'Laughing at the laugh': unhappy consciousness in Nathanael West's The Dream Life of Balso Snell.(Critical essay)
From: The Modern Language Review
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Date: 4/1/2007
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Author: Haynes, Doug
This article links the self-attacking black humour of Nathanael West's 1931 debut novel to the kind of internally divided mind Hegel describes in the 'unhappy consciousness' section of his Phenomenology of Mind. I argue that West's splitting of consciousness is in fact historical. Grounding the novelist in the era of 20s and 30s Fordism, I suggest his work articulates a 'schizophrenia' inherent in a society engaged in forms of both mass production and consumption. Finally, I consider ...
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