The L.A. novel in Hollywoodland :“cast out this wicked dream which has seized my heart!” -

Abstract

The Great Depression and Second World War created a context in which Hollywood served as a basis for the emergence of Los Angeles as a metaphor as opposed to an actual city. Dirty realism, film noir, and pulp fiction genres all situated themselves, in other words, in and around this fascinating mythic place. Anti-heroes in L.A. found themselves ensnared in sharp dichotomies such as good versus evil, reality versus artificiality, East versus West, past versus present, truth versus deception, personal gains versus social justice, and, most importantly, death versus eternal fame. The role-playing these characters executed in order to negotiate these contrasts perfectly highlight how acting was becoming indistinguishable from living, fleshing out what would soon be neologized as the “Los Angeles Novel”. This thesis unveils how the L.A. Novel scrutinized the enchantment with Hollywood. In my first chapter, I examine how this type of novel explores the plight of anti-heroes belonging to the working classes, as exemplified by Bukowski’s Ham on Rye, Factotum, and Pulp. The second chapter of this thesis then moves on to the upper classes so as to trace the generic portrayal of producers and movie directors as the infallible ones in power who — paradoxically — might lose their power at any given moment due to blackmail and coercion, as in Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, Bukowski’s Hollywood, and West’s The Day of the Locust. My third and last chapter reveals how the cold detached tone of these dirty realist works enacts a loss of humanity as a result of the proliferation of crime, drugs, and prostitution. In this chapter, I delineate how in Noir Novels, protagonists are often in-betweeners as crime bridges the gap between those in power (namely police officers, detectives, investigators) and those from the working classes who must resort to illegal activities to make ends meet, as in Chandler’s The Little Sister and The Lady in the Lake, as well as in Ellroy’s L