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The Storyteller, the Novelist, and the Advice Columnist: Narrative and Mass Culture in "Miss Lonelyhearts" Author(s): Rita Barnard Source: NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Autumn, 1993), pp. 40-61 Published by: Duke University Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1345980 Accessed: 09-12-2018 18:57 UTC

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The Storyteller, the Novelist, and the Advice Columnist:

Narrative and Mass Culture

in Miss Lonelyhearts RITA BARNARD

In 1936 the American critic Henry Seidel Canby observed that it was "folly to suppose that a society which reads a daily paper, sees a news reel weekly, and hears the radio every other hour, is going to be novelized successfully by the old-time story teller ... " (Luccock, 153). The remark, coming in the midst of the depression decade, captures a widespread anxiety about the culture of moder- nity, or, more exactly, culture in the face of modernity. 1 Indeed, the same anx- ious premise--that new structures of experience require new forms of narrative, or that such experiences might render narrative itself obsolete-informs the two texts I would like to submit to a mutual critique: Nathanael West's 1933 novella Miss Lonelyhearts, and Walter Benjamin's 1936 essay "The Storyteller: Reflections on the Work of Nikolai Leskov."

The thematic similarity between the novella and the critical essay has thus far escaped critical comment, perhaps because of differences in genre and tone, not to mention the authors' nationalities. Yet the connection is quite striking, especially since both West and Benjamin place the apparently mundane ques- tion of advice at the center of their investigations of the purpose and value of narrative and, more broadly, of art in the modern world. Miss Lonelyhearts ex- amines the fate of the newspaper advice-columnist who has no counsel for his readers: a man who wanders through an urban wasteland of dismal pawnshops, scruffy parks, and torn advertising posters, in search of some trace of redemp- tive meaning. Miss Lonelyhearts also engages a self-reflexive formal problem (since behind the figure of the failed advice-columnist there surely stands the figure of the failed novelist). It confronts, as Jonathan Raban has put it, "the possibility that the conventions of the Novel ... have been made unworkable by the urban industrial world of pulp and cheapjack commodities" (222). "The Storyteller," in which Benjamin spins a kind of three-ply history of narrative forms, structures of experience, and modes of production, addresses the identical set of problems, namely the loss of advice and the attenuation of older "epic" forms-the story and the novel. Benjamin's essay provides a useful perspective from which we may consider the theoretical and cultural implications of West's novella; conversely, the novella allows us to explore the possibilities

The author wishes to thank Peter Conn and Dana Phillips for their helpful comments on this paper.

Historians and sociologists from the 1930s frequently resorted to the term "cultural lag" to account for this perceived social crisis. The phrase expresses a concern about people's capacity to deal with the pace of change--a sense that the human culture as well as the individual experience was in some sense incommensurate with material conditions (Susman, 156; Luccock, 153).

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RITA BARNARD I MASS-MEDIATED STORYTELLING 41

and limitatations entailed in applying Benjamins' essay to the American scene. I therefore propose to read these two texts in juxtaposition so as to to re-examine their understanding of the relationship-key to our understanding of the rela- tionship between modernism and post-modernism--between literature and mass-mediated culture.

I: Stories

For Benjamin the demise of the "old-fashioned storyteller" is a symptom of alienation in the modern world:

Less and less frequently do we encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly.... It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experi- ences.... [T]he storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers. But if today "having counsel" is beginning to have an old-fashioned ring, this is because the communicability of experience is decreasing. In consequence we have no coun- sel either for ourselves or for others. (83, 86)

People are no longer able to seek counsel, or so Benjamin argues, since to do so one must at least be able to begin narrating the story for which the storyteller's ad- vice provides the unfolding and the moral. Advice, in other words, is predi- cated on shared and spoken experiences, on significance immanent in the very fabric of daily life. Where these are lost, the story-and even the novel (described in the essay as an heroic effort to distill meaning from increasingly private and meaningless lives)-shatters into short-lived bits of "information": snippets of narrative, incapable of surviving the moment in which they are new. In a standardized, mechanized world, the "moral of the story" (the product of the teller's ready supply of personal wisdom) and even "the meaning of life" (the product of the novelist's troubled artistic quest) be- come increasingly hard to discover. This difficulty is evidence, for Benjamin, of the fragmentation of experience, and of an historically new menace to older narrative modes of "producing" that experience. This menace is information, and specifically the newspaper, which stands here as a synecdoche for mass culture in general. 2

This much is familiar to all readers of Benjamin. I would, however, like to emphasize the fact that, though this essay is nostalgic and concerned to evoke for us a (perhaps imagined) pre-capitalist "organic" community, it is also very much a text of the 1930s. It speaks urgently (though incompletely) to certain pressing cultural concerns of its time-concerns which evidently crossed na- tional borders. The work of American social historians offers both empirical and subjective support for Benjamin's sense that "'having counsel' is beginning to have an old-fashioned ring." Roland Marchand, for example, has listed sev-

2 realize that many contemporary cultural critics are uncomfortable with the use of the term "mass culture," since it has come to seem so irredeemably tainted with an elitist and self-congratulatory gloom. I retain it here partly for the sake of its period flavor. It is after all a term that emerges from the thirties (Brantlinger 30); moreover, the two texts I am discussing here do express something of the apocalyptic pessimism associated with the term.

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42 NOVEL I FALL 1993

eral broad social and demographic changes (all relating to the demise of smaller communities under the impact of a consolidating national market) which by the twenties and thirties had created what he calls an "advice vac- uum": greater mobility, generational discontinuity, the isolation and shrinking of households in the new apartments and suburbs, and so forth. All of these trends, he notes, tended to sever city dwellers from the shared forms of knowl- edge of smaller communities, and to disrupt the "informal, intrafamilial and intracommunity channels of advice" (342).

The advent of the Great Depression, moreover, with its gigantic statistics, and its vast, yet incomprehensible ravages of the old certainties, extended this disconcerting experience also to smaller and rural communities. A passage from the Austrian economist, Peter Drucker, which is often picked up by American historians and memoirists of the period describes the emotional and subjective effects of the economic crisis as follows:

Depression shows man as a senseless cog in a senselessly whirling machine which is beyond human understanding and has ceased to serve any purpose but its own (Allen, 55) ... He can no longer explain or understand his existence as rationally correlated and co-ordinated to the world in which he lives; nor can he co-ordinate the world and the social realities to his existence. The func- tion of the individual in society has become entirely irrational and senseless. Man is isolated within a tremendous scene. (Kazin, 357)

This description strikes me as similar in its implications to Benjamin's memo- rable evocation of the individual's bafflement on the battlefields of Flanders:

A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood un- der the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body. (84)

The illogical enormities of modernity, implicit in such things as mechanical warfare, rampant inflation, or, in the U.S., the absurdities of poverty in a land of plenty, would seem to defy the interpretative and communicative equipment of the individual, and to attest powerfully to Benjamin's proposition that per- sonal "experience has fallen in value" (83-84).

This melancholy observation does not, however, tell the whole story. A glance at popular magazines from the early and mid-thirties would offer am- ple evidence that a concern with advice, with the voice of experience, had by no means disappeared. Every few pages or so, one discovers documents such as the following advertisement, which appeared in the Ladies Home Journal of March 1931 (and is reproduced in Marchand's richly illustrated history):

Dear Miss Dix:

"How can I make myself more popular? I am fairly pretty and not a dumb-bell,

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RITA BARNARD I MASS-MEDIATED STORYTELIUNG 43

but I am so timid and self-conscious with people, men especially ... I'm always sure they're not going to like me ...

Joan G-----"

ANSWER: "Poor Joan--you have an inferiority complex haven't you? Yet no woman need feel inferior ... Feel that you're charming, Joan, and others will find you so!"

Pretty clothes will help you tremendously ... Buy the loveliest lingerie you can ... [And] if you use that wonderful product, Lux, you'll keep your dainty gar- ments COLOR FRESH and NEW a long, long, time.... Your surroundings, too, can help you win self-confidence and poise. Pretty curtains, gay sofa cushions, table linens--all can form part of the magic spell if kept lovely with Lux.

Dorothy Dix (354)

The popular journals also contained advice-texts of a more distinctly narrative variety, such as "Mother Minds her Business" from the Saturday Evening Post (27 January, 1934: 46):

lMOTHER MIIONDS HEIR BUSINESS OU CANT CONM Ovtl

voullt C"_ T(LL wMOt(R WWAmf WONmC

/AW MASWIR 9I

/

mOGEm, IT 1MY BUSNISS! I KNOW Sm[s M APPPILY MARRIOD'

BUTr TMER IS OumTnING. Ev NOTICED HE ...

/

I ADORE HwIMMOTHRf Itt ONLY THAT... SOMETIMES... AND TONIGHT IT WAS (SPECIALLY NOTICEABLE. I WAS SO ASHANEDO

I SUSPECTED '8 0O WAS THE TROUBLE. WHY HAVENT YOU WARNED HIM ?

O.H MOTHER, I WAVE. ! THAT IS, I TRIED TO HINT GENTLY. SO AS NOT TO HURT HIS rIELINGS.BUT

HE THOUGHT I WAS 'KING

THEN QUIETLY GO AHEAD AND GET SOME UIrEBUO PCRWAPSO OURCi RIGHT. G0 O OvN R

I'M GLAD YOU GOT TWIS LIrEBUOY, ANN SUCH LAT[wPMAE YOUV 0 rilL

L! IfAAN? I AND MAYS[ IT IS JUST AS WILL IOY TO TAK[ ANY

CHANC[S WITM*O0*

NO"B.O.'NOW_ &k b THCEIS ONE MAARIAEG THtaL LAST GUESS THE CPLDff GOES TO YOU, DEAR

SYOULL HAVE TO ADMIT I WAS MINDING MY BUSINESS-.A MOT.rPS BUSINESS,!

Ku *;-W

I LOVE THE WAY IT FRESHENS

AND SOOTHES MY SKIN /

W /OMEN who really t.r.uth,, eir complexions rve about LAfbuoy. And you can't blame rthem' Fr iUfebuov's

bland, soothing lathrr ,/r<p-M/.an, FrcX s ofclogged impurities that dull and cloud the skin It freshens complexions- quickly brings the clear radiance and sparklng glow of health.

"B.O."-our common enemy Public enemy number one-that's "D. 0. (Laedy odor).' It threatens

every one of us. For we all perspre a quart daily. Overheid rooms increase the danger of offendin.g. Play safe-bathe regularly with Lifebuoy. You can tell by its x.ra. dlean, quickly.vanishing scent that Lifebuoy Ilther purifies and deo. dorizes the pores- stops B. 0."

1 I

""--I' L?

U

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44 NOVEL I FALL 1993

Though ephemeral and silly compared to Benjamin's astonishingly compact and lyrical essay, these texts are, arguably, of equal importance for a history of narrative and structures of experience. They remind us quite vividly that ad- vice, stories, and the speaking voice-far from being on the decline-had in fact become a growth industry. Americans, as Marchand records, could seek ad- vice not only from Miss Dix, but from such figures as "Ruth Miller," the friendly voice of Odo-ro-no, or "Mary Hale Martin" of Libby's, or "Aunt Ellen" (of Griswold Cast Iron Cooking Utensils). They could savor the folksy tone and the atmosphere of Gemeinschaft evoked by advertisements: a consumer could take up the invitation of the Sears and Roebuck company (offered in their pitch to rural radio listeners) to "pull up a chair and talk things over ... "; or they could rely on the homey Betty Crocker, invented by corporate fiat to answer those "questions that in more neighborly communities had been asked over the back fence." Nor was the spoken voice entirely lost: audiences could tune in to a radio program entitled "The Voice of Experience," which offered the audience advice on intimate matters, and, on a single day in 1933, received 6,500 letters from its listeners (353-57). 3

It would appear, in short, that the value of experience did not, in fact, fall straight into "bottomlessness" as Benjamin theorizes (84), but that personal ex- perience, as well as old-fashioned advice, was instead resuscitated-sublated, if you will-in a corporate and commodified guise. There is a certain historical irony, as Marchand points out, in the fact that the language that served to promote and maintain a complex system of standardized mass distribution, was everything but abstract and mechanical, but relied, on the contrary, on a "person-to-person, conversational tone of voice that belied the very nature of mass communications" (336). This ironic possibility is not accounted for in "The Storyteller," with its lament for the disappearance of the spoken voice, for the personal touch, and for the pragmatic wisdom of advice. The problem can be traced back to the logic of Benjamin's synecdoche: the fact that (at least in the essay in question), he takes the demystifying, de-auraticizing institution of the newspaper as the paradigmatic form of mass culture. 4

It is perhaps then necessary to find a second paradigm: one which could ac- count not only for the loss of the authentic voice of the storyteller, but also for the reinvention and simulation of authenticity-the commercialized survival

Lawrence Levine has recently argued that the popular culture of the thirties--including the many stories broadcast on the radio, and which people often retold to each other--can be viewed (at least hypothetically) as the folklore of industrial society (1376-79). His democratically-minded reading stresses a kind of historical and cultural continuity; it offers precisely the sort of optimistic, progressive, linear historiographic narrative that Benjamin was determined to stop in its tracks.

In the more politically optimistic essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," the paradigmatic forms are, of course, photography or film. It is interesting, however, that in both of these major essays Benjamin seems, perhaps deliberately, to shy away from any comment on advertising, a form which for other critics (F. R. Leavis, for instance) has seemed to epitomize the industrial transformation of speech communities. Indeed, one of Theodor Adorno's important arguments with Benjamin concerned his failure to account for the possibility of commercial remystification: the re- auraticization of the image, most notably of the movie celebrity. This is not to say that Benjamin was unaware of the importance of advertising. In One Way Street, for example, he contrasts the newspaper, which we read vertically, with the billboard advertisement, which we read in the "dictatorial" and auratic "perpendicular" (Reflections, 78). Moreover, his fascination with commodities on display, department stores, exhibitions, and so forth, in the Arcades Project, should be seen as an exploration of the history of advertising as an element of our everyday life and urban geography. See also Wicke, 9-13, for a more detailed discussion of these matters; and, on the Adorno-Benjamin debate, Buck-Morss, Origin, Chapter 9.

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RITA BARNARD I MASS-MEDIATED STORY~ELUNG 45

of traditional forms in the mass-mediated culture of the time. s I suggest that we turn to the genre represented by the second of the popular documents repro- duced above: the comic strip advertisement. The form seems particularly suited to the purposes of this essay for several reasons-not least the fact that Nathanael West originally intended to write Miss Lonelyhearts as a novel in the form of a comic strip, with dialogue in speech balloons ("Some Notes on Miss L," 66). The comic strip ads, with their now-familiar "mini-dramas of love-lost-and-regained through the conquest of B.O.," of marriages saved by Wonder Bread, and of academic success ensured by the energizing powers of Ovaltine, emerged at almost the exact time that West was writing his novella (Marchand, 111). In 1931, after one of the earliest Gallop polls revealed the enormous popularity of comics and the "advice to the lovelorn" columns, adver- tising agencies quickly found a way to combine the two forms, and soon inun- dated the pages of newspapers and popular magazines with this undignified new addition to the genealogy of epic forms. The genre became so popular that the early to mid-thirties came to be known, among admen, as "the balloon talk period" (Marchand, 304). But more important for their paradigmatic status than their sheer numbers, is the manner in which such narratives managed to combine and condense the characteristic formal devices of all the mass media

(in the same way, perhaps, that MTV, in recent years, has appeared to be the paradigmatic "postmodern" form, combining and condensing popular music, video, advertising, fashion spreads, and tropes from any number of fictional or cinematic genres). The comic-strip itself, as Marchand notes, was already a kind of formal compendium:

From the movies came the ideas of continuity of action, quickcutting from scene to scene, and focusing attention through the occasional close-up. From the confession magazines came the power of personal testimony and the intimate drama. From the tabloids came an emphasis on brevity and pictorial imagery. And from the radio came the persuasiveness of a conversational style and the seductiveness of eavesdropping. (112)

To all these features, the "continuity series" ads (as they were called in the trade) added the ready-made solutions of advertising. Their plots, even more unvaried than those of the soaps (another of the decade's generic inventions), always delivered the same happy message: that a panacea for all our troubles is available, and can be purchased, neatly packaged, in the form of a commod- ity. 6

The comic-strip ad, then, serves as a reminder that mass culture cannot be theorized only in terms of the fragmentation and "de-auraticization" of narra- tive and experience. It does not, however, completely invalidate Benjamin's analysis in "The Storyteller." Such symbolic representations of, or substitutions for, the traditional advice-giver's role and the lost neighborliness of older

For a recent essay criticizing Benjamin on somewhat similar grounds see Angus, 99.

6 One of the first studies of the soaps is that of Herta Herzog (1941), which gives the following formula for the genre: "getting into trouble and out again" (66).

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46 NOVEL I FALL 1993

communities may also serve as signs of their social absence, just as (in Benjamin's view) the novel's attempt to discover "the meaning of life" is an in- dex of the loss of immanent meaning in daily life. We cannot equate the growth of an advice industry, controlled and designed from above, with the "handcrafted" counsel of the storyteller, nor the speech-balloon with the spo- ken voice, nor the advertising slogan with the moral of the story. After all, the story, as Benjamin describes it, stands for a utopian idea of a lived totality: a narrative form so connected to daily labor, so "woven into the fabric of real life," that it hardly seems ideological in its meaning and effect. 7 The nostalgic reinvention of homey advice and Gemeinschaft in the American media must by contrast seem almost a matter of "false consciousness" (one hesitates to use the

phrase, but this is, I think, where the essay's positions implicitly lead us). And while "The Storyteller" is also in a sense nostalgic, its nostalgia serves a dif- ferent purpose: to emphasize what has been lost; to offer not consolation, but critique. 8

These preliminary meditations, then, offer us two ways of looking at mass culture. The first is the dystopian perspective suggested by the newspaper, characterized by the fragmentation, standardization, and loss of whatever once carried the authoritative stamp of the personal, the unique, the genuine, the handmade. The second is the ostensibly utopian narrative of the comic- strip ad: characterized not so much by the loss, but the simulation of the story- teller's authentic personal wisdom (the slogan, for instance) and voice (the speech balloon). The importance of Miss Lonelyhearts lies in the fact that it de- ploys both of these heuristic paradigms: it can be read via the cultural critique of "The Storyteller" (which will be my concern in the next section); but it also casts some light on those aspects of the history of advice-its commodification and mass-distribution-which the Benjamin essay leaves unexplored (and to which I will turn anon).

II: Newspapers

That West was deeply concerned with the intertwined phenomena of experi- ence, narrative, and mass culture is evident in his extant scraps of criticism. In

7 Althusserian notions of ideology of course render this formulation problematic. But I venture it nevertheless, since it seems to me that Benjamin is here trying to imagine, as a kind of normative touchstone, a relation to the real that is not imaginary, but directly lived, inherently meaningful. Our sense of the impossibility of such an unmediated meaning is perhaps an index of its profoundly utopian dimension.

T.J. Jackson Lears offers a fascinating-and I would say very Benjaminian-discussion of the uses of nostalgia in his essay, "Packaging the Folk," which explores the prevalence of folksy images in the advertising of the 1930s. Though he does not discuss the contuinuity series ads, his research raises exactly the same issues I am concerned with here:

(W)hen the folk were invoked, the advertisers implicitly denied any rupture beteen tradition and modernity, trivialized the challenge of the past to the present, and ignored the destructive effects of change. Their outlook resembled the evolutionary

progressiveness of Teilhard de Chardin, whose slogan they would have loved, if they had ever read it: "Nothing is ever lost to the race."

The denial of loss is not "nostalgia" but the erasure of its basis--and what may, indeed, be the basis of all historical memory under modern cultural conditions the sense of the pastness of the past, the radical disjuncture between "then" and "now" (136).

The renewed experience of this disjuncture is exactly what Benjamin would have us feel. See also Robin D.G. Kelley's essay for a discussion of the dangers of merely collapsing the "boundaries between orality and technology," a collapse which occurs when one equates the radio voice with that of the storyteller (1404).

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RITA BARNARD I MASS-MEDIATED STORYTELLING 47

"Some Notes on Violence," published in Contact in 1932, he suggests that daily life in contemporary America has rendered older forms of narrative problem- atic. In American cities, he observes, "violence is idiomatic" (the ambiguous phrase fittingly conflating the experience, and the expression or linguistic pro- duction of that experience). His evidence is to be found in the newspapers:

To make the front page a murderer has to use his imagination, he also has to use a particularly hideous instrument. Take this morning's paper: FATHER CUTS SON'S THROAT IN BASEBALL ARGUMENT. It appears on an in- side page. To make the first page, he should have killed three sons and with a baseball bat instead of a knife. Only liberality and symmetry could have made this daily occurrence interesting. (50)

Among the casualties of this sensational processing of violent experience are the received conventions of the novel: "Artistic truth," West announces, no longer requires "the naturalism of Zola," or "the realism of Flaubert." The id- iom of the mass media, as well as the idiom of everyday experience, has made the psychological verisimilitude of the nineteeth-century European novel ap- pear overwrought: an American, drilled in the shock of contemporary living by the daily assault of headlines, would respond to such writing (or so West imag- ines) as inaccurate and inappropriate ("'What's all the excitement about'"), or as belonging to a purely aesthetic category-as a matter of style without any referential urgency ("'By God, that's a mighty fine piece of writing, that's art"' [51]).

These insights correspond closely to Benjamin's sense that contemporary ex- perience no longer lends itself to the story or the novel, and, conversely, that our very capacity for experience is undermined by the mass-produced forms of nar- rative that confront us daily in the headlines. The same ideas are thematized in Miss Lonelyhearts, which we might usefully think of as the photographic negative of "The Storyteller." The urban wasteland in which the novella is set, for instance, is in every detail the antithesis of that older organic community which Benjamin associates with storytelling. The "multiple" chaos of West's city street resists interpretation, and permits only those fragmentary, desul- tory, disjointed experiences which Benjamin elsewhere describes as "urban shock":

Broken groups of people hurried past, forming neither stars nor squares. The lamp-posts were badly spaced and the flagging was of different sizes. Nor could he do anything with the harsh clanging sound of street cars and the raw shouts of hucksters. No repeated group of words would fit their rhythm and no scale could give them meaning. (11)

This sensory assault offers no material for narrative, no continuity, no distance, no aura: the city is figured as a "world of doorknobs," replete with impersonal, mass-produced objects (9). It is a "dead world," from which any trace of the

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48 NOVEL I FALL 1993

magic and miracle that empower the storyteller's craft has fled--displaced, as a telling passage suggests, by the newspaper:

[T]he gray sky looked as if it had been rubbed with a soiled eraser. It held no angels, flaming crosses, olive-bearing doves, wheels within wheels. Only a newspaper struggled in the air like a kite with a broken spine. (5)

In a similarly gloomy observation of the urban scene, the sensational "events of the day" seem to produce not stories, but headlines, emblazoned on posters: "Mother slays five with ax, slays seven, slays nine ... Babe slams two, slams three ... " (25). The repetitive phrases suggest that even these sensational events are no different from those frustratingly banal "doorknobs": standard- ized, fungible, infinitely replicable. News resembles mass-produced goods, not the handcrafted items to which Benjamin compares the story: the clay pot to which the handprint of the potter still clings (92). It is thus uncannily appro- priate that West describes his newsmen (who could be seen as the modem coun- terparts of the storyteller) as machines, which relentlessly destroy the indi- vidual qualities of whatever experiences come their way. The cynical journal- ists, as Miss Lonelyhearts observes, are "machines for making jokes": "A button machine makes buttons, no matter what the power used, foot, steam, or electric- ity. They, no matter what the motivating force, death, love or God, made jokes" (15). And though Miss Lonelyhearts himself no longer willingly partici- pates in this manufacture (realizing that his own life has also been reduced to a punch-line), he cannot, as it were, change the whole mode of narrative produc- tion.

Of all the newsmen in the novel, it is of course Miss L. himself who invites the most sustained comparison with Benjamin's exemplary figure; indeed, the idea of the photographic negative and its positive imprint again seems apt. The storyteller is the positive image of the "man who has counsel for his read- ers," whose ability to articulate the unity of his own life imbues experience with a unique meaning, while also ensuring its public usefulness and relevance. He is a kind of secular saint: "the righteous man" who can reach into the depths of the inanimate, and perceive the "natural prophecy" and order of the created world; a man of "incomparable aura," the imagined touchstone for a cri- tique of modern life (107-9). The confused advice columnist, in contrast, is the quintessential modem man, who (not unlike Benjamin's novelist) can record only the "profound perplexity of the living" (87). He has no identity, no name other than the female nom de plume his job forces him to assume. His life, as pre- sented in West's jagged narrative, is episodic; and he can find no words, offer no advice that has not already been mass-produced. However much he might search for a "sincere answer," his position at the New York Post Dispatch dooms him to be an impostor: he is, ironically, employed to provide counsel by the very institution that menaces the ability to give counsel and to "produce" expe- rience in anything other than the standardized form of information (or, as West suggests, the joke).

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RITA BARNARD I MASS-MEDIATED STORYTELLING 49

The comparison enables us to historicize Miss Lonelyhearts' predicament and understand West's implicit cultural criticism. The advice columnist's failure is not to be understood as personal; the storyteller, as Benjamin's explicit as- sociation of the figure with traditional communities underscores, can only oper- ate in a context where everybody tells stories: his advice is after all only "a proposition" concerning a life-story related to him by somebody else. Such a context is clearly not provided by the city, where the zombie-like crowds-who walk in "a dreamlike violence," stumble into movie theaters, and grab love- story magazines from the garbage cans-have "torn mouths,"a symbolic detail emphasizing the alienation of the masses even from any expressive capacity (39). The absense of stories, of exchanged experiences, is not only metaphori- cally suggested, but explicitly assserted in the text. In one of the nastier episodes, Miss Lonelyhearts tries to get the "Clean Old Man" he discovers lurk- ing in the men's room to produce some sort of confession:

"Tell us the story of your life," he said, loading his voice with sympathy. "I have no story." "You must have. Every one has a life story." The old man began to sob. "Yes, I know, your tale is a sad one. Tell it, damn you, tell it." When the old man remained silent, he took his arm and twisted it ... He was

twisting the arms of all the sick and miserable, broken and betrayed, inarticu- late and impotent. He was twisting the arm of Desperate, Broken-Hearted, Sick-of-it-all, Disillusioned-with-tubercular-husband. (17-18)

This desperate violence makes perfect sense if we recall the social dimension of stories and advice underscored so strongly in "The Storyteller": Miss Lonelyhearts is, in effect trying to restore by force the community of narrative exchange in which his archaic role as advice-giver would no longer amount to fraud. 9 His failure is only too evident in the old man's silence. Shrike, Miss L.'s cynical editor, comments quite accurately on this situation when he complains, albeit with "elaborate" irony, that "nowadays there are so few people with whom one can really talk." There are no "heart-to-heart" talks in this world of "speakeasies" (and the irony of the word need hardly be underscored), where "[e]verybody is so hard-boiled" (21). 10

It is perhaps one of West's achievements in the novella that the "heart-to- heart" letters Miss Lonelyhearts receives from his clients (and which West adapted from real letters sent to "Susan Chester" of the Brooklyn Eagle) so clearly fail to break this silence. While the awkward language and mis- spelling of the letters may seem to indicate a certain individuality (at least

It is interesting that in this scene Miss Lonelyhearts and his companion assume the identities of the psychologists Havelock Ellis and Krafft-Ebing, themselves also institutionalized purveyors of that advice which would have been an organic part of the society of the storyteller. Warren Susman reminds us that in America the institutionalization and acceptance of these new professional experts in the "talking cure" was also a legacy of the thirties (201).

10 Amusingly, history seems to bear Shrike out--at least in so far as the advertising business is concerned. A McCann- Erickson account executive announced in 1931 that "The day of the dilettante is gone. The hard-boiled boys who know the business from the bottom up are now in the front office" (Lears 122-23).

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50 NOVEL I FALL 1993

compared to the callous brevity of the newspaper headlines, or to Shrike's elo- quent recitations of cultural cliches), West's description of them suggests that they too are mass-produced. The letters are "all of them alike, stamped from the dough of suffering with a heart-shaped cookie knife" (1). These "heart- shaped" letters are, one might say, the symbolic stand-in for the "heart-to- heart" exchange-just as the "speech balloon" of the comic strip is the symbolic stand-in for the conversational voice. We cannot forget, moreover, that these confessions are letters written in isolation and confusion to a newspaper office, a situation that already signifies the disappearance of that community of tellers and interpreters in which advice is possible.

The decay of storytelling is evident also in the case of those people Miss Lonelyhearts does meet face to face: the Doyles, the Clean Old Man, and Mary Shrike, Miss Lonelyhearts' teasing mistress. The latter is perhaps the most in- teresting case in point. She is an avid believer in the "heart-to-heart," but her endless stories about her tragic childhood reveal themselves in West's descrip- tion as arbitrary signs of the personal. Mary confides, for instance, that her "father was a portrait painter, a man of genius," but as Miss Lonelyhearts muses, she might equally well have said, "My father was a Russian prince, my father was a Piute Indian Chief, my father was an Australian sheep baron, my father lost all his money in Wall Street," or (coming full circle), "my father was a portrait painter" (23). The passage is particularly corrosive in suggesting that even parents, whom one might think of as the guarantors of an individu- al's uniqueness and "originality," have also in a sense become manufactured goods, standardized options in the "business of dreams." Mary Shrike is, in short, a kind of true confession machine, as her consistent association with technological imagery seems to emphasize: her dress resembles "glass-covered steel," her "pantomime" behaviour strikes Miss Lonelyhearts as "cleanly me- chanical" (22). No wonder that Miss Lonelyhearts finds himself incapable of offering "a proposition concerning the unfolding of [her] life": the life of this Betty Boop-like confession machine is unlikely to do anything as organic, or conventionally novelistic, as unfold. It should not surprise us to read that she "always talked in headlines" (20).

One final parallel between the two texts remains to be explored. I have al- ready suggested that there is, for Benjamin, a correlation between specific nar- rative forms and specific modes of production: the story is associated with arti- sanal manufacture, and thus retains the uniqueness of something handmade, whereas "information" is associated with the massive technical (re)productive capacity of a full-blown capitalist order. (The novel and the technology of printing occupy something of an intermediate position in this scheme.) It thus makes sense that the storyteller and the advice-columnist should also be ironi- cally and antithetically connected not only in the way they relate to people, but in the way they relate to the inanimate world of things, of commodities. Miss Lonelyhearts's hysterical obsession with the jumbled objects of the modern city, and his frustration at their trashy irrelevance and mute facticity, are (like his assault on the Clean Old Man) the result of a desperate attempt to re- store some significant order, some sense of aura to the dead world. But, whereas

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RITA BARNARD I MASS-MEDIATED STORYTELLING 51

the storyteller effortlessly stands at the hierarchical apex of "the world of created things," the things of Miss Lonelyhearts' world submit to no such hier- archy and order (104). At one point in the novel they even "take the field" against their would-be redeemer:

When he touched something, it spilled or rolled to the floor. The collar buttons disappeared under the bed, the point of the pencil broke, the handle of the razor fell off, the window shade refused to stay down. He fought back, but with too much violence, and was decisively defeated by the spring of the alarm clock. (11)

One of Miss Lonelyhearts' dreams is particularly evocative in this regard. In it he imagines himself to be "a magician who [does] tricks with doorknobs," and commands them to bleed, flower and speak (9). The dream is reminiscent of a passage in The Dream Life of Balso Snell, where the protagonist, Beagle Darwin, imagines himself performing a juggling act with "an Ivory Tower, a Still White Bird, the Holy Grail, the Nails, the Scourge, the Thorns, and a piece of the True Cross" (56). The act symbolically expresses a desire to reinvest the world of mass-produced commodities with aura, to turn the most banal of everyday objects into relics, mystical objects that bring to the world a message of redemp- tion and transformation. But the dream also hints at the failure of these ef-

forts. The mystical metamorphosis occurs on the stage of a crowded theater; the redemption is show biz, a matter of "tricks," a magician's sleight of hand.

Like Benjamin, then, West is concerned with the social and material aspects of narrative and counsel-as his minute, even obsessive interest in the bric-a- brac of the urban world would suggest. Miss Lonelyhearts' "doorknobs," for in- stance, are not merely imagistic details, nor are they exactly "objective correla- tives," expressive of a certain state of the mind. They stand in, synecdochi- cally, for all modern things, objects and commodities manufactured and related to in a certain way-and a different way from the items of handicraft that Benjamin invokes in "The Storyteller" essay. As such they are signs of the resis- tant facticity of the contemporary world; and reminders that not everything- not all kinds of narrative nor all kinds of redemption-is possible at any given moment in history. No matter, then, how intense Miss Lonelyhearts' desire to be sincere, and no matter how genuine his personal religious experience, the sto- ryteller's world cannot be re-invented (or so his dream tells us), except by a kind of social prestidigitation on the level of appearance.

III: Comic strips

Having looked at this kind of spectacular social magic, we have perhaps al- ready shifted the terms of analysis to those suggested by our second paradigm: the comic strip ad. Let me say immediately that in bringing these corny narra- tives to mind, I am not trying to demonstrate any specific resemblance between them and the novella. They stand here (as I suggested above) as a synecdoche of sorts, as reminders that traditional forms of meaning-narrative and advice,

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52 NOVEL I FALL 1993

moral authority, aura-were not exactly lost in West's world. Such forms were being simulated and recirculated apace. Rather than trace the "influence" of any individual ad, I shall therefore try to indicate in general terms the ideo- logical and discursive pressure that such utopian stories might exert on a "literary" text such as West's.

It is, however, quite reasonable to suppose that the "continuity series" ads impinged directly on West's imagination as he was writing Miss Lonelyhearts, the work he considered giving the subtitle "a novel in the form of a comic strip." He was always an aficionado of popular culture, and between 1929 and 1933 this interest started to take a more serious, investigative, even anthropo- logical turn. Inspired by William Carlos Williams's use of non-literary docu- ments in his book In The American Grain, by the reportorial impulse of much American writing of the time, and by the experiments of the Dadaists and Surrealists, West consciously "interested himself in entertainments in which the masses were interested, and now reassessed movies, cartoons, popular liter- ature, and jazz as expressions of collective yearning" (Martin, 165). His friend, Julian Shapiro, recalls specifically how he and West amused each other by reading the advertisements from magazines aloud to each other (Martin, 141), and one can easily imagine them delighting in those speech-balloon dialogues, crafted by the copy writers for Post Bran Flakes, Life Buoy, and Listerine.

We might also note that, while West eventually gave up his idea of treat- ing his chapters like the conventional frames of the comic strip, and of putting the dialogue in speech balloons, many of his critics have detected traces of the original idea in the final product. Cited in evidence are the novel's episodic structure, its rapid tempo, its caricature-like descriptions, its comically exces- sive violence, its "primary colored locations," and so forth. 11 It seems to me, however, that the novella's response to the popular culture of the day becomes even more striking once we relate it not just to the comic strips (Krazy Kat, Dick Tracy, etc.), but specifically to the comic strip advertisements of the day: to that brand-new narrative form in which the easy solutions of the therapeutic com- modity are combined with the pseudo-personal solace of the advice letter. Thematically and ideologically Miss Lonelyhearts is quite clearly marked by the shadow presence of such advertisements' narratives of quotidian salvation. The central problem in the text (for both the protagonist and the novelist) is surely the struggle to represent a world that has already, again and again, been represented and encoded by these familiar comedies of what Michael Schudson has called "Capitalist Realism" (214-18).

To make this claim with regard to Miss Lonelyhearts, a text saturated with the language of commercial hype, descriptions of advertising posters, parodic slogans, and so forth, is hardly a radical move. It is, after all, possible to argue that the "sudden profusion" of advertisements in the mid-1920s and the ideo- logical pressure exerted by their collective social narrative "reshaped the re- ception of narrativity as a whole."'2 By this argument all fictions of the time,

11 See for instance Martin, 197; Reid, 84-91; Zlotnick, 236-40; Strychacz, 165-66; Raban, 221.

12 Wicke, 120. Fredric Jameson also argues that the form and cultural meaning of modernist texts can be grasped fully only when they are seem in relation-indeed, in reaction--to mass culture, their dialectical counter. Modernism and mass

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RITA BARNARD I MASS-MEDIATED STORYTELLING 53

even those that do not explicitly thematize the struggle, are in some sense in competition with the infinitely reproduceable narratives of advertisement and their minor, but readily-delivered epiphanies. Miss Lonelyhearts is simply more self-conscious and self-reflexive in its examination of these new conditions

of reception. We might recall, to begin with, that Miss Lonelyhearts' advice column is

from its very inception an advertisement, a "circulation stunt" for the newspa- per; it is significant also that the only alternative employment which suggests itself to Miss L. is a job with an advertising agency. The enterprise, in other words, is made to seem almost inescapable, and seems to frame all possible ac- tivities. 3 Moreover, Miss Lonelyhearts' task is, one might say, to write ad- vertising copy for life itself: to translate the letters of his clients into tales of satisfied customers, redeemed, not from the mere embarassments of B.O., but from ennui, despair, poverty and terror.'4 Like all of society's proliferating purveyors of therapy (such as "Philadelphia Jack O'Brien" the body-building guru, who puts in a brief appearance in one of Shrike's speeches), Miss Lonelyhearts must offer his customers the promise of transformation, or at the very least a "spiritual liniment" (53), an "aspirin," (13), or a slogan (52). His column thus deals out a kind of pseudo-spiritual feel-good poetry (e.g. "Life is worth while, for it is full of dreams and peace, gentleness and ecstasy and faith that burns like a clear white flame on a grim dark altar" [1]). The potentially commercial character of such lines-we could surely trademark these as "Walter Pater Lite"-is highlighted in Shrike's constant parodies of such remedies. The editor, for instance, advocates the delights of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms with the line "Smoke a 3 B pipe"; he recommends "Christ Dentist" as being rather like Listerine, a "Preventer of Decay." In the context of his monologues even the biblical question "When the salt has lost its savour, who shall savour it again?" (35), comes to resemble a household hint, a letter to Mary Hale Martin, or Aunt Ellen, or Betty Crocker.

Miss Lonelyhearts recognizes all too clearly that he is not in a position to laugh at "advertisements offering to teach writing, cartooning, engineering, to add inches to the biceps and to develop the bust," nor at the dreams of those who wanted to "wear leather puttees, wanted to develop a grip that would im- press the boss, wanted to cushion Raoul's head on their swollen breasts" (22). Indeed, towards the end of the novel when Miss Lonelyhearts pretends to offer

culture are, as he puts it, "twin and inseparable forms of the fission of artistic production under late captalism" (CReification," 133-35).

13 A comparable sense of the pervasiveness of advertising is evident in the work of social critics of the time. I am thinking, for instance, of James Rorty, who in 1934 used the term "advertising business" to mean the "total apparatus of newspaper and magazine publishing in America, plus radio broadcasting, and with important qualifications, the movies" (his list continues); he also speaks of "the progressive seizure and use by business, of the apparatus of social communication in America" (ix).

14 It is instructive to compare the language of some of the advertisements of the time to that of Miss Lonelyhearts' sad letters. Copywriters inserted the solutions offered by their products into emotional situations only slightly less violent and embarrassing than those described in the novel. Take, for instance, the following sample from the Saturday Evening Post of October, 1935:

"No Dickie boy ... Mommy hasn't got an ear-ache ... she's just trying to shut out Daddy's grumblings! And don't cry ...

you'll get another little wagon ... Daddy didn't mean to kick so viciously." Poor Dicky-and poor mother ... There is a solution-if father will only listen: switch to the Valet Autostrop Razor. (104)

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himself as the solution to all of his fianc&e Betty's problems, he is described in words that, to my ear, have the unmistakable tone of advertising copy. He pre- sents himself as something that would go "with strawberry sodas and farms in Connecticut": a new brand of aftershave, one is tempted to suggest on the strength of West's adjectives, "simple and sweet, whimsical and poetic, a trifle collegiate, yet very masculine" (56).

Miss Lonelyhearts, then, exposes and parodies the discourse and promises of narratives like the comic strip ad. Moreover, the constant association of the good news of these commercial messages with the good news of the gospel, sug- gests that West saw this kind of discourse as falsely auratic: "the material re- construction of the religious illusion," to steal a phrase from Guy Debord (20). The authority of religion and the authority of the mass media are shown in the novella to be inextricably confounded. Even in his quest for the "sincere an- swer," Miss Lonelyhearts can think of his success as a redeemer only in terms of a kind of transcendental mass culture; he would submit drafts of his column to God and God, like an editor on high, would approve them, would bestow a nu- minous authority upon his advice (57). One of Shrike's comments casts his reli- gious impulse in a particularly sinister light (and one suspects that his view here bears authorial sanction). He implicitly associates Miss Lonelyhearts' efforts to reinstate a mystical order with Fascism-a political order which Benjamin, for one, regarded as a particularly toxic reinvention of the auratic. Miss Lonelyhearts, Shrike observes, is the "swollen Mussolini of the soul" (52). From this point of view, his attempt to, as it were, make the cultural trains run on time-to take on the role of a kind of sprititual Superman, or a press-agent for God-is arrogant and archaic.

IV: Novels

If religion, then, seems archaic and mendaciously auratic, the same can be said of the utopian dreams-the beauty and truth--of traditional art. Shrike's cyn- ical monologues drive home the idea that art's noble promesse de bonheur is no less illusory than the commercial panacea of advertising. Even in the very first chapter he sloganizes effortlessly for Miss Lonelyhearts' column: "Art is a Way Out"; "Art is distilled from suffering"; "Art is One of Life's Richest Offerings" (4). Art, or so he proclaims, brings relief to sufferers from dental problems, acne, and hunger:

Art! Be an artist or a writer. When you are cold, warm yourself before the flaming tints of Titian, when you are hungry, nourish yourself with great spiritual foods by listening to the noble periods of Bach, the harmonies of Brahms and the thunder of Beethoven.... For you l'art vivant, the living art, as you call it. Tell them that you know that your shoes are broken and that there are pimples on your face, yes, and that you have buck teeth and a club foot, but that you don't care, for tomorrow they are playing Beethoven's last quartets in Carnegie Hall and at home you have Shakespeare's plays in one volume. (34- 35)

54 NOVEL I FALL 1993

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RITA BARNARD I MASS-MEDIATED STORYTELLING 55

And while Shrike does not mention any novels in his list, it is clear that his charges also apply to this artistic form-the one that most pertinently concerns West, and that also stands at the center of "The Storyteller" (which Benjamin regarded as his counterpart to Lukacs's Theory of the Novel). 15 From a certain perspective, the novel can even be seen as the form most vulnerable to the charge of simulated redemption. It is not just the case that as a physical object the novel remains sealed, amidst the headlines, billboards, and movies, in what Benjamin once called the "archaic stillness of the book" (Reflections, 78). The inner form of its narrative (at least according to the Lukicsian conception put forward in "The Storyteller") consciously aspires to a sense of unity and sig- nificance: the novel assumes the responsibility to re-invent a substitute totality in the modern world (Lukics, 128). Its focus on the problem of "the meaning of life," places upon the novel the increasingly difficult task of delivering an in- effable meaning from the recalcitrant and fragmentary materials of isolated lives, an effect which it achieves, most often, through the agency of memory. And while this totalizing effort is for LukAcs both progressive and positive, the novel's heroic efforts at meaning and unity can be-and have been--cast as an ideological contrivance that simulates a coherence lacking in the social world.

Both Benjamin and West emphasize the latter view. Their work implies that the substitute totality of the novel is no longer tenable-no longer, as Shrike might have put it, "a Way Out." Benjamin's comments on the ideologi- cal alibi represented by the novelistic "character" are precisely to the point: "By integrating the social process with the development of a person, it bestows the most frangible justification on the order determining it. The legitimacy it provides stands in direct opposition to reality. Particularly in the Bildungsroman, it is this inadequacy that is actualized" (88). West has even less patience with the notion of Bildung; it is subjected to a scornful parody in Shrike's deliberately corny (and wholly false) narrative about Miss Lonelyhearts' rise through the "University of Hard Knocks":

And then, the man, the man Miss Lonelyhearts-struggling valiantly to real- ize a high ideal, his course shaped by a proud aim. But alas! cold and scornful, the world heaps obstacle after obstacle in his path; deems he the goal at hand, a voice of thunder bids him 'Halt!' 'Let each hindrance be thy ladder,' thinks he. 'Higher, even higher, mount!' And so he climbs ... (54)

Both West and Benjamin, moreover, implicitly place an embargo on a certain kind of interpretation of the novel, in which the heroic reader, one might say, abets the heroic novelist in his efforts. This is precisely the kind of reading one discovers in the work of West critics who insist that the novelist "succeeds"

15 Benjamin wrote to Gershom Scholem that he had conceived of "a new 'theory of the novel,' sure to gain you, strong approval and a place next to Luk&cs" (Witte, 19).

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56 NOVEL I FALL 1993

even while Miss Lonelyhearts fails. 16 Each text, by a curious and intriguing co- incidence, offers a description of someone reading a novel-a description which, I would argue, serves as a kind of cautionary image for future readers and critics and therefore merits our close attention.

Section xv of "The Storyteller" draws a picture of an avid reader, whose "burning interest," fanned by the effect of suspense, feeds on the novel as a fire feeds on "logs in the fireplace" (100). It is not an unsympathetic picture. But the metaphor by which Benjamin expresses the novel's power of fascination-"a dry material" for the readerly flame-is double-edged. It damns the novel as no longer vital. The scene is in fact rather a desolate one. In contrast to the scene in which someone listens to a story in the company of the storyteller (perhaps weaving or spinning with other spinners and weavers as he listens), the reader of the novel is alone. He also seems cold as he devours his book, try- ing to warm his "shivering life" by the inevitably self-consuming flame of his reading. The futility of this readerly pleasure recalls the passion of the suffer- ing art-lover in Shrike's cynical caricature, who tries to warm himself before the illusory "flaming tints of Titian." Benjamin's description even gives the act of reading a certain anti-social ghoulishness. The "meaning of life," he argues, emerges only at that moment of death; for it is only from the retrospective per- spective of the finis-whether this means the death of a character or the end of a narrative-that the total significance of fictional life can be seen at all. What the reader of the novel seeks, therefore, is to draw from the death of an- other "the warmth which we never draw from our own fate" (111). The novel, the product of the solitary bourgeois subject, appears, in this description, to produce further fragmentation; it only increases the lonely individuality that made it difficult to share experience in the first place.

It is with this idea that the essay's discussion of the novel comes to a rather abrupt end, and Benjamin turns exclusively to his meditations on the decaying craft of the story. This shift in direction is critically significant. It suggests that the novel-the novel as substitute totality, that is-has become an aes- thetic and political dead-end. It is even perhaps a kind of danger. Benjamin, as Jiirgen Habermas once observed, held the strangely mystical and pessimistic view that "the semantic potential on which human beings draw in order to in- vest the world with meaning and make it accessible to experience" is not infi- nite; this potential, deposited in the earliest cultural forms "cannot be ex- panded but only transformed" (110). It would therefore seem particularly trou- bling that the "meaning of life," so heroically synthesized by the novelist's

16 One readily discovers examples of this kind of reading in Harold Bloom's recent collection of critical essays on West. After an appropriately negative assessment of the "disorder of language" in the modern world, Jeffrey Duncan, for instance, announces with surprising confidence that West was "as an artist, a practising idealist":

Miss Lonelyhearts looks at a gray sky and, empiricist that he is, sees only a dirty tabula rasa. Against that he sees the most

referential and hence ephemeral of all literature, a espapr, failing (naturally) to soar. But West's uards liP nicely, bearing Jbr the space of our imagination all the significance Miss Lonelyhearts misses in his, not in the form of crosses and doues, to be

sure, but in the form of figures, of ideas, of axrds touched with life and touching us with the same' (99).

This kind of redemptive move minimizes West's discomfiting profundity as a cultural critic in the very same gesture that celebrates him as an artist. It also demonstrates the residual power of the Lukicsian theory of the novel. Lukics's cultural hero is always the novelist whose creation "stands as that momentary reconciliation of matter and spirit toward which his hero strives in vain" (Jameson, Marxism,173).

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RITA BARNARD I MASS-MEDIATED STORYELLING 57

backward glance, is "jealously" seized upon and recklessly "swallow[ed]" by the solitary reader-who cannot relay this experience to others. 17 Benjamin's critical efforts in this essay and elsewhere therefore tend to privilege marginal and non-affirmative forms: forms in which the "semantic potential" is not given in such a readily consumable package as the novel, or forms where mean- ing is in even greater danger of being lost forever. These might be literary (as in the case of the Baroque allegorists and the Surrealists) or mass-produced (as in the case of the fascinating detritus of the early forms of commercial culture-- dioramas, fashions, expositions, advertisements-studied in the Arcades Project). The story is also such a form. Rendered obsolescent by the forces of modernity, and marginalized to the very point of extinction, it yields not a re- membered and synthesized meaning, but one that is virtually forgotten- though once experienced from day to day. Benjamin tries to preserve, in the fragmentary meditations of his essay, the memory-trace of an earlier unity still legible in this dying form. He therefore places at the end of the essay a counter-image to the novel's destructive and scarcely warming fire: "the gentle flame" of the story, which (like the earlier metaphor of the still germinative seeds from the ancient pyramids [90]) suggests a more productive albeit parsi- monious illumination. In this sense, Benjamin's "conservative revolutionary" criticism can be regarded as redemptive-not as destructive, but as transforma- tive, of the promises of high or mass culture (Habermas, 117, 124).

The "scene of reading" in Miss Lonelyhearts is ostensibly happier than the one from "The Storyteller." It is placed, perhaps strategically, quite early in the text. In his austere room, Miss Lonelyhearts pores over The Brothers Karamazov, specifically the passage where Father Zossima preaches the ne- cessity of learning "to perceive the divine mystery in things" and of learning "to love the whole world with an all-embracing love" (8). Miss Lonelyhearts reads with appreciation. But West slyly suggests that this act of reading is lit- tle different from someone reading a sob-column, or a comic-strip ad. Miss Lonelyhearts finds Father Zossima's words to be "excellent advice," and be- lieves quite readily that if he followed them, the "Kingdom of Heaven would arrive," and "his column would be syndicated" (8). The utopian promises of lit- erature, religion, and mass culture are again sinisterly intertwined, and Miss Lonelyhearts' rather cheap and self-serving idealism makes us all the more suspicious of false solutions as "spiritual liniments" (53) which can all too eas- ily become a "damned aspirin" (13). Shortly afterwards, when one of his nas-

17 Habermas's observation emerges from a discussion of Benjamin's ambivalence about aura, which I will not attempt to rehearse here. I might, however, try to suggest another way in which the novel, with its reliance on memory and its retrospective interpretation of the total "meaning of life," might strike Benjamin as a kind of aesthetic and political dead- end (this despite his great admiration for Proust and Kafka). His work on Proust, in fact, offers us two useful analytical terms: the "mwmoire volontaire" and the "mrmoire involuntaire" (derived from Bergson but also, or so Fredric Jameson suggests, from Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle). For Freud the unconscious "memory trace," however strange and fragmentary, is privileged over the willful reconstruction of conscious recollection, and is far more suggestive to the analyst--far closer to the hidden "truth." Indeed, the conscious memory can be dangerous since it tends to displace the memory trace. Similarly, for Benjamin, the story with its "short-lived reminiscences" is far more productive of a true, though fragmentary, illumination than is the "perpetuating remembrance of the novelist" (98). And the novel, as "The Storyteller" clearly suggests, tends to displace the story--it is one of the first symptoms of the story's decline. See Jameson, Marxism, 63-64, and Buck-Morss, Dialectics, 38-39 for further discussion.

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58 NOVEL I FALL 1993

tier colleagues salutes Miss Lonelyhearts with a mocking "How now Dostoievski?" his hopes for cultural salvation, or even a useful lesson, seem idle indeed (25).

This scene of reading, in short, forbids by parody any kind of redemptive reading or writing. Significantly, however, West does not exactly abandon the novel form but uses it in a way that the literary history of the "Storyteller" es- say does not foresee: as a medium for challenging and exploding the affirma- tive novel from within. Miss Lonelyhearts seems to insist that as long as the world remains unchanged, all cultural promises will be the merest hype, and the difference between novels and mass culture will be irrelevant. In other words, if a solution is to be found (and West makes no claim that it will), it will not be found in culture, but in a transformed way of life. I say this cautiously, since the extreme negativity of Miss Lonelyhearts does not exactly sanction this final and desperate hope. But it is significant that in a poem from the same year, "Burn the Cities" (1933), West presents an image we might juxtapose to the storyteller's "gentle flame," an image of the utterly destructive flames of social revolution:

Burn the cities Burn Paris

City of light

Twice-burned city Warehouse of the arts

The spread hand is a star The fist a torch Workers of the World Unite Burn Paris

(Martin, 329-30)

In the rubble of the great cities of culture, West places, startlingly, the figure of Marx, who "performs" the trick Miss Lonelyhearts could never pull off: "the miracle of loaves and fishes," of giving the masses not the "stones" of his ad- vice column but real bread.

The project suggested by West's "novel in the form of a comic strip" can now be grasped more clearly. There is a temptation to read this intriguing phrase as a call for a reinvention of the novel, for the divising of a new kind of het- eroglossic text, in which the discursive boundaries between high and mass cul- ture have been erased. (I am thinking here of the kind of argument that has been made with regard to Ulysses, for instance, which as one critic puts it "performs a tango with advertising, and is set to its music" [Wicke, 123]). But Miss Lonelyhearts seems, rather, to call for something more desperate and anti- aesthetic: an abolition of affirmative culture, a refusal to create yet another false utopia. West is drawn, or so the bitter parodies of Miss Lonelyhearts sug- gest, towards a kind of demystifying and subversive practice--much like that

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RITA BARNARD I MASS-MEDIATED STORYErLING 59

which came to be advocated, some thirty years later, by the Situationist International:

To make art would be to betray the common, buried wishes art once spoke for, but to practice d6tournement-to write new speech balloons for newspaper ncomic-strips, or for that matter old masters, to insist simultaneously on a "devaluation" of art and its "reinvestment" in a new kind of social speech, a "communication" containing its own criticism, a technique that could not mystify because its very form was a demystification. (Marcus, 170)

It is telling that West's next work, A Cool Million, comes even closer than Miss Lonelyhearts to this kind of subversive and irreverent citationality. Its lan- guage is devoid not only of any sign of high literary or personal style but also fatuous in its reiteration of optimistic cliches.

To return finally to Benjamin's argument, if the novel problematizes the meaning of life, then West's "novel in the form of a comic strip" problematizes the meaning of the novel-by making that search for meaning too explicit and therefore parodic and vacuous. In this sense, Miss Lonelyhearts is indeed "a communication containing its own criticism"; it writes new speech balloons, as it were, for an old strip. It confronts the self-destructive possibility that outdated artistic pieties have become inadequate-just as inadequate as the good country life advocated by Miss Lonelyhearts' sentimental fiancee, the pleasures of the 3B pipe, and the magic of Lux.

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