| |
home > books
> book reviews > james
ellroy
 THE
MADHOUSE OF THE SKULL
James Ellroy's 'LA Quartet'
ALEX CUTTER
Reproduced from ON - THE WORLD AND EVERYTHING
IN IT magazine with the kind permission of Tony Wakeford of Tursa/Sol
Invictus.
These four novels are an intense and murderous journey which moves through
the city sickness and evil heat of downtown LA and travels right through
to the end of the night. Taking a fuck-you-sideswipe at fashionable and
politically correct notions, Ellroy has dragged crime and it's fictions
back to where they always really existed, under the very skin itself,
those immutable furies of blood and synapses that lie outside meaningful
causality. Murder has once again become a primary and atavistic blood-pulse
urge committed by people freebasing on their blackest psycho-sexual compulsions.
In an Ellroy novel, everyone is flawed and therefore guilty as hell since
human justice can never begin to compensate for the first and greatest
injustice of all, the Fall of Man from paradise.
And of course the sheer scale of man's Fall from grace is in evidence
everywhere in these books, a violent haemorrhaging of latent desire, crime,
injustice and Fate. After the madhouse of the skull what else is there
to be said? Like Beckett, all Ellroy can hope for is to leave his own
stain on the silence.
When Samuel Dashiell Hammett disrupted the linear causality of crime
fiction, that rarefied 19thC rationalism and positivism, just when it
seemed that even the most extreme contradictions of human behaviour could
be forced to the surface and understood, he struck a rich black seam of
evil with roots that ran deep into the very terra firma of this planet.
Although Hammett might have anchored crime in the broader social milieu
he wasn't really interested in the underlying political and economic inequalities
which are so often cited as its cause. Hammett was a writer well aware
of man's 'fallen' state, but he waded only so far into such dark, polluted
waters. Ellroy on the other hand takes you all the way down from silence
to madness and exposes that central flaw right to the vein. Compared to
Ellroy, even Hammett's greatest books are like a run out with the family
to Whitley Bay.
Yet of all the writers Ellroy has been compared to the one he most closely
resembles is a non-crime writer; that bete-noir of French letters, Louis
Ferdinand Celine. Celine's books, all of which were journeys to the end
of the night, were also mystical quests to find a true image of the human
condition and to understand what its consequences are. Inevitably the
answer that is gleaned from bitter experience is to be found in absurdity,
madness and death.
Like the characters in Celine, Beckett and Kafka, the world and its
injustices makes no sense to Ellroy's detectives. But even so they still
have this desperate urge to understand both rationally and emotionally
the derailed values and the fatalistic collusions of chance which coalesce
in the act of crime. And through this they struggle to grasp the cosmic
connections that will answer "the big WHY ?" itself. They are
not content to stop at the existential limits of their own self but try
instead to make sense of the whole shebang even though they know that
they will fail. Ultimately all there is to do is negotiate their own twisted
metaphysic; a cut-rate, bargain basement sale on revenge, redemption and
rebirth, but they can only dimly perceive what is going on as they are
dragged down into the madhouse of the skull. And as it turns out, it's
a hell of a long way down.
It comes as little surprise then that Christian humanism - in which
God represents absolute reason in a rational universe - plays no part
in Ellroy's black-as-pitch cosmography. Nor is there any room at the dark
centre of these novels for its secular fallout - liberal humanism. If
there is a God then He is the dark, inscrutable God of Calvinism who represents
absolute Will. Calvinism has that emotional discipline which appeals to
Ellroy; an emotional rigor that doesn't break down in tears every time
it hears a hard luck story (and hasn't everyone got a hard luck story?)
But above all Calvinism recognises the eternal and immutable presence
of evil. Thus Ed Exley's toast to the crimes that demand absolute justice
at the beginning of LA Confidential, is the outward manifestation
of someone desperately trying to find something to believe in. Like Ellroy
he is trying to bulwark some form of order, even if it is only attenuated
religious feeling, against crimes and contradictions that he can only
begin to understand. As Ellroy has said, the obsession that lies behind
crime writing is that "it gives me tidy resolutions to dark deeds".
But ultimately Ellroy is too seduced by the ideas of redemption and
curiosity to be a good Calvinist. He might be inspired to struggle towards
some higher universal meaning which, since our reason is fatally flawed,
will always appear as a veil of almost impenetrable mystery and darkness,
but he can't accept that God's Will is in all cases reasonable and just.
Thus he can't accept the Calvinistic not-knowing and damnation which must
always be the same thing. The rock that Ellroy clings to throughout these
books is the Protestant ethic that all the most significant truths are
private and intuitive truths gleaned from personal experience. It is through
such a clause that he will be able to negotiate his own redemption. At
the end of each of these novels, all that's left are the scattered ruins
of lives; a hollow, earthbound redemption for his fallen detectives which
has been clawed back from oblivion. But in life, Ellroy is hoping for
some form of divine blessing from God, a sort of special dispensation
on the great Day of Judgement, as he is for Elizabeth Short - The Black
Dahlia.
If God or Fate or whatever had granted us a few more IQ points, we might
have been able to cut ourselves a better deal and go beyond such misnomers
as free will and causality without arriving back at Fate or God. As it
is, all we have is this poison in our veins; not blood, pur sang,
but blood fatally mixed with other psychotropic toxins, this mauvais
sang which has inexorably mired us in these meaningless metanarratives.
Yet Ellroy doesn't go as far as Celine did and completely subvert all
narrative causality. Celine saw in chance and Fate the true reflection
of the universe and used it as the structuring principle of his novels.
Ellroy is obliged to work within the limits of causality since it is the
peg on which the whole crime genre hangs. But although Ellroy's plotting
is more copasetic and convoluted than you would have any right to expect
(and about a hundred times better than Elmore Leonard's sub-standard,
boil-in-the-bag plots) he consistently short-circuits and rewires causality
through the agencies of chance as though everything operates within the
metanarrative that ends all metanarratives, Fate. After all as Joseph
Conrad said, there are no certainties in life, only contradictions.
Of all the contradictions that are scattered throughout these four books,
the one that leaves the ugliest stain on the surface of creation and screams
the biggest 'WHY?' is the case of The Black Dahlia. The body of
a part-time actress and prostitute is found one morning after having been
tortured for three days then finally exsanguinated, vivisected, her body
parts washed clean and her mouth gashed into a sick, leering parody of
a smile. It is based on the unsolved case of Elizabeth Short whose scattered
remains were found between 39th and Norton in downtown LA in 1947 and
who hit the news bigtime. Some ten years later, Ellroy's mother was found
strangled and dumped on waste ground - a crime which was also never solved.
The two murders coalesced in Ellroy's mind; a double heartpunch which
shaped his obsession with sexual depravity and violent crime.
And yet out of this mire of blood and sickness it seems possible to
discern a faint residue of meaning from the Dahlia's murder. It is as
though the killers had symbolically destroyed the cause of the Dahlia's
'evil' through the total excision of bad blood and then washed the mutilated
body parts clean. On top of this they also hacked out the sexual and reproductive
organs leaving the body hollow and eviscerated. Perhaps the Dahlia found
some form of redemption in suffering and death or maybe the killers mutilated
the body as an act of revenge against the ineffable trajectories of Fate
that had brought her to them at that time looking like that. Then again
perhaps they intended it to be a savagely ironic parody of the resurrection
itself? Who knows? Either way, for the cops who become obsessed with the
case, the Dahlia, drained of blood and viscera, everything that gave her
quiddity as a human being, is transformed into a tragic martyr. What is
important is that Bucky Bleichert's and Lee Blanchard's search isn't just
to find her killers, it is also symbolic. It is a search for the deeper,
metaphysical problems that are as elusive as the Grail.
All the best police procedurals/ private eye thrillers (the ones that
really make a difference) have this dualism built into their structure;
the surface mystery with its attendant sub-plots which, in true Chandler
style, all turn out to be one plot, and a deeper, metaphysical problem
which isn't so easily solved. The fact that Ellroy is as much interested,
if not more so, in this metaphysical angle is what gives these books much
of their remarkable edge. As Ellroy's detectives try to piece together
the disjecta membra of a victim's life with all its frustrations
and failures which lead to a violent death at the hands of an unknown
killer, their search becomes a spiritual quest; it becomes their
case and their frustrations and failures that are being worked
through. As Danny Upshaw who is investigating a series of brutally insane
sex-killings says in The Big Nowhere: "I think that if I knew
who this guy is and why he does it, then I'll know something so big that
I'll be able to figure out all this everyday stuff like cake...everything
I sensed about what people are capable of came together on one job and
I nailed why. Why. Fucking why."
These are characters who can only articulate their emotions ritualistically
through violence or as a brief, confessional, nervous rush of words after
sex. If they were granted a moment of sublime insight and they could distil
their experience into one valedictory statement, it wouldn't be Sartre's
"Hell is other people" that they would echo but rather Milton's
Satan - "I myself am hell". But the important thing is that
they have made the effort to understand, to look into the psychoactive
depths of the drowning pool and to face, point blank, that indelible presence
of evil. And having made that effort, their freefall into self-destruction
is transmuted into a form of redemptive punishment. But ultimately this
flaw means that they can never solve the deeper, metaphysical problem.
To do that they would have to make sense of what it is to be human and
alive on this planet.
Ellroy is a real maverick, something increasingly rare in these times
of political and cultural lockdown. As a self-confessed ex-coozehound/boozehound
and speed junky, he creepy-crawled his adolescence around LA's affluent
fuck pads until he wound up doing some County Jail time for his troubles.
After quitting the "avant garde" life of drink, drugs and sniffing
women's panties, he started caddying at the Bel Air Country Club. A year
later he got an idea for a first novel which would become Brown's Requiem
- a golfing and murder novel - which when read today, seems little more
than a dry run for all the nightmares that Ellroy would force to the surface
later in the LA Quartet.
Since then Ellroy has become the ultimate ego pusher, seemingly content
to turn his life into a PR exercise; a circus sideshow with himself as
both the Master of Ceremonies and its clown jumping through the media
hoops. But how much is 'for real' and how much is angle is open to question.
The angle he likes to work best is his 'Demon Dog of American Literature'
routine. Coming on like a junkyard dog, Ellroy's madcap-psycho-spiel involves
reciting his juvenile criminal history, the details of his mother's murder
and some decidedly outré "beatnik poetry". Curtly dismissive
of other crime writers he is content to stand outside the mutual back-slapping,
jerk-off-athons which have become the public face of the bigtime crime
circuit. Even Andrew Vachss whose Burke PI thrillers are full of sick
details of incest and sex murders regards Ellroy as something of an outsider.
In a recent interview in The Guardian Ellroy claimed that he wanted
to write the "biggest, baddest, sickest, ugliest, most sex-saturated,
unformulaic, most pervasively evil, profound fucking crime novels of all
time." It's the last line that gives it away. Ellroy might resemble
a junkyard dog baying at the moon, but like Flaubert's dancing bear, what
he really wants to do is move the stars to pity.
Ellroy has rather modestly said that it is his ambition to rewrite the
'secret history' of America from the perspective of the crime genre. What
conceit ! But then again judging from his recent interviews it hardly
seems surprising since his ego is continually threatening to leave the
atmosphere and start orbiting the planet. A big part of Ellroy's shtick
throughout these books has always been to present a subversive view of
McCarthyite, anti-communist America through an exposé of the seamier side
of that bedrock of all-American values - Hollywood. "The 1950s to
me is darkness, hidden history, perversion behind closed doors waiting
to creep out; the 1950s to most people is kitsch and Mickey Mouse watches
and all this intolerable stuff..." Like Chandler, he seems to regard
Hollywood as synonymous with all forms of illicit sex and he shares that
writer's dislike of actors - "The veterans of a thousand beds"
as Chandler scathingly called them.
Clearly Ellroy hates all the illusion and fakeness that lies behind
the 'dream factory'. In the Hollywood-Babylon he conjures up, the kind
of dirt that that scurrilous purveyor of showbiz scuttlebutt, Kenneth
Anger, would have killed for, spreads over the surface glitz and gloss
like a huge, black oil-slick. But of course he isn't content to leave
it at just that. Just as Hollywood represented the artifice of surface
beauty, so the Classical Hollywood Narrative represents the crystallisation
of causality with the deus ex machina happy-end the only concession
to the workings of Providence. Cinematic causality is a simplistic model
like a Venn diagram in which its logical sets intersect. But Chance is
an endlessly bifurcating process; an infinite self-embedding matrix of
complexity like the network of veins in our body - an almost perfect image
for fractalization and unpredictability itself. Ellroy's slash 'n' burn
style prose cuts right across the vein and opens up the bloodgate, letting
loose all of Hollywood's demons, slashing deep into that veneer of causality
and certainty.
And yet like all great Hollywood films, Ellroy is also a great manipulator.
He is someone who is able to articulate your own neuroses better than
you will ever be able to do. And it is through the traditional Hollywood
mechanism of character and character identification rather than a collective
and shared morality that he pulls off one of his key tricks on the reader-as-victim.
Ellroy sums up his own case "I want my readers to have ambiguous
relationships with my characters. I want any process of identification
that I engender to be based on my readers' most hidden sexual agenda,
for them to identify with then recoil over a casually uttered 'faggot'
or 'nigger'."
There is a deeply subversive pleasure bubbling under the surface of
these four books that wants you to enjoy these guilty pleasures against
your better judgement. And Ellroy gets away with it through some drop-dead
wordsmithing and humour (as sharp as the Ivy League suits he likes to
sport these days) and because his characters are complex and deeply flawed,
deeply human. Anyone who has read Ellroy has at the very least got a few
belly-laughs and probably also a pleasure-thrill when Downtown Willy Brown
coming out of the Lucky Time Wine Bar gets regaled with a "Your mother
sucks a mean dick, Sambo!" before being beaten to shit by Bucky Bleichert.
But compared to Bud White and 'Trashcan' Jack Vincennes from LA Confidential
or Dave 'The Enforcer' Klein from White Jazz, Bucky Bleichert is
a saint. Such cultural heterodoxy must have enraged many a self-righteous
milk-and-water liberal and sent them screaming into their neurotic hell.
But then you can never accuse Ellroy of pandering to an airbrushed 'feel-good
factor' or trying to make an ugly truth more palatable with a bit of cheap
sentiment. The Demon Dog of American Literature wants you to know that
you are guilty as hell.
Tipping his cap towards Kenneth Anger, Ellroy has reinvented LA as a
sort of Hollyweird-Armageddon. The LA of these four books is not therefore
the LA of Chandler's The Big Sleep or Polanski's Chinatown
which has fallen into inertia and ennui as a patina of decay encrusts
upon its surfaces. Ellroy's novels rattle along with their own desperate
energy and kinetic intensity and towards the end they even pick up the
pace. By the end of White Jazz, its protagonist, crooked cop Dave
Klein, with a guilt complex the size of the great outdoors, is not only
trying to solve the central murders and save his girlfriend at the same
time, he is also busy trying to cut himself a thick slice of redemption.
But by this time he is just so fucking far-gone and so complicit in his
own downfall that he is head-rushing at breakneck speed towards oblivion.
Ellroy keeps pace all the way with a prose style that is as experimental
as anything in Celine (he even occasionally indulges in Celine's three-point
ellipsis) or Jim Thompson's patented cold-ass-chill paranoia style best
used in The Getaway or A Hell of a Woman. Ellroy's prose
has become so pared down and streamlined (hardly any place or character
descriptions) that it speedballs through its moves like some old sled
that has been hot-wired by a speed and sulphate freak.
Despite the fact that Ellroy customises and shape-shifts his prose as
though it was a literary form of Tourette's Syndrome, these books are
also about the intrinsic failures and inadequacies of language. The piece
of music which Coleman Healy is composing and which gives The Big Nowhere
its title, is a protracted jazz-noise-squall punctuated by long breaks
of silence. The silence is supposed to represent all the lies, duplicities
and injustices - everything that is too big to be expressed by language.
For Ellroy the anti-Calvinist, these things can only be conveyed by a
silence that both rages and accuses. This descent into nihilism becomes
a part of Ellroy's rewired syntax and form-disruption which is full of
short, truncated sentences, non-sequiturs and violent interruptions of
language. It is as though such linguistic nihilism which continually threatens
to burn up the page is all that is left as the big WHY? is terminally
dead ended against the limits of the skull. It seems nothing else can
be guaranteed in a world that is not tramlined on moral absolutes and
transcendental values but is instead mired in all these exigencies of
blood, nervous tissue, Fate, contradiction...silence. What else is there
left to say?
Ineluctably, Bucky Bleichert, like all the other cops who have followed
him down, realised that however precisely he could piece together the
observable facts of causality through ratiocination, he could never bridge
that blankness, that gap between cause and effect that suddenly derailed
into three days of madness and blood. Besides it would always be an unsatisfactory
and futile compensation. How can anyone understand that vertiginous piling
up of evil that led to the consciousness of oblivion, that terrible moment
of fear and extinction brought about by a remote and absent God. It seems
that the detective's best weapon, aside from his .45, sap, brass knuckles
and a bad attitude, the hermeneutic of pure reason, can never be anything
more than a weaker form of intuition. As Bleichert says towards the end,
the Dahlia was "the human riddle I had to know everything about."
This is what Ellroy's books are all about; no amount of rational distancing
or vicarious empathy can lead to full knowledge and exorcism, this madness
of the skull has to be lived to be understood.
God bless you Mr Ellroy.
HTML version created: 16 March 1997. Original published: Autumn 1996
EXTERNAL LINK
|
|
