Making Sense of Hollywood: Mass Discourses and the Literary Order in Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust

T H O M A S S T R Y C H A C Z University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Making Sense of Hollywood: Mass Discourses and the Literary Order in Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust Toward the end of The Day of the Locust, Homer Simpson’simpotent sexual jealousy over Faye Greener, the would-be screen-goddess, forces him into mental breakdown. The incident is scarcely a key one: like most scenes in the novel, it is episodic in structure and merely confirms what is already known about Faye and Homer. Yet Homer’s inarticulacy conveys a striking sense of the fragmented stories, languages and texts prevalent in West’s Hollywood. He [Tod Hackett] sat down and tried to make sense out of what Homer had told him. A great deal of it was gibberish.. . .He hit on a key that helped when he realized that a Jot of it wasn’t jumbled so much as timeless. The words went behind each other instead of after. What he had taken for long strings were really one thick word and not a sentence. . . . Using this key, he was able to arrange a part of what he had heard so that it made the usual kind of sense.1 Ironically, for a man whose only song is the “Star Spangled Banner” (pp. 57-8) and who puts a “great deal of faith in sayings” like “Good riddance to bad rubbish” (p. 14-3), Homer’s language reminds us more of a frag­ mented, multi-layered modernist text. The symbolic density of Homer’s “one thick word” displaces linear or narrative progression, while conven­ tional time sequences collapse into an impression of timelessness. Cast in the role of reader, Tod searches for a “key” to make the “usual kind” of narrative sense out of Homer’s compressed and jumbled thoughts. And the re-structured text that Tod achieves is at once enlightening and useless, being a supremely concise summary of the events of one night, yet making “nonsense” of the actual chaos of Homer’s emotions. Tod’s predicament is our own, for The Day of the Locust invites us to make the “usual kind of sense” of it, yet as often defeats and bafflesus with its elisions, rapid shifts of action, and refusal to develop a coherent plot. The 150 Western American Literature clarity of West’s language—its avoidance of the dense complexity of the modernist text (or for that matter the convoluted discourse of a Homer Simpson)—masks its actual subtlety. The discourse of The Day of the Locust is never constant or whole. To suggest, as some critics have, that the novel reflects West’s interest in cinematic modes of narration is only a partial explanation; for, however true, it satisfies neither the numerous students of the novel who have been critical of its plotless, fragmented structure, nor the perception that film-plots described within the novel are absurdly predictable.2 If West’s technique is cinematic, in other words, Hollywood itself offers no usable models. The initial challenge to West’s technical mastery, however, comes not from critics but from a perception that “Hollywood parodies everything.”3 For West, the master-parodist, Hollywood posed a difficult question: how to satirize an institution that in many ways parodied its own aspirations and techniques. West’s narrative technique, which at times reflects, at times caricatures, and more often embroiders on the fragmented discourses of Hollywood, provides one answer. The patterns of incompletion in The Day of the Locust are the result of deliberate and finely crafted narrative strate­ gies rather than West’s slipshod artistry. The very lack of a conventional literary structure—the lack, as Edmund Wilson so aptly stated, of a “cen­ ter” to the novel—forms the heart of West’s attack on the institution of Hollywood.4 This study approaches West’s extraordinary insight into Hollywood art by exploring what the narrative structure of the novel brings to comple­ tion, and what it leaves frustratingly incomplete. Tod Hackett, West’s protagonist, plays a key role here. The opening example, in which Tod, by assuming authorial command over Homer’s broken language and...