of 1929 forced capitalism to shift its focus from the question of production to the

question of consumption, she explores the “counter-intuitive, if not a little perverse” idea

of locating the birth of something called “the culture of abundance” as occurring during a

period of outright scarcity and widespread economic hardship, pointing out, quite rightly,

that “‟abundance‟ and „hegemonic consumption‟ are not terms that come to mind when

one thinks of those famous photographs of breadlines, apple vendors, and

impoverished sharecroppers.” She goes on to argue, however, that

The thirties were, if anything, a decade of bizarre contradictions. These were certainly „hard times,‟ as Studs Terkel‟s collection of oral accounts of the period remind us, but as other histories suggest, the years of the Great Depression were also self-consciously “modern times” and modernity (as the visions of “Tomorrow” promoted in the decade‟s great fairs suggest)

29

was generally understood as having to do with the comfort, mobility and pleasure promised by the „dime-store dream parade‟ of commodities. (21)

It is, ultimately, against just this growing “parade” of commodities and the promise of

happy abundance it carries that West is writing.

In making his critique, West turns his sights on a whole range of examples that

demonstrate the deleterious effects of the logic of commodification on everyday

American life. At various points it inveighs against the proliferation of shabbily made,

functionally useless commodity objects—the so-called “surfeit of shoddy”—which it

presents as something like a material symbol of the wretched excess and excrescence

of American capitalism. This particular critique is advanced most forcefully in two

distinct scenes. The first is a long speech delivered by a Harvard-educated Indian chief

named Israel Satinpenny who leads an ill-fated “uprising” against white America that

resolutely fails in smashing the system, but which succeeds in further butchering poor

Lem Pitkin (this is where he loses his scalp). In inciting his tribesmen to revolt,

Satinpenny cites the degradation of nature and the spread of cheap commodities as

among American civilization‟s worst crimes, stating that “In our father‟s memory this was

a fair, sweet land, where a man could hear his heart beat without wondering if what he

heard wasn‟t an alarm clock, where a man could fill his nose with pleasant flower odors

without finding that they came from a bottle” and proffering an apocalyptic vision in

which civilization and nature are literally drowned by the flood of cheap commodities,

the Grand Canyon filling to its brim with razor blades and the “paleface” finding himself

“up to his neck in the articles of his manufacture” (156). Later on, Lem will visit

something called The Chamber of American Hideosities, a traveling exhibition cum

30

Bolshevik propaganda project curated by the failed poet Sylvanus Snodgrasse1. The

exhibition features a gallery in which are displayed such “hideosities” as “a Venus de

Milo with a clock in her abdomen,” “a gigantic hemorrhoid that was lit from within by

electric lights,” “objects whose distinction lay in the great skill with which their materials

had been disguised” and “instruments whose purposes were dual and sometimes triple

or even sextuple” such as “pencil sharpeners that could also be used as earpicks”

(163). As with Satinpenny‟s speech, a genuine, earnest disgust for these symbols of

wasteful excess shines through West‟s typically thick fog of irony.

But West‟s critique of commodification runs deeper than a mandarin distaste for

the surfeit of shoddy. The novel also demonstrates a deep concern with the way in

which all of history itself is subject to a transformation into Jameson‟s “vast collection of

images, a multitudinous photographic simulacra” (Postmodernism 18). The novel opens

with Lem and his mother being forced out of their colonial-era home because it has

been purchased by an antique collector named Asa Goldstein who “planned to take the

house apart and set it up again in the window of his Fifth Avenue shop” (69). And so the

house is foreclosed upon, boxed up, and taken to New York where it is transformed

from an actual dwelling that is “exceedingly dear” to its tenants into a collection of

fetishized luxury goods. This fetishization and commodification of the symbols of

American history occurs over and over again throughout the novel. At one point, for

instance, we are told of a brothel which, thanks to the help of the same Asa Goldstein,

has been transformed into a veritable EPCOT of American regionalism, with each of the

1 Of Snodgrass himself we are told that he became a “subversive” “because of his inability to sell his

„poems,‟” which has led him “like many another „poet‟ [to blame] his literary failure on the American public instead of on his own lack of talent, and his desire for revolution [is] really a desire for revenge.” (CM 162)

31

girls in its employ being housed in a room designed to reflect a specific regional

stereotype. These include “Pennsylvania Dutch, Old South, Log Cabin Pioneer,

Victorian New York, Western Cattle Days, California Monterey, Indian, and Modern Girl”

(126). Here commodity logic has thrust its roots into the soil of both interpersonal

relationships in the form of prostitution as well as greater feelings of nationalism in the

form of the stereotypical accoutrements adorning each girl and her room. What we see,

then, is a situation in which even the “deepest” of emotional bonds (romantic love and

national belonging) are transformed into the empty dance of fetishized commodity

consumption.

Thus far we have mostly been looking at the way in which this critique of

commodity capitalism is thematized and turned into narrative content throughout the

novel. West‟s engagement with this subject, however, runs much deeper than this and

in fact inflects the very formal properties of the novel itself, most specifically in its

relationship with the Horatio Alger novels it so savagely satirizes. Many critics have

labeled West‟s novel a simple parody of Alger, and while that‟s certainly a fair and

understandable claim to make, I don‟t think it quite gets to the heart of the matter. For

one thing, West doesn‟t just mock Alger‟s prose and narratives by presenting

burlesqued facsimiles, but instead directly lifts many lengthy passages and plot

sequences directly from Alger novels and simply drops them into the middle of his

narrative with minimal-to-no alteration and without any kind of indication that they‟ve

been taken from elsewhere. In fact, as Gary Scharnhorst points out in “From Rags to

Patches, or, A Cool Million as alter-Alger,” “Altogether he deliberately plagiarized

passages from six Alger juveniles--in all, over a fifth of West's novel is vintage Alger,

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only slightly modified" (59). In addition to the heavy cribbing from Alger, Jay Martin

notes that the novel also contains multiple minimally altered scraps and fragments taken

from Calvin Coolidge speeches and pamphlets by the American fascist William Dudley

Pelley (129). This use and re-use of scraps and fragments drawn from other texts can

be seen as serving a number of purposes. On the one hand, it serves the more

traditionally satiric purpose of using the words of one of the greatest proponents of the

“folklore of capitalism” (to borrow a phrase from Jonathan Veitch) in order to condemn it.

On the other hand, it can be viewed as something like a textual version of the Chamber

of American Hideosities, wherein the shabby, commodified products of mass production

are wrenched from their original context and held up as symbols of duplicity, betrayal

and exploitation. The Alger texts thus would have been chosen both for their ideological

content and for their status as degraded, artless, mass produced “literature.”

This, then, returns us fully to the question of West‟s relationship with the aesthetic

practices of modernism, for what we have just described would seem at first blush to

look quite a bit like the classically modernist technique of collage. At various points and

various times, artists and writers as varied as Picasso, Braque, Joyce, Max Ernst, and

Duchamp, among others, made use of the detritus provided to them by early 20th

century culture. But just as with the apparently modernist aesthetics and thematic

content of Miss Lonelyhearts a closer look at A Cool Million‟s use of Alger texts reveals

that once again the valences have been reversed and the outcome inverted. On the one

hand, whereas many of the modernists themselves had an at best vexed or ambivalent

33

relationship with the products of mass culture2, West expresses, here and elsewhere, a

clear mandarin disdain for its crudity and cheapness. Just as surrealist poetics sought to

find hidden in the fallen world of modernity a libidinally charged hint of the “marvelous,”

typical modernist collage worked to transform scraps culled from mass culture into the

tools of genuine, high-minded aesthetic production and to invest in them a new

significance. When, for instance the cubists pasted a piece of newsprint to a canvass, or

when Joyce mixed advertising jingles into his prose, or when Max Ernst inserted a

photograph of a nude woman into one of his paintings, the primary goal was, in

Rosalind Krauss‟s words, to “remake it, in order to dedicate it anew” (Optical 46). The

modernists may have drawn from and “quoted” the dregs of consumer culture, but in

doing so they never allowed the quoted or re-contextualized material to threaten the

sanctity of the work of art itself.

In A Cool Million, the exact opposite outcome is achieved. What constitutively sets

West‟s use of Alger‟s texts apart from the examples of modernist collage enumerated

above is that in West no indication is ever given that the re-contextualized passages

have been lifted wholesale from elsewhere. When one looks at, say, a cubist or

surrealist collage, the pasted on elements quite obviously draw attention to themselves.

The same cannot be said for the plagiarized chunks of Alger in West‟s novel. What is

most striking about Scharnhorst‟s findings is how seemingly pointless many of the

copied passages seem to be. Instead of lifting, say, particularly egregious examples of

Alger‟s naïve endorsements of capitalist folklore, West has grabbed mostly incidental

2 While someone like TS Eliot was certainly no great fan, others appear to have been rather more

accepting. Joyce, in particular, seems to have been a rather enthusiastic consumer of some of early mass culture‟s choicer fruits.

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dialogue and plot points, so as to more easily integrate them into his own text without

calling attention to what he is doing. What‟s more, the prose surrounding these pasted

in passages is intentionally designed to mimic/parody the mock heroic prose of Alger‟s

novels. The novel thus begins to fundamentally blur not only the line between parody

and parodied object, but also that between original and copy. In doing so it begins to

exert a degree of deconstructive pressure on those notions of originality, authenticity,

and the autonomy of the artistic sphere which are so central to the aesthetic ideology of

modernism3.

Indeed, when looked at in a certain light, A Cool Million seems to resemble less

the towering achievements of high modernist collage than it does the cruder, more

explicitly political (and decidedly post-modern) practice of détournement developed by

Guy Debord and the Situationist International in the 1960s. As Debord and Gil Wolman

tell it in their “user‟s guide” to détournement, the practice (and its necessity) arose out of

the belief that, in the era of spectacle-commodity capitalism, “art can no longer be

justified as a superior activity, or even as a compensatory activity to which one might

honorably devote oneself” and that “all known means of expression are going to

converge in a general movement of propaganda that must encompass all the

perpetually interacting aspects of social reality” (14). Because of this, they argue,

revolutionary cultural practice, in order to be at all effective, must no longer take the

3 The end effect of West‟s wedging of Alger‟s words imperceptibly between his own may be productively

compared to that described by Krauss with regards to the work of the artist Sherrie Levine, who‟s “works” are simply pirated photographs made by re-photographing the photographs of others, in full violation of copyright. Krauss argues that Levine‟s work “acts out the discourse of reproductions without originals” and that her “act of theft, which takes place, so to speak, in front of the surface of [the original] print, opens the print from behind to the series of models from which it, in turn, has stolen, of which it is itself the reproduction” (Originality 168).

35

form of “art,” in the classical-bourgeois sense of the word, and that it must reject outright

“culture as defined by the ruling class” (15). Implicit in all this is the idea that all

expression, “artistic” or otherwise, is always already a commodity object, always already

“degraded,” always already caught up in the dominant capitalist system, and so to

ignore that fact (by, for instance, writing a novel that seeks to reveal the immorality and

depravity of capitalism) is to unconsciously reinforce it.

When read in this light, West‟s deconstruction and disavowal of modernist

aesthetic ideology can be seen as arising out of the latter‟s failure to acknowledge the

cultural realities of life in advanced capitalist societies. What West and the Situationists

both realized is that the Archimedean position outside or beyond the noisy sphere of

circulation and exchange pre-supposed by all modernist poetics is functionally

impossible to achieve within a social order in which the logic of commodification and the

profit motive has fatally entered the realm of cultural and aesthetic production. In this

view there is no “outside” to the logic of capital and notion of a retreat into a realm of

purely autonomous aesthetic production is at best a naïve illusion, and at worst an

example of rank ideological mystification. With A Cool Million West gave us a new

model of political “art,” one that abandons all pretensions of artfulness or literary quality.

In this, his most political novel, the slow trickle of dissatisfaction with modernist ideology

that we saw in Miss Lonelyhearts becomes a tsunami, and the testing of modernism‟s

limits becomes an outright abandonment of art as such.

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CHAPTER 4 CONCLUDING REMARKS

Having now tracked the specifics of West‟s engagements with modernism through

these two novels, we find ourselves in a much better position to get a reading on where

he really stands in relation to the tripartite schema of modernism-late modernism-

postmodernism. As was extensively documented above, it is quite clear that, despite

whatever influence the European avant-garde may have had on his work, West was

most assuredly not a modernist in any traditional sense of that term. Though his work

may display certain surface similarities with that of the great moderns, at its heart lies a

deep skepticism, which at times shades over into an even deeper antipathy, toward the

aesthetic ideologies of the modernist project. It should also perhaps go without saying,

then, that, despite the best efforts of the New York Intellectuals and their cohort to

retroactively adopt him as a forefather, West was also not a “late modernist.” Though

again his work shares many surface similarities with the general aesthetic-philosophical

worldview espoused by the late modernists—a mandarin disdain for mass culture, an

ironic and arms-length engagement with “serious” politics, the habitual return of the

specter of totalitarianism—he again differs in a number of very important ways. Perhaps

the foundational belief of the late modernists, that being the belief in the so-called Great

Divide between “true” art and the debased products of mass culture, is, as we have

seen, utterly rejected by West in his novels. While he most likely would have been in full

agreement with Dwight Macdonald‟s insistence that “Masscult offers its customers

neither an emotional catharsis nor an aesthetic experience, for these demand effort”

and that “the production line grinds out a uniform product is not even entertainment, for

this too implies life and hence effort, but merely distraction” (5), he would certainly not

37

share Macdonald‟s belief in the redemptive power of so-called High Culture. Indeed, it is

just this belief that he relentlessly satirizes both in Miss Lonelyhearts (“Art is a way out”)

and A Cool Million.

Having thus decided that West is neither a modernist nor a late modernist, the

initial impulse might be to categorize him as a postmodernist, and the above discussion

would certainly seem to offer ample support for such a move. For one thing, it is just the

liquidation or collapse of the Great Divide between “high” and “low” culture that is widely

believed to be the generative moment of postmodern cultural production. However, just

as there turned out to be more than met the eye when it came to West‟s use of

apparently modernist techniques and devices in his writing, so too do his apparent

postmodern credentials begin to crumble when looked at with any scrutiny. What throws

things off balance here, it turns out, is just that mandarin disdain for mass culture that at

first seemed to justify West‟s original classification by the New York Intellectuals as

something of a proto-late modernist. While West clearly shares the postmodernist

notion that the Great Divide is nothing but an ideological fiction, he does not embrace,

as the postmodernists tend to, the collapse of high culture into mass culture as an

unalloyed good or see in it any kind of positive potential. This becomes quite clear when

one compares his treatment of mass cultural texts to that found in the work of full dress

postmodernists such as Pynchon, Warhol or Godard. Gravity’s Rainbow, “Diamond

Dust Shoes,” and A Bout de Souffle relish in their engagements with the debased, the

ephemeral, and the pulpy in ways that West‟s novels, with their barely masked

contempt for the products of mass culture, never do.

38

All of this, then, is a roundabout way of saying that any and all attempts to

retroactively range West under this or that aesthetic-ideological heading (be it

modernist, late modernist, or postmodernist) are ultimately doomed to failure. This is

especially true of the latter two categories, which both came into existence after World

War II and thus well after West‟s writing career was tragically cut short. Now, such a

statement may seem to be trafficking in the crudest sort of periodization, but there is an

important kernel of real historical truth buried in the simplistic notion that West could not

have been a postmodernist (or a late modernist) because he died before

postmodernism was even a thing, and this has to do with the relationship between the

latter two “movements” (for lack of a better term) and modernism proper. For the reason

that late modernism and postmodernism were able to emerge as they did in the 50s and

60s was that by that point modernism itself was, for all intents and purposes, dead, its

remnants interred in museum galleries and university libraries. The late moderns and

the postmoderns thus had a stable, intelligible, sealed off entity to which they could offer

their responses.

West, writing before the war, did not have the benefit of surveying modernism from

the spread wings of Minerva‟s owl. In the second half of the 1930s, modernism was a

still breathing, and in some sense, still quite vital artistic and cultural force. But it was

also a movement whose high water mark had passed and which was beginning to show

a relatively large degree of historical wear and tear. All across the great landscape of

modernism failures, betrayals, and crack-ups were occurring with increasing frequency.

Pound, , Dali, and Marinetti all became fascists; the surrealist movement disintegrated

under the weight of political disagreements and petty factional squabbling; Woolf and

39

Joyce‟s output dwindled to a slow trickle and both would be dead only a few short years

later; the great utopian towers of modern architecture were slowly being transformed

into, on the one hand, symbols of crude corporate power (the gleaming urban

skyscrapers) and, on the other, of the failure of the welfare state (the barren concrete

blocks of modern housing projects); and in America, Faulkner (and Nathanael West)

went to Hollywood, while classical modernism itself was being effectively supplanted as

a cultural dominant by the “proletarian” art of the popular front.

But to characterize this as simply a series of localized failures is to ignore the

wider historical pressures that were slowly but surely abolishing the ground upon which

modernism stood. Among these, of course, were those great concerns of West‟s—the

spread of commodity logic and the emergence of the Cultural Industry—which were

certainly eating away like termites at modernism‟s claims to artistic autonomy and

aesthetic authenticity. But even more broadly than that, I would argue, the late 30s bore

witness to a fundamental change in the global historical situation that all but obliterated

the social climate that nourished the modernist movement. In making this argument, I

want to draw on the theory of modernism advanced most forcefully by Perry Anderson

in a 1984 New Left Review article. In this essay, ostensibly a response to Marshall

Berman‟s All That is Solid Melts into Air, Anderson offers what he refers to as a

“conjunctional” explanation for the birth of modernism, proposing that the movement

emerged out of a tripartite confluence of three distinct yet interrelated historical

phenomena: (1) the continued persistence (and codification) of certain elements of a

classical, pre-capitalist culture within the modern world, (2) the rapid development of

new technology, and (3) “the imaginative proximity to revolution” (Anderson 104), or the

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belief that an total upheaval of the entire social system was right around the corner. All

works of artistic modernism, Anderson argues, can, in one way or another, be

triangulated within and between these three historical “coordinates.”

When looked at in this light, it is not difficult to see the changes that affected this

situation in the latter half of the 1930s. First, those last vestiges of the ancien regime

which fed and supported the continued vitality of a genuine classical tradition in the

West were eroding quicker and quicker and would all but disappear following the War.

As a result, the raw artistic material provided by both the ossified academicism that so

much of modernism forcefully rejected as well as the grand learned and mythical

structures that informed the likes of Ulysses and The Waste Land was becoming

increasingly unavailable. On the other hand, after the horrors of World War I‟s

mechanized warfare and the banal normalization of things like radios and moving

pictures, the novelty of new technology was rapidly losing much of its imaginative

suggestiveness. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, was the fact that the prospect of

social revolution was, in light of fascism in Western Europe and Stalinism in the Soviet

Union, beginning to lose much of its luster, to say the least. And then, of course, there is

the emergence of America as the world power. If anything can be said to have

decisively slammed the door shut on the situation sketched by Anderson it is this, as

Keynesian liberalism swept across both America (with the New Deal) and Western

Europe (riding on the back of the Marshall Plan) and, in one fell swoop, blew away both

the last remnants of the ancien regime and gave birth an economic and social stability

that effectively quelled any residual “revolutionary” stirrings. Just as the work of

modernism‟s heyday can be triangulated within the conjuncture of these forces, so too

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might the various local failures enumerated above be connected to this global historical

mutation.

Following all of this the mantle of the avant-garde was taken up by the American

intellectual establishment1 who systematically subjected the great monuments of “high”

modernism to the taxidermic process of canonization and in doing so retroactively

transformed them into precursors for their own supposedly “apolitical” aesthetic-

ideological program. It was then with this canonized, defanged version of modernism

that postmodernism broke so forcefully. The value of West‟s work, finally, is that,

poised as it is along the fault lines that run between these various aesthetic and

ideological movements, it offers unique insight into the cultural ruptures in whose

aftermath we still live.

1 As Serge Guilbaut puts it in his book on the politics and ideology of postwar American art, How New

York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (1983), in the immediate postwar period “the ideology of the avant-garde was ironically made to coincide with what was becoming the dominant ideology, that embodied in Arthur Schlessinger, Jr.‟s book The Vital Center” (3).

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LIST OF REFERENCES

Anderson, Perry. “Modernity & Revolution.” New Left Review. I.144 (1984): 96-113. Print.

Aaron, Daniel. “Late Thoughts on Nathanael West.” Nathanael West. Ed Jay Martin Eaglewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice- Hall, 1971. 161-171. Print.

Auden, W.H. “Interlude: West‟s Disease.”Modern Critical Views Nathanael West. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. 41-49. Print.

Barnard, Rita. The Great Depression and the Culture of Abundance: Kenneth Fearing, Nathanael West, and Mass Culture in the 1930s. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. Print.

Bloom, Harold. “Introduction.” Modern Critical Views: Nathanael West. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. 1-9. Print.

Breton, Andre. Manifestoes of Surrealism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972. Print.

Debord, Guy and Gil J. Wolman. “A User‟s Guide to Détournement.” Situationist International Anthology. Ed. Ken Knabb. Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2007. 14-21. Print.

Guibault, Serge. How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, FreedomExpressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.Print.

Jacobs, Karen. The Eye’s Mind: Literary Modernism and Visual Culture. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2001. Print.

Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981. Print.

—. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991. Print.

—. A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present. London: Verso, 2005. Print.

Krauss, Rosalind E. The Optical Unconscious. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1993. Print.

—. The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge: The MIT Press,1986. Print.

Macdonald, Dwight. Against the American Grain. New York: Random House, 1962. Print.

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Martin, Jay. “The Black Hole of Calcoolidge.” Nathanael West. Ed. Jay Martin. Eaglewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971. 114-132. Print.

Podhoretz, Norman. “Nathanael West: A Particular Kind of Joking.” Nathanael West. Ed. Jay Martin.Eaglewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971. 154-161. Print.

Raban, Jonathan. “A Surfeit of Commodities: The Novels of Nathanael West.” The American Novel In the Nineteen Twenties. Eds. Malcolm Bradbury and David Palmer. New York: Edward Arnold,1971. Print.

Scharnhorst, Gary. “From Rags to Patches, or A Cool Million as alter-Alger.” Ball State University Forum 21.4 (1980): 58-65. Print.

Strychacz, Thomas. Modernism, Mass Culture, and Professionalism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. Print.

Susman, Warren. Culture as History. New York: Pantheon, 1983. Print.

Veitch, Jonathan. American Superrealism: Nathanael West and the Politics of Representation in the 1930s. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. Print.

West, Nathanael. A Cool Million and The Dream Life of Balso Snell. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1961. Print.

—. Miss Loneleyhearts and The Day of the Locust. New York: New Directions, 1962. Print.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Nathaniel Deyo received his Master of Arts in English from the University of

Florida in the spring of 2011. He holds a bachelor‟s degree from Michigan State

University.