Signs of the Signs: The Literary Lights of Incandescence and Neon

If Moby Dick is the great American novel, then it is also the great American novel about signs, as the prologue maintains. The chapters that follow demonstrate that the sign is indeed a sign of American literature. After the electric sign was invented, it influenced Stephen Crane to become a nightlight impressionist and Theodore Dreiser to make the fire sign his metaphor for the city. An actual Broadway sign might have inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. In Manhattan Transfer and U.S.A., John Dos Passos portrayed America as just a spectacular sign. William Faulkner’s electric signs are full of sound and fury signifying modernity. The Last Tycoon was a sign of Fitzgerald’s decline. The signs of noir can be traced to Poe’s The Man of the Crowd. Absence flickers in the neons of Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles. The death of God haunts the neon wilderness of Nelson Algren. Hitler’s empire was an non-intentional parody of Nathanael West’s California. The beats reinvented Times Square in their own image. Jack Kerouac’s search for the center of Saturday night was a quest for transcendence.