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An Ethical Criticism of Nathanael West by Stefanie Stiles a Thesis To Hurt the Pain: An Ethical Criticism of Nathanael West by Stefanie Stiles A thesis presented to the University of Waterloo in fulfillment of the thesis requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, 2012 © Stefanie Stiles 2012 AUTHOR’S DECLARATION I hereby declare that I am the sole author of this thesis. This is a true copy of the thesis, including any required final revisions, as accepted by my examiners. I understand that my thesis may be made electronically available to the public. ii Abstract Nathanael West is typically considered to be a “major minor” American writer of the late modernist period. Best known today for Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) and The Day of the Locust (1939), West wrote four dark novellas that excoriated mainstream American culture of the 1930s. Earlier critics viewed his writing mainly as an existentialist exploration of universal human suffering; more recently, critics have claimed West as an avant-garde devoted to the criticism of Depression-era capitalism and consumer society. This thesis represents something of a return to the earlier, humanist study of West’s fiction, which he himself regarded primarily as moral satire. What differentiates this project from earlier studies, however, is its style of criticism. Since the 1980s, a new revitalized and reoriented ethical criticism has emerged, as evidenced by the proliferation of scholarly works and journal special issues on the topic of literature and ethics, the growing number of readers like Todd Davis and Kenneth Womack’s Mapping the Ethical Turn (2001), and the general trend toward linking moral philosophy and literary criticism, as carried out by Martha Nussbaum and Richard Rorty, among others. The new ethical criticism tends to be descriptive, rather than prescriptive. Using approaches inspired by the scholarship of this late-twentieth century wave of ethical critics, including Wayne Booth and Daniel Schwarz, this dissertation provides a new critical illumination of West the implied author’s unique system of ethics, as dramatized through his narrative explorations of particular lives. It attempts to answer the question that has puzzled Americanist scholars contemplating his works since their initial publication: how can a fictional world so sordid and savage still evoke feelings of compassion and humanity in so many readers? The answer, I will argue, lies in the very ferocity of the author’s depictions of universal human suffering, which ultimately inspire empathy and solidarity despite West’s very real misanthropy. iii Acknowledgements At the beginning of my studies at Waterloo, I remember a young professor in the department telling our cohort that completing the Ph.D. was “10 per cent inspiration and 90 per cent perspiration.” She was right, although I would also add a couple other important elements, one being pure dumb luck. I have been very lucky at several crucial moments in my fledgling academic career to cross paths with scholars and administrators who provided advice, assistance, and in some cases even inspiration. I would like to thank the sharp, tough-minded and fair Dr. Randy Harris for introducing me to the wisdom of Wayne Booth, and for believing in me as an unproven young doctoral student. For teaching me to take literature personally, I salute that passionate, meticulous scholar, Dr. John North. Through my work as his research assistant, it has been a privilege to be exposed to the wry, endlessly inquiring intellect of Dr. Ken Hirschkop. Grateful thanks goes to Dr. Kevin McGuirk, possessor of the most sought-after qualities in a supervisor: thoughtfulness, tact, and discernment. Kevin pulled off the neat trick of allowing me freedom when I needed it, and wise correction when I went too far astray. Additional thanks goes to our invaluable administrative staff over the years, including Margaret Ulbrick, Sarah Morse, and Fiona McAlister, who have been there to answer questions and fix bureaucratic snafus along the way. Working remotely in the final stages of my Ph.D., I would like to thank the good people at Transport Canada’s Special Projects and Arctic Shipping branch for making my “day job” so pleasant. On the home front, the greatest tribute must be paid to my fiancé, Adeel Khamisa, who has supported me steadfastly throughout this process, and is now in the second year of his own doctoral studies. I have drawn strength from our little family unit—including Banjo, the Jack iv Russell terrier, who spent a significant portion of the dissertation determinedly installed on my lap. My final words of acknowledgement go to my family and community in Elgin, New Brunswick. Since I left home over a decade ago, much of my education, in and out of academia, has simply been learning the vocabulary to put names to lessons you have already taught me. v “Turning back to his desk, he picked up a bulky letter in a dirty envelope. He read it for the same reason that an animal tears at a wounded foot: to hurt the pain.” —Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts vi Table of Contents Introduction Nathanael West, the Misanthropic Ethicist ..................................................................................1 Chapter One Wrestling with Balso: An Experiment in Ethical Criticism .......................................................40 Chapter Two The Redemptive Value of Miss Lonelyhearts ............................................................................87 Chapter Three Alger’s Last Stand: West’s Indian Critique of the American Success Myth ...........................150 Chapter Four Spiritual Longing in The Day of the Locust .............................................................................202 Conclusion The New Old West ...................................................................................................................259 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................283 vii Introduction Nathanael West, the Misanthropic Ethicist “I was serious therefore I could not be obscene. I was honest therefore I could not be sordid. A novelist can afford to be everything but dull.” —Nathanael West, “Some Notes on Miss L.” “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.” —T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” I first read Nathanael West‟s Miss Lonelyhearts in early 2007, in greyest Brussels, in winter. The bleak atmosphere of the novel (“...the gray sky looked as if it had been rubbed with a soiled eraser” [(1933) 2009: 5]) was in perfect harmony with my neighbourhood; in my mind, to this day, the dingy stone angels of Place des Martyrs, and the lines of West‟s misanthropic novel are inextricably linked. It was a magnificent gloom. The slight novella, barely 60 pages long in any of its publishers‟ iterations, had a visceral impact on me. Every critic and layperson acknowledges Miss Lonelyhearts as pessimistic in the extreme, and it was at that, but I felt something more, something that penetrated my moral imagination in a way few books ever had. In West‟s curious half-world of cripples, rapists, abused wives, sacrificial lambs, and murderers, something else also abided in the darkness. I would not quite call it a redemptive something— West was no Steinbeck. His squalid poor never gave great humanist, universalist speeches. Nor was it simply an accusatoryi something, like the novels of his proletarian peers, Edward Dahlberg, Nelson Algren and the like, who saw the world in class terms, whose (anti-)heroes were vile and embittered men who had every reason to be vile and embittered. West‟s 1 protagonists were middle class, like himself, or respectably poor at worst, and were typically passive observers in a world of unrelenting, arbitrary violence (with the exception of Lemuel Pitkin, the perpetual victim, not observer, in A Cool Million). The bit characters whose tortures they observed (again, excluding Lemuel), did not “rise above” their suffering. They were not brave or admirable. And yet, despite his rampant misanthropy, the experience of reading West was an elevating one. This perplexed me at the time. How could something so sordid fill the heart up with this queer, choking sensation, a painful compassion not too far removed from joy? Consider this excerpt from Miss Lonelyhearts, a letter from a disabled gas meter-man, one of the titular columnist‟s correspondents: ...I am a cripple 41 yrs of age which I have been all my life and I have never let myself get blue until lately when I have been feeling lousy all the time on account of not getting anywhere and asking myself what is it all for. You have a education so I figured may be you no. What I want to no is why I go around pulling my leg up and down stairs reading meters for the gas company for a stinking $22.50 per while the bosses ride around in swell cars living off the fat of the land. Don‟t think I am a greasy red. I read where they shoot cripples in Russia because they cant work but I can work better than any park bum and support a wife and child to. But thats not what I am writing you about...It aint the job that I am complaining about but what I want to no is what is the whole stinking business for. (West [1933] 2009: 46-47) The entire ethos of West is distilled in this one passage. Here he presents the uncouth Peter Doyle, with all his flaws clearly visible—he begins the letter by explaining that he only decided to write upon learning that “Miss Lonelyhearts” was actually a man, and not “some dopey woman” (West [1933] 2009: 46). And yet, Doyle‟s obvious misery still generates pathos. 2 Granted, it is a particularly Westian pathos, rigidly controlled and never allowed to develop into the saccharine. As the narrative unfolds, in a scene that can only be described as squalid, Miss Lonelyhearts sleeps with Doyle‟s wife.
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