Urban growth and narrative identity in Los Angeles fiction

In Southern California: An Island on the Land (1946) Carey McWilliams memorably characterized Southern California as “man-made, a gigantic improvisation,” and “a product of forced growth and rapid change” (13). This study examines how literature has represented the impact of this growth on the individual. By looking at canonical Los Angeles fiction written during the 1930s and 1940s, I show that novels of this period display an important concern with population and urban growth, as well as intense anxiety about the consequences of this growth on masculine identity. I focus specifically on the work of four major authors: Chester Himes, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, and John Fante. Each of these writers is now recognized as a significant figure in the canon of literature about Los Angeles, and each is interested in the city as both a peculiar urban space and as a space fraught with historical and ideological significance. Each writer’s work specifically takes up the changes in population size and composition, as well as the changes in the configuration of urban space, that Los Angeles experienced in 1930s and 1940s and uses these changes to fictionally examine the relationship of an individual, and his sense of self, to his environment. ❧ Though each writer’s engagement with the real historical details of what was happening in Los Angeles at the time—or at least with his understanding of what was happening—is unique, there are three major themes that tie all four writers together. The first is a concern with how personhood generally, and manhood in particular, is defined and realized against L.A.’s changing environment. As the population both grows and becomes more diverse, and as neighborhoods shift, almost seismically, beneath one’s feet, how does one maintain a stable sense of self? This question is complicated further by race, and by anxiety about whiteness in particular. These writers ask, from widely different points of view, what it means to be and not to be white in L.A. The second major concern that ties these four writers together is the threats and challenges to identity that the complex spatiotemporality of the city presents. These writers thematize the way one moves through the city, as well as the way one reads and navigates the city’s changing spaces, to articulate the degree to which an individual has adapted to L.A. The third is melancholia, and the way that a sense of self is born out of various kinds of loss—loss of a city one thought one had known, loss of stability and hope for a future in a hostile, antipathetic city. ❧ By paying attention to these three concerns we can see not only that Los Angeles’s rapid growth and change entailed a perceived threat to masculine identity, but also that writers attempted to find ways, even if subtle or barely conscious, to deploy the unique spatiotemporality of a city growing seemingly out of control to structure their novels. By using Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, I will show that the dynamics of a rapidly changing city appear in images of city space, including streets and buildings, as well as neighborhoods, in ways that (1) give these novels a unique and coherent narrative structure, and (2) tie the novels to the spatiotemporal realities in which they existed.