A Critical and Cultural Poetics of the End: Self, Space, and Volatility in Los Angeles
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City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 2010 A Critical and Cultural Poetics of the End: Self, Space, and Volatility in Los Angeles Pamela Albanese Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/1709 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] A CRITICAL AND CULTURAL POETICS OF THE END: SELF, SPACE, AND VOLATILITY IN LOS ANGELES by PAMELA ALBANESE A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Comparative Literature in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York. 2010 ©2010 PAMELA ALBANESE All Rights Reserved ii This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Comparative Literature in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Professor Ammiel Alcalay Date Chair of Examining Committee Professor Vincent Crapanzano Date Executive Officer Professor Ammiel Alcalay Professor Vincent Crapanzano Professor Wayne Koestenbaum Supervisory Committee THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii Abstract A CRITICAL AND CULTURAL POETICS OF THE END: SELF, SPACE, AND VOLATILITY IN LOS ANGELES by PAMELA ALBANESE Adviser: Professor Ammiel Alcalay A Critical and Cultural Poetics of the End: Self, Space, and Volatility in Los Angeles delineates the correspondences between Los Angeles spaces—exterior, topographical, architectural, and imaginary—and aspects of the self—interiority, identity, experience, and desire—in fictional and non-fictional depictions of Los Angeles. Through close readings of key Los Angeles novels, essays, and films, this project emphasizes how the narrative "I" traverses urban space, focusing on the dissolution of boundaries between self and place. Los Angeles' sprawling, decentralized layout and rapidly-shifting landscape have a profound influence on narrative identity, generating a volatile and disquieting sense of self; this project also explores how the city’s unique spatial orientation contributes to a literature and cinema of disillusionment exclusive to Los Angeles. iv Table of Contents Introduction (1) Chapter One: Light and Exteriority (20) Part 1: Illuminations on Exceptionalism (20) Part 2: Self-Destructive Fires of Creativity: Approaching a Local Literature (31) Part 3: Mike Davis’ Literary Destruction of Los Angeles (49) Chapter Two: Landscape and Spatiality (61) Part 4: The Politics and Poetics of Decentralization in Los Angeles (61) Part 5: Visual Emblems of Decentralized Time and Space (76) Part 6: Fictional Rumblings and Trembling Landscapes: Ask the Dust (88) Chapter Three: Movement and Temporality (103) Part 7: The Freeway Flâneur: Play It As It Lays and Tropic of Orange (103) Part 8: Automatic Devices: Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles (120) Part 9: Memory and Desire: Mulholland Drive (130) Chapter Four: Submersion and Interiority (145) Part 10: Behind the Scene and the Unseen: Inland Empire (145) Part 11: Submersion of the Self into the Landscape: Play It As It Lays (160) Part 12: Subterfuge of the Deluge (172) Epilogue (189) Bibliography (194) v Introduction A Critical and Cultural Poetics of the End: Self, Space, and Volatility in Los Angeles delineates the correspondences between Los Angeles spaces—exterior, topographical, architectural, and imaginary—and aspects of the self—interiority, identity, experience, and desire—in fictional and non-fictional depictions of Los Angeles. Through close readings of key Los Angeles novels, essays, and films, this project emphasizes how the narrative "I" traverses urban space, focusing on the dissolution of boundaries between self and place. Los Angeles' sprawling, decentralized layout and rapidly-shifting landscape have a profound influence on narrative identity, generating a volatile and disquieting sense of self; this project also explores how the city’s unique spatial orientation contributes to a literature and cinema of disillusionment exclusive to Los Angeles. Myriad writers and critics have described Los Angeles as an unstable and exceptional city, on the verge of destroying itself through both manmade and environmental means. Themes of disillusionment, disintegration, and calamity are prevalent in Los Angeles literature and film, and this project investigates the reasons for this tendency. If the frenetic claustrophobia, existential isolation, and economic inequality of the modern and postmodern metropolis elsewhere have driven countless fictional characters to physical or psychological dissolution, then what sets Los Angeles apart from examples of urban alienation and spatial dislocation in fictional and critical representations of other cities? Rather than approach “the city” in film or literature as an all-encompassing construct, applicable to London, Cairo, 1 Tokyo, Paris, Berlin, Buenos Aries, St. Petersburg, Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, or New York, this project connects the idiosyncratic attributes of Los Angeles’s urbanism to its anomalous aesthetic tendencies and temporal and spatial orientations (and disorientations). A facet of this project investigates Los Angeles's image as a singular place—a futuristic city devoid of history and on the brink of catastrophe—both in terms of how the city projects, distorts, and magnifies its self-image through literature and film, and how the self or narrator negotiates the disconnect between such an imagined community and the sensation of being there in the present. How does Los Angeles destabilize linear and centralized notions of time and space? Furthermore, is an insistence on Los Angeles's exceptionalism another illusion to mask the ordinariness—or emptiness—beneath the surface sheen? Conversely, are mundane actions and dissociative states a defense mechanism for psychological extremes—instigated by an earthquake-prone, combustible landscape and an illusory Hollywood dream factory? The concept of a place existing in the imagination before it is experienced in reality is a common thread throughout the cultural history of Los Angeles. This originates in the "pre- history" of California itself—named and conceived in the sixteenth century Spanish imagination before explorers arrived on its soil.1 This project highlights the interplay between preconceived notions of a place based on cultural transmission of fact and fiction, and firsthand experience for the narrator, character, or observer in literature and film. To describe the experiential and imaginary modes of urban narratives of Los Angeles, this project measures the dissonance between anticipation and experience in works that both reveal the 1 In Landscape of Desire: Anglo Mythologies of Los Angeles, William Alexander McClung writes: “The name [California] had been adopted from Rodriguez de Montalvo’s Las Sergas de Esplandián (1510), a romance about an island near the Earthly Paradise, full of gold and Amazons…” (40); “Sabed que a la diestra mano de las Indias existe una isla llamada California muy cerca de un costado del Paraíso Terrenal; y estaba poblada por mujeres negras, sin que existiera allí un hombre, pues vivían a la manera de las amazonas.” 2 connection between identity and landscape, and concurrently engender and expose a mythologized sense of place in the region. Conceptual Foundations A range of models for examining literary and cultural space have influenced my own approach to investigating Los Angeles writing and film. The problem of defining and theorizing urban space recurs throughout twentieth-century post-structural thought; David Harvey, Michel de Certeau, Michel Foucault, and Henri Lefebvre have all proposed methods—from Foucault's heterotopias, to Harvey's spatial practices, to de Certeau's idea of a city as anonymous, universal subject, to Lefebvre's triad of perceived, conceived, and lived spaces. In the January 2007 PMLA’s special issue on cities, Patricia Yaeger responds to Lefebvre's skepticism about the effectiveness of applying codes from literary texts to the mapping of space. She addresses the formidable task of defining a poetics "for entities as large, chaotic, historically differentiated, and geographically various as world cities," by proposing a metropoetics, "a poetics of infrastructure," or "a strategy for understanding the history and phenomenology of cities through acts of cultural and literary making, or poesis..." (21-22) A form of "space-mapping" occurs through the ever shifting, unfixed nature of literary codes; the vast associations, connections, and evocations generated by a work of literature correspond to the defamiliarizing and infinitely mutable qualities of the city. Yaeger's metropoetics—synthesizing questions of ecology, diachrony, colonialism, poverty, utopia, citizenship, memorial, insularity, and enclosure—offers a novel approach to channeling the immensity of a city's cultural production into an “urban imaginary.” 3 Literary and critical texts about other cities reveal how Los Angeles deviates from and corresponds to various models of the urban narrative, while demonstrating the breadth of modes in which fictional works and critical studies have portrayed and represented cities. References to approaches such as Walter Benjamin's essays on the flâneur, Roland Barthes' Empire of Signs, and Italo Calvino's Invisible