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Mass Cultural Populism and the Hollywood Novel: The Case of Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Chip Rhodes
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Extract

The short history of the Hollywood novel provides a useful index of the ways that 20th-century U.S. literature has imagined the relation of sign systems to the external reality with which they would coincide. Very early Hollywood novels like Harry Leon Wilson's Merton of the Movies (1922) found their critiques of the nascent film industry on its fictiveness and conventionality, indicting Hollywood for the falsification of reality. Literature in general and the Hollywood novel in particular would serve, by implication, to set the record straight. As modernism in its many permutations supplanted realism, however, these straightforward epistemological distinctions became increasingly blurry. Informed by the recognition of the materiality of language, modernist fiction would have a lot harder time leveling its critiques.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 24 , October 1999 , pp. 589 - 604
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1999

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References

Notes

1. Schulberg, Budd, What Makes Sammy Run (New York: Random House, 1941)Google Scholar.

2. Mailer, Norman, The Deer Park (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1955)Google Scholar.

3. Waugh, Evelyn, The Loved One (Boston: Little, Brown, 1948)Google Scholar.

4. Fitzgerald, F. Scott, The Last Tycoon (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1941), 3Google Scholar.

5. Didion, Joan, The White Album (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), 153Google Scholar.

6. Chandler, Raymond, The Little Sister (New York: Ballantine, 1971), 153Google Scholar.

7. All references are from the Signet Classic edition. West, Nathanael, The Day of the Locust (New York: Penguin Classics, 1983)Google Scholar, with an introduction by Alfred Kazin.

8. On this point, I take issue directly with Wisker, Alistair who in The Writing of Nathanael West (New York: St. Martin's, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar reads the opening tableaux this way:

West begins the novel in the middle of an action, at the end of Tod Hackett's working day. In a cinematic manner events and actions are first described, explanations then emerge later in the text. The opening paragraph is followed by an absurd scene in which the cavalry and other fighting forces disappear behind half of a Mississippi steamboat urged on by a small, ridiculous figure. The explanation becomes clear when, over half way down the first page, we read that Tod is in Hollywood and has been there less than three months “and still found it a very exciting place.”

The fact that Tod is blasé about what he sees suggests that the very cinematic trope Wisker mentions is being parodied by West through Tod's response — more evidence of the cynicism for which I've been arguing.

9. Hansen, Miriam, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 90–127Google Scholar.

10. See the enumeration of the features of the Hollywood novel as laid out in Tough Guy Writers of the Thirties, ed. Madden, David (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968)Google Scholar.

11. Referring to the people who “had come to California to die,” the narrator says, “He [Tod] was determined to learn much more. They were the people he felt he must paint. He would never again do a fat red barn, old stone wall or sturdy Nantucket fisherman” (23).

12. Barnard, Rita, The Great Depression and the Culture of Abundance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

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14. Trachtenberg, Alan, The Incorporation of America: Culture & Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982), 177–81Google Scholar.

15. For more on Mencken's pivotal role in redefining the American intellectual, see chapter 1 of my forthcoming book on twenties U.S. culture, Structures of the Jazz Age: Mass Culture, Progressive Education and Racial Disclosures in American Modernist Fiction (London and New York: Verso, 1998)Google Scholar.

16. Martin, Jay, Nathanael West: The Art of His Life (New York: Farrrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970)Google Scholar; and Wisker, Alistair, The Writing of Nathanael West (New York: St. Martin's, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17. For a detailed and persuasive description of the specific features of this preconsumer culture, see Susman, Warren's important essay collection, Culture as History (New York: Pantheon, 1979)Google Scholar.

18. Quoted in Isbister, J. N., Freud: An Introduction to His Life and Work (Cambridge: Polity, 1985), 97Google Scholar.

19. I am indebted for this last possibility to Bradley J. MacDonald's unpublished essay, “Marx and the Figure of Desire.” MacDonald's essay draws upon the work of Gilles Deleuze, among others, in its attempt to reconcile Marxism and psychoanalysis. For an explanation of why this reconciliation is impossible, see Montag, Warren's “Marxism and Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Encounter,” Minnesota Review n.s. 26 (1986)Google Scholar.

20. Zizek, Slavoj, Looking Awry (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 43Google Scholar.

21. Quoted in Martin, 211

22. Bradbury, Malcom, The American Novel and the Nineteen Twenties, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies (Stratford-upon-Avon: Edward Arnold, 1971), 13Google Scholar