Capitalism and its Discontents by Kraniauskas Professor John;

Author:Kraniauskas, Professor John; [Неизв.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Wales Press

Ellroy’s trilogy thus presents readers with a populist version of its statism, writing its fictional history from the perspective of the subaltern frontline employees of the repressive state apparatus and those they press into service – for example, the doomed young film star Sal Mineo or the boxer Sonny Liston. Crutch is such a character-narrator. Commenting on the lowly bourgeois characters of the novels of the conservative Walter Scott, Lukács, again turning to Hegel, refers to them as ‘maintaining individuals’ – the stuff of civil (or bourgeois) society. As noted above, the principle characters of ‘Underworld USA’ are certainly such stuff, but of political society, specifically of the ‘white state’. Lukács also calls these characters ‘mediocre heroes’, insisting they have formal and compositional consequences that define the historical novel form.

The language of Ellroy’s novels, however, is not simply written in that of its subaltern killers such as Crutch – even though he is ostensibly the narrator – and others of his ilk. Tedrow and Holly, the main characters of two of the trilogy’s novels are more like managers, in personal contact with – and so mediating readers’ perspectives on – real, executive power: Hoover, Hughes, Nixon, ‘the boys’ and so on. Tedrow is the son of a wealthy Klansman (who he murders at the end of The Cold Six Thousand). He and Holly are almost like brothers. These mediocre heroes are indeed maintaining individuals, and what they maintain is the existing order against reform-and-revolution, inside the state (the assassination of Kennedy) and out (the assassination of King). In Blood’s A Rover, this means getting Nixon elected and the Mafia/Hughes casino deal arranged (Tedrow), and especially tracking and subverting ‘black revolution’ in Los Angeles occasioned by the rise of the Black Panther Party (Holly).23

Building on the well-known COINTELPRO operations against the Black Panther Party by the FBI, Ellroy has Holly parodically call his ‘Operation BAAAAAAD BROTHER’. The discourse of the novel, its writing, thus registers the power of its object – a changing history, a changing language – as it negates it (here in a mock FBI report), producing a caricature or stereotype. Ellroy’s use of anxious parody here gives a sense of his work with language and form in the novel.24 Even Hoover and Nixon humorously take on such speech acts, the language of the supposed black ‘other’, as registered in telephone-conversation transcripts: ‘Lay it on me, brother … Tell it like it is, because I’m cool with it’ (Hoover to Holly); ‘Tell it like it is’ (Nixon to Holly) (383, 384).

The first word of chapter 44 (Los Angeles 10/22/68) is: ‘NEGROFICATION’ (225), written in capitals and underscored as if a newspaper headline.25 It is an imperative – Marsh Bowen, Holly’s undercover informant, needs to sharpen his ‘black’ image and militant black power performance (he is a black ex-cop) – but also reads as a warning and/or, more neutrally, as signage with regards to a particular state of affairs. It is all of these, simultaneously. ‘Negrofication’ is what happens politically to the mediocre heroes/maintainers of the ‘white’ state as they turn against it.

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