Portrait of the Artist as Social Symptom: Viral Affect and Mass Culture in The Day of The Locust

In a historical moment when anything from a blog to a revolution can “go viral,” we might pause to ask, When did this once troubling biological term come to signify something positive? To contextualize these times of technopolitical optimism, it is worth returning to a certain pessimism about emergent media attending the social, political, and aesthetic concerns of the United States in the 1930s. A decade initiated by the first electronmicroscopic image of viruses seemed similarly destined to chart the implications of its metaphorical menace. On one level, the economic stagnation of the Great Depression counterintuitively fostered a new focus on speed, not only regarding literally accelerated transportation and communication but also as a cultural ethos yielding both anxiety and anticipation (Irr 1998, 46–49). Similarly, this era’s interest in mass culture was underwritten by a logic of contagion that manifested in the equal and opposite urgency to record and preserve fading folkways (Retman 2011). On the eve of European fascism, Marxian and psychoanalytic preoccupations with group psychology centered on how common feeling comes to take on the speed, potency, and inhuman qualities of the mob, and how mobs might lead to revolutions of the Left or Right. In other words, the 1930s seemed centrally concerned with the question of how collective affect goes viral.

These discourses appear to synergistically collide in the American literary author Nathanael West’s last novel, The Day of the Locust (1939), with its representation of the monstrous social worlds produced by Southern California and the early Hollywood cinema industry. The novel’s final scene of a riot at a movie premiere is the inevitable culmination, the final fatal symptom, of what W. H. Auden called “West’s disease,” the social malaise of emotional “cripples” in a “democratic and mechanized society” (1971, 121, 123). I will argue, however, that West’s disease might not just refer to Auden’s cultural lumpenbourgeoisie but also must be seen as a disease of the artist himself; as an ostensibly resistant producer in consumer capitalism, the artist nonetheless appears as an ironic site for viral infection.

The Day of the Locust traces a few months in the life of Tod Hackett, a Yale-trained painter recruited to do Hollywood set design. In his spare time he labors on his epic canvas The Burning of Los Angeles, meant to represent the rage of “those poor devils who can only be stirred by the promise of miracles and then only to violence” (West 1962, 184). Tod becomes obsessed with his neighbors, whom he uses as subject sketches for his masterwork. They include Faye Greener, a gorgeous and vapid seventeen-year-old aspiring starlet; her father, Harry Greener, a culturally fading and literally dying vaudevillian clown; and Homer Simpson, an Iowan suffering from consumption who has come to Los Angeles for his health and does little else than express having “time on his hands” by means of a tic in his seemingly autonomous hands. In early sketches for Tod’s composition, a naked Faye is at the center of the canvas as the object of mob rage. As Tod’s observations of LA’s “dream dump” fail to materialize as his portrayal of the revolutionary affect of a nation, he becomes obsessed with increasingly rapacious fantasies about Faye.

In a final riot scene at a movie premiere on Hollywood Boulevard, seemingly sparked by Homer’s finally rising to action in assaulting a child, Tod’s leg is broken as he attempts to escape while also trying to save girls from being molested in the mob’s abandon. Tod’s attempts fail under the force of the mob, but on a conceptual level, it is also too late for him to bridge the difference between his fantasy and reality. In pain and pinned in place, he escapes by imagining that he is sketching the final details of his painting: Faye is no longer the central object and focus of the mob’s rage but merely another participant in the foreground. In fact, there is no centering object...