Tired Gestures and Exhausted Forms: Nathanael West and the California "Dream Dump"

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• Tired Gestures and Exhausted Forms:Nathanael West and the California "Dream Dump"
• Rochelle Rives (bio)

Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust is a veritable catalog of the health quackery and messianic lifestyle fads of 1930s Los Angeles. Nonetheless, the novel reminds us, those enlisted in the "Search for Health" had actually "come to California to die."¹ Literally and figuratively aging, these Californians become ideal aesthetic models for the work of the novel's artist/protagonist, Tod Hackett. Yet the body in decline is a body Tod cannot paint. Struggling to bring his work to completion, Tod is unable to claim his authority as a painter because of his attraction to these bodies. As it explores Tod's modern attempt to produce and paint exhaustion, the 1939 novel—with its aesthetic vision centered on artistic failure and incompletion—engages the histories of both theater and painting as models for tired affective and aesthetic forms. Indeed, certain well-known modernist preoccupations with order, personality, and aesthetic mastery are satirized in Tod Hackett's vision of an exhausted Hollywood landscape. Through the tradition of grotesque art and early twentieth-century physiological performance styles based on the formalization of hysterical gesture, debility and decline, West creates an alternative "historical sense," drawing incisive parallels between the emptiness of Hollywood culture and modernist aesthetic anxiety.²

I highlight this concept of "historical sense"—from T.S. Eliot's 1919 essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent"—not to promote Eliot as a master spokesperson for modernist aesthetic ideology, but to underline one explicitly articulated term in modernist discourse that may act as a measure or lens through which to gauge West's own interest in the "perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence."³ In the essay, Eliot promotes a rescaling of tradition, the product of which is a new proportional "order" that demonstrates a "conformity between the old and the new," a temporal synthesis that [End Page 55] is further linked to aesthetic mastery.⁴ In contrast, The Day of the Locust, with its emphasis on temporal disjunction, failure, and incompletion, comments satirically on the "sterility and social impotence of the masterwork."⁵ At the same time, the novel performs its debt to the masterwork. Indeed, Tod must situate his own work in relation to art historical tradition and aesthetic prototypes in order to claim his authority as a mostly unsuccessful painter, but this relationship to authority is often indeterminate and ambiguous, as is the ultimate political work we can understand West's fiction as doing.

Humorously, and, as I will argue here, politically, West shares with Eliot a concern for this problem of modern emotional "experience" and expression; however, West's fiction also draws attention to the irony of so much explicit fuss over emotions that should not, apparently, "happen consciously" nor be "recollected," "experience[d]," "express[ed]," or analyzed.⁶ Eliot indeed links the acquisition of an impersonal, "historical sense" to the "surrender" of "particular emotions;" the result of this concession, he argues, is a "new art emotion."⁷ What would such a new art emotion look like? Matthew Mutter argues that West's fiction is "preoccupied" with the form or appearance of affects and "the comic inadequacy of distinctively modern discursive attempts to diagnose, explain, inhabit, or transform suffering."⁸ Mutter is responding explicitly to Justus Nieland's claim that West's comedy rejects such affects as sustaining relationality, further exposing the emptiness of a humanist sentimentality that links sympathy and identification to "public and communal belonging."⁹

What these two ostensibly divergent arguments share is a concern for the question of whether the antagonisms of a work of art can be resolved or redeemed into "conformity" through a totalizing politics or form, or whether the work is merely a comic reflection of the various affective contradictions that inform our suffering under capitalism.¹⁰ My own interest here is not merely in whether affects can be "diagnose[d], explain[ed], inhabit[ed], or transform[ed]," but also in the question of whether they can be, on one hand, formed into a discernible aesthetic shape, substance, or experience, or are, on the other, merely exhausted...