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Anoedipal Fiction: Schizoanalysis and the Black Dahlia Author(s): D. S. Neff Source: Poetics Today, Vol. 18, No.

3 (Autumn, 1997), pp. 301-342 Published by: Duke University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1773129 Accessed: 31/10/2008 14:40
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AnoedipalFiction: Schizoanalysisand TheBlackDahlia


D. S. Neff
in of University Alabama Huntsville English,

Abstract Oedipus-as myth, figure, and complex-has served capitalist defenders of detective fiction well. A promising, but rather unexpected, variant of Oedipal criticism is provided by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's schizoanalysis, a Nietzsche-inspired critique of Freud that moves beyond Erich Fromm and Wilhelm Reich to examine the systematic co-opting of the libido by a capitalism whose "first requirement,"according to Guattari, is to "separatedesire from work,"and then to block "everyapproach to desire on the part of the worker"by "familialistcastration [the Oedipus Complex] and the traps of consumerism, and so on; after which it is not hard to take possession of his labour-power." Deleuze and Guattari are particularly interestedin what they call "minor"or "anoedipal"literature,which exposes an alliance between Freud and capitalism. James Ellroy's BlackDahlia(1987),the most recent attempt to "solve"in fiction the unsolved 1947torture,mutilation, and murder of Elizabeth Short, is a vivid example of an "anoedipal"detective novel. Indeed, The BlackDahlia may be read as a relentless critique of mid-twentieth-centuryAmerica that sees emotional devastation, racist paranoia, and familial psychosis as inevitable by-productsof capitalism capitalizing on desire by way of the Oedipus Complex. served capitalist defenders Oedipus-as myth, figure, and complex-has of detective fiction well against charges made by certain socialists, who Thanksare due to the UAH Humanities for Center,whichprovidedfinancialsupport the creationof the computergraphicsin this essay.I am also very gratefulto Professor Keith

Jones of the UAH art and art history department for redrawing and reformatting for computer Figures 2, 3, and 4 in this essay.

Poetics Today18:3 (Fall 1997). Copyright ? 1997 by The Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics.

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tend to see the genre as a symptom of decaying imperialism that provides little besides escapism for its readers.' For traditional psychoanalytic critics, unconscious Oedipus is a detective/criminal who accounts for readers' and writers' unending identification with those who commit and/or uncover crimes (Lawson 1963: 72), an identification that represents either
entrapment in neurosis (Buxbaum 1941: 373-81) or healthy development (Ekstein and Friedman 1959: 581-629). That unfortunate Theban is also

seen as a locus for and disperser of intrapsychic tensions associated with the formation of male and female gender identities of mystery readers and
writers (Bergler 1945: 317), and as an evoker of the primal scene: the pre-

mature revelation of the Oedipal triangle occurring when the very young child either sees or phantasizes parental intercourse, a repressed epiphany that is presented in a safer and more entertaining form in detective fiction (Pederson-Krag 1949: 207-14).2 For a more formalist constituency,

conscious Oedipus serves as a link between the detective novel and Sophoclean tragedy (Hartman 1975: 203-4). Oedipus also serves as an inspira-

tion for the literary critic who tries to move beyond the Oedipus Complex to Oedipus's process: "that repeated, even obsessive, probing of his own history" in the face of conflict, forming experience into "a series of new patterns, reordering the present and integrating into it wishes and conflicts from the past, always aiming toward the resolution of contradiction" (Hutter 1975: 207-8). For some structuralistsand poststructuralists,Oedipus haunts not only the semiotization/deconstruction of the unconscious
(Lacan 1972 [1966]: 38-72; Derrida 1987 [1975]: 413-96; Johnson 1982:

457-505), but also triangles of mimetic desire that engender rites of sacrifice protecting against universal violence (Girard 1965 [1961], 1977 [1972]).
1. For example, Ernst Kaemmel argues that the classic detective novel "arose in the most highly developed countries of premonopolistic capitalism, in England and the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century," but has, "under the conditions of decaying imperialism in the United States, . .. sunk to the so-called 'hard-boiled' variety and to the horror potboilers of a Mickey Spillane," reaching "its temporary nadir in horror stories and movies." A utopian socialist detective literature, on the other hand, would deal with "acts would against law and against society in a literary plot," but the pursuit of the wrongdoer be quite different from that described in a typical capitalist detective story, for "it is scarcely conceivable that the investigation of a criminal in a socialist society could be the solo performance of a private man, an outsider, if necessary against the collective work of the police and of the organs of state, indeed against the cooperation of the populace." Such a socialistic development in crime fiction would result in "a really modern criminal literature, whose main purpose would then no longer be to pass the time and to titillate the nerves," for it would have "attained the function of transmitting knowledge, and thereby for the first time a serious literary function" (1983 [1962]: 56-57, 61). 2. Freud'smost extended discussion of the primal scene may be found in 1918:3-122. Other useful remarks on primal phantasies (as opposed to conscious fantasies) are recorded in 1963 [1916-1917]: 358-77?

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A promising, but rather unexpected, variant of Oedipal criticism is provided by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's schizoanalysis,3which is and allied works. This developed and put into practice in Anti-Oedipus Nietzsche-inspired critique of psychoanalytic theory does to Freudian and TheAnti-Christ to Chrisdo of Oedipalization what TheGenealogy Morals In their attempt to explain why Marxist predictions for the ultitianity.4 mate triumph of socialism failed, leading instead to the proliferation of fascism(s)and of potentially revolutionary masses that grew to desire their own repression,5Deleuze and Guattari examine the systematic co-opting of the libido by a capitalism whose "firstrequirement"is "to separate desire from work,"and then to block "every approach to desire on the part of the worker"by "familialist castration [the Oedipus Complex] and the traps of consumerism, and so on; after which it is not hard to take possession of his labour-power" (Guattari 1984 [1977]: 254). In other words, Oedipus, in the service of capitalism/psychoanalysis, and with the almost complete willingness of the masses, "breaksup all productions of desire and crushes all formations of utterances" (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 77). For Deleuze and Guattari, "oedipalization is one of the most important factors in the reduction of literature to an object of consumption conforming to the established order, and incapable of causing anyone harm." According to such a perspective, Oedipus makes of literature a "minor expressive activity that secretes ideology according to the dominant codes" (Deleuze and Guattari 1977 [1972]: 133-34). Forthe schizoanalyst, though, "the only literature"that deserves praise is characterized as "anoedipal,"
3. I am aware of the distinctions clinical psychologists make between a "schizoid"(neurotic) personality and a "schizophrenic" (psychotic) personality, but I will use the terms synonymously throughout the essay, following Deleuze and Guattari's controversial refusal to draw the usual distinctions between "neurosis"and "psychosis"(1977[1972]: 136-37). See Cooper 1967 for some background on antipsychiatry and schizophrenia. Some especially useful discussions in English of Deleuze and Guattari's work may be found in Girard 1978 [1972]: 84-120; Jameson 1981: 21-23; Wright 1984: 162-71; Jardine 1985: 208-23; Rudnytsky 1987: 338-44; Bogue 1989; Kroker 1992; and Massumi 1992. Interested readers should also consult the special issue of Semiotext(e) Anti-Oedipus on (vol. 2, no. 3 on [1970]), and the special issue of SubStance Deleuze (vol. 44/45 [1984]). 4. Mark Seem, in his "Introduction"to Anti-Oedipus, provides cogent observations concerning Deleuze and Guattari's debt to Nietzsche (1977: xv-xvii). As Bogue notes, the Nietzschean character of schizoanalysis became somewhat obscured when LAnti-Oedipe [The anti-Oedipus] was rendered into English as Anti-Oedipus (1989: 83). 5. Deleuze and Guattari acknowledge that they were influenced greatly by Reich 1970 [1933] on the question of why the masses grew to desire their own repression under fascism, but they consider Reich's quest to be unfulfilled because he ultimately ignored real social conditions, preferring instead to concentrate on Oedipal fantasies within the unconscious (1977 [1972]: 29-30, 118-19). For insightful analyses of various twentieth-century fascisms see Chirot 1994 and Laqueur 1996.

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as writing that "places an explosive device in its package, fabricating a counterfeit currency, causing the superego and its form of expression to explode, as well as the market value of its form of content" (ibid.). Some anoedipal literary works that Deleuze and Guattari designate are Proust's
Remembrance ThingsPast (ibid.: 42-43); Buchner's Lenz (ibid.: 2); Beckett's of novels (ibid.: 2, 12, 14, 20); Klossowski's Baphomet (ibid.: 77); Lawrence's

essays on psychoanalysis (ibid.: 49-50); and the writings of Artaud (ibid.: 8-9, 134-35). Deleuze and Guattari do not discuss detective fiction per se, but it seems fair to say that a genre so dependent on Oedipalization would most likely arouse only their contempt. There is, however, a detective novel that merits a good deal of praise from those who believe in the goals of schizoanalysis:James Ellroy's BlackDahlia, the most recent attempt to "solve" in fiction the unsolved 1947 mutilation/torture/murder of Elizabeth Short.6 Ellroy,who was born during the year following Short's murder, suffered the divorce of his parents when he was six years old. At age ten, he was faced with the murder of his mother, whose half-nude body, wrapped in an overcoat, was found in an El Monte field after what Ellroy surmises was
"a sex deal that went bad" (qtd. in Dougherty 1987: 124). Her murder, like

that of Elizabeth Short, was never solved. Soon after his mother's murder, Ellroy remembers picking up Jack Webb's Badgeand reading a "haunting" account of the Elizabeth Short murder (Webb 1958: 22-35), which

"brought ... [his] mother's death home in very brutal terms" and caused him to have nightmares for years after about the killing of Elizabeth Short
(Dougherty 1987:
122-24).7

Short's murder. 6. See Dunne1977foranotherfictionalsolutionto Elizabeth

nickname JaniceKnowltonand MichaelNewtonassertthatElizabethShort's"famous got its startin LongBeach,but its originsremainelusiveto the presentday.It has been saidby

The title of Ellroy's novel derives from Elizabeth Short's nickname: "the Black Dahlia."

more than one reporter that newsman Bevo Means made up the Dahlia handle as a hook for selling papers, but the journalists may be wrong. Witnesses from the IF Club, a gay bar at Seventh and Vermont, recall Short calling herself the Black Dahlia in 1946. We also have apparent confirmation from the press. On January 17, 1947, the Hollywood CitizenNews quoted Long Beach Detective Inspector E. C. Boynton as stating that Short 'was known to police as the Black Dahlia for her custom of wearing sheer black clothing'" (1995: 118-19). In The BlackDahlia, Ellroy credits Bevo Means with the creation of Elizabeth Short's nickname, saying that Means was inspired by the title of a 1946 film, TheBlueDahlia, starring Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake (1987:94). It is also possible that TheBlueDahlia inspired Elizabeth Short in her creation of this mysterious, romantic sobriquet. Kenneth Anger suggests that Short's nickname "had derived from her lustrous black hair, usually worn in a bouffant pompadour, and her habit of dressing in black sweaters and slacks"(1984: 132). 7. In his recently published memoir, Ellroy describes vividly the effect that reading about the Black Dahlia murder had on him, and recounts his and Detective Bill Stoner's hitherto unsuccessful efforts to solve the murder of Jean Ellroy (1996: 100oo-109,2o8-1o).

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When Ellroy was seventeen, he was expelled from high school because of his disruptiveness. Soon after, his father died of stomach cancer. From 1965 to 1977, Ellroy lived the life of a petty criminal, drifting around the toughest neighborhoods of Los Angeles, sinking into alcoholism and drug abuse, being convicted a dozen times for misdemeanors, and spending time in jail. Ellroy credits a 1973 reading of Joseph Wambaugh's OnionField, a novel-like examination of the real-life murder of a Los Angeles police officer, with showing him how his life might be molded into fiction. Ellroy sobered up in 1977,began writing in 1979, and had his first novel, Brown's (1982), a mystery Requiem, published in 1981 (Meeks 1990: 53). Clandestine set in 1950SLos Angeles, was followed by Bloodon theMoon(1985 [1984]), the first installment of a three-novel series (including also Because NJight the Hill [1989 {1986}]) featuring the exploits of De[1987 {1984}] and Suicide tective Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins of the Los Angeles Police Department. Killeron theRoad(originally titled SilentTerror), fictional study of a serial a killer, appeared in 1986. Ellroy's first six novels show that he mastered the specific, but rather limiting, requirements of fictional police procedurals. It was only when the Elizabeth Short murder case, to which he alluded briefly in three of
his early novels (1981: 29; 1982: 1oi; 1989 [1986]: 32), became the focus of

Ellroy's novelistic scrutiny that his writing moved into a new, more substantial phase. TheBlackDahlia (1987)constitutes Ellroy's opening venture into what Linda Hutcheon, in her thorough and penetrating study of postmodernism, calls "historiographicmetafiction,"a mode of writing that, in direct contradiction to "late modernist radical metafiction," attempts "to demarginalize the literary through confrontation with the historical, and ... does so both thematically and formally" (1990 [1988]: 108). TheBlack Dahlia is also the novel that initiates Ellroy's mission to "completely recreate America in the 20th century through crime fiction" (Meeks 1990: 54). It is the first novel in a series known as the LosAngeles which (acQuartet, to Mike Davis) "attempts to map the history of modern Los Angecording les as a secret continuum of sex crimes, satanic conspiracies, and political scandals" in post-World War II America during the Black Dahlia investigation, the Red Scare (TheBig Nowhere [1988]), the scandal-magazine conSee Knowlton and Newton 1995: 162-201 for a thoroughgoing critique of the account of the Black Dahlia murder presented in Webb 1958. Janice Knowlton, who claims that the recovery of repressed memories of her father (George Frederick Knowlton) murdering Elizabeth Short have finally resulted in the solving of that infamous crime, joined forces with Michael Newton (a respected true-crime writer) in an effort to offer the most complete treatment of all aspects of the Dahlia case to date. Their presentation of the autopsy report (which is made public for the first time in their book) is extremely helpful in separating fact from myth in the various accounts of the murder.

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troversies (L.A. Confidential [199o]), and federal investigations into police


corruption in Los Angeles (White Jazz [1992]) (Davis 1992 [1990]: 45). In

his most recent novel, American Tabloid (1995),which compares quite favorwith Don DeLillo's Libra(1988) and Norman Mailer's Oswald'sTale ably (1995),Ellroy sees the assassination ofJohn F. Kennedy as "only one crime in a long series of crimes," the product of "collusion"between "the unsung leg breakers of history,"which can be revealed through "a tabloid sewer crawl through the private nightmare of public policy" (Gray 1995: 75). What makes The Black Dahlia an anoedipal novel open to DeleuzeGuattarian schizoanalysis is its willingness to trace patterns of Oedipalization, to question their validity, and to reveal the primal and only partially co-opted desire rising up through and around triangular boundaries that have exerted a seemingly omnipotent hold on the vast schizogenic expanses of mid-twentieth-century America. Because Ellroy apparently sees emotional devastation, racist paranoia, and familial dysfunction as inevitable by-products of capitalism capitalizing on desire by way of Oedipalization, TheBlackDahlia may be read as a relentless critique of an unholy alliance among democracy, capital, and Freud that temporarily succeeds on a national level only because of the quiet destruction it perpetuates in families and neighborhoods. 1. Some BasicSchizoanalytic Concepts: the Desiring-Production, Socius, and the BwO
Deleuze and Guattari (1977 [1972]: 288-89, 328) acknowledge their debt

to the writings ofJacques Monod, a Nobel prize-winning biochemist who examines how seemingly random combinations of elements may eventually result in molecules (amino acids and nucleotides) that form even larger units (proteins and nucleic acids): these are macromolecules, the biochemical "self-constructing machines" and "self-reproducing machines" that comprise the very stuff of life.8 In Monod's view, the "anthropocentric illusion" should be dispelled, because all living beings "are chemical machines," whose "growth and multiplication require the accomplishing of thousands of chemical reactions whereby the essential constituents of cells are elaborated." Such a process is "organized along a great number
8. For another persuasive example of biochemical materialism see Dawkins 1989, in which musings on our dependence on mitochondria (the organelles that provide energy for nucleated cells, but whose genetic code differs from that in the nuclei) lead to the revelation that human beings are "gigantic colonies of symbiotic genes" (ibid.: 182). For an accessible discussion of the role that mitochondria play within cells see de Duve 1984: 148-66. On mitochondrial DNA see Grivell 1983.

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of divergent, convergent, or cyclical 'pathways,' each comprising a series of reactions" (Monod 1972 [1970]: 3-13, 42, 45, 80-98, 183-96).9 Schizoanalysis makes great metaphoric use of Monod's biochemical materialism, proposing a basic homology between life processes on the molecular and macromolecular (or "molar") levels, and what goes on within and between larger psychological and cultural entities. For Deleuze and Guattari, "everywhere ... [are] machines-real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections" (1977 [1972]: 1).

In schizoanalysis, "desire"is "not bolstered by needs, but rather the contrary; needs are derived from desire: they are counterproducts within the real that desire produces" (ibid.: 27). Desire is a blind, unconscious life force that "is always extra-territorial,de-territorialized, de-territorializing, escaping over and under all barriers"(Guattari 1984 [1977]: 257). Life results from constant, impermanent accommodations achieved between a desire that will never be fully co-opted, and machines on simple (molecular) and more complex (molar) levels that will continuously attempt, fail, and reattempt to impede the flow of desire. In the Deleuze-Guattarian cosmos, "desiring-production"designates activities on the part of molecular machines, which seem to operate in a rather random manner, interrupting flows in chaotic, unpredictable ways, times, and places, and working "according to regimes of syntheses that have no equivalent in the large aggregates." Many molecular machines combine with others "under determinate conditions" in the creation of macromolecules, or molar machines, whose activities are much more predictable than those undertaken by molecular machines (1977 [1972]: 287-89).

A molar machine that is central to Deleuze-Guattarian theory is known as the socius;it employs "social production," or "desiring-productionitself under determinate conditions," in order "to codify the flows of desire, to inscribe them, to record them, to see to it that no flow exists that is not properly dammed up, channeled, regulated"(ibid.: 29, 33; italics omitted). The socius's task, of course, can never be complete, for desiring-production works against such a totalization on a molecular level. Even if one is willing to grant great power to the nontotalizing forces on the molecular level, how do Deleuze and Guattari, working in fields dominated by what they would unhesitatingly call molar concepts (such as the "organ," the "person," the "self," a "society"), escape the error of machine a singlething"(ibid.: 285)? They turn as "considering complicated any
9. For background on protein synthesis and the formation of nucleic acids see de Duve 1984: 24-40, 251-368, 385-407 and Scott 1986: 25-112, 137-69.

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of Figure1 The schematicrepresentation a globular protein (papain) from


Drenth et al. 1968: 932, reprinted in Monod 1972 [1970]: 188. This illustration

for characterizacouldhaveservedas a partialinspiration Deleuzeand Guattari's


tion of the BwO as a "cosmic egg" and a "giantmolecule" (1977[1972]: 281).

again to Jacques Monod for inspiration (ibid.: 328), having become intrigued by Monod's description of a macromolecule, a globular protein, as "a veritable machine--a machine in its functional properties, but not, we now see, in its fundamental structure, where nothing but the play of blind combinations can be discerned." "Randomness"in the globular protein is "caught on the wing, preserved, reproduced by the machinery of invariance and thus converted into order, rule, necessity."Indeed, according to Monod, "in the ontogenesis of a functional protein are reflected the origin
and descent of the whole biosphere" (Monod 1972 [1970]: 98). The Mo-

nodian globular protein (Figure i), an important biological compromise between randomness and invariance, becomes a model for what is perhaps the strangest and most mysterious of schizoanalytic concepts: the "Body without Organs" (BwO). BwOs, which might be described as eddies of varying size and duration throughout the unending flow of life, result from complex struggles between the unconscious randomness of desiring-production and the more systematized, conscious productions of the socius. Figure 2 presents a diagram of the formation of a BwO, a "cosmic egg" (Deleuze and Guattari:
1977 [1972]: 19, 281), a zone of potentiality occurring when molecular and

molar machines intermittently cancel each other out in their unending but

Fiction Neff * Anoedipal

309

Social Production from the Socius under (Molar--Desiring-Production determinate conditions)

A
e ",i,'-"
' ~"~-. -! .:

A
, j ^
, IN
: -- -~, _l

Desiring-Production (Molecular--aleatory)

Aii

of Constantly shifting "surface(s)" BwO 2 Figure The formationof a BwO. The name of the concept was inspiredby theselinesfromAntoninArtaud's nos. 5-6: "Lecorpsest le corps/ il est seul/ 84, et n'a pas besoind'organe/ le corps n'estjamaisun organisme les organismes / sont les ennemisdu corps"[The body is the body / it is all by itself/ and has no need of organs/ the bodyis neveran organism organisms the enemiesof the are /
body] (quoted and translated in Deleuze and Guattari 1977 [1972]: 9n).

A A\^

unavoidable inability to capture all of the life force. Because it can neither degenerate into complete chaos nor finally congeal into a static wholeness, the BwO is forever virtual.'0 It is "occupied, populated only by intensities. Only intensities pass and circulate."It cannot be characterized as "a scene, a place, or even a support upon which something comes to pass," for it merely "causes intensities to pass; it produces and distributesthem in
lo. See Karplusand McCammon of simulations the con1986for somestartling computer stant internalmotionsoccurringwithinproteins.Their researchis a usefulcorrectiveto
earlier static models of protein structure and action.

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Poetics Today 18:3 The Primitive Territorial Machine (Hystea (Hysteria)


Desiring-Production (Molecular)

Te Barbarian The

Despotic Machine (Manic-Depression/Paranoia)

Molecular Revolution MolarSocialCoding by the Primitive Machine olecularSocialDecoding Territorial d MolarSocialRecoding

Di

bytheCivilized
Machine Capitalist MolarSocialOvercoding by the Barbarian DespoticMachine The Black Dahlia for The Black Dahlia (see Figure4)

The Civilized Capitalist Machine


(Schizophrenia) Poles of Delirium in (Constantly oscillating,recombining differentproportions and permutations) Social code u Code of Desire , Molecular Molar Recoding --Decoding Deterritorialization Reterritorializatioin -.. Fascist --Anarchic Libertarianism B Subjected Groups Subject-Groups . Racist .Racial Schizoanalysis Psychoanalysis ."Psychosis" "Neurosis"I . Anoedipal Oedipal .Unconscious as Factory Unlconsciousas Theatre .

Figure3 This diagramwas inspiredby the descriptionsof a BwO and the Deleuze-Guattarian interpretation of history presented in Anti-Oedipus A Thouand sandPlateaus.(Inset: the schizoanalytic cycle of history.) a spatium that is itself intensive, lacking extension. It is not space, nor is it in space; it is matter that occupies space to a given degree-to the degree corresponding to the intensities produced. It is nonstratified, unformed,
intense matter, the matrix of intensity, intensity = o" (Deleuze and Guattari 1987 [1980]: 153). Schizoanalytic theory posits that the molar socius struggles with molecular desiring-production on many levels, thereby creating variably sized eddies in the life flow. Consequently, cultures, tribes, families, and individuals are all BwOs, only illusory and transitory molar "unities" engendered by molecular randomness. Figure 3 is a diagram of a BwO for the historical period of The Black Dahlia. The virtual surface of that "cosmic egg" has been formed by successive accommodations between desiring-production and a periodically changing socius. In other words, large and small bits and pieces of successive molar social formations are scattered across the surface of the

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BwO, mixing with one another, under constant perturbation (in greater or lesser degrees) from molecular desiring-production. The social stages delineated in the diagram are not the five stages in the Marxist scheme of history (primitive communism, ancient city-states, feudalism, capitalism, and socialism) because, in the Deleuze-Guattarian view, that scheme needs to be revised because the "special situation of the State . . . has to be
explained" (1977 [1972]: 218-19)."

In the schizoanalytic scheme, there are two "precapitalist social machines," both of which "code the flows of desire"very closely because of a basic "fear"of, and "anguish"at, "decoded flows" (ibid.: 138).The "primitive territorial machine codes flows, invents organs, and marks bodies." It is concerned with alliances and filiations, grouping individuals into various ranks.The "primitivemachine is not ignorant of exchange, commerce, and industry,"but that type of social machine nevertheless"exorcisesthem, localizes them, [and] cordons them off" (ibid.: 144, 152-53, 186).The "barbarian despotic machine" emerges when "the despot challenges the lateral alliances and the extended filiations of the old community. He imposes a new alliance system and places himself in direct filiation with the deity: the people must follow" (ibid.: 192).The main social unit in this type of social machine is the caste, and "the role of money in commerce hinges less on commerce itself than on its control by the State .... Money is fundamentally inseparable, not from commerce, but from taxes as the maintenance of the apparatus of the State" (ibid.: 197). Eventually, however, the State "witnesses its decline" under "the blows of private property, then of commodity production." Ranks and castes give way to classes, marking "the appearance, the surging forth of now decoded flows that pour over the socius, crossing it from one end to the other" (ibid.: 218). Whereas flows of exchange and production were not strong enough to break the hold of precapitalist social machines, capitalism, "born of the encounter of two sorts of flows: the decoded flows of production in the form of money-capital, and the decoded flows of labor in the form of the 'free worker,'" is "the only social machine that is constructed on the basis of decoded flows, substituting for intrinsic codes an axiomatic of abstract quantities in the form of money" (ibid.: 33, 139). Thus, "the tendency of capitalism is to substitute for fixed and limiting relations between men and things an abstractunit of equivalence that allows
11. Deleuze and Guattari (1977 [1972]: 171,270n, 312) display a familiarity with the work of Erich Fromm, and it is likely, even though they make no specific references to Escapefrom Freedom (1969 [1941]) or The SaneSociety (1990 [1955]), that schizoanalysis constitutes a radical reorientation and completion of the historical schemes and other central ideas found in those discussions of fascism, conformity, and capitalism.

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the free exchange, and the aleatory substitution, of everything for everyof thing" (Bogue 1989: loo). Capitalism, then, is "the negative all social formations" (Deleuze and Guattari 1977[1972]: 153),haunting them in the guise of "their terrifying nightmare," invoking a "dread [that] they feel of a flow that would elude their codes" (ibid.: 140). For all of capitalism's revolutionary force, though, it perpetuates itself through the very same accommodations between randomness (desiringproduction) and regularity (social production) that result in the formation of BwOs. Deleuze and Guattari clearly state that although "capitalism is indeed the limit of all societies, insofar as it brings about the decoding of the flows that the other social formations coded and overcoded," it also "substitutes for the [previously developed] codes an extremely rigorous axiomatic that maintains the energy of the flows in a bound state on the body of capital." In short, capitalism is a primarily bifurcated process that "axiomatizes with one hand what it decodes with the other" (ibid.: 24546). Schizoanalysis, then, is the study of the primal split within capitalism, a discipline that injects new life into the currently discredited Marxist predictions concerning capitalism's final death. In the schizoanalytic version of history (see inset, Figure 3), flows will eventually resist reterritorialization, for "capitalismtends toward a threshold of decoding that will destroy the socius." Then the BwO will become a completely "deterritorialized field" crisscrossedwith unleashed "flowsof desire"(ibid.: 33). At that point, the molecular revolution will be complete, having finally thrown off all traces of molar reterritorialization. There are crucial psychological ramifications throughout Deleuze and Guattari's"universalhistory" of desiring-productionand social production (Bogue 1989: 95). The primitive territorial machine, with its strict coding of organs, bodies, families, and tribes, tends to produce hysteria. The barbarian despotic machine, with its overcoding of military, religious, and/or bureaucratic enterprises led by conquerors, high priests, and/or despots, tends to produce manic-depression and paranoia (Deleuze and Guattari 1977 [1972]: 33, 193). Capitalism, itself riven at its very core by a split between coding and decoding, deterritorialization and reterritorialization, molar repression and molecular potential, is schizophrenic. Capitalism also constitutes a schizophrenizing Batesonian double bind that offers the promise of revolutionary freedom while at the same time effectively forestalling any opportunities for such liberation (ibid.: 79-82, 92, 138, 151, 245-51).12
A double-bind theory of schizophrenia may be found in Bateson 1972 [1956]: "The theory of schizophrenia presented here is based on communications analysis, and specifiobservations cally on . . . [Russell's] Theory of Logical Types. From this theory and from
12.

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One of the central ironies in schizoanalysis is that a primally bifurcated capitalism, "through its process of production, produces an awesome schizophrenic accumulation of energy or charge, against which it brings all its vast powers of repression to bear" (ibid.: 34). Hence come the "poles of delirium" listed in Figure 3, which are various schizophrenic positions that result from capitalism's violent battles with itself. The poles designate the limits of deterritorialization and reterritorialization governed by the molecular "code of desire" and the molar "social code" (ibid.: 15-19). However, since reterritorializationis so powerful within the capitalist machine, "it appears that the oscillation [between the poles of delirium] is not equal," and that everything associated with the "code of desire" has, for now, only the slimmest possibility for revolutionary fulfillment (ibid.: 376). Almost all-powerful are nostalgic attempts to recapture the pervasive social strictures of the barbarian despotic machine, such as fascism(s) and the State, peopled by "subjected groups" kept under control by measures engendering and perpetuating paranoia and racism. Almost completely stifled are libertarian movements, with their "subject-groups"characterized by a "racial" attitude (ibid.: 64, 103-5), an unfettered willingness to exist in a state of affairswhere "bodies, actions, ideas, knowledge, fantasies, [and] images function as commodities which can be translated into other commodities, as deterritorialized schizophrenic flows that escape social
coding" (Bogue 1989: 1oo).'3 A particularly volatile locus on the BwO is
of schizophrenic patients is derived a description, and the necessary conditions for, a situation called the 'double bind'--a situation in which no matter what a person does, he 'can't win.' It is hypothesized that a person caught in the double bind may develop schizophrenic symptoms" (ibid.: 201). in 13. The use of schizophrenic this quotation results in a conflation of terms that is inescapable because Deleuze and Guattari do the same thing in their writings. It should be remembered that the Deleuze-Guattarian "poles of delirium" are bothincluded under their general conception of "schizophrenia." In other words, when Deleuze and Guattari refer to "racist" attitudes held by "paranoid" members of "subjected groups," they nonetheless consider those "neurotic" individuals to be "schizophrenic." Such a classification is not incorrect, for other experts on schizophrenia (see, for example, Arieti 1994 [1976]: 224-28, 244-46) note such symptomatology in certain phases or versions of that mental illness. The to problem of conflation of terms arises because Deleuze and Guattari use schizophrenia designate a general category, but then use the same term to denote the supposedly "psychotic," anarchic, and libertarian alternatives of thinking and living within that category:
SCHIZOPHRENIA

Paranoid "Neurotic" Racist Subjected Groups

Schizophrenic "Psychotic" Racial Subject-Groups

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the border between the poles of delirium, an area of constant oscillation


called the "nomadic" zone (1977 [1972]:
105).

Deleuze and Guattari see "how things turn fascist or revolutionary" as a central problem for schizoanalysis (ibid.: 260), and lay much of the blame on psychoanalysis for the almost complete success of capitalist reterritorialization. They do credit Freud for the discovery of the unconscious, but then criticize him severely for his fateful theoretical swerve away from desiring-production (the unconscious as a factory producing the real) toward the Oedipus Complex (the unconscious as a site for fantasy, myth, and theatrical representation). In the schizoanalytic view, "the imperialism of Oedipus" (ibid.: 51) works with powers of molar reterritorialization by "a fantastic repression" of desiring-production (ibid.: 3). Oedipalization, a seductive mythic appeal to paranoid, racist, and nationwithin the and alistic impulses that is put forth as "both problem thesolution" 81, 103), aids and abets the most repressive impulses psychoanalysis (ibid.: within capitalism by "neuroticiz[ing] everything in the unconscious" by closing "the familial triangle over the entire unconscious." Consequently, nature of desiring-productionremains present, but it is fitted "the anoedipal over the co-ordinates of Oedipus [whether 'positive,' 'negative,' 'group,' or 'symbolic']," where it gets translated "into 'pre-oedipal,' 'para-oedipal,'
'quasi-oedipal,' etc." (ibid.: 51-55).'4

Because Freud's treatment "has chosen the path of oedipalization," schizoanalysis feels that it "must cure us of the cure" (ibid.: 68). The proletariat in the molecular revolution is that class of individuals whom psychoanalysis writes off as "psychotic" because they either cannot or will not give satisfactory answers to the Oedipal cross-examination. In Deleuze and Guattari'sview, "the schizo has his own system of co-ordinates for situ"neurotic," under the rubric of "schizophrenia," Deleuze and Guattari's assumptions concerning the incidence of schizophrenia in capitalist societies wildly exceed those of traditional psychiatrists. Indeed, during their most effusive moments, when indicting schizophrenegenic tendencies that they see within capitalism, Deleuze and Guattari exclaim, "We are all schizos!" (1977 [1972]: 67). The extremity of the schizoanalytic revaluation of what constitutes schizophrenia becomes quite clear when one reads more mainstream estimates on the incidence of schizophrenia during the decades following World War II. For example, Irving Gottesman observes that when investigators around the world use broad criteria, the morbid risk for schizophrenia is approximately 1 percent of the population, but when they employ narrow criteria, the risk drops to somewhere between 0.27 and 0.55 percent (1991:80). 14. Freud's remarks on the "negative" Oedipus Complex (where a child competes with the opposite-sexed parent for the affections of the same-sexed parent) may be found in 1923: 33. "Group" Oedipus refers to the tracings of multigenerational Oedipal relations within families by Freudian family therapists, and "structural"Oedipus alludes to the symbolic importance of the phallus in Lacanian theory.

and both "psychotic" Because they include many disparatepsychologicaldisturbances,

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ating himself at his disposal, . . . which does not coincide with the social code, or coincides with it only in order to parody it" (ibid.: 13-15).To those who argue that schizophrenics who, through complete ego loss (catatonia) or grandiose ego expansion ("I am everyone and everything"), offer little if any insight into reality, schizoanalysts respond that those supposed "psychotics" constitute a crushed, deformed vestige of psychic liberation in a system that has either ignored or tried to stamp out anything anoedipal (ibid.: 67-68). Deleuze and Guattari (ibid.: 131-32)support in the strongest terms the following passages from the writings of R. D. Laing, a pioneer in antipsychiatry: Madnessneed not be all breakdown. may also be breakthrough.... The It persongoing throughego-lossor transcendental experiences may or may not becomein different Then he mightlegitimately regarded be as waysconfused. mad. Butto be mad is not necessarily be ill, notwithstanding in ourculto that turethe two categories havebecomeconfused. (1971 [1967]:133,138) 2. TheBlackDahlia:The Detective as Schizo From a traditional psychiatric viewpoint, TheBlackDahlia may be read as the story of an incipient schizophrenic cop, Bucky Bleichert, who degenerates to the very brink of "psychosis"during his work on the Elizabeth Short murder case. According to the schizoanalytic perspective, however, Bucky'sjourney into schizophrenic vision may be regarded as the microscopic, "personal" struggle occurring around an infinitesimal BwO; because it is a recursive part of the larger cultural BwO, this struggle reflects and replicates the potentially revolutionary struggle occurring within capitalism in the larger, cultural BwO.15 Silvano Arieti's Interpretation Schizophrenia of (1994 [1974]), a highly regarded discussion of that complex mental and emotional phenomenon, will serve throughout this essay as a major source for traditional psychiatric views on schizophrenia.'6Arieti never mentions the work of Deleuze and Guattari in his encyclopedic survey of opinions on schizophrenia,
15. According to Deleuze and Guattari, conditions on the cultural BwO are reflected by and replicated within smaller BwOs because "it is in oneand thesamemovement the represthat sive socialproduction replaced the repressingfamily," socius's "delegated is the by agent of psychic repression, or rather the agent delegated to psychic repression" (1977 [1972]: 119). In the schizoanalytic perspective, then, the primal rift within capitalism is mirrored by and reproduced within schizophrenic individuals. 16. Richard Noll, in The Encyclopedia Schizophrenia the Psychotic and states that of Disorders, Arieti (1914-1981)has been "long recognized as a leading authority on schizophrenia," and that Interpretation Schizophrenia "was hailed soon after the appearance of the first edition of in 1955 as the most complete presentation on the disorder since Eugen Bleuler's in 1911" (1992: 18).

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and Deleuze and Guattari do not refer to Arieti's analyses. While all three might agree on Arieti's useful descriptions and analyses of the various stages in, and differing manifestations of, schizophrenia, the schizoanalysts and the mainstream psychiatrist would disagree intensely on the role society plays in the genesis, development, and amelioration of schizophrenia. Arieti sees some validity in the connection between schizophrenia and "the sickness of society," but he nevertheless would not go as far in that particular direction as Siirala (1963), Laing (1971[1967]), or Deleuze and Guattari.'7For Arieti, as for most conventional psychologists and psychiatrists, any well-meaning exaggeration of schizophrenic insight, such as that which might occur by overemphasizing the value of Bucky Bleichert's schizophrenic epiphanies, would not "recognize that the fragments of truth he [the schizophrenic] uncovers assume grotesque forms, and that he will apply these grotesque forms to the whole world, so that whatever insight he has achieved will be less pronounced and less profound than his distortion" (1994 [1974]: 127). For the schizoanalyst, though, Bucky can be viewed as a Deleuze-Guattarian "schizo," a "nomadic subject" crossing tumultuous
zones of intensity on the macroscopic BwO (1977 [1972]: 19-21, 84-87).

Moving into schizophrenia, Bucky seems to constitute a microscopic part of the primally riven cultural BwO as his peculiar progress toward enlightenment moves him closer and closer to two discoveries that lie at the heart of Ellroy's novel: the identity of the murderersof Elizabeth Short, and the insidious role that Oedipalization plays in capitalist reterritorialization. A brief explanation of a widely accepted view of the psychodynamics of schizophrenia should prove helpful to an understanding of the stages that Bucky Bleichert goes through in his efforts to solve the murder.While cautioning readers about great variability in the development of symptomatology and the difficulty in separating many "prepsychotic" from "psychotic" states, Arieti nonetheless isolates four phases in the development of full-blown schizophrenia. (1)During infancy and early childhood, genetic predispositions and environmental difficulties prevent the infant in question from experiencing security and satisfaction. Because that infant, like any other, is unable to distinguish between self and other at such an early stage in development, an apparently pervasive external badness becomes introjected as an internal badness, and internal badness is then incompletely projected outward onto significant features of the ex17. For other representative discussions of schizophrenia as an illness engendered by society see Hill 1983 and Modrow 1995; for more biologically based views of schizophrenia see Andreasen 1984, Snyder 1986: 61-89, Patterson and Spohn 1988, and Posner and Raichle
1994: 212-17.

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ternal world, especially the parents.18 The psychologically compromised child consequently attempts to escape from seemingly overwhelmyoung ing threats from without by establishing an inner life, which is not very pleasant either, because such a child, for whatever reasons, has been unduly sensitized "to one or all of four fundamental negative characteristics: anxiety, hostility, detachment, unpredictability."Nevertheless, the child tries to build defenses against such pervasive outer and inner negativity (Arieti 1994 [1974]: 73-96). (2) Having existed in a situation where almost nothing may be gained from either hostility or compliance, the incipient schizophrenic in late childhood labors at solidifying defense structuresthat seem to succeed, creating a lifestyle based on either withdrawal (the "schizoid personality"), or erratic and tumultuous engagement (the "stormypersonality") (ibid.: 97-109). (3) Distressing or seemingly trivial precipitating events in adolescence or early adulthood may trigger a collapse of defense
mechanisms (the "prepsychotic panic") (ibid.: 120-21, 130-32). (4) If the

prepsychotic panic is not successfully resolved, the schizophrenic moves even further away from ordinary reality, reverting to much earlier modes of coping that had proved less than effective for the task of constructing an adequate sense of security, satisfaction, and self (ibid.: 122-25). Bucky Bleichert lives during a period in history marked by extreme deterritorialization and reterritorialization:wartime and post-World War II America, and he must develop his craft in a nomadic zone that, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is filled with schizogenic potential. Bucky and his partner, Lee Blanchard, move back and forth across the geographic, psychological, and social borderlands between Mexico, a geographical and cultural area of deterritorialization that served as a powerful inspiration for Artaud (Deleuze and Guattari 1977 [1972]: 85), and the American West, a particularly volatile site for capitalist reterritorialization- the "Orient" of a country whose "West is the edge of the East" (Deleuze and Guattari 1987 [1980]: 19). Figure 4 depicts a theoretical space for TheBlack Dahliaon a mid-twentieth-century BwO. That diagram should help to clarify important points in the following analysis; its various elements will be explained at relevant points in the discussion. Bucky is a rather troubled young man who has locked deep within his psyche early traumas suffered at the hands of his tyrannical father and alcoholic mother. Bucky displays the preschizophrenic "stormy personality" as he seeks to build an identity first by making a reputation in the
18. This picture of inadequate infantile self-building is derived from object relations theory, an especially influential offshoot of psychoanalysis. Scharff (1996) provides an excellent selection of writings on object relations theory.

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:::: : ::: :........._


Emmett Sprague m. Ramona Upshaw Cathcart

Madeline (actuallyfathered by George Tilden)

Martha

NOMA (Develops betv Poles oJ

ZONE OF RETERRITORIALIZATION
Bucky's "Line Escape" of

\^ ^

?l!:il M^

ZONE OF DETERRITORIALIZATION
Figure4 Bucky's "line of escape" across an Oedipal grid on a section of a BwO for the historical period of TheBlackDahlia.This diagram was inspired by Deleuze on and Guattari's observations in Anti-Oedipus capitalist territorialization and reterritorialization on the BwO, and specific plot elements within TheBlackDahlia. The four uppermost triangles represent the Oedipal situations presented near the beginning of the novel. Bucky moves through the next five lowermost triangles as he, getting closer to "psychosis,"finally experiences a prepsychotic panic (which coincides with his solving of the Elizabeth Short murder). Bucky's final upward movement through the Ramona Sprague/Martha Sprague/Emmett Sprague triangle signifies his apparent relapse into Oedipalization. The question mark at the end of the "line of escape" denotes Bucky's uncertain fate. (Inset: the Sprague family.)

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boxing world and later by joining a powerful organization, the Los Angeles Police Department. Unfortunately, Bucky's father is a German immigrant who has performed subversive activities for the Bund, and the price Bucky must pay for admission to the police force is turning over his two best friends, who are Japanese Americans, to federal authorities for relocation as proof of his loyalty to the United States (Ellroy 1987: 8, 24-26). In the schizoanalytic view, Bucky's search for a stable self has effectively insulated him from any revolutionary insights, placing him, at least temporarily, among forces perpetuating fascism and racism within an ostensibly egalitarian, democratic nation that is, ironically, engaged in a worldwide struggle for survival against major fascist powers. Bucky and Lee's first assignment draws them into a confusing confrontation that epitomizes the repressive power of social recoding on the schizophrenic frontier of America, in the "Orient" of a country at war with the Orient: the Zoot-Suit Riots in Los Angeles (June 3-13, 1943). During that civil disturbance, bands of servicemen and civilians harassed Mexican Americans wearing zoot suits by beating them, cutting their hair, and destroying their clothes.19 Bucky, called to duty during the riots, is given an old "WorldWar I tin
hat and an oversize billy club known as a nigger knocker, . . . driven to

the battleground in personnel carriers borrowed from the army, and given one order: restore order." He and his fellow officers must do so without their guns because their superiors do not want ".38's falling into the hands of reet pleat, stuff cuff, drape shape, Argentine ducktail Mexican gangsters." Bucky runs and hides when he sees most of the police personnel
19. The zoot suit, which defied U.S. Productions Board Limitations Orders designed to curb domestic fabric production during wartime, consisted of a wide-brimmed hat (sometimes adorned with a long feather), an oversized jacket with exaggerated shoulder padding and patch pockets, a brightly colored tie (bow or knotted), very high-waisted pants, a six- or seven-foot hanging watch or key chain, and light-colored shoes with pointed toes. The pants had deep "reet pleats" that allowed for the "drape shape" (the crease that billowed out to its widest point at the knee and then tapered back to the ankle). The drape of the trousers was often ensured by "stuff cuffs" (i.e., stuffing the very generous cuffs). Zippers were often concealed in the inseams at the ankles of the pants so that the wearer could get his feet through. A good illustration of a zoot suit may be found in Baker 1992: 46. George J. Sanchez calls the Zoot-Suit Riots "the most outward manifestation" of the racism experienced by Mexican Americans in wartime Los Angeles; he also asserts that estimates made by law-enforcement officials about the number of young Mexican American men wearing zoot suits in the early 1940s (up to two-thirds, in some cases) were probably exaggerated (1993: 13, 265). A feel for the atmosphere surrounding the Zoot-Suit Riots may be acquired by reading the national press coverage of those disturbances in the June 21, and Time.A particularly useful discussion of the riots from a 1943, issues of Life, Newsweek, Mexican American perspective may be found in Novas 1994: 111-12, 128-29.

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ignoring the violence that rampaging servicemen are inflicting on people and property, and he encounters Lee Blanchard, who seems to be protecting a zoot-suiter from three marines. Bucky and Lee take the zoot-suiter to an abandoned house, where Bucky learns from Lee that the young Mexican American is wanted for manslaughter because an old woman died of a heart attack when he snatched her purse. They have therefore saved the zoot-suiter only to have the justice system turn him into "dead meat," because, as Lee says, "Manslaughter Two's a gas chamber jolt for spics. Hepcat here's about six weeks away from the Big Adios." The episode ends with Bucky laconically stating that the Los Angeles City Council dealt with the civil unrest by making the wearing of a zoot suit illegal (which actually happened), and noting that Lee was promoted to sergeant for the arrest of the young zoot-suiter, who was executed about a week after Lee's promotion (ibid.: 3-10). Ellroy is sensitive to the schizogenic power existing in a society that makes war on itself in order to make war on others. He invokes the ZootSuit Riots as an instructive example of how young white American men, such as Bucky and Lee, gain a firm sense of self, but at a terrible cost, as paranoid social recoding attempts to obliterate, and yet ironically regenerates, schizophrenic social decoding. Group desire must be controlled and sustained in order for a democratic society to support a long war, and the fostering and magnification of paranoid, racist fantasies worked extremely well for the American government during World War II.20Wartime Los Angeles was especially susceptible to such appeals because of California's long history of racism, and the fear of invasion or infiltration by the Japanese. Citizens of Los Angeles identified so fiercely with the national war effort that they were severely embarrassed when an enemy air raid that was supposed to have occurred on February26, 1942 (and that would have made Los Angeles the first American city attacked by the enemy), was declared by the Navy never to have taken place (Maz6n 1984: 15-19). Mexican Americans were the ethnic group with the highest percentage of its members in combat units during World War II (Meier and Rivera 1972: 186). Nevertheless, they suffered greatly, having been connected in the minds of many Californians not only with the Japanese, but with the fascist Sinarquistas, international communism, and Nazism (Mazon 1984: 21-22, 26-28, 97-98).21 Indeed, Mexican Americans were worse than Japanese
of 20. See Fussell1989: 115-29 for a brief but revealingdiscussion Allied racismduring WarII. World are seen as 21. See Thomas Sanchez1978for a detectivestory in which the zoot-suiters to and attempts causeracialunrestin the pawnscaughtbetweenthe Sinarquista communist UnitedStates.

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Americans in the minds of some, even after Pearl Harbor, as is evidenced by Governor Olson's proposal in 1942 to "move both Issei and Nisei out of cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco and the coastal areas," and "to transplant them into the agricultural valleys of the interior." Such a measure was undertaken, according to Bill Hosokawa, in order to "enable California to maintain its important and lucrative agricultural production without importing large numbers of workersundesirable for other reasons, namely Mexicans and Southern Negroes" (1969: 269). The Sleepy Lagoon trial, which stemmed from the death of Jose Diaz in August of 1942 and which Mauricio Mazon characterized as "a contravention of normal judicial procedures" (1984: 20-21), resulted in the conviction and imprisonment for murder of seventeen Mexican American youths.22The zoot suit became so closely associated with subversive feelings and/or activities in wartime America that it became an object of satire in" 'Zoot Suit' Yokum," a L'il Abner comic-strip episode that ran nationally in Sunday papers between April 11and May 23, 1943-immediately before the Zoot-Suit Riots in Los Angeles.23 Some have interpreted the Zoot-Suit Riots as an elaborate scapegoating ritual.24Others have seen them as an Oedipal response by the American servicemen to what they unconsciously perceived as infanticidal desires on the part of their symbolic fathers (Mazon 1984: 109-10). Leonard Pitt, however, has described the zoot-suiters as victims of a "schizoid heritage," doomed to live in a culture that worshiped the "romantic heritage" of Old Mexico while despising the Mexican Americans living and working within it (1966: 290-96). Peter Bourne has remarked upon the schizogenic processes that were part of basic training in World War II, that is, the stripping away of civilian identity and the creation of a military persona (quoted in Maz6n 1984: 87). Mauricio Maz6n, building upon the two previously cited studies, argues that each group participating in the riots was subjected to a confusing double bind: "zoot suiters could not be both good Americans and good pachucos. And neither, for that matter, could servicemen be good soldiers and theoretically have reservations about the course of the war. The same held for civilians whose presumed loyalty superceded all self-interests"(ibid.: 14). Fittingly enough, for the schizoanalyst, both zoot22. The Sleepy Lagoon murder and trial play an important role in Ellroy's Big Nowhere See Quartet. Valdez's ZootSuit(1992)for a powerful (1988), the second novel in the LosAngeles dramatic portrayal of the injustices perpetrated at the Sleepy Lagoon trial. 23. "'Zoot-Suit' Yokum"is reprinted and analyzed in Maz6n 1984: 31-53. 24. Carey McWilliams asserts that "in Los Angeles, where fantasy is a way of life, it was a foregone conclusion that the Mexicans would be substituted as the major scapegoat group once the Japanese were removed" (quoted in Maz6n 1984: 19).

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suiters and servicemen remained so blind to the basic split at the heart of capitalism that each group tended to be co-opted by Oedipalization. Instead of experiencing any revolutionary epiphanies, both groups explained their behavior in paranoid Oedipal terms, with themselves fighting against rivals in the other group who were sexually assaulting girls belonging to
the first group (Turner and Surace 1972 [1956]:
210-19).

Such reasoning on the part of zoot-suiters and servicemen is not surprising, given that the primacy of Oedipus in American family life was noted by contemporary observers of 1940s and 1950s America. For exof ample, in an annotation to the twentieth edition of Generation Vipers, wrote that by the early 1940s the Oedipus Complex "had Philip Wylie become a social fiat and a dominant neurosis in our land," constituting "a way of life" that was "shameful in grownups of both sexes," and a "national cult" that was a "catastrophe"(Wylie 1955 [1942]: 194). Rampant mid-twentieth-century Oedipalization has also been criticized by feminist historians chronicling the development of the "companionate family," that is, the nineteenth-century American family "shorn,"by the growth of capitalism, "of many traditional economic, educational, and welfare functions," and "assigned primary responsibilities for fulfilling the emotional and psychological needs of its members" (Mintz and Kellogg 1988:107-8). Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English provide a thorough discussion of how child-rearing experts in the 1940s and 1950s "managed to transform Freud'sstormy epic into an orderly series of functional necessities": whichwere so essentialfor sex-role These little cross-sex,cross-ageflirtations could never go on in a well-runnurseryschool or first grade. socialization Oedipalnest for the hatching Only the familycould providethe appropriate of infantgenderidentities.Parsonsand the host of child-rearing expertswho the followedhim [includingDr. Spock]not only acknowledged Oedipusand Elektra complexes, theyvirtuallyinsistedthatfamiliesshouldprovidethem for their children.Boys would not become men unlessthey fell in love with their mothersand then graduallyshiftedtheir allegianceto the father;girlswould not becomewomenunlesstheycompetedwiththeirmothersfora heterosexual to attachment the father,and so on. (1978: 248-51) While some post-Freudian readers of Deleuze and Guattari might accuse them of constructing a straw person out of Oedipalization, it seems safe to assert that, at least in the United States during the period of Elizabeth Short's murder, psychoanalysis and Oedipus reigned supreme, shaping central conceptions of self, family, and society. The triangular grid in Figure 4 represents the major Oedipal mechanisms that co-opt revolutionary energy and awareness throughout TheBlackDahlia. Bucky's nomadic investigation can be viewed as taking place in what Pauline Marie Rose-

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nau calls "post-modern hyper-space,"where "every aspect of geographical space as normally conceived" is turned inside out and reformulated as "a mentally constructed set of relationships"(1992: 69). As his investigation progresses, Bucky will approach more fully the ideal of DeleuzeGuattarian theory: a "schizophrenic out for a walk," a "better model than a neurotic lying on an analyst's couch" for actually getting "a breath of
fresh air, a relationship with the outside world" (1977 [1972]: 1-2).

Before the Black Dahlia case, Bucky and Lee are safely "neurotic,"each held fast within familial and symbolic triangles (pictured in Figure 4). Bucky is trying to deal with his ambivalent feelings toward his father, whom he blames for his alcoholic mother's suicide (Ellroy 1987: 25). Lee, who had competed with an adored sister for the love and recognition of their perfectionistic father, blames himself after she disappears forever, the probable victim of a rape/murder (ibid.: 73). Lee forms another triangle in an attempt to assuage his guilt by rescuing Kay Lake, a symbolic surrogate for his lost sister, from the sadistic attentions of Bobby De Witt, a procurer, armed robber, and drug dealer (ibid.: 29-32). After De Witt's arrest another triangle forms, peopled by Bucky, Lee, and Kay. Bucky describes his newfound triadic relationship in the following terms: "Opponents [in a rigged departmental boxing match], then partners, then friends. And with the friendship came Kay, never getting between us, but always filling in our lives outside the job with style and grace" (ibid.: 55). A connection between capitalist reterritorialization,Oedipalization, fascism, and racism is firmly drawn in TheBlackDahlia when Kay tells Bucky that he was. destined to complete their triangle because the "little bits and pieces here and there" she had heard about him, things such as his betrayal of his Japanese friends and his and Lee's behavior during the Zoot-Suit Riots, made him not reprehensible, but rather her "storybookhero" in stories that were tantalizingly real (ibid.: 88). Those versed in traditional theories of schizophrenia can easily isolate several precipitating factors in Bucky's progression toward the "prepsychotic panic" and subsequent "psychosis."One such factor is Bucky's difficulty in solving the Elizabeth Short murder. Even though his efforts at detection are almost completely disrupted by a criminal-justice system that capriciously encourages and then discourages him, Bucky begins to feel that he is an abject failure in police work-the one area where he "contacts the world, expresses himself, gains acceptance or recognition, and senses who he is and where he belongs" (Johnson 1994: 84). Bucky's shaky autonomy and confidence in his masculinity are also put to a severe test during the maintenance and ultimate dissolution of his always ambivalent relationship with Lee Blanchard. The formation of a

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friendship with someone of the same gender often disturbs the fragile sense of self and the insecure gender identity of the incipient schizophrenic (Arieti 1994 [1974]: 131), and Bucky suffers greatly when the apparently secure Bleichert/Lake/Blanchard triangle disintegrates. Lee, overwhelmed by what he sees as a resemblance between the Elizabeth Short murder and the fate of his sister, violates departmental policies, only to disappear forever somewhere in Mexico in his obsessive pursuit of the Black Dahlia killer (Ellroy 1987: 76, 143-48, 152-56). Bucky, who constantly wished to get off the unproductive Short case, but stayed on it only in an effort at "bracing Lee and Kay" without losing his manhood (ibid.: 154), has a problem with satisfying Kay's requests for sexual and emotional solace. Bucky cannot betray Lee even after Kay, who has learned about the Oedipus Complex in her education courses, reminds Bucky that displacing Lee and claiming her as a sexual prize would constitute the fulfillment of perfectly acceptable Oedipal desires: kiddieartwork I'd findher gradingbookreportsand perusing glad to stoically, front a likemaintaining business-as-usual would see me, butcausticunderneath, at keepher griefoverLee'sabsenceand her contemptfor my reluctance bay.I the frontby tellingher I wantedher, but would only move on it tried denting withovereducated she act whenLee'svanishing wasresolved; answered psychohe aboutourmissingthird,turningthe education [Lee]bought logicalclaptrap her around,usingit as a weaponagainsthim. I explodedat phraseslike"paraand noidtendencies" "pathological selfishness," comingbackwith"hesaved you, me." for comeback thatwas, "Heonly he made helped I had no comeyou."Kay's backfor the truthbehindthejargonand the fact that withoutLee as a centerpiece, the two of us wereloose ends,a familysanspatriarch. (Ibid.:172-73) Kay eventually wins out by compelling Bucky to marry her (ibid.: 230-32). Instead of fulfilling Bucky's supposedly Oedipal wishes, however, that unstable marriage merely constitutes another precipitating factor for schizophrenia because, as Arieti states, marriage, which is dangerously destabilizing for the preschizophrenic, frequently "tends to reproduce situations similar to those that have caused . . . intense anxiety in . . . childhood" (1994 [1974]: 131). There is no final Oedipal refuge for Bucky, only Oedipal snares. He moves closer and closer to the prepsychotic panic, feeling (as do most schizophrenics at that particular stage) "threatened from all sides, as if he were in ajungle[,] . . . a jungle of concepts, where the threat is not to survival, but to the self-image" (ibid.: 120). Harry Stack Sullivan's traditional psychiatric conception of the schizophrenic's "need to escape" into "psychosis" after higher self structuresare compromised (paraphrased in ibid.: into a revo121) is transformed, by the Deleuze-Guattarian revaluation,

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lutionary "line of escape" leading to a different, but not invalid, way of seeing the world (1986 [1975]: 6, 34). Indeed, as the reader can see from a glance at Bucky's particular "line of escape" across the Oedipal grid in Figure 4, it is only during his supposed "breakdown"that Bucky makes any real progress on the Elizabeth Short case. While some famous detectives, such as Poe's C. Auguste Dupin, Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, and Agatha Christie's Miss Jane Marple, are unquestionably eccentric, most likely neurotic, and possibly mildly schizophrenic, each of them has a relatively stable sense of self and uses Aristotelian logic to solve crimes.25 What is so significant and unusual about Ellroy's Bucky Bleichert is that Bucky is able to solve the Elizabeth Short murder only afterhe suffers a dramatic dissolution of "neurotic,"paranoid selfhood and begins thinking in non-Aristotelian, "psychotic,"schizophrenic ways. As the prepsychotic panic approaches, incipient schizophrenics often enter an extremely intense state of "preoccupation and absorption" that is "suggestive of autohypnosis or trance."Encircled by the "elemental and archaic thought forms" that erected the now-crumbling defenses during much earlier periods of psychological development, those individuals find themselves "plunged into the lower strata of the mental life"-a "strange
25. In "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," Poe's Dupin, who would fit the description of a "schizoid personality,"has had "the energy of his character"dissipate as a result of "a variety of unfortunate events" that have left him in poverty. Dupin has ceased, for the most part, "to bestir himself in the world," preferring instead to live in "fantastic gloom" as he devotes himself even further to sharpening his extraordinary powers of ratiocination. Dupin believes so fully in his analytical abilities that he considers himself virtually telepathic, able to determine a companion's thoughts even before his companion thinks them (Poe 1978 [1841], 2: 527-37). Dupin's startling belief can be interpreted as an example of a characteristic of schizophrenic thinking known as "reverse inference," where "the patient is able to foresee the conclusions of his reasoning because it is the anticipated conclusion that retrospectively directs his train of thought" (Arieti 1994 [1974]: 244). The narrator,who is Dupin's devoted companion, may so fervently wish to believe in Dupin's powers that he merely acquiesces to Dupin's assertions and agrees with Dupin's supposed reading of his thoughts. Sherlock Holmes, another "schizoid," whose cocaine use is perhaps self-medication for spells of melancholia, displays a strong paranoid streak, characterizing, with the barest thread of evidence, his seemingly unconquerable archrival, Professor Moriarty, in The Valley of Fear,as the ultimate architect and beneficiary of any significant criminal activity in England (Doyle 1993 [1914-1915]: 6, 169). Arieti notes that a typical schizophrenic defense mechanism is "one of anxiety in the face of space," which necessitates "escape into a restricted or very definite space" (1994 [1974]: 249). In The Houndof the Baskervilles, Holmes tells Watson that "a concentrated atmosphere helps a concentration of thought." The "logical outcome" of such a theory, according to Holmes, is "getting into a box to think" (Doyle 1993 [1901]:28). Even though Miss Jane Marple displays fewer symptoms of incipient schizophrenia than either Dupin or Holmes, she is disconcertingly paranoid. She uses her hobbies of gardening and birdwatching to spy on goings-on throughout the village of St. Mary Mead, and she is described as "the worst cat in the village," who "always knows every single thing that happens-and draws the worst inferences from it" (Christie 1977 [1930]: 8, 17).

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new world in which previous experience and accepted standards of value do not apply" (Boisen 1971 [1936]: 79-80).26 Figure 5 describes various types of "paleologic" displayed by preschizophrenics and schizophrenics. As Bucky attempts to endure stresses arising from his failure to solve the Black Dahlia case, Lee's disappearance, and his problematic sexual and personal relations with Kay, he begins to lose a sense of separation between his own mental processes and the external world ("adualism"). He wants so badly to recover the former illusory stability of the Bleichert/Lake/Blanchard triangle immediately before the discovery of Elizabeth Short's mutilated corpse, that he depends increasingly on paleologic as a means of restoring that reality. During his investigation of the Dahlia killing, Bucky catches a glimpse of Madeline Sprague, a rich and "spoiled sewer crawler" who cultivates her resemblance to Elizabeth Short (Ellroy 1987: 129). Bucky meets Madeline in a lesbian bar and questions her about the Black Dahlia, at which point she offers to have sex with him to keep her name out of the newspapers (ibid.: 120-23). Even though Madeline first denies having had relations with Elizabeth Short (ibid.: 121),Bucky eventually learns that Madeline, intrigued by the idea of coupling with a look-alike, had made love with Elizabeth (ibid.: 152). At first, Bucky notices only "a common, everyday resemblance" between the two women, a likeness that is only "superficially
similar," "more hairdo and makeup than anything else" (ibid.: 1lo, 121). As

external stresses increase, and Bucky's psychological need to solve Elizabeth Short's murder grows, he employs the non-Aristotelian logic of the schizophrenic as a means of accomplishing that goal. Confusing the partial identity of predicates with the identity of subjects (which is a variety of the "awholism"so characteristic of schizophrenic thinking), Bucky, ignoring the fact that Madeline's eyes are hazel and Elizabeth'swere blue (ibid.: 173),nonetheless uses the following reasoning to transform Madeline into the Black Dahlia: Major Premise: Elizabeth Short was of average height and weight, had blue eyes and upswept dark hair with a yellow barrette, and wore dark-redlipstick. Minor Premise: Madeline Sprague is of average height and weight, has upswept dark hair with a yellow barrette, and wears darkred lipstick. Conclusion: Madeline Sprague is Elizabeth Short.
26. See Rochester and Martin 1979 for an alternative view that examines schizophrenia in terms of discourse failure instead of an employment of non-Aristotelian logic.

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Paleologic A. Engendered because of a basic "adualism" (inability to effect meaningful boundaries between mental life and the external world). B. Performed in accordance with "teleologic regression" (protecting against a dreaded future event by shifting to archaic modes of thinking). C. Supported by a strong need to believe in its "logical" basis, to prove it "logically." D. Produces indirect, "spheric"meaning. E. Characterized by "primary awholism" (inability to perceive wholes, first fragmenting them, and then often reconstituting the parts into distorted, surrealistic "wholes"-characterized in Bemporad 1967 as the "Arietieffect"). F. Substitution of partial or total identity of predicates (of quality, or of spatial or temporal contiguity) for identity of subjects. G. Moving from inference to description ("reverse inference") instead of vice versa. H. Replaces causality by logical deduction ("The Law of Sufficient Reason") with causality by psychological explanation (often found in paranoia). Aristotelian Logic versus Paleologic A. The Aristotelian Law of Identity is A.") becomes this in paleo("A "A may be B, provided B has a quality of A." logic: B. The Aristotelian Law of Contradiction is not both A and non ("A A.") becomes this in paleologic: "A may be seen as A and B at the same time." C. The Aristotelian Law of theExcluded Middle("A either is or is not A.") becomes this in paleologic: "Things are often seen as a composite of A and B," (or) "A = A + B + C where B and C have a part A in common." 5 summarized from Figure Paleologic,or schizophrenic thinking(information
Arieti 1994 [1974]: 224-302). Deleuze and Guattari see the "awholism"inherent in the thought processes of schizophrenics as containing the potential for "molecular,"revolutionary insights. While some might characterize such non-Aristotelian thinking as "poststructuralist,"traditional psychiatrists would characterize it as

"archaic" "prestructuralist." or

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Madeline exerts her uncanny power over Bucky by saying "I look like her [Elizabeth]" (ibid.: 195), perversely drawing him away from Kay, whose relationships with two men have been undermined by the discovery of Elizabeth's lifeless body (ibid.: 172-74). Bucky finds himself "ruled by two women," and caught in "a crossfire of their strange, strong wills" (ibid.: 172). He eventually marries Kay (ibid.: 230-32), but whenever the Dahlia case proves especially frustrating, Madeline/Elizabeth reasserts her influence; finally, Kay moves out after labeling Bucky a "necrophile" whose erotic gratification is provided by an illusory relationship with a corpse, rather than by actual intercourse with his wife or mistress (ibid.: 176, 24546, 259). When even Madeline can find no more excitement in playing Elizabeth Short, Bucky's "awholism"increases as he moves one step further in his paleologic. He buys "ajet-black upswept wig at Western Costume, a yellow barrette at a dime store on the Boulevard," and the services of "a skinny brunette in a flouncy cocktail dress" in yet another imaginary revivification of the Black Dahlia. Here he acts according to an even more bizarre pattern of logic than that employed during his liaison with Madeline: Major Premise: Elizabeth Short was of average height and weight, had blue eyes and upswept dark hair with a yellow barrette, and wore dark-redlipstick. Minor Premise: This hooker is wearing a jet-black upswept wig and a yellow barrette. Conclusion: This hooker is Elizabeth Short. Bucky takes the prostitute to a room containing files and photos that Lee had filched earlier in his furtive investigation of the Dahlia murder, places the wig on her head, and sticks "the yellow barrette into the coif to make things right."All he manages to accomplish, unfortunately,is to "tilt everything off to one side," making the woman resemble the dead Elizabeth instead of the Elizabeth he wants to reanimate. The young prostitute becomes frightened when Bucky uncovers some hanging photos of Elizabeth to trigger his imagination, for she thinks that he is the killer of the Black Dahlia, instead of a person hunting the killer (ibid.: 260-62). Bucky's delusion-haunted affair with Madeline draws him deeply into the secrets of the Sprague family (see inset, Figure 4). Madeline's putative father, Emmett Sprague, a Scottish veteran of World War I, came to California with his comrade, George Tilden, to strike it rich "in the silent flicker business."George worked as a lighting man, but his career ended in

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failure. Emmett, on the other hand, married a well-to-do young woman, built substandard housing, and became a real-estate tycoon after Mack Sennett enlisted him to build Hollywoodland, the housing development below the famous sign on Mount Lee. Even though he fought the Germans in World War I, and finds that Hitler "was a bit excessive" in his methods, Emmett thinks that the United States would "regretnot joining forces with him to fight the Reds." Madeline's family is a model for the economically successful but ultimately schizogenic companionate family of the 1940s and 1950s. Each parent has co-opted a daughter in a household war, with Ramona Sprague nurturing the quiet, artistic Martha, and Emmett Sprague indulging the promiscuous Madeline. The Spragues' marriage is nothing more than a badly maintained illusion, and Emmett does not bother to conceal his activities with Mexican prostitutes (ibid.: 130-32). Emmett Sprague is not only an inspiration for Madeline's wild behavior; he also seems to be important in her sex life, a fact that is made quite clear to Bucky when Madeline imitates her father's voice and Scottish burr when she speaks to Bucky about her sexual proclivities (ibid.: 121-23). Late in the novel, when Bucky realizes that Madeline has played a larger role in Elizabeth's murder than she has admitted, he goes to the Sprague mansion, where he finds Madeline and her father "lying on the big canopied bed" in the master bedroom. They are dressed, but Madeline lays her head in her father's lap while he caresses her shoulders. Bucky jumps to the obvious Oedipal conclusion, but Emmett informs him that the apparent incest "isn't a cuckold," but rather "just affection," something for which he and Madeline have been given "dispensation"because, as Madeline reveals, Emmett is not her real father, and their sexual relations have been limited to petting and vicarious gratification received from discussing each other's carnal adventures. In a further attempt to exonerate themselves from Bucky's accusations of incest, Madeline and Emmett explain that there was a much more urgent reason than sex for them to enmesh Bucky in a seemingly Oedipal triangle. They felt that establishing such a relationship would allow them to observe, direct, and contain Bucky's search for the murderer (ibid.: 286-90). Little did they know, however, that their Oedipal plot would engender within Bucky, a Deleuze-Guattarian hero, paleologic, a type of molecular thinking that would render him ultimately impervious to such symbolic molar snares. During the confrontation in the Spragues' master bedroom, Bucky learns that Madeline and Emmett Sprague initiated their dealings with him in an effort to conceal George Tilden's involvement in Elizabeth Short's murder. It seems that Emmett never really wanted children, but, after enduring his wife's endless badgering, he consented to one "mean"

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act of procreation, which apparently resulted in the birth of Madeline. Ramona Sprague, though, was having an affair with George Tilden at the time, and it was George who actually fathered Madeline, a fact that Emmett did not realize until Madeline was twelve. When he could no longer deny the resemblance between Madeline and George, Emmett then found George, "played tic-tac-toe on his face with a nigger shiv," and covered up the incident by taking George to the hospital and presenting him as the victim of a car crash (ibid.: 290-91). George, "a pitiful disfigured wreck," acceded to Emmett Sprague's entreaties for forgiveness and secrecy concerning Madeline's parentage, accepting an offer of money and a permanent job as handyman for the Sprague properties. George, who saw Elizabeth Short during the shooting of a stag film that Madeline arranged in one of Emmett's abandoned buildings, developed an overwhelming lust for this woman who looked like his own daughter; he threatened to disclose to the public not the truth about Madeline's parentage, but, more ironically, the "incest" occurring between Madeline and Emmett if Elizabeth could not be provided for his
pleasure (ibid.: 290-93).

Thinking that fulfilling George's hitherto stifled Oedipal desires with a surrogate daughter would be enough to ensure his silence about their own quasi-incestuous activities, Madeline and Emmett Sprague tricked Elizabeth into meeting George. Elizabeth was murdered, according to Madeline and Emmett, because what they considered to be George's rather eccentric but harmless sexual idiosyncrasies turned out to be too bizarre and violent to be controlled by any Oedipal desire for sex with his "daughter."George's father was a great Scottish anatomist, and the young George "liked to touch the organs his dad threw out." Such preferences only increased by the time George entered World War I, when he "used to take his bayonet to the dead Jerries." Emmett even suspects that George has "burgled graves" in America, collecting "scalps and inside organs" (ibid.: 291), but explains that, since George saved his life during World War I, he could never see George as anything but "a daft little
brother" with harmless libidinal eccentricities (ibid.: 291-92).27 It turns

out, however, that the version of Elizabeth Short's murder that Madeline and Emmett Sprague concocted is only partially true, and Bucky is able
27. The character of George Tilden is probably based on Edward Gein, the Wisconsin murderer/necrophile who haunted the imaginations of Americans during the early 1950s, and who served as the inspiration for the mother-fixated murderer in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. See Schechter 1989: 206 for examples of how Gein's psychosis was Oedipalized in press coverage.

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to escape their second Oedipal ruse only by progressing even further into "psychosis." This progression is hastened by a visit to George Tilden's torture shack where, among the "shelves holding jars of preserved organs," Bucky sees "brains, eyes, hearts and intestines floating in fluid," as well as "ovaries, glots of shapeless viscera, [and] ajar filled with penises."After glimpsing "a woman's hand, wedding ring still attached to her finger,"Bucky discovers two notebooks. He opens one, noticing pages "filled with neatly typed descriptions of grave robberies- cemeteries, plot names and dates in separate columns." His horror becomes almost unendurable when he reads that some of those grave robberies took place at the cemetery where his mother was buried (ibid.: 296). Bucky kills George after George ambushes him at the shack, but his revenge is strangely empty. The apparent solving of the murder can never be made public because Bucky has concealed information on the relationship between Elizabeth and Madeline in earlier efforts to sustain his delusory revivification of the Black Dahlia (ibid.: 297-300). Bucky's killing of George Tilden after making a symbolic connection between George's perverted necrophilic activities and Bucky's mother's corpse can be explained in Oedipal terms, as a strange variation of killing a father-rival in order to possess a beloved mother. Unfortunately, however, Bucky feels no closer to the truth after that apparent resolution. A more likely explanation for Bucky's resistance to simple, and ultimately false, Oedipal solutions to Elizabeth Short's murder, given his preschizophrenic symptomatology, is that the torture shack/mother association has triggered a prepsychotic panic in Bucky. Arieti explains that an incipient schizophrenic experiences the prepsychotic panic "as a sort of strange emotional resonance between something that is very clear . . . and something that is unclear and yet gloomy, horrifying."The badness that the incipient schizophrenic infant felt within, "the malevolent you . . [that] had been transformed, introjected, tamed, and transformed into a distressingother" is, during the prepsychotic panic, "extrojected, projected, appear[ing] strong, often in the most unusual, fantasied forms." Usually, the sense of inner badness (that has originally come from a sensed pervasive outer badness before the infant could separate self from world) becomes projected, through very primitive defense mechanisms, onto the mother or mother substitute, "the most important inner object" for an infant. Such a child, unduly sensitized to "anxiety, hostility, detachment, [and/or] unpredictability,"constructs "a whole image of mother out of these negative parts, and the resulting whole will be a monstrous transformation of mother" (Arieti 1994 [1974]: 89, 121, 123). In Bucky, as in many preschizophrenics,

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that terrible introject of the "bad mother" has been incompletely buried by defense mechanisms; it threatens to reemerge, and shatter the notion of self, if the circumstances are right. Fathers are not exempt from such defensive metamorphoses, for "the future schizophrenic feels that both parents, in different ways or in similar ways, have failed him" (ibid.: 91). Even though Bucky may dread the unwilling disinterment of an infantile "bad mother,"the apparently uncanny resonance between the outer world (the world of the Sprague family) and his crumbling inner world (the threat of a reemerging monstrous mother) allows him to escape false Oedipal trails and finally discover the entire truth about the Black Dahlia murder. Bucky's solving of the case is a direct result of yet another exercise in paleologic. During the period when Bucky was trying unsuccessfully to transmute Madeline Sprague and the skinny brunette hooker into Elizabeth Short, he was investigating the suicide of Eldridge Thomas Chambers, a neighbor of the Spragues. In the entrance hall of the Chambers home, Bucky saw "a portrait of a clown, a young boy done up in court jester's garb from long, long ago." The lad's body "was gnarled and hunched," and "he wore a stuporous ear-to-ear smile that looked like one continuous deep scar."Bucky stared at the painting "transfixed,thinking of Elizabeth Short, DOA at 39th and Norton." The more he concentrated on the painting, the more the faces of Elizabeth and the clown blended into one (Ellroy 1987: 239). Later in the novel, after he has killed George Tilden, Bucky sees the haunting painting again, and learns from Mrs. Chambers that the mutilated clown in the painting is Gwynplaine, the hero of Victor Hugo's TheMan WhoLaughs (1911 [1869]), who was disfiguredas a child by the Coma group that kidnapped children, mutilated them, (child buyers), prachicos and then sold them as court jesters (see Figure 6a). Bucky then remembers that there was a copy of Hugo's book in George Tilden's shack. Bucky makes a final connection between Gwynplaine and the Black Dahlia murder when he discovers, from a bill of sale in Ramona Sprague's handwriting (the same handwriting that he had noticed in the torture shack), that Eldridge Chambers had bought the painting of "the scar mouth clown" from Ramona Sprague on January 15, 1947 (the day that Elizabeth Short's vivisected corpse was found). When Bucky realizes that Ramona Sprague killed Elizabeth Short (ibid.: 306-8), he is confronted with a real monstermother, an unnerving living, breathing personification of the terrifying maternal introject that lies imperfectly buried within many a preschizophrenic and schizophrenic psyche. Bucky confronts Ramona Sprague with his newfound evidence, and finally learns that she had earlier participated in George's strange sexual activities (by killing neighborhood cats for him) in an attempt to have

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Figures6a-b The work of the Comprachicos: (top) the surgically induced smile of Gwynplaine, hero of Hugo's Man WhoLaughs(1911[1869], detail from illustration facing 1.268); and (bottom) the "smile" slashed into Elizabeth Short's face (detail
from a photograph in Anger 1984: 128-29).

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George complete her family, and her marriage to Emmett Sprague, by fathering her child. After Emmett discovered Madeline's true parentage and cut George's face, George wanted nothing to do with Ramona, who was "moved by both the then "came across Hugo's TheMan WhoLaughs," Comprachicos and their disfiguredvictims," and subsequently "bought the Yannantuono painting and kept it hidden, staring at it as a memento of Georgie in her private hours." When she saw George go off for his fateful assignation with Elizabeth Short, Ramona became jealous of George's desire for a surrogate Madeline and, in an ironic reversal of her previous employment of Oedipal temptation (by having George take her husband's place as the biological father of Madeline), burst into the shack, knocked Elizabeth unconscious with a baseball bat before George could have sex with her, and "promised him parts of the girl to keep forever."Ramona then tortured Elizabeth for two days while George looked on, both of them reading "the chants of the Comprachicos" aloud from TheMan Who Laughs.So that Elizabeth "wouldn't hate her after she [Elizabeth] was dead," Ramona "slashed" an ear-to-ear smile across Elizabeth's face before helping George to dismember her (ibid.: 309-13) (see Figure 6b). The sight or imagining of parental intercourse is the farthest thing from Bucky's mind during his moment of deepest revelation in TheBlackDahlia. He is presented with no Freudian primal scene when he learns the full story of Elizabeth Short's murder. Instead, he experiences what might be called the primal scene of schizophrenia: a series of hallucinatory, nightmarish visions of a mother and father torturing a being that seems to be their child, carving a smile into the supposedly bad child's face so that it appears to approve of their hellish actions. The truly frightening thing for Bucky may be that the hideous activities of George Tilden and Ramona Sprague do not feel utterly alien to him, for he, as an incipient schizophrenic, has almost certainly kept buried somewhere within himself impressions of acts on the part of his own parents that seemed very much like those about which he has just learned. Even though the reader of The BlackDahlia never finds out exactly what such impressions might be, Bucky's early family situation constitutes a roaring silence within his life and throughout the novel, a mystery even deeper for Bucky than the Elizabeth Short murder, and one that might never be solved. 3. Conclusion:The AnoedipalHeroand Social Reterritorialization According to traditional psychiatry,Bucky's prepsychotic panic shows that he is in danger of an imminent breakdown, a slide into "psychosis," a cataclysmic shattering of self from which he might never recover. For

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the schizoanalyst, however, Bucky's profoundly disturbing moment of insight is best described as a Deleuze-Guattarian "plateau,"a "continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end" (Deleuze and Guattari 1987 [1980]: 21-22).28In other words, Bucky's prepsychotic panic has the potential to push him far beyond the molar Freudian family romance as a model for capitalist family interactions. Indeed, just as Bucky's growing molecular "awholism"has helped him to realize the psychic and physical mutilation of children occurring behind the smashed Oedipal facades that the Sprague family has constructed, such schizophrenic thought processes might also be trained, with great benefit, on himself and his capitalistic society. Bucky has it in his power to entertain the profoundly disturbing possibility that Hugo's Comprachicos, those indefatigable makers of monstrosities for profit, constitute a much more suitable model than Freudian Oedipalization for what often occurs within the modern American companionate family. He also has the ability to connect the permanent, twisted smile of Hugo's Gwynplaine not only with the awful "smile" carved into Elizabeth Short's face, but also with the false self that he seems to have created in the face of what he has apparently perceived as overwhelming demands, by his parents and his culture, for an unremitting conformity to something impossible. Indeed, Bucky, who was so horrified when the bewigged prostitute thought that he was the murderer of the Black Dahlia (Ellroy 1987: 260-62), might even have the capacity to realize that George Tilden and Ramona Sprague, themselves almost certainly schizophrenic, were drawn to the portrait of Gwynplaine, and the torture and murder of Elizabeth Short, in efforts to assuage inner torments that may have been unbearably similar to his own.29 Bucky's opportunity for anoedipal molecular insight passes almost instantaneously, though. He identifies very strongly with Martha Sprague, and his desire to give Martha, who does not know of her mother's involvement in the Black Dahlia killing, the illusion of a normal mid-twentiethcentury family life is so irresistiblethat he immediately helps to reestablish the formerly murderous Oedipal dynamics within the Sprague family. In an effort to preserve Martha's loving image of her mother, he tacitly agrees when the dying, lupus-ridden Ramona Sprague asks him never to reveal to Martha the true story of the murder. Bucky also helps Madeline Sprague
28. Deleuze and Guattari have borrowed their concept of the "plateau" from Bateson 1972 [1949]. 29. During an argument with Kay near the conclusion of TheBlackDahlia, Bucky doesequate himself with the seriously disturbed George Tilden, but that moment of insight passes almost instantaneously (Ellroy 1987: 304).

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to create a false Oedipal trail as she tries to conceal Emmett Sprague's involvement in the "father"/daughter slaying of Lee Blanchard, who was blackmailing them after he discovered their role in Elizabeth Short's murder. Bucky goes right along, and loses his job at the police department as a result, when Madeline concocts "a brilliant fantasy-a lovers' triangle of Lee/Madeline/Bucky," which "seasoned homicide dicks" swallow, "hook, line and sinker"(ibid.: 318). Consequently, Emmett Sprague, capitalist extraordinaire, is never connected with the Blanchard murder. Madeline is convicted in Los Angeles of third-degree manslaughter for Lee's murder, and her sentence is reduced after psychiatrists find her to be a "severely delusional violent schizophrenic adept at acting out many different personalities." Bucky's silence on matters concerning the Spragues is sealed forever when he sees a particularly affecting photograph on the front page of the Los Angeles Daily News. In the photo, which was taken after Madeline's trial, is "Ramona [Sprague], hollow-cheeked with disease, . . . being shepherded by Martha, all good strong business in a tailored suit" (ibid.: 318-20). Martha, who has hated her father for preferring her half sister over her and/or her mother, and her half sister for monopolizing Oedipal affection that should have belonged to his real daughter, finally, through Bucky's help, gets to occupy her very own Oedipal triangle, at least during the short time before her mother's death. Ironically, Martha will go on, blind to the truth about her mother, her supposedly successful Oedipalization allowing her eventually to assume her place in a capitalist society as a commercial artist, "sketching alter egos to plaster over ads huckstering toothpaste and cosmetics and cornflakes"(ibid.: 313-14). Bucky's aid in obliterating the truth about parental murderers is the most troubling feature of TheBlackDahlia'sconclusion for readers versed in traditional psychiatry andfor schizoanalytic interpreters. One of the most powerful defense mechanisms for the incipient schizophrenic is to split off from consciousness, and thereby deny, what are experienced as qualities of the "bad mother," the "bad father,"and the "bad family" (Arieti 1994 [1974]:94-95). In traditional psychiatry,"the therapist'stask is to assist the individual in identifying and taking responsibility for this negative force, in understanding its origins, and in beginning the process of integrating it into the ambivalently experienced self and other representations"(Johnson 1994: 98). Bucky does none of those things, for Martha Sprague or for himself, because to reveal the truth about her mother to Martha might bring Bucky too close to buried truths about his own family life. The prepsychotic panic evoked at the torture shack may be quelled by such defensive maneuvers, but, in a very real sense, Bucky denies the reality of the

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murders he has recently solved as he perpetuates an essentially delusory vision of his world. Even though Bucky has maintained a basically schizophrenic mode of thinking, he has not gone far enough in that direction to please the schizoanalyst. In the Deleuze-Guattarian perspective, Bucky becomes a victim of molar Oedipal reterritorialization at the very moment when he could give way to a molecular mode of thinking, a revolutionary shattering of the Oedipal grid that would reveal the complicity between capitalism, psychoanalysis, and the nuclear family. Bucky's "line of escape" pictured in Figure 4 finally moves upward into the zone of reterritorializationon the cultural BwO, through the Ramona Sprague/Emmett Sprague/Martha Sprague triangle, and ends with a question mark. That question mark is in the diagram because there still seems to be some hope, albeit slim, for Bucky. At the end of the novel, Kay tells Bucky that she is carrying his child, and Bucky vows that their new familial triangle (not pictured on the grid in Figure 4) will not be built on "a new foundation of lies" (Ellroy 1987: 323-25). Such a promise is difficult for the reader to believe, given Bucky's recent prevarications on behalf of Martha Sprague, and his disturbing discovery that Kay, who had known of Lee's blackmail scheme since its inception, had been told the secret of the Black Dahlia murder by Lee and had kept it from Bucky in an effort to preserve their triangular relationship (ibid.: 303-4). Deleuze and Guattari would be disappointed, but not surprised, by Bucky's failure to achieve a personal molecular revolution.Just as forces of social reterritorialization stifle the profoundly frightening, and yet oddly exhilarating, deterritorializations achieved by capitalism, that same process tends to be reflected and replicated in anoedipal literary works: literature: fromThomasHardy, fromD. H. Lawrence Strange Anglo-American to MalcolmLowry,from Henry Millerto Allen GinsbergandJack Kerouac, men who knowhow to leave,to scramble codes,to causeflowsto circulate, the to traverse desertof the body withoutorgans.They overcomea limit, they the shattera wall, the capitalist barrier. And of coursetheyfailto completethe pronevercease failingto do so. The neuroticimpasseagaincloses-the cess, they of America,the returnto the nativeland-or daddy-mommy oedipalization, else the perversion the exoticterritorialities, of then drugs,alcohol-or worse
still, an old fascist dream. (Deleuze and Guattari 1977 [1972]: 132-33)

TheBlackDahlia, with its preschizophrenic hero, whose mental "awholism" allows him to solve one of the twentieth century's most baffling crimes, moves further toward schizoanalytic revelation than most anoedipal works. Ellroy, though, is too sensitive to the power exerted by Oedipalization in

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mid-twentieth-century America to grant Bucky Bleichert any more than a glimmer of hope that his "line of escape" will end anywhere but back home, where a tidy familial triangle will probably work to conceal, perhaps forever, the truth of capitalist schizogenesis.
References
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