The Borders of Things

"Mankind, mankind . . ."

I just finished reading Nathaniel West's novella Miss Lonelyhearts. The book is a series of connected episodes, which follow the central character, a male advice columnist who goes by the name of "Miss Lonelyhearts" and is only identified by this name throughout the whole novel.

Right away, the text's disruption of identity is obvious. Miss Lonelyhearts is known as his mass-mediated name, a name which sponsors anonymity and the faceless confession. His correspondents, with their tales of woe, grief, and depression capitalism, identify themselves primarily thru descriptive pseudonyms: "Sick-of-it-all," "Desperate," "Disilluisoned-with-tubercular-husband." The letters are remarkable in that they are pathetic without being precious, compelling without being contrived. In this respect, they are like the novel itself, which, as far as I can tell, occupies an underappreciated position in American modernism. In prose almost precisely between Fitzgerald and Hemingway in its terseness and irony, West's tale is subtle in its formal complexity and yet critical in its awareness of the historical contingency.

Formally, the use of the episodic device brings together the novel's two central narrative elements: Miss Lonelyhearts as journalist (each episode bears a title that could be pulled from a contemporary gossip column) and Miss Lonelyhearts as messiah (at one point, Shrike, Lonelyheart's editor/antagonist/ironic other proclaims "The Gospel according to Shrike," which could easily be applied to the entire novel.) The journalistic style of the prose is coupled with internal reflections by Lonelyhearts and the occassional passing of judgment. But the words always get gummed up in the process: Lonelyheart's primary interaction with the sufferings of "humanity," toward which he positions himself as a fractured Christ figure, is framed and determined by the written word, the hidden names, which, like the secret name of God found in gnostic theologies, are themselves "living symbols." And yet, as the prose withdraws from these large and transcendent themes, the novel reveals their failures: one cannot heal humanity, there is no representative suffering that somehow contains it all, "Sick -of-it-all" is always more than sick of it all. The only way out, perhaps, is hysteria, a state Lonelyhearts finds honestly attractive: at several points, he (the son of a Baptist minister) tries to whip himself into a charismatic ekstasis, repeating over and over to himself the name of Christ, hoping that something will happen.

So while Lonelyhearts identifies himself as a Christ, Christ is always outside, elsewhere, other. The fundamental fracture here is woven throughout the text, manifesting itself in various ways. Mary, one of Lonelyheart's love interests, wears a medal around her neck, which requires her to lean down so that Lonelyheart's can read it, revealing her breasts in an intentionally sexualized gesture which is always frustrated, since Mary refuses to sleep with him. Even more complexity is added to the gesture when Mary tells him that her mother died of breast cancer, "leaning over the table." The aborted sexuality of her willing peepshow is a refraction of Mary's own maternal loss--the signified of sex is simultaneously overdetermined and incomplete, a message which never reaches its sender, just as Lonelyhearts gives answers to people whose names are not their own.

These forms without meanings, or forms with too much meaning, bounce off each other in an attempt to both diagnose and offer an advice column to the question of modern malaise. The advice is decidedly grim, critical of all the attempts at answer given at the time and elsewhere. At one point, Shrike offers Lonelyhearts the possible treatments for his Christ-sickness, only to demonstrate their failure: "soil" (i.e., the pastoral), "South Seas," (Gauguin's nobel savage), hedonism, "Art" (transcendence thru the aesthetic), suicide, and drugs. None of these alternatives are viable, or accessible, to the advice columnist of 1933. Thus, Shrike's only answer, which turns out to be a non-answer:

My friend, I know of course that neither the soil, nor the South Seas, nor Hedonism, nor art, nor suicide, nor drugs, can mean anything to us. We are not men who swallow camels only to strain at stools. God alone is our escape. The church is our only hope, the First Church of Christ Dentist, where He is worshiped as Preventer of Decay. The church whose symbol is the trinity new-style: Father, Son and Wirehaired Fox Terrier.

Shrike's answer (anticipatory, perhaps, of Heidegger's famous Der Spiegel declaration that "only a god can save us") reveals its impossibility, an anti-theology reflected in the meaninglessness of his trinity. Precisely because only a God, that is, an impossible transcendence, can save Miss Lonelyhearts, he is doomed to absurdity.

This novel is crucial, I think, because it is social realism and then some. More than simply a depicition of the cruelties and absurdities of the depression, capitalism, advertising, and a society which needs to confess its pain to an anonymous person, the entire structure of the text, its style, characters, plot, etc., solidifies the problem, shows it in such a way that the showing cannot be seperated from the shown. I think I'm getting at the old critical principle that form is inseperable from content; clearly, this is not only for the abstract texts of high culture. Another, better known, example of what I'm talking about is the final passage of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, when Rose of Sharon breast feeds a starving old man the milk that should have gone to her now dead baby. The scene begs to be interpreted in a symbolic/allegorical sense, via so many structures of meaning: female/male, capitalism/community, birth/death, virgin/whore, oedipus/jocasta, savior ("Rose of Sharon" is one of the names of Christ)/damned.

One could go a long way here. But precisely because the scene is so viscerally real, situated in a material time and place where, if this explicitly did not happen, it very well could have, any formal tropes we'd want to apply are dramatically complicated. The real does not trump or eliminate the symbolic, but neither does the symbolic overwhelm the real. Steinbeck perfectly shows us something that we could not have, or might not have, scene otherwise, at an intersection of form and material. Miss Lonelyhearts accomplishes the same thing--perhaps even better, and equally traumatic.

Posted by pjaussen at September 18, 2006 05:20 PM | TrackBack