Fiction as decreation: the novels of Nathanael WestShow full item record
Title | Fiction as decreation: the novels of Nathanael West |
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Author | Brand, John Michael |
Date | 1969 |
Genre | Dissertation |
Degree | Doctor of Philosophy |
Abstract | Nathanael West wrote as a Jew, a fact often cited, but never elaborated by critics. His debt to the Bible is considerable, but this legacy has been treated as if it were no more than a minimal part of his consciousness. In his novels he conveys an awareness of at least these Jewish concerns: the Word as liberating act (The Dream Life of Balsa Snell), the New Covenant and the heart's renewal (Miss Lonelyhearts), the mission of the Suffering Servant (A Cool Million), and the Day of the Lord and reconstitution of creation (The Day of the Locust). However, West did more than articulate a tradition, for having become part of American experience, he expressed and reshaped his Jewish traditions, so that throughout his work, the faith of Israel undergoes a drastic change. It is negated altogether, or becomes so secular that it is impoverished in the process and becomes bland and harmless, no longer conveying a numinous and regenerative power. This dissertation thus initially explores the Jewishness of West, a task made necessary by his choice of themes and concepts belonging to the Judea-Christian traditions. Having noted the manner in which West reduces the Jew to absurdity, the dissertation next traces the course of reduction as it is applied to the American. The fact that West repudiated the legacy of Israel in no way means that he was ready to embrace the realities of American experience. West renders foolish the idea of the American as a new creature, strips him of traditions which formerly sustained him, and leaves him bare of any others. The American's denudation is enacted in each novel, because West is mainly interested in creating nothingness. Hence at almost every point in his work reduction occurs: the novels are short, and chapters, paragraphs and sentences usually are too; events are episodic, as actions are not sustained; people are less types of man than they are fragments--they are skeletal and vaporous; and metaphor is used to reduce ideals and people to absurdity, linking the vital to the inanimate and thereby deadening it. The course of reduction pervades each novel, and betrays the zeal with which West so thoroughly pursues nothingness. This dissertation thus finds that West's fiction is essentially reductive, or decreative, and suggests that the pattern of decreation became compulsive with him. The ??ore he used the method of reduction, the more he had to use it again. Having fled what he considered the chains of his Jewish heritage, he left himself few ways, beyond his own vexed sensibility of interpreting human experience. What he wrote, and the way he wrote it, only confirmed his worst fears about human nature and destiny. West thus allowed his technique to so dominate his imagination, and hence his fiction, that his novels, consistently reductive, became unfortunately repetitive. |
Link | https://repository.tcu.edu/handle/116099117/32564 |
Department | English |
Advisor | Burford, William |
This item appears in the following Collection(s)
- Doctoral Dissertations [1487]
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