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