Corpse and Accomplice: Fredric Jameson, Raymond Chandler, and the Representation of History in California

You can’t have everything, even in California.

—Raymond Chandler

Postmodernism was always, as its prefix implied, concerned in part with what had passed away. Whether the theoretical endeavors to define the term have expired from the ecstatic overdose of their own pronouncements or been eclipsed by the larger, planetary orientations of “globalization” theory, it seems nonetheless true that a pall of nostalgia hangs over postmodernism. At first glance this seems somewhat paradoxical, for how could the ostensibly global condition of postmodernity, “the vision of a world capitalist system,” elicit this feeling for a lost home (Jameson 1997, xviii)? And where might that local address be if it is supposedly everywhere? One answer, which may only beg the question further, is California.

Indeed, it is striking to observe how often California, and Los Angeles in particular, has served as the mise-en-scène for canonical pronouncements of the postmodern, whether in theory, fiction, or film. “There is nothing to match flying over Los Angeles by night,” writes Jean Baudrillard. “A sort of luminous, geometric, incandescent immensity, stretching as far as the eye can see, bursting out from the cracks in the clouds. Only Hieronymus Bosch’s hell can match this inferno effect” (51). Baudrillard’s apocalyptic vision replays the image of Los Angeles familiar to viewers of Blade Runner (1982), a film that, arguably more than any other, solidified the connection between the disjunctive temporality of the “post” and the space of Los Angeles.¹ Similarly, in what has become a veritable set piece of postmodern fiction, Oedipa Maas, the heroine of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, looks down upon a Southern California suburb that appears to transform before her eyes into a circuit full of secret meaning. In his own inaugural account of postmodernism, literary critic Fredric Jameson finds himself lost within the hyperspace of a Los Angeles hotel. Finally, as a way of punctuating this partial list, urban theorist Edward Soja effects what is perhaps the ultimate consolidation of the many postmodern encounters with Los Angeles when he characterizes the city in Borgesian terms as the “Aleph”: Los Angeles becomes the space that contains all spaces (222).

That so many of the foundational moments of postmodernism occur in California suggests a kind of split within the theorization itself, something on the order of Lacan’s famous distinction between the subject of the speech act and the subject of the enunciation. The various pronouncements are all oriented toward the world at large, all intend to mark a global shift in time and space, and yet each has a decidedly regional locus. In other words, California is the place from which each is spoken, in spite of the claim, variously put forward, that capitalism in its so-called late stage has colonized all spaces and brought them together under the single law of exchange. Even if all spaces are one space, as Soja would have it, it is still not clear in the last analysis why California should be the mystical point of their manifestation.

A certain atmosphere of mystery thus pervades such pronouncements: What lies beneath this insistent need to see California as the preeminent space of postmodernism’s historical imagination, and why is Los Angeles itself so central to the conceptualization of that which seems to be so much larger in scale? Such an interrogation requires that we move between the paradigmatic worldviews organized by the periodizing term and the particular ground that has occasioned so many of those views. As Raymond Chandler remarked apropos of the city that was his muse: “Down these mean streets a man must go” (1995b, 991). Fredric Jameson’s work proves particularly useful in this regard: for all of the evident influence his account has had upon the critical discourse of postmodernism, little attention has been paid to the way he links his global claims about the concept to the local spaces of California.

Indeed, Jameson’s corpus possesses a Chandlerian movement of its own for which the streets of Los Angeles are absolutely critical...