This Cosmic Pawnshop We Call Life: Nathanael West, Bergson, Capitalism, and Schizophrenia

1 After three days of sleep, Ass Lonelyhearts dreams a dream. And in this dream he finds himself an object in a pawnshop window, displayed along with such fetishistic objects as diamond rings, watches, shotguns, fishing tackle, mandolins, as he puts it, "the paraphernalia of suffering." This scene causes him to meditate on the material world's "tropism for disorder, entropy," only to conclude that "All order is doomed, yet the battle is worth while." And so Miss Lonelyhearts continues this battle for order by shaping the objects in the window into various configurations--a phallus, a heart, a diamond, a circle, a triangle, a square, a swastika, a cross--only to collapse finally in futility and exhaustion (West, Miss Lonelyhearts 30-31). Now this strange dream mirrors the assaults that have been made on all belief systems throughout the text. But it also suggests, more subtly, the criticism of commodification and a dehumanizing capitalism that lies at the heart of West's enterprise. When one tropes life and religions and what passes for "values" as objects in a pawnshop, then one has succumbed to a powerful species of nihilism indeed. And yet the pawnshop has other connotations. It suggests that all of us are used goods, that all of us are involved in an exchange system in which we are forced to barter ourselves to the highest bidder, that all of us are rejected or extraneous objects seeking some sort of system to give us meaning and value. These are not comforting thoughts, and yet they form the core of West's vision of life as a cosmic pawnshop, a buyer's market where the only tenuous hope we have for survival lies in self-deprecating humor and mechanistic disengagement from the emotions. In a letter to a friend, West observed about himself: "I do consider myself a comic writer, perhaps in an older and much different tradition than Benchley or Frank Sullivan. Humor is another thing; I am not a humorous writer I must admit and have no desire to be one." As several critics have noted, West's "comic" characteristics are not as close to Greek traditions--ridicule through comic reduction--as he would like us to believe.(1) In his two major works, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) and The Day of the Locust (1939), West clearly intended to experiment with the traditions of vaudeville comedy, burlesque, comic-strip action, and the grotesqueries associated with the dark violence of gallows humor, all modern-day adaptations of ridicule through comic reduction. But West was also attempting something much more complex. He aimed in these two texts to use a particular theory of comedy--derived from Henri Bergson--in order to make a particularly Bergsonian criticism about what passes for life in a dehumanized, mechanized, and industrialized society, that is, society as pawnshop. In depicting his characters and their lives as ludicrously machine-like, commodified, and objectified, West condemns the schizophrenia and alienation that capitalism has produced in its modern victims.(2) West's characters are schizophrenic and alienated because they are victimized by their beliefs in two conflicting ideologies. On one hand, they embrace the humanist ideology; they believe themselves to be "totalities" and "selves" as they throw off their oedipal inheritance. But according to the "anti-oedipal" ideology to which West subscribes, they can be seen more accurately as part-objects of the machine we call life. And the disparity between these two systems produces for West and his readers the rather dark humor of both works. In laughing at his characters, West laughs specifically at the conflicts caused by their subscription to humanist beliefs, which are later contradicted by their mechanistic behavior and attitudes. And yet his characters have had no choice but to behave as machines, as comically grotesque automatons who have been programmed to deconstruct. Like Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, he rejects the bourgeois notion of a "self," of human beings as "individuals" or "totalities. …