Making It New: 1900–1945 517own bodies, say, or “machines for making jokes” – or a label – and one that, in the
case of the protagonist, is not even accurate in terms of gender – objects are magnified,
take on a life of their own. So, on one day, we learn, the “inanimate things” over
which Miss Lonelyhearts “had tried to obtain control took the field against him.
When he touched something, it spilled or rolled to the floor. The collar button
disappeared under the bed, the point of the pencil broke, the handle of the razor fell
off, the window shade refused to stay down.” This is a world in which things, evidently,
are more animated than people: where character is commodified and commodities
assume character, and an often malevolent one at that. It is also a world stripped of
meaning, where there is a play of surfaces, and nothing else (apart from the old,
redemptive myths that the narrative allusively mocks). In its self-evident artifice,
Miss Lonelyhearts effectively reminds the reader what its protagonist learns, and then
forgets: that nothing can explain things – least of all, a story like the one we are
reading. To that extent, West was writing here on the borderline between modernism
and postmodernism, negotiating a move from art as explanation, a source of
redemption or redress, to art as game, a verbal playfield. Miss Lonelyhearts anticipates
many books written several decades later that play with the premise that everything,
including the book before us, is insignificant, a play of signs – in a word, a fiction.
For West, the difference with popular culture was not that it was superficial: in
a depthless world, as he saw it, such comparative terms were impossible. All was
depthless, a veneer. The difference was that, in its pursuit of the appearance of depth,
the appropriation of meaning, it succeeded in being only, as Miss Lonelyhearts puts
it, “puerile.” That puerility is the subject of The Day of the Locust. The novel opens
with a brief impression of a film set. The central character, Tod Hackett, a painter
working at a film studio, looks out of his office window to see an eighteenth-century
battle in progress. The armies disappear behind “half a Mississippi steamboat.” It is
all absurdly artificial. But the reader then accompanies Tod through Los Angeles,
past “Mexican ranch houses, Samoan huts, Mediterranean villas, Egyptian and
Japanese temples, Swiss chalets, Tudor cottages, and every possible combination of
these styles that lined the slopes of the canyon.” So, it is clear, what is depicted in the
studio is no more unreal than what lies outside. This is a place where “the need for
beauty and romance” has issued in “the truly monstrous,” and nothing is what it
seems. Its inhabitants are those who hang about the studios, waiting for a break:
cowboys who have never roped a steer, young women who have become imprisoned
in the masks and masquerades they have assumed in the hope of becoming stars.
They are also the nameless crowd, the spectators: the retired, middle class and middle
aged, who have traveled to southern California at the end of years of “dull, heavy
labor” in the Middle West, in search of “the land of sunshine and oranges,” the dream
world described to them in the movies and magazines. Once there, they have become
overwhelmed by a sense of tedium and betrayal. “The sun is a joke. Oranges can’t
titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their
slack minds and bodies.” In an ironic inversion of American myth, these are people
who have bought into a commodified version of paradise, a cheap vision of the
West, only to find how counterfeit the dreams sold to them are. And the discoveryGGray_c04.indd 517ray_c 04 .indd 517 8 8/1/2011 7:54:07 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 07 AM