Popular Culture Review Vol. 1, December 1989 | Page 49

readers are left “in character.” He does not require cross-dressing of the reader. Kate Green, a Minnesota writer, shows in her two detective novels how strong California is in the American genre. Both, written in Minnesota, are set in California. But her detach ment lets her de-sex the genre; her detectives are women. In the California detective novel the obsession to know, to understand, is a stronger desire than sex. California is the land o f desire, we all know, and its desire is to know, to understand. It rejects the traditional limitation to rational ways of knowing; Nancy Reagan is one of many Californians who have astrologers. In paradise we can let ourselves want to know what it all means, by any method. The land o f desire is also the object o f desire. Another major kind of California narrative is the pilgrimage to the promised land. Steinbeck’s Joads model the journey, and the arrival. W hen they get to paradise, the fruitful orchards are there, but they can only look at them from outside the guarded fence. Nevertheless they have succeeded. Though they cannot grasp the paradise they dreamed of, they have found it. They have succeeded in their goal because they have seen the dream face to face, as have we who see it only in the movies. The dream of desire is the object of desire. If reality threatens the dream, we reject it in favor of preserving the dream of paradis K