The Day of the Locust is a 1939 novel by American author Nathanael West, set in Hollywood, California during the Great Depression, depicting the alienation and desperation of a disparate group of individuals who exist at the fringes of the movie industry.
Time magazine included the novel in its list of 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005[1], and noted critic Harold Bloom included it in his list of canonical works in the book The Western Canon[2].
Plot summary
The book follows a young man named Tod Hackett who thinks of himself as a painter and artist, but who works in Hollywood as a costume designer and background painter. He falls in love with Faye Greener, an aspiring starlet who lives nearby. Between his work in the studio and his introduction to Faye's friends, he is soon interacting with numerous Hollywood hangers-on, including a cowboy who lives in the hills above the studios and works as an extra in cowboy movies, his Mexican friend who keeps fighting cocks, and Homer Simpson, a hapless businessman whom Faye is taking advantage of. The book ends with a riot at a movie premiere.
Biblical allusions
The original title of the novel was The Cheated. [3]
The title of West's work is likely a biblical allusion to certain passages in the Old Testament. Susan Sanderson writes:
The most famous literary or historical reference to locusts is in the
Book of Exodus in the Bible, in which God sends a plague of locusts to the pharaoh of Egypt as retribution for refusing to free the enslaved Jews. Millions of locusts swarm over the lush fields of Egypt, destroying its food supplies. Destructive locusts also appear in the New Testament in the symbolic and apocalyptic book of Revelation.
West's use of the locust in his title, then, calls up images of destruction and a land stripped bare of anything green and living. Certainly, the novel is filled with images of destruction: Tod Hackett's painting entitled "The Burning of Los Angeles," his violent fantasies about Faye, and the bloody result of the cockfight, just to name a few. A close examination of West's characters and his selective use of natural images, which include representations of violence and impotence — and which are therefore contrary to popular images linking nature and fertility — reveals that the locust in the title refers to the character of Tod.[4]
The title may also refer to the plague that appears in the Book of Joel.
The riot that occurs at the end of the book—and its foreshadowing in Tod Hackett's painting—may be a reference to the apocalypse.
Symbols and metaphors
James F. Light has suggested that West's use of mob violence in the novel was an expression of a generalized anxiety about the rise of fascism in Europe. Light also suggests that West may have written into the novel a more personal anxiety about his marginalized role as a Jew in America.[5]
Themes
All of the characters are outcasts who have come to Hollywood in search of a fulfillment of some dream or wish: "The importance of the wish in West's work was first noted by W.H. Auden, who declared (in one of the interludes in The Dyer's Hand) that West's novels were essentially "parables about a Kingdom of Hell whose ruler is not so much a Father of Lies as a Father of Wishes"."[6] In this respect, Light suggests that Day falls in with a general project that pervades West's fiction: namely, exposing certain hopeful narratives that pervade modern American culture as frauds.[7]
Characters
For the most part, West's characters are intentionally shallow and iconic, and "…derive from all the B-grade genre films of the period…" (Simon, 523).[8] West's characters are Hollywood stereotypes, what Light calls "grotesques".[9] The novel's protagonist, Tod Hackett (whose name likely derives from the German word for death and a common epithet for Hollywood screenwriters and artists, who were pejoratively called "hacks"), is a set painter who aspires to artistic greatness. In the first chapter of the novel, the narrative voice announces: "Yes, despite his appearance, Tod was really a very complicated young man with a whole set of personalities, one inside the other like a nest of Chinese boxes. And 'The Burning of Los Angeles,' a picture he was soon to paint, definitely proved he had talent." Over the course of the novel, we are introduced to several minor characters, each corresponding to a given Hollywood trope. There is Harry Greener the fading vaudevillian, his daughter, Faye the starlet, Claude Estee the big-time producer, Homer Simpson the hopelessly clumsy "everyman," Abe Kusich the diminutive, yet vicious gangster, Earle Shoop the cowboy and Miguel the Mexican his sidekick, Adore Loomis the child star/prima donna, and Adore's doting stage mother.
Film
In 1975 a film based on the novel was made, starring William Atherton as Tod Hackett, Donald Sutherland as Homer Simpson and Burgess Meredith as Harry Greener.
Pop culture
The book is mentioned and remarked upon in Y the Last Man.
The Simpsons creator Matt Groening named his most famous character, Homer Simpson, after the character of the same name in the novel.
Works cited
- Simon, Richard Keller (1993). "Between Capra and Adorno: West's Day of the Locust and the Movies of the 1930s". Modern Language Quarterly 54 (4): p. 524.
References
[10]
- ^ http://www.time.com/time/2005/100books/
- ^ http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/grtbloom.html
- ^ Aaron, Daniel. "Review: Waiting for the Apocalypse" Hudson Review, Vol. 3, No. 4 (Winter, 1951) pp. 634-636
- ^ http://www.answers.com/topic/the-day-of-the-locust-criticism
- ^ Light, James F. "Nathanael West and the Ravaging Locust" American Quarterly, Vol. 12, No. 1 (Spring, 1960), pp. 44-54
- ^ Barnard, Rita. "'When You Wish Upon a Star': Fantasy, Experience, and Mass Culture in Nathanael West" American Literature, Vol. 66, No. 2 (Jun., 1994), pp. 325-351
- ^ Light, James F. "Violence, Dreams, and Dostoevsky: The Art of Nathanael West" College English, Vol. 19, No. 5 (Feb., 1958), pp. 208-213
- ^ Simon, Richard Keller (1993). "Between Capra and Adorno: West's Day of the Locust and the Movies of the 1930s". Modern Language Quarterly 54 (4): p. 524.
- ^ Light, "...Ravaging Locust"
- ^ http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=404939&c=1
