Leaving Something to Be Desired: Affective Strategies and the Everyday-Spectacular in Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust

Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust embodies an environment pervaded by Hollywood culture. However, rather than focusing on characters subsumed into its thrall, this reading examines the incorporation of such spectacular constructs into everyday life. Resulting affective dynamics manifest a sui generis dream machine, directed by and starring West’s central figures, where the highest good is a state of perpetual excitement, fuel to the fires of unending passion. These strategies of affective creativity and self-dramatization catalyze intoxicating experiential thrill and complicate its pleasures as they delve into excitations of the darker emotions involving hatred, rage, and willfully unrequited love. A variety of episodes demonstrate that all the world is indeed a stage—it can also take the form of film set, production studio, and cinema, as much as everyday people are its inevitably featured players.