Re: RARA-AVIS: Ellroy

From: Michael Robison ( zspider@gte.net)
Date: 24 Nov 2002


JIM DOHERTY wrote:
> If you're going to arguewith somebody, deal with the
> issues he or she has raised. Brian never said
> corruption, racism, etc., didn't exist, and to suggest
> that he did as a way of showing the fallacy of his
> arguments is to fight unfairly.

************* I quote Brian:
"...the only landscape Ellroy is exploring (mytho-poetic or otherwise) is the interior landscape of his own dark, twisted psyche..."

I interpretted this as meaning that the world Ellroy portrayed was a mere reflection of himself with no foundation in reality. It still doesn't look like an unreasonable interpretation to me. I'm standing by it. And I realized that I was overstating my case and I believe that Brian saw the humor I intended.

> What Brian implied, and it's a fair point, is that the
> TOTAL corruption Ellroy shows, in which there is NO
> character acting from good or noble purposes is at
> least as far from reality as a presentation that
> suggests that there is no brutality, corruption, or
> racism in the ranks of American law enforcement.

Well I didn't know how to take that statement. I saw some good in some of the characters in every book I read of his. Bucky and Lee might not have been saints in BLACK DAHLIA, but at least they were trying to bring a murderer to justice. Wasn't their supervisor a good guy? Same for the rest of the Quartet. And I think there was a guy or two in AMERICAN TABLOID who at least started out half-way good.

miker

--
# To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to
# majordomo@icomm.ca.  This will not work for the digest version.
# The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 24 Nov 2002 EST