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Mass Cultural Populism and the Hollywood Novel: The Case of Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
Extract
The short history of the Hollywood novel provides a useful index of the ways that 20th-century U.S. literature has imagined the relation of sign systems to the external reality with which they would coincide. Very early Hollywood novels like Harry Leon Wilson's Merton of the Movies (1922) found their critiques of the nascent film industry on its fictiveness and conventionality, indicting Hollywood for the falsification of reality. Literature in general and the Hollywood novel in particular would serve, by implication, to set the record straight. As modernism in its many permutations supplanted realism, however, these straightforward epistemological distinctions became increasingly blurry. Informed by the recognition of the materiality of language, modernist fiction would have a lot harder time leveling its critiques.
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References
Notes
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West begins the novel in the middle of an action, at the end of Tod Hackett's working day. In a cinematic manner events and actions are first described, explanations then emerge later in the text. The opening paragraph is followed by an absurd scene in which the cavalry and other fighting forces disappear behind half of a Mississippi steamboat urged on by a small, ridiculous figure. The explanation becomes clear when, over half way down the first page, we read that Tod is in Hollywood and has been there less than three months “and still found it a very exciting place.”
The fact that Tod is blasé about what he sees suggests that the very cinematic trope Wisker mentions is being parodied by West through Tod's response — more evidence of the cynicism for which I've been arguing.
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