Pavey 10052444 thesis

1 Crime, Space and Disorientation in the Literature and Cinema of Los Angeles Alexander John Pavey Thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Language and Literature at University College London 2017 2 I, Alexander John Pavey confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. 3 Abstract Participation in the rhythms and processes of twentieth-century capitalism depended upon physical mobility, particularly in a city as geographically dispersed as Los Angeles. This fluid individual mobility also served to justify the introduction of new law enforcement practices that increasingly sought to rationalize urban space.

How did the literature and cinema of Los Angeles represent the experiences of citizens for whom mobility was both vital and potentially incriminating? Within such an environment, I propose, successful orientation became particularly crucial. I develop an original but historically grounded theorization of disorientation as a concept through which to interpret the unease and vulnerability of individual protagonists as they navigate the city. Whilst drawing on a wide body of theoretical sources, my research remains rooted in the close analysis of cinematic and literary texts, and the specific historical and geographical context with which they engage. The automobility of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe allows him to navigate the dispersed topography of 1940s LA, but his investigations are often ineffectual and leave him weary and jaded.

The protagonist of Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945) struggles to orientate himself within a wartime Los Angeles in which racism is manifested spatially. Himes’s novel provides a lens through which to view the experience of 1970s South LA depicted in the films of Charles Burnett and Haile Gerima, in which the city’s African-American community confronts disorientating conditions of circumscribed movement and arbitrary incrimination. Law- enforcement officials exert spatial control in the novels of Joseph Wambaugh and James Ellroy, but they also find themselves compromised by jurisdictional conflicts. Pursuing careful analyses of character, form and setting, this project explicates some of the compelling and troubling visions of urban experience that Los Angeles has prompted, and challenges a critical tendency to elide aspects of the city’s racial past.

4 Acknowledgements I am indebted to my supervisor, Professor Matthew Beaumont, for his perceptive advice and persistent encouragement throughout this project. My secondary supervisor, Professor Philip Horne, and the wider Department of English Literature and Language at University College London have also provided stimulating and appropriately challenging feedback, in both formal and informal situations, that has been instrumental in shaping my research. The warm and supportive atmosphere amongst the 2011 English PhD cohort continues to serve as a source of encouragement. I’m particularly grateful to Karina Jakubowicz for organizing the thesis writing workshops in which the later chapters of this thesis were first drafted, and for solidarity during the latter stages of this research.

Rebecca Roberts-Hughes and Tom Norton have provided support and inspiration over many years of friendship, throughout our various literary and academic endeavours. They stand here for the many other friends, too numerous to name, who deserve thanks: All Hallows crew, Warwick crew, Walthamstow crew, and beyond. Alex Dutton, Charles Shanks, Nicola Regan, Rich Smith — never completely lost. The contribution to this project of my parents, Maureen and Norman Pavey, and my brother Mark is immeasurable.

They have never faltered in their support, and I owe them love and gratitude, as I do to my extended family of Richardsons, Paveys, O’Hanlons, Chorltons and Becks. Finally, and most importantly, my wife Alice and our son Lenny — for every decision we’ve made, and the adventures to come. We walk together. 5 Table of Contents Introduction p.

7 Chapter One ‘To become completely lost’: Disorientation, p. 55 Incrimination and the Mobile Metropolis Chapter Two ‘Overtones of weariness and disorientation’: p. 92 Retrospection, Reconstruction and Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles Chapter Three ‘If a white man asks where you’re going’: If He Hollers p. 146 Let Him Go and South LA in the 1940s Chapter Four ‘Being stopped’: Arrested Movement, the LA Rebellion p.

186 and South LA in the 1970s Chapter Five ‘Confused about your jurisdiction, Deputy?’: Territory, p. 232 Identity and Los Angeles Law Enforcement Conclusion Getting Lost p. 301 6 List of Illustrations Figure 1 Significant locations in The High Window p. 122 Figure 2 South Los Angeles and surrounding neighbourhoods p.

147 Figure 3 Los Angeles businesses listed in the 1941 ‘Green Book’ p. 154 Figure 4 Los Angeles businesses listed in the 1956 ‘Green Book’ p. 155 Figure 5 Los Angeles businesses listed in the 1962 ‘Green Book’ p. 156 Figure 6 Locations of Dorothy’s walks along Central Avenue p.

205 (Bush Mama) Figure 7 Danny Upshaw’s jurisdictional transgressions (The Big p. 265 Nowhere) 7 Introduction No matter how smart you think you are, you have to have a place to start from; a name, an address, a neighbourhood, a background, an atmosphere, a point of reference of some sort. Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye (1953)1 The Image of the City: Orientation in Mid-Century Los Angeles During the 1950s, Kevin Lynch conducted empirical research in three North American cities — Boston, Jersey City and Los Angeles — with the aim of considering ‘the visual quality of the American city by studying the mental image of that city which is held by its citizens’.2 Lengthy interviews were held with small samples of residents to evoke their own images of their physical environment, which included descriptions of specific routes and places, subjective sketches of areas, and the description of imagined journeys through the city. This data was cross-referenced to construct a tentative ‘group image’ of each area, then compared with the visual ‘reality’ of each city at the time, to provide the basis for further hypotheses about the nature of urban experience.

The results of this research were published in Lynch’s 1960 monograph The Image of the City. The overriding concern of Lynch’s work was city design — with how we might build or remodel cities to be highly legible, thereby making them more pleasant, satisfying places in which to live. Individual orientation, Lynch suggested, entails the establishment of a clear ‘environmental image’ composed of various constituent parts: paths, landmarks, edges, nodes and districts.3 Different urban structures are more or less amenable to this process — the physical composition of the city can facilitate or frustrate the ‘purposeful mobility’ that is the ‘original function’ of the environmental 1 Raymond Chandler, ‘The Long Goodbye’, in The Big Sleep and other novels (London: Penguin Books in association with Hamish Hamilton, 2000), p. 2 Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City, Publications of the Joint Center for Urban Studies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960), p.4 This suggests, Lynch concluded, that planners might speculate further about how city design could be better attuned to the needs of city dwellers.

The Image of the City is a short book that has exerted an influence well beyond the restricted terms of reference Lynch established. Although his sample sizes were small (and by no means representative of each city’s diverse social structure), his empirical approach was innovative. As Donald Appleyard notes in appraising the significance of Lynch’s work, the fields of urban planning and city design had not previously attempted to begin with the experiences of ordinary city dwellers — how they perceived and understood the environment in which they live.5 This aspect made it an influential early work in what came to be called environmental psychology, in addition to its impact within the field of urban planning, upon which it has had ‘a profound effect’ in both teaching and practice.6 Outside of these immediately relevant fields, The Image of the City has also been influential in cultural studies, and particularly in relation to urban and spatial theory and the so-called ‘spatial turn’. This influence can be traced in part to Fredric Jameson’s important 1984 essay ‘Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’.7 There, Jameson mobilized Lynch’s concepts to play an allegorical role: the process by which individuals orientate themselves in the metropolis serving as a 4 Ibid.

5 Donald Appleyard, ‘The Major Published Works of Kevin Lynch: An Appraisal’, The Town Planning Review, 49. 6 Gert-Jan Hospers, ‘Lynch’s The Image of the City after 50 Years: City Marketing Lessons from an Urban Planning Classic’, European Planning Studies, 18. Pearce and Michael Fagence provide an extensive overview of Lynch’s significant influence on the fields of planning studies and environmental psychology in ‘The Legacy of Kevin Lynch: Research Implications’, Annals of Tourism Research, 23. To take just one further recent example, Magdalena Zmudzinska-Nowak’s has applied Lynch’s principles of ‘legible’ city space to an analysis of central European post-war planned communities: Magdalena Zmudzinska-Nowak, ‘Searching for Legible City Form: Kevin Lynch’s Theory in Contemporary Perspective’, Journal of Urban Technology, 10.

7 Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, New Left Review, 146 (1984), 53–92. The essay is also included in, and provides a title for, the later collection of Jameson’s writings: Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), pp. 9 model for the ‘cognitive mapping’ that, for Jameson, is demanded by the state of late capitalism, through which the subject might situate herself within the otherwise disorientating global networks of postmodernity.8 Jameson’s call for an aesthetic of cognitive mapping in subsequent works has recently been taken up by Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle in their Cartographies of the Absolute (2014). Toscano and Kinkle analyse a diverse corpus of visual and narrative works that, they suggest, provide ‘glimpses into, or distant refractions of, the functioning of a global political economy; works that address the place of individuals and collectives within this “sublime” system’.9 This thesis will not endeavour to identify further examples of works that map the totality of global capitalism, in the manner that Toscano and Kinkle have done so effectively.

I will suggest, within more modest terms of reference, that the literary and cinematic works considered here implicitly present a consistent ‘narrative proposition’, as Toscano and Kinkle put it, about some of the social forces that shaped Los Angeles in the twentieth century. And it is Kevin Lynch’s work that will provide a first point of reference for this analysis: his theorization of urban experience, his characterization of Los Angeles’s form at mid-century, his focus on individual mobility, and in particular his vivid descriptions of the unease or even trauma that disorientation can entail. If The Image of the City is an investigation into how city design might be better attuned to the needs of city dwellers in which Los Angeles serves as one of three case studies, it is also, on another reading, one of many accounts of twentieth-century Los Angeles in which residents struggle to navigate the city’s dispersed topography, and in which their experiences are marked by moments of unease and disorientation. Lynch’s 8 Jameson refines and expands upon this conceptualization in his later essay ‘Cognitive Mapping’, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed.

by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), pp. 9 Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle, Cartographies of the Absolute (Winchester: Zero Books, 2014), p. 20 10 respondents, he noted, repeatedly used certain words to characterize the city: ‘“spread- out,” “spacious,” “formless,” “without centers”’, and their common image of Los Angeles was of ‘an endless spread’, which was associated with spacious residential areas but also carried ‘overtones of weariness and disorientation’.10 They found Los Angeles ‘difficult to organize or comprehend as a whole’, and the areas they pictured most vividly were ones that they found ‘rather alien or even menacing’.11 The dispersed urban form that Lynch’s interviewees described has been the subject of extensive further scholarship by urban theorists and historians.