A Time to Mourn and a Time to Dance: Horace McCoy's "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?"

Abstract

The theme of isolation and estrangement in existential writings which reached a peak of popularity with readers in the 1950's and 1960's through a revival of interest in Kafka's work and in the fiction and plays of Sartre, Camus, and Ionesco (to this list might be added a reassessment at that time of Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche) has been traced largely in the productions of these European writers. Latter-day examinations of the existential dilemma of modern man incline toward identifying it in such diverse American writers as T. S. Eliot, Auden, Hemingway, and in European writers not usually regarded as members of the tradition, such as Joyce, Greene, Orwell, and Huxley. A work to receive all but the scantiest attention is Horace McCoy's 1935 novel They Shoot Horses, Don't They? With the exception of Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) and The Day of the Locust (1939), McCoy's novel is indisputably the best example of absurdist existentialism in American fiction.' Dismissed in America essentially as a penny dreadful at its first apearance, it nevertheless found, as did West's works, popularity among a small band of French existentialists who recognized its beauty and power. My study attempts to reveal its literary merit as a minor masterpiece of absurdist fiction. In fact, it anticipates Sartre's La Nausee (1938) and Camus' L'Etranger (1942) as an existential parable. It is not unlikely that both Frenchmen knew the novel, and that their fictions-in content and style-were influenced by it. McCoy's hero is not unlike Meursault in many respects, and his heroine uncannily presages Roquentin's intense disgust for life.