Introduction
“The Day of the Locust” is written by an American novelist Nathanael Wes in 1939. The main theme revolves around the states of Hollywood and California and highlights different aspects of Great Depression. The book has gained so much popualarity in its domain, and still a number of people wants to read the book, and the author has achieved high success in his career. The main theme also includes the despair and alienation of a major group of strangers who were resided in the film industry of Hollywood. It is considered as one of the famous and best Novel by the author.
Amid the turmoil of the Great Depression and well into its aftermath, California—and Hollywood in particular—became an irresistible symbol to writers and artists of the opulence, falsity, and aggression of American society. A sort of "unplace," a space where people lived but did not necessarily identify as natives, Hollywood seemed to represent the growing restlessness and alienation brought on by economic crisis, sustained by enduring poverty, and compounded by increasing greed, materialism, and social ambition. Nathanael West—born Nathaniel Wallenstein Weinstein—was one of a host of authors to explore the contradictions that riddled Hollywood's social hierarchy, but perhaps the only one to exploit the masquerade to such sardonic, incisive effect. Born in New York to upper-middle-class Jewish immigrants, West seemed always able to view American society at a remove, to apply his idiosyncratic artistic talent and acerbic wit in depictions of lives betrayed by entertainment and the hollow promise of materialism. Never an assiduous student West relied on his craftiness rather than intellect to gain admittance to a series of schools, finally securing a job as a hotel manager. This job—obtained chiefly through the social connections of his then-impoverished family—allowed West to remain afloat financially even as the world around him crumpled under economic and emotional strain. Although West associated with various coteries of surrealists and erudite authors, he drew his artistic inspiration from the bedraggled masses brought low by the ravages of the Depression. Among beggars, vagrants, prostitutes, and frauds, West found characters that seemed to him to offset the more popular narratives of Hollywood glamour or rags-to-riches Americanism with the realism of the bleak—and often grotesque—underbelly of commodity culture.
Discussion
Going towards the prostitution seems to be unjustified for Faye as Tod already told her that he can give her money for the purpose of her father’s funeral. In this scene the main character has been abused and it has been shown that despite having enough resources and option available Faye is selecting to be a prostitute. Critics often read West's gifts as an illustrator and caricaturist, as well as his disillusioning stint as a screenwriter in Hollywood (where he lived just off Hollywood Boulevard), into Tod Hackett, the protagonist of West's fourth and final novel, The Day of the Locust. And undoubtedly, West's proximity to the masses that made up the structure of a thinly veneered pyramid on which perched the elite of Hollywood's golden era gave him a sense of the underrepresented—and yet infinitely more representative—characters who play out the novel's bizarre conflation of fun (which Theodor Adorno defines as a manufactured attempt at genuine pleasure), entertainment, and violence (Nathanael. 23-24).
Showing the example of Mexican people that they can kill other people for money seems to be unjustified. In a scene where Tod went Hodge’s safflery store in order to inquire about Faye an unjustified argument came across. They meaningless argue about the Mexican people. This sort of construction is pouring doubts in the mind of people. To construct this interplay, West relies on a cast of grotesques. Tod, a Yale-educated artist, comes to Hollywood as a costume and set designer for National Films, where he is befriended by Honest Abe Kusich, a bookkeeping dwarf. Subsequently, he meets Faye Greener, a crass starlet who makes up in solipsism and wantonness what she lacks in talent; he begins to lust after Faye and, in an effort to get close to her, strikes up a relationship with her father, Harry Greener, a former vaudevillian clown who keeps up his character despite his inability to secure a career as a performer in Hollywood. Harry falls ill at the home of Homer Simpson, a hotel bookkeeper from Iowa who tries to maintain in California a banal quotidian routine in lieu of meaningful relationships. When Harry dies, Faye moves in with Homer, yet maintains a relationship with her handsome, violent, and vacuous boyfriend, Earle. Finally, Homer—broken and betrayed by his experience in California—determines to return to Iowa (Nathanael. 34-36).
The cock fight in Homer’s garage seems to be weird. It is an animal abuse when Abe told that there were a lot of guys before you with heavy cash. In this scene a total humiliation of animal has shown that people come with dough to enjoy seeing animal fighting. In one sense, Homer functions as the novel's most pathetic character, a spineless, solicitous figure who tolerates Faye's infidelity and domination of him with a sort of apathetic passivity, one of many indications of a consciousness so evacuated that he fails to register even pain and betrayal. He is, however, only one of the novel's myriad characters to accept entertainment, sexuality, and performance as a substitute for personal fulfillment or authentic emotion and interaction. In light of these characters, it becomes significant that West's original title for the novel was The Cheated, since the novel probes the great betrayal of American modernity: Characters invest in kitsch, pretense, and hope of professional and social advancement, only to be ultimately cheated by false promises of easy success, instant gratification, and manufactured scenery and experience masquerading as the real (Nathanael. 34-36).
The idea of making a moving given by Faye to Tod seems to be vague. Faye suggested Tod at his house. The idea of making movie in order to make money is an absurd dream. The scenario of movie is even not interesting. It is clearly shown that she is copying the scenario from Tarzan Movie. This sort of approach is really meaningless and hurts the rating of the novel (Nathanael. 23-24).
Conclusion
All the lines of approach lead to the conclusion that this novel was the total waste from Nathanael West. There are a lot of weak points in this novel which restricted its rating among public. In this essay there are some scenes discussed which are really not up to the mark. Some of the noteworthy vague scenes are discussed in this essay such as showing the example of Mexican people that they can kill other people for money seems to be unjustified; the cock fight in Homer’s garage seems to be weird. It is an animal abuse when Abe told that there were a lot of guys before you with heavy cash, the idea of making a moving given by Faye to Tod seems to be vague. Faye suggested Tod at his house, and going towards the prostitution seems to be unjustified for Faye as Tod already told her that he can give her money for the purpose of her father’s funeral. In the novel's final scene, Tod wanders downtown to find Homer sitting amid a crowd waiting for a movie premier to begin; the scene erupts in chaos and violence when Homer finally responds to the taunts of a boy and, as he stomps on the boy's back, the crowd falls on Homer. Tod, rescued from the crowd by a police officer, sits in the back of the police car and screams along with the siren: In the novel's final moment of rupture, Tod, never able to distinguish Hollywood's mechanical reproductions from genuine experience, actually becomes the experience himself. After surrounding himself with—and creating—the "cardboard food in front of a cellophane waterfall" and the "small pond with large celluloid swans floating on it" (126), Tod reaches the point at which the simulated world of the movie sets comes to represent and then supersede the real world and authentic experience for himself and the actors he associates with. And, West seems to suggest, this replacement of the genuine with the artificial, this unfulfilling relationship to facade and commodities, ultimately gives way to disillusionment, disgust, and spastic violence.
References
West, Nathanael. The day of the locust. New York: Time Inc., 1965.
West, Nathanael. Novels and other writings: the dream life of Balso Snell ; Miss Lonelyhearts ; A cool million ; The day of the locust ; Other writings ; Unpublished writings and fragments ; Letters. New York: Literary Classics of the United States :, 1997.
