The Uses of Surrealism in Wests The Day of the Locust - Essay Example

Your Your Voice of Unreason: The Uses of Surrealism in West's The Day of the Locust When war broke out in the 1910's, it was on a scale never before seen in human history. The treaties which all of the major countries in the world had signed guaranteed that any minor conflict would turn into a gigantic one. Not only was the number of countries unprecedented, the amount of death was also astounding. Trench warfare produced mounds of corpses. Technological advances in weaponry produced bombs that were deadlier, and biological weapons that wreaked such awful destruction on their victims that, once the war ended, they were outlawed by international agreement. When the war finally ended, it was called the Great War, because it was thought that no such war would ever be fought again. The next decades did nothing to break the pessimism that many felt about the world's future. The crash in the world financial markets that happened in 1929, the worldwide drought in 1930, conspired to create the Great Depression, a worldwide economic downturn that basically lasted until industry began gearing up for what would be called the Second World War. As a result, the 1930's was a decade of extreme pessimism, which was manifested in a number of ways. The arts produced "case studies, reportage, documentary photography, proletarian literature, and 'social problem' films" with the goal of "reconstruct[ing] the 'hidden' logic of an elusive social reality" (Veitch, xvii). This is the time period in which Nathanael West made his literary mark. Jonathan Veitch makes note of the problems that critics have had in assigning West a particular place within the writing of that time, and American literature as a whole. Different critics described him, variously, as a "poet of darkness," "an apocalyptic writer," "a universal satirist," "a homegrown surrealist," and a "writer of the left." (Veitch xi, xvi). Some of these descriptions have definite contradictions with one another, but they all reflect different elements of the author's persona, and his work. His "style was never constant. At times his pictorial technique closely resembled collage [but also] cartoon strips, movies, and several schools of painting, as well as such non-graphic visual arts as the tableau and the dance." (Schug). While many of West's novels and other writings defy classification, though, The Day of the Locust does not. The surreal elements of this novel place it squarely in the camp of modernist fiction. His technique and methods bear considerable similarity to those of his contemporaries. When one considers some of the commonalities of modernist fiction: violence, decadence, irony, the grotesque, dreams, realism, allusion, distortion, and experimentation (Schug), all of these apply to The Day of the Locust, and many of them are a result of the surrealist techniques that West applies to his novel. The particular target of West's writing in The Day of the Locust is the dilemma that the artist faced when taking on the growing culture industry of the 1930's. The Hollywood industry is both the object of critique in the novel, as well as the subject of the story itself. The book executes a dark criticism of the so-called "dream factory" that Hollywood was in those times (and still is seen to be today) (Blyn). Ironically, those many of the aesthetic techniques at work in the novel owe a debt to that same Hollywood industry that the book itself is attacking. Consider, for example, the riot scene where a star appears at the premiere of a film. Protagonist Tod Hackett is taken away by the police in a squad car: He was carried through the exit to the back street and lifted into a police car. The siren began to scream and at first he thought he was making the noise himself. He felt his lips with his hands. They were clamped tight. He knew then it was the siren. For some reason this made him laugh, and he began to imitate the siren as loud as he could. (185) Clearly, the siren operates as a signifier on a number of levels. Not only does it refer to the alarm of the police car, it also refers to the mythological characters whose beautiful voices lured ship upon ship to destruction, and against whose temptations Odysseus had all of his men fill their ears with wax, and tie him to the ship's mast, so that no one who heard the voices would be able to steer the ship in their direction. The surrealistic atmosphere resulting from a grown man sitting and imitating a siren, unsure whether the sound is coming from the car or his own mouth, contributes to a more general uncertainty as to the true power of these sirens. The entire Hollywood film industry serves, after a fashion, as a collection of sirens, because the industry lures so many people to itself, and so many of those people who come and heed the industry's call ended up in professional and physical ruin (Simon, 523). And so the siren-scream that Tod Hackett gives out is a symbol for the contradiction present from the novel's very foundations: a work of art that uses the techniques that it criticizes. One question that divides critics about West's intentions in this novel is the disagreement over whether West utilized Hollywood's techniques of representation just so that he could criticize them, or whether the imitation is done more unconsciously (Roberts, 66). As one might expect, though, very few contemporary critics will go one way or another, asserting instead that West is doing both at the same time (Blyn). And so Tod's scream assumes even more layers of meaning: it becomes a sign of cultural hierarchies falling down upon themselves, of the very nature of authenticity falling under serious doubt, and the duplicity that is foundational to the postmodern world (Gorak, 11). One of the most powerful ways that surrealism appears in the novel is in the use of sound; ironically, the exploration of sound in the novel has been mostly absent from scholarship about this work. In Hollywood, sound was just beginning to have an impact on the industry. The era of silent film was just giving way to the time of the talkies, and a transition concomitant to this one was the empowerment of the studio system. If one takes Tod's scream and sets it inside the history of the production and reproduction of sound, one sees the ways in which The Day of the Locust rebels against its contemporary laws of the culture industry, and fights off the destructive call of the film industry. The scream is a dissonant use of sound, and dissonance went against the aesthetic principles of the film industry, and asserted an independent sort of values associated with beauty (Blyn). And so a new identity for the narrative character as a simultaneous receiver and producer of sound was born, and this birth is highly dependent on the surrealistic use of dissonant sound within the narrative. The siren-scream is not the only surrealistic use of sound that contributes to West's revolutionary message. The entire concept of adding sound attractions to film, and the tabloid culture that is so dependent on creating and recording spectacles also make surrealistic appearances in the novel. Manifestations of this include Adore Loomis. The ostensible child star makes sexual movements with his hips while he sings, "Mama doan' wan' no peas." Faye Greener makes a version of "Jeepers, Creepers" and utilizes it to get back at her father in the vaudeville industry. Both renditions of the song take the words themselves and separate them from their meanings. Also, it is important to note that the most important sounds of the novel (scream, moan, sob, and laugh) are all nonverbal. As such, all are ripe for (and end up subject to) misinterpretation, and as such they contribute to the surrealistic confusion that surrounds the events in which they happen. Homer Simpson's cry is an example of this gap between the sound signifier and the signified meaning. When he cries, the "sound was like an ax chopping pine, a heavy, hollow chunking noise" that sounds absolutely nothing like the grief that is the intended signified (167). He simultaneously makes and receives confusing sounds: right before the cry, he heard Faye's sounds of sexual pleasure but misinterpreted them as signs of sickness (Simon, 532). Harry Greener hears his daughter's version of "Jeepers, Creepers" and immediately responds with his "masterpiece laugh," which "began with a sharp, metallic crackle, like burning sticks, then gradually increased in volume until it became a rapid bark, then fell away to an obscene chuckle. After a slight pause, it climbed until it was the nicker of a horse, then still higher to become a machinelike screech" (96). Not only is the listener tortured by this sound, but what is normally a sound of amusement or pleasure (the laugh) becomes instead a sign that Harry is highly distressed. He misinterprets the song, and his daughter misinterprets his laugh, because she fails to understand the level of his distress (Blyn). Interestingly, this laugh is copied throughout the book by Faye, Homer and Tod. There are two levels of significance as a result: the effects of the mechanization of sound are demonstrated, and the ways in which an auditory signifier can be misleading also come to light, both in the production and in the reception of sound. Rather than contributing to the multisensory experience for the audience, as Hollywood thought that the integration of sound would accomplish, what sound does here is to cause confusion. This confusion is the heart of West's protest message, and the surrealistic ways in which he writes these scenes only contributes to that confusion. The "old teaser routine" and the accounts of the various histories of vaudeville, silent film, and what was then modern film are two additional ways in which West uses surrealism to augment his rhetorical argument. When the novel stops its narrative course to digress into history, the effect is to destabilize the coherence of the book as a whole. The effect is not dissimilar to the extended chapters on whaling in Melville's Moby-Dick. While the narrative parts of Melville's novel are suspenseful and dramatic, the lengthy asides given to the description of the whaling industry, and the categorization of the various types of whales, serve to disrupt the narrative flow and to give the audience a clear idea as to the whirlwinds raging in the author's own mind as he composed the novel. While Moby-Dick predates surrealism by almost a century, the pessimism that such American Anti-Transcendentalist writers as Melville and Hawthorne gave rise to some predecessors to the surrealistic narrative techniques. The "old teaser routine" is an instance where the ways in which sound holds the power to dissociate dramatically appear. Harry plays the role of a "Bedraggled Harlequin" and must play straight man to the Family Ling and its acts of acrobatic wonder. When Harry "ventures to tickle Sister and receives a powerful kick in the belly in return" (78), he makes his first error. Most of his routine consists primarily of sound, though. While the Ling family swings, cartwheels, and juggles around him, Harry's job is to provide verbal entertainment. He tries a bad joke and gets thrown in the air by Papa Ling. He makes another joke, and his punch line is rendered inaudible by the orchestra, which will not let him begin again. It is worth noting that Harry's sound is overwhelmed by stimuli from two different senses: the sound of the orchestra, and the visual splendor of the Lings' routine. The spoken words are never permitted to mesh with the visual performance, and sound becomes a gag - not just the literal choking off of sound, but a metaphorical bit to amuse an audience (Rabinowitz). And so the surrealistic swirling of sounds serves to show how stimuli can often fail to mesh together, and that the idealistic promise of Hollywood that stimuli would always mesh together, and that the Hollywood life would be idyllic, would lead to disaster for so many artists. The ways in which Faye develops through the novel also use surrealistic elements in protesting the development of the Hollywood film industry. Above we discussed how Tod's siren-scream, on one level, refers to the lures that Hollywood places out there for its artistic victims. Tod also views Faye as one of these siren voices that the industry utilizes for its own ends, so it is instructive to view how Faye changes in the story. The reader's first image of Faye comes from a photograph of her, playing the part of a dancing girl. She is wearing "a harem costume, full Turkish trousers, breastplates and a monkey jacket" (67). The film in which she appeared in this outfit "was about an American drummer who gets lost in the seraglio of a Damascus merchant and has a lot of fun with the female inmates" (67). Tod's opinion of the movie was that "[s]he had only one line to speak, 'Oh, Mr. Smith!' and spoke it badly" (67). In other words, when Faye is first introduced to the reader, she appears as nothing more than a mere accessory to the spectrum of attractions so crucial to the cinema aesthetic. However, as Faye develops during The Day of the Locust, one can find analogies between her progress and the progress that happened between the time when cinema was all about sound attractions to the entrenchment of what would become known as the classical Hollywood film institution of the 1930's (Blyn). Faye starts to develop her own stories: to come up with inspiration, she would "get some music on the radio, then lie down on her bed and shut her eyes" (104). In her own opinion, though, this process was too "mechanical." Natural dreams were, in her opinion, a better source of inspiration (Sarver, 32). As Faye shares more and more stories with Tod, "her excitement narrowed and became deeper and its play internal" (106). This mirrors the way in which Hollywood storytelling would gradually match up with the dictates of realism. However, Faye refuses to finish her stories, which could be viewed as an unconscious rebellion against the mechanization of inspiration, because the very fact that such stories could not be completed could be taken to show that mechanization is a fatally artificial way to find inspiration. When Faye does her version of "When You're a Viper," she acts like a snake charmer, and completely seduces her audience. However, the seduction results in a violent riot, because Faye refuses to provide narrative closure (here, sexual satisfaction) to the men that she had aroused. And so it is, according to West's critique, with the way that the film industry had become: the spectator is seduced into wanting a very specific gratification, but that gratification is ultimately denied. The surrealistic descriptions of the riot and its aftermath only serve to underscore the depth of the rhetorical argument. As one can see, surrealism and its elements serve to emphasize many portions of West's critique of the Hollywood film establishment in the 1930's. Art at that time was infused with pessimism, and the film establishment was trying to bleach that pessimism out of cinema and replace it with a more sanitized hopefulness that would become more patriotic. West's writing, as well as those of his modernist contemporaries, showed that institutional sanitization not only has its limits, but also has fatal flaws. Works Cited Blyn, Robin. "Imitating the Siren: West's The Day of the Locust and the Subject of Sound." Literature Film Quarterly, 2004. Accessed 14 August 2007 online at http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3768_is_200401/ai_n9407039/print. Goldman, Jane. Modernism 1910 - 1945: Image to Apocalypse. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Gorak, Jan. God the Artist: American Novelists in the Post-Realist Age. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Rabinowitz, Paula. "Po-mo Pulp in the 1930's." Novel: A Forum on Fiction Spring 1996. Accessed 14 August 2007 online at http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3643/is_199604/ai_n8743947/print Roberts, Matthew. "Bonfire of the Avant-Garde: Cultural Rage and Readerly Complicity in The Day of the Locust." Modern Fiction Studies 42, 61-90. Sarver, Stephanie. "Homer Simpson Meets Frankenstein: Cinematic Influences in Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust." Literature/Film Quarterly 24, 217-22. Simon, Richard Kellerman. "Between Capra and Adorno: West's Day of the Locust and the Movies of the 1930's." Modern Language Quarterly 54, 513-34. Schug, Linda. "Modernism in The Day of the Locust." Thesis. 2003. Siegel, Ben. Critical Essays on Nathanael West. New York: Macmillan, 1994. Veitch, Jonathan. American Superrealism: Nathanael West and the Politics of Representation in the 1930's. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. Vescio, Bryan. "American Superrealism: Nathanael West and the Politics of Representation in the 1930's." Style, Spring 1999. Accessed 14 August 2007 online at http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2342/is_1_33/ai_58055910/print. Read More