Cold Intimacy: Compassion, Precarity and Violence in Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts

Abstract

This chapter examines the ethico-political dimensions of (Christian and charitable) compassion in Nathanael West’s novella Miss Lonelyhearts, published in the darkest year of the Great Depression (1933). While West did not explicitly write his radical leftist convictions into his satirical fiction, this chapter argues that Miss Lonelyhearts stages a conflict between absent yet massively needed political responses to socio-economic precarity and an intratextual world whose ‘superrealist’ absurdity revolves around the compassionate, male advice columnist Miss Lonelyhearts being held ethically responsible for alleviating the material causes of his correspondents’ acute vulnerability. The columnist reacts repeatedly to their suffering with aversion and violence, and this chapter traces an anti-capitalist textual politics in West’s unparalleled representation of fraught relations where negative emotions triggering repulsion clash violently with compassion as a positive affect sustaining desire, attraction and love – that is, the realm of intimacy. Enlisting concepts such as Eva Illouz’s ‘cold intimacy’, Lauren Berlant’s ‘cruel optimism’ and Sianne Ngai’s ‘ugly feelings’, it reads the text’s refusal of compassion and intimacy as a radical rejection of an enduring predicament: an affective-political regime of resilience by which capitalism uses intimate relations and positive emotions to prevent class conflict and socio-economic equality.