'LVPDQWOLQJWKH$PHULFDQ%R\1DWKDQDHO:HVW૷V$

&RRO0LOOLRQ
0DULD$OPDQ]D

Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory,

Volume 71, Number 4, Winter 2015, pp. 53-79 (Article)

3XEOLVKHGE\8QLYHUVLW\RI$UL]RQD
DOI: 10.1353/arq.2015.0028

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/arq/summary/v071/71.4.almanza.html

Access provided by Concordia University Libraries (7 Jan 2016 19:40 GMT)

 maria almanza

Dismantling the American Boy:

Nathanael West’s A Cool Million
What kind of pretty boy was this that came apart so horribly?
Nathanael West, A Cool Million

“W as it intentional or accidental?” lemuel

Pitkin asked himself as the bottle careened towards his path
and smashed at his feet (West, Cool Million 124). The narrator of
Nathanael West’s 1934 A Cool Million, or The Dismantling of Lemuel
Pitkin tells the reader that this unexpected projectile missed poor Lem-
uel’s skull by mere inches. That he is spared this injury comes as a shock
in a narrative in which this doe-eyed protagonist loses his teeth, an eye,
his left thumb, scalp, one leg, and finally his life in a series of accidents.
West’s violent satire has received little critical attention and has often
been dismissed for its heavy-handed borrowing of the Horatio Alger
short story in which an impoverished young protagonist rises from his
lowly beginnings to the ranks of the middle class.. Addressing Lemuel’s
repetitive injury in light of Alger’s image of the self-made man, this
article explores West’s use of disfigurement as narrative disruption. As I
argue, not only does West’s maimed hero represent the harsh social
realities of urban industrial modernity, A Cool Million performs the met-
aphorical dismantling of Alger’s “American boy” and its grounding in
the myth of the able body.2 Responding to the image of dismantling and
subsequent replacement, this article considers the developing notion of
the individual as an assemblage who might be remade in relation to a
series of prostheses.
The progenitor of “boot-strap-success,” Alger’s pulp fiction narrates
a fantasy of the American dream in which hard work and American

Arizona Quarterly Volume 71, Number 4, Winter 2015

Copyright © 2015 by Arizona Board of Regents
issn 0004-1610
54 Maria Almanza

backbone pays out in dividends for deserving protagonists. In the words

of Wt. Lhamon, Jr., “The Alger legacy designates the way one makes a
heap of money through a clean life and diligent work; from rags to
riches through luck and pluck” (17). Though Alger’s rags to riches fic-
tion was released in the late nineteenth-century, “[his stories] were reis-
sued posthumously in paperback editions that sold more than one
million copies annually by 1910.”3 In the words of Marcus Klein, “no
one does not know what is meant by the Horatio Alger story” (Easterns
14). The various titles of Alger’s publications, Work and Win, Strive and
Succeed, Struggling Upward, Making His Way, and Risen from the Ranks,
served as axioms for readers while “conflating conduct and economics”
in an economic moralism characteristic of the rags to riches plot
(Lhamon 16). The mobility of Alger’s industrious hero and the morality
attributed to amassing wealth has perpetuated one of the founding fic-
tions of capitalism: heroism and economic success are one in the same,
while financial stability is just around the corner for those who are
deserving.4 On the contrary, West’s novella follows the trials and tribu-
lations of a young man forced to relocate to New York City. West’s pro-
tagonist leaves his rural roots intending to pay off a debt owed on his
mother’s home; however, what he finds in the big city is not his fortune,
but a series of misfortunes. Lemuel appears to have all the defining char-
acteristics of Alger’s country-bred hero: socially accepted values, hon-
esty, a simple upbringing, and an undying belief in hard work. But unlike
Alger’s self-made man, Lemuel is violated, commodified, brutalized, and
eventually totally dismantled by the powers that be. Whereas Alger’s
hero finds financial stability in the big city, West’s mock-hero is robbed,
kidnapped, and maimed until finally he is killed. Describing Lemuel’s
final moments in the Bijou theatre where he works as a stooge in a bur-
lesque show, the narrator states, “A shot rang out and he fell dead, drilled
through the heart by an assassin’s bullet” (Cool Million 177).

i. how a boy is dismantled

Dubbed “a prophet of American violence” by Harold Bloom, West
weaves his novels together by way of violent themes and scenes of
horror from lynch mobs to massacres (26). The disfigured characters
that line the pages of West’s novels have led critics to recognize new
levels of violence, “which [West] saw augmenting progressively through-
out history” (8). In the words of Leslie Fiedler, “West’s novels [function
 Nathanael West’s A Cool Million 55

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,

In America violence is idiomatic. Read our newspapers. To make

the front page a murderer needs to use some imagination, he also
has to use a particularly hideous instrument. Take this morning’s
newspaper: FATHER CUTS SON’S THROAT IN BASEBALL
ARGUMENT. To make the first page, he should have killed
three sons with a baseball bat instead of a knife (478).

As West describes it, violence is so banal that it need be excessive in

order to stand out from every other act of violence. Of the abundant
tales of violence that West encounters, he writes, “We now believe we
would be doing violence by suppressing them” (478). Though violence
is present throughout West’s work, in A Cool Million it takes its most
hyperbolic form: the very limits of the body’s capacity to withstand
injury are tested by Lemuel’s continual mutilation. In one emblematic
scene, Lem makes a trip West with his love interest Betty Prail. Unable
to protect her from a ruffian who refers to himself as “the man from Pike
County,” Lemuel attempts to thwart Betty’s rape but instead walks into
the “saw toothed jaws” of a bear trap. He lies helpless while his body is
ransacked. Left mangled, Lem’s prosthetic limbs—a set of “store teeth”
and “glass eye”—are looted from his person. When he is found by his
traveling companion, Mr. Whipple, the narrator tells us that “[the man]
bent over the unconscious form of the poor, mutilated lad and was happy
to discover that his heart still beat” (158). Even as the boy’s teeth are
removed by a prison doctor, his leg severed in a bear trap, and his scalp
torn from his head, the barest form of life remains.5
While this scene appears as an exceptional representation of vio-
lence, West often represented modernity by alluding to disfigurement.
The Day of the Locust (1939) features Abe Kusich, a dwarf bookie with a
“slightly hydrocephalic head” who is characterized by his violent ten-
dencies (60). In Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) an advice columnist laments
his inability to help the city’s down-and-out, amongst them is a young
56 Maria Almanza

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:

All West’s books contain cripples. A cripple is unfortunate and

his misfortune is both singular and uncurable. Hunchbacks,
girls without noses, dwarfs, etc., are not sufficiently common in
real life to appear as members of an unfortunate class, like the
very poor. Each one makes the impression of a unique case.
Further, the nature of the misfortune, a physical deformity,
makes the victim repellant to the senses of the typical and
normal, and there is nothing the cripple or others can do to
change his condition. . . . As used by West, the cripple is . . . a
symbolic projection of the state of wish-ful despair, the state of
those who will not accept themselves in order to change them-
selves into what they would or should become, and justify their
refusal by thinking that being what they are is uniquely horri-
ble and incurable. (45)

Auden portrays disability as the singular experience of the “physically

deformed.” Utilizing metaphors of disease, he depicts West’s protagonist
 Nathanael West’s A Cool Million 57

and the “cripple” as resistant to models of rehabilitation, self-fulfill-

ment, and progress. The “cripple” is presented as an improper subject—
a character who “suffers from a spiritual disease” and wears that disease
on the body. According to Auden, disability functions as a trope for
pity, self-hatred, and is the physical manifestation of the protagonist’s
spiritual disease.
By characterizing the Westian protagonist as spiritual cripple,
Auden places West’s work within current debates regarding the repre-
sentation of disability. Attending to the metaphorical depiction of dis-
ability, Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell consider how disability
functions as a “narrative prosthesis” or representative crutch. Snyder
and Mitchell voice their suspicion that bodily difference is too often
used as a narrative entryway or means to speculate on the pathological
nature of society. Critical to their notion of “narrative prosthesis” is the
idea that narratives work towards an “explanatory compensation” in
which disability is prime subject matter. Mitchell and Snyder contend
that modernism is, particularly, guilty of reifying “pathological cultural
models of disability” in which grotesque images provide a rhetorical
parallel to the pathologization of the modern subject (142). They argue
that modernism seldom challenges negative perceptions of disability,
but instead reinforces associations of pity, corruption, and moral way-
wardness by alluding to grotesque figures. Pointing to texts such as
Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, they criticize modernist authors
for not being critical enough of their use of disability.6 Whereas “later
[read Postmodern] generations assess the mistakes and political procliv-
ities of the previous [generations],” Snyder and Mitchell argue that nar-
ratives, such as Anderson’s, go slumming in the symbolism of the
grotesque with little to no regard for people with disabilities. In turn,
Anderson’s novel and more generally modernism have been criticized
for “yok[ing] physical aberrancy to metaphors of denigration and per-
versity” while not interrogating disability issues (145).
Returning to A Cool Million vis-a-vis Snyder and Mitchell’s case
against modernism, West’s satire proves substantially more complex
and critically sophisticated in its portrayal of disablement. Rather than
presenting disabled characters who serve as the grotesque inversion of
an able-bodied protagonist, it is modern systems of disablement that
West outlines. In A Cool Million, physical difference is not presented as
58 Maria Almanza

an alien experience, but is exposed as a present social reality. Lemuel’s

disfigured body points to those institutions that disable him: prisons,
banks, and political campaigns. Furthermore, West does not invoke dis-
ability in order to rehabilitate or erase the disabled subject, but to offer
the dismantled subject as a counter to Alger’s self-made man as a socio-
cultural ideal and ideologically charged symbol.
While characters may attempt to recuperate Lem as hometown
hero, disability is never transcended by West’s narrative. On the con-
trary, it is all the more apparent by the novella’s end in which Lemuel
performs his disablement in his role as a stooge. Performing in “Fifteen
Minutes of Furious Fun with Belly Laffs Galore,” the dismantled body is
represented as the butt of jokes and as Lemuel’s unavoidable fate.
During the performance, the actors turn on Lemuel as they violently
beat him with newspapers. He is quite literally beaten by the day’s cur-
rent events. “For a final curtain. They [bring] out an enormous wooden
mallet labeled ‘The Works’ and with it completely demolish our hero.
His toupee flew off, his eye and teeth popped out, and his wooden leg
was knocked into the audience” writes West (174). Not even Lemuel’s
prostheses remain intact. Instead, his dismantled body takes center
stage—a stark contrast to that of Alger’s self-made man.
Unlike West’s dismantled boy, Alger’s narrative follows a logic of
social cleansing in which the rise to the top means the erasure of those
on the bottom. Referencing this logic, Lhamon writes:

In the early chapters of Ragged Dick [the poor, the ‘urchins’ or

less fortunate] are everywhere on the streets and sleeping in
doorways. Yet by book’s end and Richard’s ascent the streets are
purified. . . . Poor men who fail to succeed in the system disap-
pear . . . As symbolic action, this rise of one man with con-
comitant social cleansing action is serious. An ultimate world
without threatening villains, without evil adults, without poor
people, without problems: this is how the literary contribution
to the one-dimensional society is made. (17-18)

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

ability, West’s dismantled protagonist encourages readers to “investigate

the . . . metaphorical operations” of the Alger narrative and how they
contribute to modern notions of ability (Snyder and Mitchell 145-46).
For Klein, West upsets the culture of success proffered by the Alger
narrative, drawing attention to its rhetoric. In A Cool Million, “Every
character, every thing, and every incident is a cultural cliché ripe for
undermining” (Foreigners 265). The clichés of capitalism are every-
where mimed by characters like Mr. Whipple or Sylvanus Snodgrasse,
both of whom reproduce the language of the Alger narrative. Amongst
their clichés are: “This is the land of opportunity and the world is an
oyster” (Cool Million 73). Recognizing a disconnect between the Alger
narrative and his own, Lemuel confronts the reader and other charac-
ters with a very different reality. The downtrodden boy exclaims, “I left
Ottsville to make my fortune and so far I’ve been to jail twice and lost
all my teeth and one eye” (138). To this he is met with further clichés
and the suggestion that he must overcome all adversity. Even Betty
Prail succumbs to the rhetoric of bootstrap success as she tells Lemuel,
“To make an omelet you have to break eggs. . . . When you’ve lost both
your eyes, you can talk. I read only the other day about a man who lost
both of his eyes yet accumulated a fortune. I forgot how, but he did”
(138). The myths of the American dream are everywhere reiterated,
“America is the land of opportunity. She takes care of the honest and
industrious and never fails them as long as they are both. This is not a
matter of opinion, it is one of faith. On the day that Americans stop
believing it, on that day America will be lost” (73-74). The satire’s ideo-
logical clichés acknowledge the myth of the American dream as a narra-
tive sustained not only through persuasive rhetoric, but via the fabrication
of an able-bodied hero—or, at the very least, an overcoming crip.
Lemuel, however, upsets the romanticized principles of self-deter-
mination, autonomy, and progress as he fails to fulfill his supposed des-
tiny through industry or will. Unlike the self-made man, he is altered by
external forces and is driven less by volition than accident or manipula-
tion. It is outside forces that determine the trajectory of West’s novella
rather than any semblance of will. The misfortunes Lemuel encounters
from his numerous arrests to his eventual kidnapping prove him inca-
pable of responding to his environment or navigating the city. When
faced with threats from the likes of thieves, rapists, and con-men, he is
60 Maria Almanza

described as “unable to utter one word in explanation. . . . All he could

do was to gaze after their departing backs with mute but ineffectual
anguish” (Cool Million 105). When given three instances to save his
sweetheart from assault he not only fails but is injured in his inept
attempts. On the first occasion Lem is beat up by the bully Tom Baxter;
on the second he is kidnapped by the nefarious prostitution king, Wu
Fong; and on the third he clumsily steps into a bear trap only to have
his leg severed and his head scalped. Though his inability to protect the
female heroine is suggested to be an offense of the highest order, his
largest fault is that he is unable to protect his own bodily constitution.
Resisting the foundations of the Alger narrative, Lemuel upends
the notion of a proper American subject; on the contrary, he is the dis-
abled counterpart to the autonomous and self-reliant individual. As
pointed out by disability theorist Rosemarie Garland Thomson:

[The] ideology of self determination . . . [and] autonomy

assumes immunity to external forces along with the capacity to
maintain a stable, static state of being. . . . According to such
logic, physical alterations caused by time or environment—the
changes we call disability—are hostile incursions from the out-
side, the effects of cruel contingencies that an individual does
not adequately resist. (45)

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

ii. the crime of exchange

John D. Rockefeller would give a cool million to have a stom-
ach like yours.
Nathanael West, A Cool Million

A Cool Million begins with this haunting epigraph. A quote ripped

from the newspapers, perhaps a saying that circulated throughout the
‘20s and ‘30s, its origin is uncertain. While the epigraph may be a false
historical artifact, it is quite plausible in its reference. Biographers of
Rockefeller suggest that he dined on milk and crackers and took small
bites on account of digestive troubles: “For years it was rumored that
[Rockefeller] had a standing million dollar offer for any doctor who
could repair his stomach” (Chernow 322). West’s epigraph seems ripe
with meaning in this reference to the self-made millionaire and his
need for a new organ. After all, West’s satire references the oil tycoon
throughout as the exemplar of social mobility. Whipple notes that
Rockefeller was the paradigmatic figure of American success. As he tells
Lem, “The story of Rockefeller and Ford is the story of every great
American and you should strive to make it your story. Like them you
were born poor and on a farm. Like them, by honesty and industry, you
can not fail to succeed” (Cool Million 74). It is not surprising that West
begins a narrative that mocks the self-made man with an allusion to the
sickly American hero. Nor is it surprising that the epigraph suggests
that a man might give a cool million for another man’s innards. This
odd turn of phrase only anticipates the novella’s theme of exchange and
the commodification of the most personal of possessions—the body. In
the words of Tom Nissley, “the saying carries the horror of the exchange
of the alienable for the inalienable, the money for the vital organ, the
cool million for the warm stomach” (89).
Within the satire’s first pages, the trope of substitution makes its
appearance as West sets the scene for a critique of commodity capital-
ism and its founding principles of displacement and exchange. The nar-
rative begins with the violation and commodification of the most
private of spaces—the family home. Arriving home from school, Lem
finds that his mother’s home has been repossessed by the bank and sold
to antique collector and interior decorator Asa Goldstein of “Colonial
Exteriors and Interiors.” “Mr. Goldstein planned to take the house apart
and set it up again in the window of his Fifth Avenue shop,” writes West
62 Maria Almanza

(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:

Wu Fong was a very shrewd man and a student of fashions. He

saw that the trend was in the direction of home industry and
64 Maria Almanza

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)

The change of “fashions”—consumer interests, business practices,

and assumed desires—leads to the redecorating of the brothel’s fifty odd
suites and the hiring of American labor, what in reality are “inmates”—
females from poor families “thrown into the open market” (93). In this
house of disrepute, rich clientele pay not only for sexual favors, but an
“authentic” experience with homegrown women like Lena Haubengra-
ber from Perkiomen Creek, Bucks County, Pennsylvania or Powder River
Rose from Carson’s Store, Wyoming. Gesturing to a culture entrenched
in the fashioning of American identity, the prostitutes are housed in
suites decorated by Asa Goldstein—the same interior decorator who
buys and refashions Lem’s family home. Each of the suites functions as a
small-scale reproduction of regional America: “The idea of [each room]
is [said to be] carried out with excellent taste and real historical knowl-
edge” (93). Among these rooms are: “Pennsylvania Dutch, Old South,
Log Cabin Pioneer, Victorian New York, Western Cattle Days, Califor-
nia Monterey, Indian, and Modern girl.” The prostitutes pleasure men
while wearing “bright gingham” dresses or “five gallon hats” (126-27).
The brothel’s attention to “authenticity” is not lost on the décor, costum-
ing, or food. As West describes it, the johns who frequent the brothel are
offered the most “genuine” selection based on the room of their choos-
ing: buckwheat pancakes served by “an old Negro in livery,” “roast
groundhog and Sam Thompson rye,” “fried squirrel and corn liquor,”
“mountain oysters and forty-rod,” or “tortillas and prune brandy” (128).
These women are taken from their homes and placed on the “open
market” only to serve the same function as that of the surrounding furni-
ture or dinner fair. As if they are a hunting horn or a saddle blanket, the
women are ripped from their homes only to stand in for what Roland
Barthes has described as a “natural image of reality” (155). In his ornate
descriptions of the brothel, West relays the mutual constitution of con-
sumer goods and American identity and presents the 1930s as a unique
moment in American history in which the turn to a consumer driven
culture re-enforced notions of American identity through the commodi-
fication of goods and the narrative packaging of national myth.
 Nathanael West’s A Cool Million 65

In his seminal essay “Myth Today,” Barthes writes of “Myth [as]

constituted by the loss of a historical quality of things: in it, things lose
their memory that they were once made” (142). Whether it is the rags
to riches myth, Alger’s myth of regional identities, or the myth of the
able body each of these myths works to naturalize that which is ulti-
mately constructed. “A type of speech,” as Barthes argues, “[myth] does
not deny things, on the contrary, its function is to talk about them;
simply, it purifies them, it makes them innocent, it gives them a natural
and eternal justification” (143). The commodification of the regional
alongside the notion of the “genuine American,” reveals the cultural
significance of these narratives to sustaining American identity as a
commodity. As Tim Nissley points out, “what [West] proposes as the
authentic artifact of Americana is that figure of alienated and debased
authenticity, the commodity” (90). Contending with the production of
“the American” in a period in which “The American Way of Life” was
being solidified as both a popular idiom and culturally shared idea, the
America of A Cool Million is, as Rita Barnard notes, an “America of
simulacra . . . where a frenzied passion for fakery, replication, and col-
lection comes to seem the key national characteristic” (145). Accord-
ingly, when Wu Fong re-markets his brothel as “a hundred per centum
American place,” he only vaguely changes the décor of the rooms sug-
gesting that histories and people are interchangeable. Initially, Lem’s
sweetheart Betty is kidnapped and made to play the American girl.
However, soon she stands in as the representative of New England. Wu
Fong moves Dolores O’Rielly from Alta Vista, California into the suite
previously occupied by Conchita, the Spanish girl. The narrator tells us
that “[Wu Fong] merely substituted a Mission chair for the horsehide
one with the steer-horn arms and called it “Monterey” (A Cool Million
127). West’s depiction of consumerism and the logic of the brothel
points to the process of acculturation inherent in movements such as
the “Buy America Act”—of which the brothel is a direct example.
More importantly, the brothel suggests the ways in which the meta-
phorical production of American identity treated the subject as substi-
tutable within the logic of commodity capitalism.
There is a shared violence in Wu Fong’s brothel and the sale of
Lemuel’s home. Both recognize an economic shift; the relocation of the
rural home to the commercial space of Fifth Avenue registers a move
from a private to public economy. Likewise, the women of the brothel
66 Maria Almanza

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

The violence of modernity is mirrored in these scenes of displace-

ment that occur throughout the text. No longer invested in the vio-
lence attributed to a singular agent, West highlight’s modernity’s
systemic violence. Lhamon points out that “evil in Alger’s fiction . . . is
pervasive but personal: aberrant, not systemic, not structural” (17). On
the contrary, A Cool Million contends with a level of violence that
reduces the body to an abstraction; Lem’s body is presented as a series of
detachable parts ripe for manipulation—whether rhetorical or physical.
Furthermore, violence is presented as anonymous and systemic as it is
dispersed into systems of production, the logic of exchange, and the
subsequent abstraction of the individual. Even the representation of
Lemuel’s assassin is ambiguous for he is referred to via a series of names:
“the fat man in the Chesterfield overcoat,” “Operative 6348xm,” or
“Comrade Z.” The killer is disguised by a series of costumes, including
the false beard that he wears on the night of Lem’s assassination. In A
Cool Million, the enemy is no longer detectable for the cause of frag-
mentation and manipulation is ubiquitous. As described by Slavoj
Žižek, whereas subjective violence is attributed to social agents, “objec-
tive” or systemic violence “is precisely the violence inherent to [the]
normal state of things” (2). More precisely, “[objective violence] took on
a new shape within capitalism . . . . Violence is no longer attributable to
concrete individuals and their ‘evil’ intentions, but is purely ‘objective,’
systemic, anonymous” (10, 13). In part this is because the everyday vio-
lence and injustices played out in social reality are now determined by
the abstract logic of capital: the invisible and everyday mechanisms of
the very system that is founded on the myth of progress. While Alger’s
formulaic, one-dimensional narrative presents “heroes [that] acted out
the resolutions his audience wanted”, West reveals a level of systemic
violence that could no longer be suppressed (Lhamon 21).
Opposed to Auden’s notion of the inborn or singular experience of
disability, A Cool Million represents disablement as inherent to industri-
alization and the logic of capitalism. Lem is continually exposed to
environments and modes of production, which threaten to not only
dismantle the individual but to reassemble him. In turn, his dismember-
ment is presented as the effect of systemic issues, such as in the boy’s
predisposition to injury. Lemuel tries to avoid accidents, but in doing so
he only runs into further harm. After a dog attack, he is robbed—a
misunderstanding that leads to his imprisonment and the eventual
68 Maria Almanza

removal of his teeth by the prison warden. A carriage accident then

leads to the loss of his eye, and so on until eventually he is killed. Pre-
senting a culture of trauma, disability is here depicted not as a problem
of the individual body, but as a social reality. The status of Lemuel is
double: his character functions as a satirical representation of the anti-
hero who does not amass wealth but instead falls apart, while also rep-
resenting the manipulation of the body. Disability is alluded to in both
of these instances, but in a different model than that of trauma. Rather
than a narrative centered on the individual, A Cool Million critiques the
systemic violence to which the modern subject is everyday exposed.
As West’s plot suggest, by the turn of the century, a new type of
violence had manifested itself in modern machine culture.10 Speaking
to modern forms of violence, Seltzer describes the shift in the nature
and magnitude of violence relating the figure of the wounded body to a
culture entrenched in representations of the machine. In Serial Killers,
Seltzer writes:

By 1900 something strange and something new appears on the

scene. The wound, for one thing, is by now no longer the mark,
the stigmata, of the sacred or heroic: it is the icon, or stigma, of
the everyday openness of every body. This is a culture centered
on trauma (Greek for wound): a culture of atrocity exhibition,
in which people wear their damage like bandages of identity, or
fashion accessories. (2)

Similarly, the status of Lem’s “wounds” or “being wounded” extends

from the individual to a culture increasingly exposed to production and
consumption, both of which threaten the integrity of the body. The
seemingly organic gives way to the mechanic as Lemuel becomes the
spectacular representation of what it means to be dismantled rather
than dismembered—that is, that form of violence that might be called
modern, technologically mediated, and mechanized.
Lemuel’s representation as a broken-down machine is best under-
stood in relation to the historical moment of the twentieth-century, a
period in which there was a “‘vague and shifting’ line between the ‘ani-
mate and the inanimate’ and between the natural and unnatural.”11 As
disability scholar Sarah Jain points out, though the theorization of
man-as-machine was not an entirely new concept, the twentieth-cen-
 Nathanael West’s A Cool Million 69

tury witnessed the trope of “man as machine [as] no longer a theoretical

construct but rather a social reality mediated in the workplace, the
press, and the rising consumer culture as a whole” (33). It is for this
reason that A Cool Million frames the body as both a problem and a site
of work. Lem is dismantled, but he is soon offered a series of prosthetic
parts. The satire features prostheses such as a glass eye and a set of false
teeth, which function to reconstitute and manipulate the body for ulte-
rior purposes—the glass eye being the most obvious example. Having
lost his eye in a carriage accident, Lem is approached by a con man who
poses as a manufacturer for a glass eye factory. He offers Lemuel a propo-
sition that foretells of the boy’s future manipulation: “My man, if you
can wear this glass eye, I have a job for you” (115). Though Lem is
certain he is part of a “sales promotion campaign” and is “rehabilitated”
thanks to the supposed good will of his employer, he is instead manipu-
lated on account of his missing organ. The con is simple. Lem pretends
to lose his eye while shopping. Upon reporting the missing eye to the
shop manager, he offers the staff a thousand dollar reward for help in
recovering the organ. Unbeknownst to Lem, a second con man arrives
the next day with an eye in hand. Refusing to turn over the eye to the
staff, the manager offers the con man a sum of money hoping to later
receive the full reward. The scheme hinges on the boy’s ability to be
outfitted with interchangeable parts. Though he is naively hired for his
ability to remove his eye, the deed lands him in prison and yet again at
the mercy of authorities. Throughout the novel, Lem’s mangled body
similarly functions as a series of receptacles.
In representing the simultaneous anxiety of disfigurement and the
eventual rebuilding of the subject, West points to a cultural shift in
thinking of man as machine. Resistant to Auden’s reading of disability
as pathology, Lemuel Pitkin does not adhere to the traditional notion of
subjecthood. On the contrary, A Cool Million and its representation of
dismantling raises the question: What were the circumstances of pro-
duction that fostered this image of man as a dysfunctional machine?
Undoubtedly, the ability to serially produce and reproduce goods was
the source of much anxiety regarding a man’s status as a human. The
rise of Ford’s assembly line in 1908 cemented Marx’s fear that man
would become a metaphorical and physical appendage of the machine.12
Likewise, Frederick Winslow Taylor’s “scientific management” analyzed
bodies into measurable and standardized procedures, effectively config-
70 Maria Almanza

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.

iii. fascist assemblages

In A Cool Million’s final scene, a parade is given in Lemuel’s honor
at a rally for the novel’s proto-fascist political party, “The National Rev-
olutionary Party.” West here turns to the fascist group, which is at the
center of much of his plot. At the rally, Lem’s horrific biography is re-
told in order to suggest that the young man is the victim of an “un-
American Conspiracy”—a plot against America engineered by its
endangered body politic, including foreigners, International Capital-
ism, communism, and labor unions. Class struggle and the violence of
modernity, both of which seem subconsciously at work in the novella,
are here projected onto the body of the foreign other. As West makes
clear, underlying the Alger narrative is the xenophobia mimed by the
rhetoric of the “National Revolutionary Party.” The party’s charismatic
leader, Mr. Whipple, rhetorically situates Lem’s narrative within the
party’s call to action, calling on the dissatisfied masses to return Amer-
72 Maria Almanza

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:

‘Who dares?’—this was L. Pitkin’s cry,

As striding on the Bijou stage he came—
‘Surge out with me in Shagpoke’s name,
For him to live, for him to die!’ (177).

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:

He did not live or die in vain. Through his martyrdom the

National Revolutionary Party triumphed, and by that triumph
this country was delivered from sophistication, Marxism and
International Capitalism. Through the National Revolution
its people were purged of alien diseases and America became
again American. . . . Simple was his pilgrimage and brief, yet a
thousand years hence, no story, no tragedy, no epic poem will
be filled with greater wonder, or be followed by mankind with
deeper feeling, than that which tells of the life and death of
Lemuel Pitkin. (179)

Whipple’s series of rhetorical gestures—the song and speech—fabricate

a new body for Lemuel Pitkin. His mutilated body is rehabilitated into
a double on which the movement reconstitutes an America for Ameri-
74 Maria Almanza

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

fabricate a collective ego” (149). This fabrication of a collective ego is

blatant in the novel’s final scene. The crowd is described as “a million
strong” as they march in the regalia of the party to a song by which they
declare their allegiance and willingness to die just as Lemuel died. In
unison the crowd cries out:

“A million hearts for Pitkin, oh!

To do and die with Pitkin, oh!
To love and fight with Pitkin, oh!
To live and fight with Pitkin, oh!” (178).

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

gestures to the presence of fascist thought on American soil. Critics like

Marcus Klein have noted that Mr. Whipple appears very much to be an
“American Hitler” (Foreigners 265). As West suggests, political move-
ments like Nazism are not unthinkable or singular, but are deeply rooted
in the nationalist narratives of our very own American heroes. If Alger’s
narrative provided a mythology of the American dream that has helped
to sustain the capitalist logic in which self-invention and production go
hand-in-hand, West critiques “the American dream” and its ablest logic
via the dismantled body. A Cool Million’s image of a boy falling apart
upsets Alger’s narrative by featuring a subject that is denied by the
American success story. In turn, West’s dismantled subject calls into
question what types of bodies are represented in nationalist narratives
from Alger’s tales of American democracy to West’s representation of
American fascism.
Randolph College

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).

works cited
Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel
Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995.
Auden, W. H. “Interlude: West’s Disease.” Modern Critical Views: Nathanael West.
Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. Print.
Barnard, Rita. The Great Depression and the Culture of Abundance. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1995. Print.
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. New York: Farrar, 1972. Print.
Bloom, Harold. “Introduction.” Modern Critical Views: Nathanael West. Ed. Harold
Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. 1–10. Print.
Brown, Elspeth. “The Prosthetics of Management: Motion Study, Photography, and
the Industrialized Body in WWI America.” Artificial Parts, Practical Lives. Ed.
78 Maria Almanza

Katherine Ott, David Serlin, and Stephen Mihm. New York: NYU Press,
2002. 249–99. Print.
Chernow, Ron. Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. New York: Random, 1998.
Print.
Decker, Jeffrey Louis. Made in America: Self-Styled Success from Horatio Alger to
Oprah Winfrey. Minnesota: U of Minnesota P, 1997. Print.
Gardner, Ralph D. Horatio Alger, Or the American Hero Era. {City?}Illinois: Way-
side Press, 1971. Print.
Garland Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in
American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. Print.
Jain, Sarah. “The Prosthetic Imagination: Enabling and Disabling the Prosthesis
Trope.” Science, Technology and Human Values 24.1 (Winter 1999): 31–54.
Print.
Klein, Marcus. Easterns, Westerns, and Private Eyes: American Matters 1870–1900.
Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1994. Print.
———. Foreigners: The Making of American Literature 1900–1940. Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 1981. Print.
Lhamon, Wt. Jr., “Horatio Alger and American Modernism: The One Dimensional
Social Formula.” American Studies 17. 2 (1976): 11–27. Print.
Madden, David. Nathanael West: The Cheaters and the Cheated. {City?}Florida:
Everett/Edwards, 1973. Print.
Nissley, Tom. Intimate and Authentic Economies: The American Self-Made Man from
Douglass to Chaplin. New York: Routledge, 2003. Print.
Rabinbach, Anson. The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity.
New York: Basic, 1990. Print.
Seltzer, Mark. Bodies and Machines. New York: Routledge, 1992. Print.
———. Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture. New York: Rout-
ledge, 1998. Print.
Siebers, Tobin. Disability Theory. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2008. Print.
Snyder, Sharon, and David T. Mitchell. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the
Dependencies of Discourse. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2000. Print.
Solomon, William. Literature, Amusement, and Technology in the Great Depression.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. Print.
Susman, Warren. “The Culture of the Thirties.” Culture as History: The Transforma-
tion of American Society in the Twentieth Century. New York: Pantheon, 1984.
Print.
 Nathanael West’s A Cool Million 79

Veitch, Jonathan. American Superrealism: Nathanael West and the Politics of Represen-
tation in 1930s America. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1997. Print.
West, Nathanael. A Cool Million Or, The Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin. New York:
Farrar, 1934. Print.
———. Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust. Ed. Jonathan Lethem and John
Sanford. New York: New Directions, 2009. Print.
———. “Some Notes on Violence.” Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Docu-
ments. Ed. Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Jane Goldman, and Olga Taxidou. Chicago:
U of Chicago P, 1998. 477–79. Print.
Žižek, Slavoj. Violence. New York: Picador, 2008. Print.