516 Making It New: 1900–1945All order is doomed” and everything is running down. What is different, now, is the
absence of a saving illusion. “Men have always fought their misery with dreams,”
Miss Lonelyhearts tells himself at one point. “Although dreams were once powerful,
they have been made puerile by the movies, radio, and newspapers. Among many
betrayals, this one is the worst.” And Miss Lonelyhearts is among those who feel
most fiercely betrayed. In his agony, the sense of his own futility, Miss Lonelyhearts
momentarily becomes the persecutor of the wretched, whose suffering he cannot
extenuate or explain. Twisting the arm of a poor old man in a public toilet, “he was
twisting the arm of the sick and miserable, broken and betrayed, inarticulate and
impotent.” He is really twisting his own arm because, he senses, he is “capable of
dreaming the Christ dream,” passionately embracing a saving fiction. He is, in fact, a
Christ figure himself, even if an absurd and impotent one. And this is underlined in
the story by his editor Shrike, who plays the part here of Satan. Shrike, named after
a bird of prey, is a man of inexhaustible cynicism. Like Miss Lonelyhearts, he has lost
belief but appears to revel in that condition. And, offering Miss Lonelyhearts the
kingdoms of the earth, he mocks all possible faiths – religion, art, nature, or whatever:
anything that might give some significance to life. The climax, a darkly comic one,
comes when Miss Lonelyhearts has a religious experience. Succumbing to the
temptation of the “Christ dream,” he is convinced he has become one with God.
Driven by that conviction, he holds out his arms Christlike to the crippled husband
of a woman who has written to him for advice, whom he has met and with whom
he has had sexual relations. He is persuaded that, when he has embraced him, the
cripple will be made whole, and that, in running to help him, he is running to all the
wretched of the earth “to succor them with love.” But the cripple fights to escape
from his embrace. In the struggle that follows, the gun the cripple is carrying
suddenly goes off, and Miss Lonelyhearts is killed. Miss Lonelyhearts’s bid to become
a savior, a redeemer, ends in a black, bleak farce.
When writing Miss Lonelyhearts, West gave it the provisional title: “a novel in the
form of a cartoon strip.” That suggests the tone of this book, which turns a potentially
tragic theme into a comedy of the absurd. Beneath the surface of the narrative, West
makes sly, allusive play with all manner of myths, all kinds of stories that other,
earlier cultures have used to endow their (as West sees it) fundamentally meaningless
lives with a sense of meaning. Along with being a mock Christ, for instance, Miss
Lonelyhearts is a mock Oedipus, a mock quester, and a mock hero of vegetation
myth. On the surface, however, what the reader is presented with is precisely that: a
world of surfaces. The characters are, intentionally, ciphers, caricatures, identified by
one or two exaggerated features. Each short, sharp chapter is a comic routine, a
cartoon strip the nature of which is announced by its title: “Miss Lonelyhearts in the
dismal swamp,” “Miss Lonelyhearts and the cripple,” and so on. Within each routine,
too, each character seems to be doing no more than playing a game, telling a story or
adopting a role to give themselves the illusion of human presence. “There was
something clearly mechanical about her pantomime,” we are told of one character;
while of Miss Lonelyhearts it is said that his “gestures” are “too appropriate, like
those of an old-fashioned actor.” With characters reduced to objects – parts of theirGGray_c04.indd 516ray_c 04 .indd 516 8 8/1/2011 7:54:07 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 07 AM