UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE L.A. Stories: Identity and Conflict in Posturban Culture A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English by Mikage Kuroki December 2011 Dissertation Committee: Dr. John Ganim, Chairperson Dr. Tiffany Lopez Dr. Traise Yamamoto Copyright by Mikage Kuroki 2011 The Dissertation of Mikage Kuroki is approved: ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION L.A. Stories: Identity and Conflict in Posturban Culture by Mikage Kuroki Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in English University of California, Riverside, December 2011 Dr. John Ganim, Chairperson Los Angeles represents the paradigmatic postmodern city, its centrifugal layout the antithesis of the modern ring-centered city of which Paris, London, and Vienna and their American counterparts New York and Chicago are prime examples. Despite its postmodern geography, however, L.A., like the modern city, equally threatens to intensify the lives and overwhelm the psyches of its residents. Over a century ago, Georg Simmel argued that the modern urban dweller represents a new human type who develops a blasé attitude as both a product of and a defense against such a modern, metropolitan existence. How do we consider Simmel’s definition of metropolis to accommodate L.A.? Furthermore, would such a mental type effectively combat the stimulation of the city’s landscape, given its propensity to disasters – both manmade, social disasters and natural ones? In the larger context, does L.A. literature suggest an iv evolution in urban theory or convey what has been called a “particular posturban consciousness”? Much of L.A. literature explores this particular posturban consciousness, offering what Simon Malpas identifies as one aim of postmodernism: to “[reread] and critique… modern values and projects” (43). My examination of L.A. literature from the last two decades - D.J. Waldie’s Holy Land , T.C. Boyle’s Tortilla Curtain , Steve Erickson’s Amnesiascope , Nina Revoyr’s Southland , Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange , Salvador Plascencia’s People of Paper , and Chris Abani’s The Virgin of Flames – reflects such an aim. Moreover, these novels reveal this particular apocalyptic tension between disaster and the promise of new world orders. In Chapter One, I argue that Waldie and Boyle’s texts reveal the tensions of collectivity and anonymity and of utopia and apocalypse. In Chapter Two, I demonstrate how natural disaster in Erickson and Revoyr’s novels serve a revelatory function, violently shaking the protagonists out of amnesiac stupor. In Chapter Three, I show how Yamashita and Plascencia’s works share a vision of disaster and redemption and re-imagine new transnational communities and consciousness, pushing for a New World (B)order. In Chapter Four, I examine Abani’s novel for its similar themes of apocalypse, disaster and redemption, identity crisis, and transnational relations. v Table of Contents Introduction ...............................................................................................…….1 Chapter 1 ................................................……….........................................….16 Chapter 2 ................................…………........................................................104 Chapter 3 ……………………........................................................................194 Chapter 4 ........................................................................................................295 vi Introduction As I was working on an early draft of this dissertation one summer weekend in 2008, I took a break to visit the Huntington Library in San Marino, California and enjoy This Side of Paradise: Body and Landscape in L.A. Photographs , the special exhibit at the time. The photographs on display varied widely, ranging from late 19 th century pictorial histories of a burgeoning Los Angeles to more recent representations like The Valley , photographer Larry Sultan’s photographic documentary of the thriving porn industry in L.A.’s San Fernando Valley. Some photographs on display included William Garnett’s famous aerial photographs of the development of the Lakewood suburb 1 and Ansel Adams’s image of the tangled arteries of the L.A. freeway interchange 2; others depicted manmade and natural disasters including the St. Francis Dam Disaster and the Long Beach Earthquake while still others captured the city’s iconic beaches, boardwalks, surfers, and billboards featuring Angelyne. 3 Trying to make sense of all of the images to imagine some single, coherent definition of L.A., all in a single afternoon proved to be a dizzying and futile effort on my part. The futility of my efforts as a spectator to comprehend these various representations of L.A. as a unified narrative, as a single L.A. story, was one intended effect of the exhibit, I think. Like the novels I explore in the next chapters, the exhibit demonstrates the inability to sum up L.A., neither the landscape nor the residents who 1 William A. Garnett, Grading Lakewood California , 1950; Foundation and Slabs, Lakewood, California , 1950; Finished Housing, Lakewood, California , 1950 (Watts and Bohn-Spector 59). 2 Ansel Adams, Interchange, Los Angeles Freeway , 1967 (Watts and Bohn-Spector 43). 3 John Humble, Selma Avenue at Vine Street, Hollywood, January 23, 1991 , 1991 (Watts and Bohn-Spector back jacket). 1 occupy its spaces, in a single coherent statement. In this respect, the exhibit is a postmodern endeavor, the sort of “rereading and critique of modern values and projects” one definition of postmodernism Simon Malpas offers (43). In other words, the play, anarchy, dispersal, difference, indeterminacy and antinarratives of postmodernism replace modernism’s imperatives of purpose, hierarchy, centering, origin, determinacy, and grand narratives, to borrow Ihab Hassan’s terms (280-1). Accordingly, my examination of L.A. literature from the last two decades - D.J. Waldie’s Holy Land (1996) and T.C. Boyle’s Tortilla Curtain (1995) in the first chapter, Steve Erickson’s Amnesiascope (1997) and Nina Revoyr’s Southland (2003) in the second, Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange (1997) and Salvador Plascencia’s People of Paper (2005) in the third, and finally Chris Abani’s The Virgin of Flames (2007) in my last chapter – may contain similar themes such as postmodern fragmentation, marginalization, colonialisms, transnationalism, natural and human disasters, humanity, apocalypse, reinvention, and renewal but no overarching category other than the loose umbrella of “L.A. stories ” can adequately encompass all of these works. Significantly, the following words welcomed visitors at the entrance of the Huntington exhibit: “Contrary to popular belief, Los Angeles does not defy description so much as provoke it.” To say that the city cannot be described erroneously implies a lack on the city’s part, that L.A. must but cannot be reduced to a single definition or lens through which to view the city. However, as the exhibit’s message corrects, indeterminacy is precisely the beauty and terror of L.A., the city’s sheer number of possible representations, its ability to “provoke” diverse descriptions and interpretations. 2 To which side of paradise does the exhibit’s title This Side of Paradise refer? The beautiful side? The wrong or ugly side? Of what paradise - paradise lost, found, enhanced, or perverted? Indeed, the authors of the L.A. stories I consider here are equally provoked by both the beauty and terror of the city, variously representing its urbanscape, identities, and conflicts as the title of my dissertation suggests. The Los Angeles depicted in the exhibit and imagined in the literature I explore, can be understood as the antithesis of the modern ring-centered city, its postmodern layout “peculiarly resistant to conventional description” and distinguished by multiple centers rather than an urban core like those of traditional metropolises –Paris, London, and Vienna or their American counterparts New York and Chicago (Soja, Postmodern Geographies 222). Despite L.A.’s centrifugal layout, Angelenos may be no different from residents of such traditional metropolises in the sense that the constant shifting of faces, events, scenes, and other such stimuli equally threatens to over-stimulate, overwhelm, and consume them, erasing their individuality. The question then becomes, how does the L.A. subject survive in an environment that is both awe-inspiring and menacing at the same time, protecting against a landscape that signals modernity and progress yet also warns of potential annihilation? Over a century ago, the German philosopher and sociologist Georg Simmel argued that the modern urban dweller represents a new human type who develops a blasé attitude as both a product of and a defense against a modern, metropolitan existence in which the “swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli” has a tendency to intensify his life and overwhelm his psyche. How do we consider Simmel’s definition of 3 metropolis to accommodate the paradigmatic postmodern city of Los Angeles? Does the unique case of Los Angeles also demand a revised understanding of what qualifies as urban stimuli? Do Angelenos respond to urban stimuli in the same fashion as do residents of other metropolises? Do Los Angelenos respond uniformly with