Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
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DOI: 10.1353/arq.2015.0028
as] a deliberate assault on the common man’s notion of reality; for vio-
lence is not only his subject matter, but also his technique” (qtd. in
Madden 79). In West’s 1932 “Some Notes On Violence,” he suggests as
much as he argues that violence is the “highest common denominator”
of the modern text. Speaking of violence as a reality for all Americans,
he writes,
girl who writes, “No boy will take me out because I was born without a
nose. . . . I have a big hole in the middle of my face that scares people. . . .
Ought I commit suicide?” (2). Though disfigurement is present through-
out West’s work, A Cool Million’s subtitle, The Dismantling of Lemuel
Pitkin points to the mechanization of the body as a historically particu-
lar practice of bodily violence. West’s satire depends on a protagonist
that fails to function. His is a form of embodiment that upsets the very
fantasy of a “healthy” and “whole” subject.
Critics have, however, responded less favorably to West’s work,
often misunderstanding his use of disfigurement. Attempting to provide
interpretive consistency for West’s references to deformity, W.H. Auden’s
1957 “West’s Disease” considers the reoccurring image of disablement.
Auden describes West’s oeuvre as the materialization of a modern dis-
ease: one that renders the protagonist “supremely self-centered” and
pathological. In his critique of West’s protagonist, Auden ignores West’s
lesser-known satire and its turn to “dismantling”—a phrase that repre-
sents a mechanical rather than pathological subject. Auden instead
claims that the Westian protagonist is self-loathing and anti-social.
Conflating West’s “self-centered” protagonist with the “cripple,” he
deems both un-assimiliable to the larger social order. Auden writes:
Whereas Alger’s plot follows the logic of social cleansing, West coun-
ters the logic of accumulation and erasure. Unlike those narratives,
which are said to dwell in the grotesque with little to no regard for dis-
Nathanael West’s A Cool Million 59
A Cool Million presents a body that is badly managed. This body does
not adhere to notions of individualism, but instead places into “ques-
tion such concepts as will, ability, progress, responsibility, and free
agency” (Garland-Thomson 47). The body of Lemuel Pitkin is prob-
lematically contingent and anxiously exposed: a thorn in the meta-
phorical side of the American body politic. As a disabled subject, Lem’s
violated body upsets myths of wholeness, autonomy, and self-care upon
which modern notions of individualism rely. Whereas Alger’s plucky
hero proves industrious and deserving of his spoils, West’s protagonist is
unable to master the trials presented to him and, in turn, is presented as
a violated subject. Lem is not a self-made man but a mechanism out-of-
working-order. It is in this respect that Lem’s disfigured body poses an
important threat to the culturally imagined body of the hero and to
nationalist narratives, domestic and abroad.
Nathanael West’s A Cool Million 61
(69). After being denied a loan from the bank, Lem is sent out into the
world to make his fortune. This event spawns Lem’s pursuit of the
American dream, social mobility, and the wealth that is his supposed
birthright. A Cool Million’s episodic plot follows Lemuel’s attempt to
return his mother’s home to its rural roots opposed to the shop window
where his home is displayed as a slice of Americana. This reference to
the home as a replica, or a tourist attraction, foregrounds the novel’s
critique of consumer culture as well as West’s analysis of the fabrication
of “American” identity as commodity.
As noted by cultural historian Warren Susman, “it was during the
Thirties that the idea of culture was domesticated” (154). Cultural texts
such as Ruth Benedict’s 1934 The Patterns of Culture and the 1935
founding of the American Institute of Public Opinion registered a
growing investment in the idea of American culture. Terms such as an
“American way of life” and “the American Dream” were increasingly in
vogue as the nation began to imagine its sense of cultural identity.
Nowhere were the fantasies of American culture more on display than
at the World’s Fair, where consumerism was paired with the vision of a
technologically superior future.7 The fair exhibited a consumer’s para-
dise, a futuristic world of mechanical and technological progress along-
side nostalgic images of a primitive past. A prime example was “The
Homes of Tomorrow Exhibit,” which featured modern design and new
gadgets for home convenience or General Motor’s fully functioning
assembly line. The 1933 Fair, aptly named “A Century of Progress,” is a
prime example of the juxtaposition of modern/technological progress
with images of American folk-revival. Juxtaposed to images of techno-
logical, industrial, and economic progress—the signs of a prosthetic
culture— the fair featured barbaric representations of villages from
exotic locations and sideshow like representations of difference.8 As
Rita Barnard illustrates in The Great Depression and the Culture of Abun-
dance, “The ideological project of the . . . fairs [was] to reveal the gospel
of inevitable progress and to celebrate the status quo in a triumphal
parade of its products” (137). The 1939 fair with its slogan, “Building
the world of tomorrow,” projected a futuristic landscape made possible
by consumerism. Though the fairs fostered the image of an economic
and consumer utopia, this image stood in stark contrast to the reality of
the Great Depression. As Barnard points out, the modern design of the
Chicago’s Fair was surrounded by a backdrop of tenement housing in a
Nathanael West’s A Cool Million 63
city riddled with unemployment and gang warfare. Though the 1930s
was a period of financial ruin and political unrest, the myth of the
“American dream” was sustained by way of cultural institutions like the
World’s Fair and texts like the Alger narrative, which offered an image
of America as the land of milk and honey.
The Alger narrative is amongst those cultural products that allowed
the myth of the “American dream” to flourish, despite the stock market
crash of 1929 or the dust bowl migration of the 1930s. As Marcus Klein
notes, Alger presented a bucolic nostalgia in his reference to hard work-
ing country boys and idyllic farms; however, the ultimate goal was to
prove one’s worth in the city.9 In this respect, Alger offered readers an
image of regional heroes who were both representative of a nostalgic
rural America and modern subjects able to navigate modernity
unscathed. In contrast, West’s Depression era satire exposes “‘The
American’ as an artifact and product, something mass-produced and
reproduced” through a series of legible tropes (Bodies and Machines 49).
A Cool Million parodies, subversively plagiarizes, and comically re-enacts
Alger’s narrative and its mythology of various American identities only
to deconstruct these “realities” into their structuring verbiage—that is,
the tropes, political speeches, and fabricated heroes that have come to
“naturalize” the Alger narrative as the American success story.
These cultural stereotypes are showcased by the novel’s lengthy
descriptions of cultural institutions such as Wu Fong’s brothel, where
the description of American identity is precipitated on the abstraction
of individual realities. Just one of many institutions in which West cri-
tiques commodification, Wu Fong’s brothel is a clear example of a space
in which the body is treated as a reproducible good. Marketed as a
“House of All Nations” Wu Fong’s establishment, on which West
expends a great deal of descriptive energy, offers wealthy men illicit
sexual services from exotic women in rooms decorated to match the
women’s respective countries. However, the Depression and the subse-
quent “Buy American” campaign changes the focus of Wu Fong’s
whorehouse from a “House of All Nations” to a “hundred percentum
American place.” It is this change that highlights the modern logic of
exchange. West writes:
home talent, and when the Hearst papers began their “Buy
American” campaign he decided to get rid of all the foreigners
in his employ and turn his establishment into an hundred per
centum American place. (126)
are taken from their homes and placed in rooms that are comic forger-
ies; not only their dwellings, but also their lives are replaced by replicas
taken for the real thing. Similarly, what was once Lem’s home is soon a
tourist attraction, which he visits as if a stranger on the street. West
describes in great detail the moment the dismantled boy returns home.
He writes that, “Of the things that struck him [first and foremost] was
the seediness of the old house. . . . Our hero stood gazing at the exhibit
for so long that he attracted the attention of the one of the clerks. . . .
‘You admire the architecture of New England?’ [the clerk asks] ‘No; it’s
that particular house that interests me, sir’. . . . I used to live in it. In
fact, I was born in that very house” (101).
Lemuel’s childhood home is no longer the home he remembers.
Not only is it described as uncharacteristically “seedy,” the home has
also been rearranged to better suggest the idea of New England archi-
tecture. Permitted to “examine his old home at close range,” Lemuel is
consulted for his native knowledge as the clerk asks him where his
mother would have placed a chest of drawers. West writes, “Lem’s first
thought on inspecting the article in question was that [his mother]
would have kept it in the woodshed but he thought better of this when
he saw how highly the clerk valued it. After a little thought, he pointed
to a space next to the fireplace and said, ‘I think she would have sat it
there’” (102). Lemuel is paid an expert’s fee for this bit of advice. Rec-
ognizing that the chest no longer has the same use value, he succumbs
to the desires of the market as he relocates the drawers. A strange scene
indeed, the displacement of the home from its foundation to the shop
window acts as a powerful analogy for the novel’s larger theme of the
violence inherent in the move from production to consumption. “The
homelike,” as Mark Seltzer has noted in his work on twentieth-century
serial killer narratives, “emerges again and again as the scene of the
crime. . . . The public spectacle or exhibition of ‘the private’ in machine
culture—museums or replicas of homes as tourist sites . . . seems to have
become inseparable from the exhibition of bodily violence or atrocity”
within American “wound culture” (Serial Killers 202). Fittingly, the
home is identified as the site of a violated space of interiority as it sym-
bolizes those spectacular scenes of bodily violence that appear through-
out A Cool Million. Just as Lem’s body is re-built by a series of prostheses,
the family home is re-fashioned. It is removed from Ottsville only to be
structurally and rhetorically rebuilt on the streets of Fifth Avenue.
Nathanael West’s A Cool Million 67
uring the body as one more piece of modern technology.13 These forms
of mass production not only placed disabling demands on the body in a
series of repetitive motions, but conceptually amputated the body into
its working parts. Labor became divorced from those individuals who
performed work as the worker was reduced to a string of motions meant
to streamline production and eliminate waste. Meanwhile, “the camera
[used in motion studies] and the manager [of systematic management]
became necessary additions, or prostheses, to the worker’s radically
delimited role” (Brown 253). In turn, work became inseparable from
“the process of sorting, representing, or programming” (Seltzer 159).
For Anson Rabinbach, both Taylorism and its predecessor, the Euro-
pean science of work, “shared a preoccupation with economizing
motion and achieving greater work performance through adapting the
body to technology” (242). Given these widespread systems of manage-
ment, it is no surprise that the body began to be re-imagined as a series
of processes—diagrams, statistics, and carefully mapped motions—that
depicted the worker at the level of information rather than agent.
As the historian Elspeth Brown points out, within these systems of
labor “the motions made by workers could [now] be objectified, ana-
lyzed, and standardized as simply another variable of the labour process”
(255). Alongside these new understandings of motion and function the
“ideal of corporeal efficiency emerged as the new utopian standard” in
the early twentieth-century (258). This economy of efficiency and the
call for prosthetic intervention were mirrored in the private economy of
the body. On the one hand, the body was problematized in relation to
new stimuli, demands, and the changing landscape of modernity. On
the other hand, the body was reimagined as able to be manipulated and
perfected via prosthetic intervention: parts might be rearranged or
replaced by surrogate parts that could better meet the demands of indus-
try. In the face of rising concerns regarding the contingency of the body,
its unhinging presented the possibility of reassembling and augmenting
bodies not simply around a principle of standardization or modification
but rather optimization.
Though A Cool Million does not directly reference the factory, the
logic of the factory appears throughout in scenes where Lemuel is
described as a receptacle for intervention. As William Solomon writes,
“The historical referent of the mutilated character is the mechanized
worker . . . [for] the boy’s disintegration suggests the somatic and psy-
Nathanael West’s A Cool Million 71
chic effects of economic rationalism” (154). Not only does A Cool Mil-
lion’s machine man reflect the logic of “economic rationalism” it portrays
the disabled body as a primary site of intervention. From the novel’s first
pages, Lem is described as susceptible to intervention in part because he
is considered poor, criminal, and sick. In a telling example, a prison
warden removes Lemuel’s teeth. Reciting the rhetoric of medical inter-
vention, the warden explains, “The first thing to do is to draw all your
teeth. . . . Teeth are often a source of infection and it pays to be on the
safe side. At the same time we will be introducing a series of cold show-
ers. Cold water is an excellent cure for morbidity.” Though Lemuel
insists that he has never had a toothache, the warden points to disable-
ment as a form of prevention for those who are viewed as deviant: “In
my eyes . . . the sick are never guilty. You are merely sick, as are all
criminals. . . . Please remember that an ounce of prevention is worth a
ton of cure” (90). Providing Lemuel with a “parting gift,” the warden
presents the boy with an ill-fitting set of false teeth that comically fall
into his lap every time he opens his mouth. While modernity’s chang-
ing economic landscape is indeed the historical referent for this image
of a dismantled machine, Lem is not simply a mirror for machine cul-
ture and its systemic violence. The boy’s fragmentation and subsequent
replacement points to the prosthetic logic underlying ablest ideology,
and this logic’s connection to the political propaganda of the period.
ica to Americans for the sake of Lemuel Pitkin. Whipple asks his audi-
ence to not only identify with Lem as the disenfranchised American
boy, but to take up arms in his name. He presents the boy’s misfortunes
as proof of the party’s claim that there is indeed an “un-American con-
spiracy” underway. As he explains, “[Lemuel’s] teeth were pulled out.
His eye was gouged from his head. His thumb was removed. His scalp
was torn away. His leg was cut off. And finally he was shot through the
heart. . . . [For this young man who ventures into the world to find work]
Jail is his first reward. Poverty is his second. Violence is his third. Death
is his last” (179).
Mr. Whipple provides a stark but accurate tally of the violence
Lemuel encounters upon leaving home. However, the culprit is contest-
able. The violence featured in A Cool Million is none other than that
waged by consumer capitalism and its prosthetic logic, but the fascist
group places blame elsewhere. The group’s nationalist rhetoric supports
a social cleansing agenda by way of the narrative opposition between
the American boy and the foreign other. Lemuel’s manufactured image
as martyr for “The National Revolutionary Party” is the ultimate appro-
priation of A Cool Million’s already dismantled protagonist. In this final
act, Lem’s wounds are reclaimed in the name of the group’s fascist
agenda. The novel’s closing scene seem to suggest that fascism is per-
haps the end game of all that has come before it—economic rational-
ism, nationalist propaganda, and the logic of consumer capitalism. A
figure that evokes emotional investment in the fascist agenda, Lem’s
image as “the American boy”—a politically efficacious abstraction—is
used to enforce the party’s nationalist propaganda. While A Cool Mil-
lion’s final scene represents the fear of American fascism or the belief
that it may be closer to home than we would like to imagine, West
makes the case that fascism is founded in corporeal models that rein-
force the myth of the able body.
At the rally Lemuel’s birthday is made into a holiday as the reader
learns that a bloody revolution has taken place in the days following the
boy’s assassination. Meanwhile, Whipple rises to presidency on the
back of Lem’s biography. Whereas Lemuel bares the brunt of the move-
ment’s violence, Whipple is described as a man for whom “the years
have dealt but lightly. . . . His back is still as straight as ever and his gray
eyes have not lost their keenness” (178). Like Alger’s hero, Whipple’s
rise to power depends on the sacrifice of his disabled counterpart.
Nathanael West’s A Cool Million 73
Though it is clear that Lemuel dies because of the movement, his last
moments indicate little of his sincere investment in the group. Instead,
the dismantled boy is sought out by Whipple and given a speech
intended to rally the audience of the Bijou Theatre. On stage Lemuel
begins reading his script, “I am a clown . . ., but there are times when
even clowns must grow serious. This is such a time. I . . .” (177). In the
very next moment, Lem is shot through the heart by an assassin’s bullet.
Representative of the manipulation of the body, even in death, Lem’s
final words are appropriated by Whipple in The Lemuel Pitkin Song. The
song opens the rally and paints the boy as a martyr willing to die for his
party. The lyrics read:
The rally cry frames Lemuel’s narrative as that of the “American boy”
for whom the American dream is made impossible by a series of foreign
others: “Marxism,” “International Capitalism,” and “sophisticated
aliens”—all of which are identified as the enemy to American social
mobility.
Lemuel’s martyrdom and his symbolic function within the ensuing
revolution, is outlined explicitly by Whipple:
cans. It is through the manipulation of the disabled body and its narra-
tive that the country is said to purge itself of disease and is able to return
to a “healthy” state. The political rally exemplifies the rhetorical
manipulation of the individual’s biography in order to solidify mass
identification with a larger movement. Suggesting the ways in which
the individual’s narrative might be re-integrated into nationalist rheto-
ric, the rhetorical fine-tuning of this final scene reveals the commodifi-
cation of the individual for mass consumption. Lem’s biography is
clearly worked over in order to better serve as propaganda. In Whipple’s
speech there is no talk of the selling of Lemuel’s home, nor is it men-
tioned that Whipple is the very same bank Manager who refused to
offer Lemuel a loan. On the contrary, Whipple tells a thoroughly
“American story,” one in the spirit of the Alger narrative—a story of a
hero in the making. He paints a romantic scene of the boy’s road to suc-
cess, “First we see him as a small boy . . . fishing for bullheads in the Rat
River of Vermont. Later, he attends the Ottsville High School, where
he is captain of the nine and an excellent outfielder. Then, he leaves for
the big city to make his fortune. All this in the honorable tradition of
his country and its people” (178). The reader is left to question what to
make of this moment in which all that has come to pass is retold in the
most ideological of fashions. If the dismantled body previously served as
a narrative disruption, the novella’s final scene leaves the reader with
the question: what are we to make of the re-appropriation of the dis-
abled body for a nationalist agenda? What does this scene suggest about
the intersection of corporeal aesthetics and propaganda and how does
the representation of the body in A Cool Million correspond to West’s
representation of fascism?
William Solomon notes the significance of fascism to the novel’s
scenes of dismantling as he considers how forms of amusement such as
the burlesque act of Riley and Robbins reaffirm group identities and
ideological commitments to political movements. As Solomon argues,
such images of dismantling represent not only economic rationalism,
but likewise “work to discover and disclose the degree to which the
identifications mass-produced bodies solicit are responsible for the
reproduction of potential agents of violent aggression” (141). He con-
tends that “one of West’s primary concerns as a writer is to ironize the
libidinal binding of frustrated persons on which political movements
hinge . . ., the way in which the fragmented body may be utilized to
Nathanael West’s A Cool Million 75
Even more so, the scene highlights the group’s identification with the
rehabilitated image of a fabricated hero. For Solomon, the individual’s
body is placed second to the good of the nation as the final scene ironizes
“the politically coercive force of attractive corporeal models” and the
aestheticization of politics (141). Turning to the aesthetic leanings of
fascism, West writes that the crowd is shrouded in the party’s official
costume: “a coonskin cap . . ., a deerskin shirt . . ., and a pair of moc-
casins” made by the party’s tailor, Ezra Silverblatt (113). Whipple’s ora-
tory provides a different form of costuming as he reframes Lemuel’s
narrative, appropriating his wounds in favor of an image of individual
and national sacrifice. Undoubtedly, all of these prosthetic devices
function to salvage the collective body of Lemuel Pitkin as American
boy. This narrative recuperation supports an abstract projection of the
national body, while Lemuel’s disfigurement is sanitized in the name of
putting his body to work for a fascist agenda.
Presenting fascism as a domestic product, A Cool Million directs the
reader to fascism’s reliance on mythmaking, collectivism, propaganda,
and control of the masses through the sanitized image of a national
hero. Though fascism is often thought of as a problematic politics that
happens “over there,” that is to say not in America, West’s satire of the
American success story acts out those modes of exchange and bodily
exploitation that would reach their fruition in movements like Nazism
and Italian Fascism. There is a more than a passing comparison to be
made between West’s criticism of Alger’s nationalist narrative and
West’s allusion to the proto-fascist “National Revolutionary Party” and
its war against the foreign and diseased body. Though Hitler would have
just come into power as A Cool Million was released, West’s novella
76 Maria Almanza
notes
1. As Jonathon Veitch points out, West mimics a number of Alger’s motifs:
“the rural origins of the protagonist; the arrival of the naïf in the city; the necessity
for and danger of the confidence of strangers; the careful tally of accumulating
assets; [and] the frequent tests of character that prove the worthiness of the protago-
nist” (96). For more on the tenets of the Horatio Alger short story, see Marcus
Klein, Easterns, Westerns, and Private Eyes: American Matters 1870-1900.
2. For a discussion of the “ideology of ability” see Siebers. In his “Introduction”
Siebers points out that ability is often seen as “the ideological baseline by which
humanness is determined” (10).
3. The afterlife of the Alger narrative is suggested by the record of his book
sales, “More copies sold each year between his death in 1899 until 1920 then did in
his entire lifetime,” notes Jeffrey Louis Decker (32).
4. Marcus Klein points out that the ultimate goal of the Alger hero is respect-
ability: “The boys would choose Respectability rather than riches, but that was not
to say that there was no relationship between the two of those virtues, especially in
the time and place” (56). After all, for each good deed Alger’s protagonists perform
they are met with a monetary reward.
5. For the implications of “bare life” within bio-politics, see Agamben.
6. As Snyder and Mitchell point out, the dream life of Anderson’s artistic pro-
tagonist renders disability as the symbolic manifestation of a “defoliated, alien, and
imperfect world”—a world from which the able-bodied artist is safeguarded (145).
7. It is worth noting that the Chicago’s World Fair is alluded to in the plot of
Nathanael West’s A Cool Million 77
A Cool Million. A layover in Chicago leads Lemeul’s group of friends to wonder the
fairgrounds while Lemuel purchases a new eye and set of teeth elsewhere. However,
when Lem arrives at the fairgrounds he is accosted by operative from the Third
International who delays the groups meeting and further injures the protagonist.
8. The midway offered curious displays of cultural “others” such as: “Midget
City,” Siamese twin babies placed in formaldehyde and billed as a “live two headed
baby,” “A Believe it or not Odditorium,” as well as “so-called-foreign-villages” and
exhibits of non-Western people. See Bogdan’s Freak Show for more on the midway.
9. See “The Impostors” in Easterns, Westerns, and Private Eyes. Here Klein
describes the relationship between the country and the city in the Alger narrative
as well as the need for the hero to be able to navigate the city, spotting those indi-
viduals who may do the protagonist harm.
10. For more on the correlation between bodies and machines, see Seltzer’s
Bodies and Machines.
11. Thorstein Veblen qtd. in Seltzer, Bodies and Machines, 61.
12. The human machine relation is not specific to the twentieth-century. In
the nineteenth-century the body was often thought of in relation to the engine
alongside principles such as thermodynamics and entropy. However, the assembly
line led theorists to new levels of thinking of the body as machine. Likewise, scien-
tific disciplines such as Taylorism sought to understand the body as a series of work-
ing and often interchangeable parts.
13. As cultural historian Anson Rabinbach notes in his study of scientific man-
agement, Taylor’s system was “the first management-oriented industrial ideology. . . .
Broadly conceived, ‘scientific management’ . . . rationalize[d] the component parts
and the general functioning of the enterprise in a series of stages in order to increase
productivity and eliminate the waste of labor power and materials” (140, 139).
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