Day of the Locust

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Day of the Locust (original title: The Day of the Locust ) is a 1939 novel by the American writer Nathanael West . The novel addresses the alienation and despair of an inhomogeneous group of people whoeke out their existenceon the fringes of the Hollywood film industryand who hope in vain for success. The novel is now considered a classicof 20th century American literature . The US American magazine Time included him in its 2005 selection of the best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005 . The British newspaper The Guardian counted him among the 1000 novels everyone must read in 2009. The novel was made into a film by John Schlesinger in 1975and was released in German cinemas under the name Der Tag der Heuschrecke .

action

The main character of the plot is Tod Hackett, who sees himself as a painter and artist, but is employed in the Hollywood film industry as one of the costume designers and background painters. In addition to his work in the studios, Tod continues to try his hand at painting and is working on a painting about the Los Angeles Apocalypse.

"A talent scout for National Films had brought Tod to the Coast after seeing some of his drawings in an exhibit of undergraduate work at the Yale School of Fine Arts. He had been hired by telegram. If the scout had met Tod, he probably wouldn't have sent him to Hollywood to learn set and costume designing. His large, sprawling body, his slow blue eyes and sloppy grin made him seem completely without talent, almost doltish in fact. "

“A talent scout for National Films brought Tod to the California coast after seeing some of his drawings at a freshman exhibit at the Yale School of Fine Arts. He had been hired by telegram. Had the talent scout met Tod personally, he would probably not have piloted him to Hollywood to learn the work of a costume and set designer. With his massive, expansive body, his portly blue eyes and his simple grin, he looked talentless, almost silly. "

He falls in love with 17-year-old Faye Greener, who is hungry for success and who stages herself like an upcoming star, even though she has only worked as an extra on one film and occasionally works as a prostitute. Through his work in the film studio and his courtship for Faye, he met numerous people who, like himself, belong to the marginal figures of Hollywood and most of whom are also interested in Faye. These include a cowboy Earle, who occasionally works as an extra in westerns, his Mexican friend Miguel, who makes fighting cocks, the short Abe Kusich and Homer Simpson, a lonely accountant with saved fortune. Homer is actually from the Midwest and moved to Hollywood for health reasons. In Hollywood he seems like a foreign body, his unconditional infatuation is ruthlessly exploited by Faye. After the death of Faye's father, a worn-out vaudeville actor who kept his head above water by selling polishes, Faye moves into Homer's house as a lodger. Homer and Tod have hopes for Faye, who, however, first pays her attention to Earle and then to Miguel.

The novel ends in a crowd riot before a film premiere. After Faye moved out, Homer suffered a mental breakdown and wanders disoriented through the turmoil. When Adore Loomis, a would-be child star from his neighborhood, teases him again and throws a stone at him, the unconscious Homer brutally tramples the boy down. The book ends with the fact that Death, who creates his apocalyptic painting of Hollywood before his eyes, can only with difficulty and injured free himself from the crowd.

title

Nathaniel West originally planned, the novel The Cheated - The dupes to call. The title he ultimately gave his work is possibly a reference to the Old Testament . Susan Sanderson points out that the best-known mention of locusts is that in Exodus : The request of Moses and Aaron to let the Israelites go, the Pharaoh meets with an increase in forced labor. Then God first plagues the Egyptians with nine plagues in order to induce Pharaoh to let the Israelites go. The eighth plague is a swarm of locusts that plague the land and eat them bald. Destructive locusts are also mentioned in the New Testament Revelation of John . According to Sanderson, West's use of the term "grasshopper" dissolves images of devastation and a land where nothing green lives anymore. In the novel, there are multiple references to destruction, violence and devastation: The painting, on which the figure works death Hackett, titled The Burning of Los Angeles - The fire of Los Angeles , Death Hackett violence imagination plays in Faye a major role , the mob's desire to lynch Homer Simpson, and the bloody end of the cockfight.

subjects

Like many other American writers - most famously William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald - Nathaniel West worked for the Hollywood film industry during the 1930s. He processed this experience in his work: For him, Hollywood is a macabre cemetery of American illusions, the grave of the American dream. Everything is just fake and monstrous, even reality becomes a masquerade:

"A great many of the people wore sports clothes which were not really sports clothes. Their sweaters, knickers, slacks, blue flannel jackets with brass buttons were fancy dress. The fat lady in the yachting cap was going shopping, not boating; the man in the Norfolk jacket and Tyrolean hat was returning, not from a mountain, but an insurance office; and the girl in slacks and sneaks with a bandanna around her head had just left a switchboard, not a tennis court. "

“A lot of the people wore sportswear without it actually being sportswear. Their sweaters, knickers, sweatpants, blue flannel jackets with brass buttons were just fantastic costumes. The fat lady with the sail cap went shopping, not sailing. The man in the Norfolk jacket and Tyrolean hat did not come back from the mountains, but from the insurance office and the girl in training pants and sneakers with the sweatband around her forehead had just left the switchboard and not the tennis court. "

All are only present because they want to fulfill a dream or wish. The first to recognize the importance of desire in West's novels was WH Auden . He described West's novels as parables about a hell whose ruler is not the master of lies, but the master of wishes. James Light argues similarly. As in other works by West, the exposure of the hopeful narratives of American modernism as fraud is a leitmotif of the novel "Day of the Locust". Some critics have also pointed out that West's novel represented a radical change in narrative tradition since the late 19th century. While most of his contemporary literature rejects or does not address mass culture, West places it at the center of his novel.

James F. Light also sees West's description of the violent mobs in the last chapter of the book as an expression of concern about fascist Europe. West himself was Jewish and thus belonged to one of the marginalized groups in the United States.

Characters of the act

The flat and stereotypical portrayal of the novel's protagonists is considered a deliberate device of West. They could all come from B-movies of the time, wrote Richard Keller Simon in 1993. Harry Greener, Faye's father, is a rundown variety artist; Faye is the ambitious and cold-hearted starlet; Claude Este is a successful screenwriter; Homer Simpson is the clumsy and disaffected everyone; Abe Kusich is a short gangster; the cowboy Earle, who has his Mexican buddy in Miguel, and Adore Loomis is the precocious child star with a career-addicted mother.

filming

Locust Day was filmed in 1975 . Directed by John Schlesinger , the script was written by Waldo Salt . Donald Sutherland took on the role of Homer Simpson in the novel. Cinema magazine wrote that the film was a "startling portrait of Hollywood losers". He paints “a bizarre, evil picture of the decline of the legendary American dream”.

Reception of the novel in popular culture

  • Bob Dylan recorded a track called "Day of the Locusts" for his 1970 album New Morning .
  • The 1982 song "Call of the West" by the Los Angeles- based new wave band Wall of Voodoo , which contains the unsuccessful attempt by a middle-aged man to realize his dreams in California, was described as the musical implementation of the last chapter of the novel.
  • Although it is often assumed that Matt Groening , the creator of The Simpsons , named his most famous protagonist Homer Simpson after his father, Groening said in several interviews that he named the character after one of the novel's protagonists.
  • The novel is mentioned several times in the comic book series Y: The Last Man (2002-2008) and the main character of the series described the novel as the greatest of all time.
  • The 2009 song "Peeled Apples" from Journal for Plague Lovers by the group Manic Street Preachers contains a line that refers to one of the characters in the novel: "A dwarf takes his cockerel out on a cockfight" - "A dwarf leads his Rooster to cockfight ”.
  • The author is mentioned in the Amazon series "The Man in the High Castle", in which the film project of the man in the high castle under the code name "Heuschrecke" is edited by the Germans and Japanese

expenditure

Secondary literature

  • Richard Keller Simon: Between Capra and Adorno: West's Day of the Locust and the Movies of the 1930s. In: Modern Language Quarterly. 54 (4), 1993, p. 524. doi: 10.1215 / 00267929-54-4-513

Single receipts

  1. ↑ 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read: The Definitive List , accessed July 17, 2014.
  2. ^ West: The Day of the Locust. Green Light, Los Angeles 2011, ISBN 978-1-62240-024-9 , p. 1.
  3. ^ Daniel Aaron: Review: Waiting for the Apocalypse. In: Hudson Review. Vol. 3, No. 4 (Winter, 1951), pp. 634-636.
  4. ^ Peter Conn: Literature in America - An Illustrated History. Cambridge University Press, London 1989, ISBN 0-521-30373-7 , p. 440.
  5. ^ West: The Day of the Locust. Green Light, Los Angeles 2011, ISBN 978-1-62240-024-9 , p. 1.
  6. ^ Rita Barnard: 'When You Wish Upon a Star': Fantasy, Experience, and Mass Culture in Nathanael West. In: American Literature. Vol. 66, No. 2 (June 1994), pp. 325-351.
  7. ↑ James F. Light: Violence, Dreams, and Dostoevsky: The Art of Nathanael West. In: College English. Vol. 19, No. 5 (February 1958), pp. 208-213.
  8. ^ Jacobs: The Eye's Mind: Literary modernism and visual culture. P. 243 ff.
  9. ↑ James F. Light: Nathanael West and the Ravaging Locust. In: American Quarterly. Vol. 12, No. 1 (Spring, 1960), pp. 44-54.
  10. ^ Richard Keller Simon: Between Capra and Adorno: West's Day of the Locust and the Movies of the 1930s. In: Modern Language Quarterly. 54 (4), 1993, p. 524.
  11. ^ Film review in Cinema , accessed on July 17, 2014.
  12. ↑ allmusic.com
  13. ↑ Chris Turner: Planet Simpson: How a Cartoon Masterpiece Defined a Generation. 1., revised. Edition. Da Capo Press, Cambridge 2005, ISBN 0-306-81448-X , p. 77.
  14. ↑ Y: THE LAST MAN: Safeword.  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. P. 24.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / books.google.se