twilight of the avant-garde: nathanael west and the …
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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,
32
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.
34
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.
36
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.