Nathanael West, Secularism, and the Uses of Comedy

This essay is an attempt to understand the elusive metaphysical and ethical meanings of the comic in Nathanael West, and in doing so to chart the possible relations between secularism and comedy. West described his fiction as “moral satire,” yet he is also a comedian of cultural “discourse,” and the normative discourses necessary to the moral energies of satire are travestied in his work. I argue that to elucidate this paradox we must read West as an ironist of irony and a satirist of satire; West is an unrelenting comic novelist who nonetheless thematizes the existential uses of comedy and accentuates their dangers and limits. I show how this tension unfolds with regard to secularism and religion, particularly in Miss Lonelyhearts: West’s comic deflations of religious aspiration seem aligned with a vehement secular materialism, yet West brings his irony to bear on the discourse of secularism itself, and the characters that understand themselves as masterful comic agents must do penance as comic objects.