Modernity, historical trauma, and the crisis of ethics reading Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts after Levinas

Nathanael West's tragically brief creative career was intensely concerned with the anomie of modern society, especially in the landscape of twentieth-century America. For West, this landscape is one populated by the disintegration of traditional community and the interrogation of values once posited as unassailable. As such, conventional West criticism has read the author as an intractable nihilist. Within the last decade, however, West criticism has taken an entirely new approach. Critics like Jonathan Greenberg and Justus Nieland have attempted to erect an ethical West by placing him within the discourse of modernist antisentimentalism. It is within this critical reevaluation of West that I would like to place my argument.When we are first introduced to the title character of West's Miss Lonelyhearts, we find the advice columnist incapable of offering another hackneyed response to his suffering readership, which is a refusal that places him on the road to what we might call a sincere ethical response that seeks an appropriate message of hope and healing. As we see, though, Miss Lonelyhearts' ethical journey is fraught with peril: he must constantly battle with the rhetoric of the newspaper column's sentimentalism, a morally bankrupt culture that degrades his desire for sincerity, and the dangers of egotistical pride. Indeed, he presumably dies unable to realize his ethical responsibility. Nonetheless, I locate within this ostensibly meaningless death and within the text the potential of a radical reassessment of ethics that anticipates the work of Emmanuel Levinas.For Levinas, ethical traumatism commands a supererogatory giving out of the subject, who has no available means of what constitutes an appropriate moral response. Using the ethical philosophy of Levinas, I perform a close reading of the novel that finds a West who presents ethical responsibility as a trauma that obligates the subject to a moral duty it can neither fulfill nor defer. We see, then, that the ethical moment in West comes not in normative ethical action, but instead, comes in the traumatic moments of Miss Lonelyhearts' "writer's block," when language and cognition break down, and Miss Lonelyhearts has absolutely no idea how to respond or proceed.