Miss Lonelyhearts and the Performance of Nihilism
Nathanael West’s novel Miss Lonelyhearts centers around an advice columnist who begins to feel the unbearable weight of his readers’ sufferings, and struggles to find the words of wisdom in order to placate them. This sentiment begins to take a toll on his work, and eventually discharges into his personal life, where everything seems to be devoid of any purpose. As the eponymous protagonist strives desperately to find meaning through various means, the iconoclastic editor Shrike is always there to derogate him to the point of distraction, and finally to the brink of insanity. Miss Lonelyhearts’ quixotic search and Shrike’s antics are both tied to a nihilistic outlook, and are rooted in performance. While Lonelyhearts seems to be performing in front of a full theater (inhabited by his readership, along with his girlfriend Betty), Shrike performs primarily to an audience of one (Lonelyhearts). Significantly, these performances have opposite intentions, but lead to the same conclusion by similar means. Lonelyhearts, through multiple forms of histrionics (embodied through public sympathy, object fantasies, physical intimacy, and religion), intends to find meaning, but fails. Shrike, through his own brand of theatrics (shtick, irony, and cruelty), intends to show that life has no meaning, and succeeds. Lonelyhearts’ frustration, and ultimate failure, lies in the impotence of his performances; the theater is full, but he is unable to fulfill the desires of any of the audience members, or himself. Shrike, on the other hand, through the degeneration of his lone spectator, succeeds with his performance of nihilism.
The first type of performance portrayed by Lonelyhearts is the project of public sympathy. The role of advice columnist has been given to him, and, significantly, we never know the eponymous protagonist by his real name. “Miss Lonelyhearts” is nothing more than a mask, concealing a man that remains obscure to the reader. Unlike a Shakespearian fool, who will always outwit a member of a higher rank, Lonelyhearts remains tongue-tied throughout the text, towards his peers, as well as his superior, Shrike. His unintelligibility, as well as the impossibility of his task, is reflected in the pool of extreme afflictions suffered by his readership (e.g. a girl born without a nose).
In his chapter on European Nihilism in The Will to Power, Friedrich Nietzsche states, “What does nihilism mean? That the highest values devaluate themselves. The aim is lacking; “why?” finds no answer” (Nietzsche 9). Analogously, Lonelyhearts faces questions like “Ought I commit suicide?” (West 3), “How can I support my children?” (West 43), and “What is this whole stinking business for[?]” (West 47). As he digs through the layers of what he views as genuine sympathy, he cannot find an adequate answer to any of these questions, because, in fact, there is no answer.
The column had started off as a job- a joke among everyone at the newspaper, including himself- and it eventually transformed into an irrevocable obsession. He cannot turn away from the writers of these letters, but at the same time he is unable to formulate any coherent responses. He essentially becomes an actor on stage who is desperately trying to remember his lines. For him, the play that began as a farce has inexplicably become a tragedy. “He found it impossible to continue. The letters were no longer funny. He could not go on finding the same joke funny thirty times a day for months on end” (West 1). From these three sentences alone, the reader should become skeptical as to how genuine the protagonist’s feelings really are. If the examples given are any indication, it is hard to imagine any of the letters seeming funny to the person they were addressed to. Furthermore, is it on account of a sudden burst of sympathy that he is no longer laughing, or is it simply because things generally lose their original meaning through repetition and mass-production? If it’s a case of the latter, then this adds another dimension to Lonelyhearts’ doomed performance; he cannot help these people, not only because there is no secret meaning of life in which he can indulge them with, but because there are physically too many letters for him to answer. Therefore, the more letters that find their way onto his desk, the more impossible, disorderly, and meaningless his job becomes.
In his essay on Miss Lonelyhearts, Randall Reid asserts that “[Miss Lonelyhearts’] passivity is that of an actor confronted with a role. The part is dictated by the pressure of mass suffering and by the cynical fraud of his employers, and if he plays it at all he must play it according to the script. But the role is both unplayable and unavoidable” (Reid 92). From this angle, the play that was once a farce is still a farce and, in fact, always has been. From the beginning, the play hasn’t changed, only the role of Lonelyhearts has changed. In one of the few eloquent speeches that he gives in the duration of the novel, his position on the matter is revealed to his girlfriend Betty. While speaking in the third-person, it feels like he’s speaking, not of himself, but a character that he has no choice but to portray: “‘He sees that the majority of the letters are profoundly humble pleas for moral and spiritual advice, that they are articulate expressions of genuine suffering… For the first time in his life, he is forced to examine the values by which he lives. This examination shows that he is the victim of the joke and not its perpetrator’” (West 32). While there might be fleeting moments of authentic feeling that invade the text, they remain a means to a dire end: “Crowds of people moved through the street with a dream-like violence. As he looked at their broken hands and torn mouths he was overwhelmed by the desire to help them, and because this desire was sincere, he was happy despite the feeling of guilt which accompanied it” (West 39). In this particular scene, the origin of his guilt is unknown, and the result of his sympathy is a perpetual state of disorder, leading to no where with a similar “dream-like violence.” Regarding Lonelyhearts’ doomed performance, Reid finally concludes, “The theatrical metaphor defines the real basis of West’s psychology... All attempts at love or dignity fail. They are puerile gestures which refuse to express real emotion, trite expressions which have become meaningless through repetition... There is, therefore, no escape in comedy” (Reid 94).
While there might be no escape in comedy, there is no denying the theatrical and comedic elements of Lonelyhearts’ memorable object fantasies. In some instances, it is unclear whether these fantasies are Lonelyhearts’ or West’s: “He walked into the shadow of a lamp-post that lay on the path like a spear. It pierced him like a spear” (West 4), or later on, “the gray sky looked as if it had been rubbed with a soiled eraser. It held no angels, olive-bearing doves, wheels within wheels. Only a newspaper struggled in the air like a kite with a broken spine” (West 5). These could either be the unconscious musings of the protagonist, or the author adding insult to his already injured hero. Other instances are more clearly emblematic of Lonelyhearts’ direct fantasies: “Tomorrow, in his column, he would ask Broken-hearted, Sick-of-it-all, Desperate, Disillusioned-with-tubercular-husband and the rest of his correspondents to come here and water the soil with their tears. Flowers would then spring up, flowers that smelled of feet” (West 5). Either way, the objects are seen as movable props that add dimension and immediacy to Lonelyhearts‘ abject performance. Furthermore, the anthropomorphizing of certain things (e.g. a newspaper with a “broken spine”) suggest that these aren’t simply passive objects, but additional characters that play an active role to the outcome of the scene.
In the introduction to his book, Comedy is a Man in Trouble, Alan Dale muses, “the most common structural device in slapstick... is the chase. It’s the ultimate kinetic expression of the hero’s being out of step; his wishes can’t be borne, his idiosyncrasy can’t be resolved; he simply has to hotfoot it out of the range of authority or society he’s run up against” (Dale 7). In Lonelyhearts’ case, he is continually chasing after a sense of purpose, to no avail. Shrike, with his constant stream of facetious remarks, is obviously the authority figure he is up against, but the sociopathic editor pales in comparison to the society in which Lonelyhearts lives, where he is bombarded with myriad letters and objects, yet is unable to find an ounce of meaning. Paradoxically, it is the objects that follow him throughout his doomed quest, first in his dreams, then his waking life, and finally within his delirium. As his roles change, the objects change. In a world filled with life but no meaning, he must instill meaning in the lifeless.
In the initial dream sequence, he plays the role of a magician-priest. “With sleep, a dream came in which he found himself on the stage of a crowded theater. He was a magician who did tricks with doorknobs. At his command, they bled, flowered, spoke. After his act was finished, he tried to lead his audience in prayer. But no matter how hard he struggled, his prayer was one Shrike had taught him and voice was that of a conductor calling stations” (West 9). As a magician, he “succeeds.” With the objects at his beckon call, he perform miraculous acts. Yet, as he switches to the role of a priest, he is unable to perform something as simple as leading a prayer. Despite his prowess as a magician, the miracles are ultimately useless, as he is unable transcend above the “range of authority,” which is embodied by Shrike.
In his waking life, he views himself as both a man oppressed by the existence of objects, as well as a savior who is canonized through the use of objects. Lonelyhearts’ perception of objects in the former case relates directly to his obsession with order. It is within these moments where West’s comedy is especially magnified, where the objects take on the role of minor characters with authority, rebelling all at once with the sole purpose of tormenting the protagonist: “All the inanimate things over which he had tried to obtain control took the field against him. 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” (West 11).
In his essay on West’s use of deadpan humor, Justus Nieland states that “West’s slapstick operates when the subject, who can neither feel the world’s pain nor ascertain the status of the material world, explodes in comic-strip violence or feels his feeling stall out” (Nieland 73). In a world without meaning, Lonelyhearts turns to the material world for solace, only to find a more unforgiving, implacable chaos. Shortly thereafter, he turns to his waking life fantasies, where all of his readers have come to worship him through useless things: “He... turned again to the imagined desert where Desperate, Broken-hearted and the others were still building his name. They had run out of sea shells and were using faded photographs, soiled fans, time-tables, playing cards, broken toys, imitation jewelry- junk that memory made precious, far more precious than anything the sea might yield” (West 26). The strange beauty of this scene is upstaged by the underlying sense of futility that it exudes. The people in the scene are not people, but characters: Desperate, Broken-hearted. The name they are building is not a real name: Miss Lonelyhearts. The adjectives describing the objects (“faded,” “soiled,” broken”) emit a unanimously pathetic quality. Furthermore, it doesn’t seem far-fetched to infer that once the shrine is completed, the very sea that brought forth the objects will eventually destroy it.
Finally, while in a state of delirium, he imagines himself standing in front of a pawnshop, the graveyard of abandoned objects, where he views the “paraphernalia of suffering,” along with a “tortured high light twisted on the blade of a gilt knife, a battered horn grunted with pain” (West 30). The passive adjectives from the previous fantasy have made way for more violent, disparaging ones, like “tortured” and “battered.” Similar to the aforementioned magician scene, the anthropomorphizing of objects are directly related to his current role. Later, in one of the more didactic, yet illuminating sections of the novel, West professes that “man has a tropism for order. Keys in one pocket, change in another. Mandolins are tuned GDAE. The physical world has a tropism for disorder, entropy. Man against Nature… the battle of the centuries. Keys yearn to mix with change. Mandolins strive to get out of tune. Every order has within it the germ of destruction. All order is doomed, yet the battle is worth while” (West 31). The “battle” is essentially the performance in which Lonelyhearts is the lead character. While Order is the play he wants to be in, where “the hero’s determination propels him through the story, by the end of which he often enough triumphs by the very objects and forces that bewildered and exasperated him at the outset” (Dale 10), Disorder is the play in which he is unfortunately confined, where nothing triumphs, not even love.
Regarding the state of love, West chose to go against the current of sentimentalism. Lonelyhearts is not heartsick, nor has he been scorned; he is simply unable to love, in any sense of the word. Therefore, all of the romance and overt sexuality is played out not through love or desire, but rather superficial role-playing. With Betty, he plays the role of a boyfriend-fiance. With Fay Doyle, he plays the role of a lover. In both cases, he can find no where in himself anything that resembles sincere feeling. The things he says are lines appropriate to the scene, and the gestures involved are mere stage directions: “[Betty] had accepted him and they had planned their life after marriage, his job and her gingham apron, his slippers beside the fireplace and her ability to cook. He had avoided her since. He did not feel guilty; he was merely annoyed at having been fooled into thinking that such a solution was possible” (West 12).
The image of the “slippers beside the fireplace” is cliche to the point of madness. Interestingly enough, when he states his frustration at “having been fooled,” this is ones of the few points in the novel where he directly alludes to the fact that his actions are leading to failure. Shortly thereafter, he berates Betty for no apparent reason, other than his own irritation: “He began to shout at her, accompanying his shouts with gestures that were too appropriate, like those of an old-fashioned actor” (West 12), which is followed by a cruel string of rhetoric: “‘What’s the matter, sweetheart?’ he asked, patting her shoulder threateningly. ‘Didn’t you like the performance?’” (West 13). The performance has failed, and has degenerated into farce.
The performance becomes even more forced and clumsy when he is confronted by Fay Doyle, who had written him a letter complaining about her marriage. In turn, he goes from being a fiance to a lover, a role he is equally inept at portraying. In Nieland’s essay, he claims that “Lonelyhearts is much more comfortable with abstractions than material particularities, and this becomes laughably obvious in the slapstick confrontations with the body of his readership, which he tends to understand as obscene materializations of his letters, physical manifestations of suffering that remain maddeningly unknowable” (Nieland 70). Indeed, he seems caught off guard when one of his letters has become a real person, and his awkwardness swiftly proceeds into the territory of slapstick: “He drew back when she reached for a kiss. She caught his head and kissed him on the mouth. At first it ticked like a watch, then the tick softened and thickened into a heart throb. It beat louder and more rapidly each second, until he thought that it was going to explode and pulled away with a rude jerk” (West 28). Although he had been given the illusion of power in the case of Betty momentarily, here we see the performance of intimacy turn against him, just as the aforementioned objects of his fantasies “rebelled” against him.
Once they have slept together, Mrs. Doyle tells him the dire story of her marriage, which is equal parts grotesque and cliche. Once she has finished her lines, he misses his cue and she lets him know: “He remained silent until she nudged him into speech with her elbow” (West 30). While this instance is comparable to one actor urging another to recite his lines, a more extreme view could be that of a ventriloquist awaking his dummy. He has lost all semblance of control, and this fact is cemented into reality when he says further, “‘You’re still pretty...’ without knowing why, except that he was frightened” (West 30). It is no coincidence that the following chapter is where Lonelyhearts finds himself within the “Dismal Swamp,” or a state of delirium.
Like the cases of sympathy and objects, intimacy led to a place without meaning. Paradoxically, he had initially used the letters to avoid intimacy, and in this case he had used intimacy to avoid the letters. However, compared to the letters, with which he still had a dire obsession, sex was a fleeting production. After sympathy, objects, and intimacy, there was a final mode of performance through which Lonelyhearts would intend to find meaning: “If he could only believe in Christ, then adultery would be simple and the letters extremely easy to answer” (West 26).
In the beginning, there were two jokes floating around the newspaper office. One was Lonelyhearts’ column, and the other was religion, specifically Christianity. “Christ was the answer, but, if he did not want to get sick, he had to stay away from the Christ business. Besides, Christ was Shrike’s particular joke, “Soul of Miss L, glorify me. Body of Miss L, save me. Blood of…” (West 3). Untrue to his word, and against the ironclad irony of Shrike, he moves steadily toward the “Christ business.” In the final act, religion is the mode of performance that ultimately destroys the actor.
From the outset, there is a direct correlation between Lonelyhearts’ state of mind and religion; the further he veers away from sanity, the closer he moves toward Christ. In his essay, “The Religious Masquerade: Miss Lonelyhearts,” Kingsley Widmer declares, “the role-playing religious order madly violates the (dis)ordering that is. Religion, by the same logic with which it provides acceptance or solace, anesthetizes the essential human and defeats the actual... To be “born again,” as was Miss Lonelyhearts, is to be dead- and quite literally- to the truth” (Widmer 29). In this sense, Lonelyhearts is a dead man walking, long before the realization of the climax.
The first instance of Lonelyhearts being seen in a religious position comes in the aforementioned dream sequence, when he fails to lead a group into prayer. In the following dream, which is conspicuously reminiscent of the story of Abraham and Isaac, he is seen on a hill with a group of college friends, where they intend to sacrifice a lamb. Unlike the case of Abraham, no angel of God appears to prevent him from carrying out this act, and the result is nightmarish: “He brought the knife down hard. The blow was inaccurate and made a flesh wound. He raised the knife again and this time the lamb’s violent struggles made him miss altogether. The knife broke on the altar” (West 10). Later, he finds the bleeding lamb under a bush and kills it with a rock, leaving the remains to a storm of flies. In the absence of God, the sacrifice- thus, the performance- has no meaning. As Reid declares, “In the world of Miss Lonelyhearts, all gods are dead. And the deadness of these alternatives to the redeemer role intensifies the pressure upon Miss Lonelyhearts to make his part come alive” (Reid 94). In the lamb scene, Lonelyhearts is a self-proclaimed Messiah who has no message to give. With every blow of the knife, and every violent convulsion, he is striving for a sense of purpose and self-worth, and yet this is something he is unable to achieve. The harder he impales the lamb, the further he veers away from his goal.
According to Nieland, “[Miss Lonelyhearts’] tough luck is not just the grim lesson of the lamb episode but, in fact, the central comedy of Miss Lonelyhearts, whose protagonist’s projects of symbolic uplift- his work of first feeling his readership’s pain and then responding to it in a meaningful way- are thwarted at every turn” (Nieland 62). In a tumultuous scene with Fay and Peter Doyle, Lonelyhearts’ view of himself as a religious figure has already begun to take its toll on his waking life, and he fails miserably in this role: “Miss Lonelyhearts realized that now was the time to give his message. It was now or never... ‘Christ is love,’ he screamed at them. It was a stage scream, but he kept on. ‘Christ is the black fruit that hangs on the crosstree. Man was lost by eating of the forbidden fruit. He shall be saved by eating of the bidden fruit. The black Christ-fruit, the love fruit…’” (West 49). This forced declaration not only fails to leave any impression on the Doyles, but it fails to convince Lonelyhearts, himself. While the desperation in his voice is painfully real, the message of his sermon is nothing short of balderdash.
Near the end of the novel, a fever takes hold of Lonelyhearts, and religion takes an irreversible clutch on his psyche. “He fastened his eyes on the Christ that hung on the wall opposite his bed. As he stared at it, it became a a bright fly, spinning with quick grace on a background of blood velvet sprinkled with tiny nerve cells... Everything else in the room was dead” (West 56-57). In this moment, religion merges with object fantasy and becomes a single performance, encapsulated by insanity. When Doyle emerges onto the scene (apparently, with the purpose of killing Lonelyhearts), this is the moment of climax in Lonelyhearts’ spiritual opus: “God had sent him so that Miss Lonelyhearts could perform a miracle and be certain of his conversion. It was a sign. He would embrace the cripple and the cripple would be made whole again, even as he, a spiritual cripple, had been made whole” (West 57). Consequently, Lonelyhearts fails to secure a mutual embrace, the gun in Doyle’s possession explodes prematurely, and the two men fall only “part of the way down the stairs” (West 58). In the end, the performance of Lonelyhearts fails on every level.
For every failure that Lonelyhearts suffers, Shrike is closer to succeeding. Even in Lonelyhearts’ moments of solitude, Shrike’s spirit looms over him like an insidious shadow. On the other hand, in Shrike’s presence, Lonelyhearts is like a doe-eyed man walking towards his own execution. While the advice columnist is searching everywhere for meaning in vain, his editor leaves no stone unturned in proving that there is no meaning. Through his unique brand of histrionics, nothing remains sacred, including (especially) religion: “‘I can walk on my own water. Haven’t you ever heard of Shrike’s Passion in the Luncheonette, or the Agony in the Soda Fountain? Then I compared the wounds in Christ’s body to the mouths of a miraculous purse in which we deposit the small change of our sins’” (West 7). With all the mockery he is making of religion, including the venomous double entendre “small change of our sins,” this is just one of many incendiary speeches he makes within the text. His intuitive sense of anarchy is shocking, if for no other reason than the fact it is so uncompromising. In order to remain consistent in his performance, he relies on a series of unwavering mannerisms: “Although his gestures were elaborate, his face was blank. He practiced a trick used so much by moving-picture comedians- the dead pan. No matter how fantastic or excited his speech, he never changed his expression. Under a shining white globe of his brow, his features huddled together in a dead, gray triangle” (West 6). With the exception of a fleeting moment- “here the dead pan broke” (West 21)- where sadness interrupts his voice, there is no progression of change in Shrike; he is the true “Stone-Face” of Miss Lonelyhearts. Throughout the text, irony is his mode, alcohol is his prop, and nihilism is his aim.
“Nihilism,” according to Nietzsche, “is ambiguous.” It can either be “a sign of increased power of the spirit: as active nihilism,” or a “decline and recession of the power of the spirit: as passive nihilism (Nietzsche 17).” If Shrike can be seen as being possessed by an “active nihilism,” while Lonelyhearts is possessed by a “passive nihilism,” there is no other scene that reflects this so starkly (and theatrically) than “Miss Lonelyhearts and the Dismal Swamp.” First, all of the objects in Lonelyhearts’ fantasies reflect a state of utter dejection. Then, he muses on the fact that all order is doomed. Lying in bed, feeling literally “drunk with exhaustion” (West 31), he falls asleep. Even in the confines of his room, he has found himself unable to escape the meaninglessness of the world, and feels a sense powerlessness, or otherwise a “decline and recession of the power of the spirit.”
Suddenly, without warning or invitation, “active nihilism” breaks through the door, in the form of a slapstick comedian bereft of applause from the audience: “Shrike burst into the room. He was drunk and immediately set up a great shout, as though he believed that Miss Lonelyhearts was too near death to hear distinctly” (West 32). Lonelyhearts remains passive, but Shrike is relentless: “Miss Lonelyhearts turned his face to the wall and pulled up the covers. But Shrike was unescapable. He raised his voice and talked through the blankets into the back of Miss Lonelyhearts’ head” (West 32). Then, with the intensity of a man single-handedly burning down a forest, and the comic voracity of Groucho Marx, he verbally destroys seemingly every human institution designed to relieve either boredom or suffering, including hedonism, art, and religion.
Although blatant irony is his weapon of choice here, the unseen paradox of Shrike’s speech could very well have escaped him. He might be preaching a message close to the truth, but like his counterpart, he is still reciting lines and following stage directions. He is a character, a parody, not a human being. “Shrike is locked into his role just as Miss Lonelyhearts is locked into his,” says Robert Emmet Long, in his essay, “Miss Lonelyhearts: The Absurd Dead Center of the World.” “His illusion is that he can compensate for the loss of God and of spiritual values through a defiant hedonism. But hedonism is merely another escape dream, as he himself, at one point, notes, and for Shrike it is singularly and bitterly pleasureless. Shrike’s shrillness is an attempt to kill the nerve of feeling, which mocks his attempt to find self-mastery through hardened intelligence alone. Inwardly divided, caught between a spirituality that is dead and a sexuality that is malignant, Miss Lonelyhearts and Shrike are ‘performers’ unable to achieve an authentic sense of self” (Long 78).
Miss Lonelyhearts and Shrike both have their stages on which they perform. Miss Lonelyhearts has his dreams, waking life fantasies, and strained relationships. Shrike has the speakeasies, parties, and, most memorably, Lonelyhearts’ room. It is through a hard-boiled style of slapstick that their desires are either ephemerally carried out or permanently withheld. While the conventional uses of slapstick portray the temporary chaos of a make-believe world, West’s slapstick portrays a perpetual chaos of the real-world. From the start, the performances from the two main players are doomed to fail. In Miss Lonelyhearts’ case, every step intended toward meaning is, in reality, two steps closer the chasm of disorder. In Shrike’s case, while his performance works in theory, it offers him no satisfaction; he succeeds in his act, only because he fails. In the performance of nihilism, neither heroes nor villains exit the stage triumphant. Through the means of farce, what Nathanael West ultimately shows the reader of Miss Lonelyhearts is a tragedy.
Works Cited
Dale, Alan S. Comedy is a Man in Trouble: Slapstick in American Movies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
Long, Robert Emmet. “Miss Lonelyhearts: The Absurd Dead Center of the World.” Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts. Ed. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2005. 53-82.
Nieland, Justus. “West’s Deadpan: Affect, Slapstick, and Publicity in Miss Lonelyhearts.” Novel 38.1 (2004): 57-83.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power. Ed. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1968.
Reid, Randall. The Fiction of Nathanael West: No Redeemer, No Promised Land. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967.
West, Nathanael. Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust. New York: New Directions, 2009. 1-58.
Widmer, Kingsley. “The Religious Masquerade: Miss Lonelyhearts.” Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts. Ed. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2005. 11-52.