Mass Culture and Class Distinctions in the Novels of Nathanael West

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Mass Culture and Class Distinctions in the Novels of Nathanael West Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 1994 Mass Culture and Class Distinctions in the Novels of Nathanael West Stephen P. Johnson Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Johnson, Stephen P., "Mass Culture and Class Distinctions in the Novels of Nathanael West" (1994). Dissertations. 3435. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/3435 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 1994 Stephen P. Johnson LOYOLA UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO MASS CULTURE AND CLASS DISTINCTIONS IN THE NOVELS OF NATHANAEL WEST A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH BY STEPHEN P. JOHNSON FLORENCE, SOUTH CAROLINA JANUARY 1994 DISSERTATION ABSTRACT Mass Culture and Class Distinctions in the Novels of Nathanael West Stephen P. Johnson Nathanael West's novels have long been noted for their bridging of European avant-garde techniques and American mass culture forms; this especially appealed to intellectuals in the 1950s and 1960s affirming a highbrow affinity for lowbrow art at the expense of what they perceived as a threateningly monolithic middlebrow taste. But the novels actually balance two opposing but complementary critiques. On the one hand, West's novels dramatize the pessimistic, psychoanalytic critique of the authoritarian culture industry that Theodor Adorno was beginning to develop in the 1930s. On the other hand, the novels register the symbolic effects of mass media technology that Walter Benjamin (and Jean Baudrillard after him) articulated with more optimism. The appeal of West's critique to post-World War II intellectuals may also have to do with the way West's novels both depict and engage in middle-class conflicts concerning aesthetic taste. West's life and work, when analyzed from the perspectives of Pierre Bourdieu's cultural sociology and Andrew Ross's discussion of American intellectuals and popular culture, suggest two things. First, many of the characters' conflicts in the novels are precisely those of the most culturally well-endowed fraction of the lower middle class, a class fraction in which West found himself economically for much of his life. Second, the novels' obvious literary influences and the main characters' taste discriminations manifest the cultural strategies of an arriviste intellectual, one who, like the late-nineteenth­ century Dandy and then the twentieth-century "camp" producer in the entertainment industry, exploits his own sense of disqualification as a traditional, responsible intellectual by affecting an extreme decadent or kitsch taste. In the 1960s, as Pop Art emerged and the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century notions of avant-garde were declared dead, West's self-consciously embattled attempts to create an avant-garde art undoubtedly contributed to his novels' appeal and led to their inclusion in the canon of American late modernism. Copyright by Stephen P. Johnson, 1993 All rights reseived. 11 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to thank Dr. Paul Jay for providing the encouragement and advice I needed to develop, revise and complete this project. I also thank my other readers, Dr. Joyce Wexler and Dr. James Rocks, for helping to strengthen the study's theoretical rigor and readability. Many thanks to my colleagues at Francis Marion University, especially Dr. Thomas Dabbs and Mr. Lynn Kostoff, for reading drafts and enthusiastically engaging in countless conversations on work in progress. I am grateful to Ward and Delora Johnson and to Donald and Marion Kay for their support over the last seven years. For their affection, I am indebted to my sons, Brandon, Alex and York--especially the eldest, Brandon, who can finally imagine life without Dad's dissertation. My greatest debt is to my wife, Kathie Johnson, whose patience and strength have made it possible for me to complete this project and still have what both of us hold most dear. 111 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION . 1 Chapter 1. PSYCHOANALYZING THE CULTURE INDUSTRY ......... 17 2. REPRESENTATIONS OF MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION.. 51 3. WEST AS "CAMP" INTELLECTUAL..................... 90 4. BALSO SNELL, MISS LONELYHEARTS, AND CONFLICTING CULTURAL PRETENSIONS . 126 5. THE DAY OF THE LOCUST AND THE USES OF CAMP SENSIBILITY . .. 159 CONCLUSION ............................................. 198 WORKS CITED ............................................. 201 VITA ..................................................... 209 IV INTRODUCTION The dream life of a highbrow, lowbrow existence. W. H. Auden, "West's Disease" Nathanael West's work has long been admired for its balanced critique of mass culture in the 1930s. West's novels, it is often observed, depict mass culture in a way that neither defends nor condemns it. They take mass culture as their subject but manage neither to adopt a condescending tone nor descend into adopting its forms uncritically. The earliest explicit praise for West on this count came in a 1951 Partisan Review article in which Isaac Rosenfeld reviews several recently published works including a reissue of The Day of the Locust. Isaac Rosenfeld exclaims that West's writing is the "nearest thing to a new art form ever to be derived from the materials of mass culture" (110). He explains that what distinguishes West's writings from those "that have come out of the intellectuals' recent interest in popular culture" is that the latter are inept--"lucubrations [that are] self-conscious or condescending or inspired by mawkish concern over the fate of culture" (109-110). West's novel, on the other hand, Rosenfeld insists, "is neither an apology for nor a condemnation of the popular," for West is "in touch 1 2 with popular culture over its whole range," staying "clear of the platitudes and condolences over the death of culture" (110-11). In this brief review article, Rosenfeld naturally cannot offer much evidence for his conclusion; he merely notes that West wrote his Hollywood novel from firsthand experience as a scriptwriter. But Rosenfeld's assessment of West is important because he sets it within the context of a debate among intellectuals at that time about how to understand and evaluate mass culture--and even more important because this debate was emerging at the very time that West's novels were beginning to be republished and to gain more than a specialized, cult audience, which is all they had had in the 30s and 40s. Between Miss Lonelyhearts' original publication in 1933 and its third reprinting in 1950, for example, less than 20,000 copies were printed (White 5-6).1 But in 1955, 190,000 copies were printed, and between 1959 and 1964, another 145,000 copies (7-9). The Day of the Locust has a similar sales history. After two 5,000-copy printings in 1950, the novel rose to a 250,000-copy printing in 1953 and totalled an additional 225,000 copies in six more printings over the next eleven years (21-24).2 1White does not list the number of copies for the first reprinting in 1934, but given that the original printing was of 2,200 copies (1,400 of which were kept by the printer when Liveright went bankrupt and were eventually remaindered), and the two subsequent reprintings (by Harcourt, Brace and Company) were each 5,000, it is safe to assume that the first reprinting was no greater than 5,000 copies. 2Sales of both novels published together continued to rise in the next decade: between 1962 and 1974, 389,000 copies of the New Directions dual publication were printed (24). The respectable sales of these two novels in the 1950s, along with the publication of his Complete Works (7,600 original copies; 24,600 total 3 This suggests that interest in West's writing, which began in the 1950s and grew into the 1970s when his work attained a secure position in the academic canon of American modernists, is due at least in part to intellectuals' and academics' interest in mass culture. Rosenfeld is, of course, creating something of a straw man in characterizing his fellow intellectuals as reactionary critics of mass culture. Yes, there were the T. S. Eliots who, at the time, were still expressing elitist reactions to democratic culture that, as Alan Swingewood indicates in his study of intellectuals' "myths" of mass culture, dates back at least to Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America and was famously expressed by Jose Ortega y Gasset in The Revolt of the Masses (1930).3 But Rosenfeld was writing to the readers of Partisan Review for whom middlebrow culture or "kitsch"--not lowbrow, mass-marketed entertainment--was becoming the real enemy. In recounting the history of the magazine, Richard Pells notes that because its young editors and contributors were intellectuals over five printings) seems to have led the Berkeley Publishing Corporation to print 100,000 copies of A Cool Million in 1961 (17). Since this is by far the largest printing of that novel, one can assume that it was never as well received as the other two. 3ln his Notes Towards a Definition of Culture (1948), for example, Eliot warns that mass culture is lowering "the standards" of culture, undermining the kind of common culture that provides a society with moral order and that can only be sustained by an elite minority (91). He unapologetically defends cultural hierarchy, challenging the assumptions that a high culture of and for a minority elite has no place in twentieth-century Western society and that high culture must be made accessible to mass audiences (105).
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