Some
Reference Points for Discussion
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Preliminary Class Business
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What Califia is "About"
Finding the Gold Mine
Personal Memory
- Augusta's effort to remember the location of her father's
gold coins
- Calvin's search for the identity of his parents
- Kaye's "seances" with departed spirits (Nellie
Clare)
- All the Seeker's effort to remember the location of the lost
gold mine
- Violet Summerland's Alzheimer's disease
Family History: Five Generations
- Stories of love and compassion (e.g., Samuel Walker and Willing
Stars)
- Stories of death and loss (e.g., Augusta's delayed mourning
for her dad
and mother
)
- Stories of new love and compassion (e.g., affair between Calvin
and Kaye)
California History
A history of the Seekers ,
Players ,
and Builders
of California. Compare such other works about the building of
California as Upton Sinclair's Oil! (1927), John Steinbeck's
The Grapes of Wrath (1939), and Roman Polanski's Chinatown
(1974). Or compare Sergio Leone's film about the building of the
West: Once Upon a Time in the West (1968).
- Spanish arrival
- Gold Rush
- Oil Rush
- Water
- Wind Power
- Hollywood
- (Silicon Valley)
Social History (Chumash, Chinese, women, Spanish, and Anglos)
- Luesebrink: "A wish to include minority and female voices
as a valid expression of our memory of history guided the account
of Willing Stars, the Chumash Grandmother of Califia."
- Women as the Muses of Califia, the "Keepers"
of social memory
(Note: Mnemosyne, or memory,was the mother of the muses)
Cosmic History
- Cosmic Time Line
- Kaye's "Geological Certainties": earthquakes
,
volcanic action, water, fire
- Kaye's Star Maps
The Theme of Historicity Itself
- Luesebrink: "The Califia stories occur in specific historic
periods and in actual locations. Yet, while Califia thereby
seems to fall easily into a category we might call historical
fiction, my intention was to use factual time and place in a
somewhat different manner. The historical material in Califia
is primarily neither background nor decoration nor local color
(although I hope these functions obtain); rather, history itself
is a major thematic element of the novel."
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Califia and the Myth of California
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Marjorie Luesebrink, from
"Historical
Background of Califia" (2001):
My aim was not to create historical
fiction, but to isolate a definitive piece of the compromised
California paradise and make it a world. This world is populated
by characters that reflect the peculiar disposition - an
uneven blend of pragmatism, irrationality, and hope - of
the California seekers, players, and keepers. . . .
The "myth located in the bedrock of physical space
and local artifact" is not "spun of marvelous
invention," but it is a fabrication, painstakingly
crafted to preserve authenticity. Califia, even though
it is an experimental form in a new format, revisits the
roots of the narrative-mythic novel.
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Chumash myths
Spanish myths
Anglo myths
Eagle Rock / Glendale Freeway
What is "myth"? Compare
Claude Lévi-Strauss on "myth"
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The Web of History
Marjorie Luesebrink, from "Historical
Background of Califia" (2001):
Embedding the modern story in real ground was important; the
search for historical certainty is best done by "mapping"
in a literal as well as a metaphorical sense. As Philip J.
Ethington writes, Los Angeles suffers from "unknowability":
"Influential writers on postmodernity such as Fredric
Jameson have named specific sites within Los Angeles as evidence
of a new condition, in which history itself is effaced by
the 'depthlessness' that characterizes a core condition of
the 'world space of multinational capital'–the ultimate
source of ongoing exploitation and alienation. Recent scholarship
has singled out Los Angeles as either unique among cities,
or especially representative of new conditions of urban life
and globalism." ("Los Angeles and the Problem of
Urban Historical Knowledge.")
Califia, with its careful
mapping of places, excavation of the sediments of forgotten
layers and observation of remembered outcroppings, records
of the topographical and topological features, is a defense
against such erasure. The "depthlessness" that
has been noted by some historians and cultural theorists
is one aspect of Southern California. But the impression
of shallowness is also the result of looking with a traditional
orientation for hierarchies of meaning in a place that is
constantly shifting, creating a new surface. There is something
underneath, but the history of Los Angeles tends to reveal
itself through a multiplicity of approaches. And, as Augusta
observes (The Journey West), "the past is always
with us."
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Imagine that what we see on the surface
of California in Califia is just the top if a deep set
of geological
layers (animation).
The story of Califia—narrated in different ways by the three
main characters (Augusta, Kaye, Calvin)—is a pilgrimage plot
in which horizontal motion
,
as in any pilgrimage, stands in for a vertical quest. In olden
pilgrimages, the quest was for transcendence on high. In Califia,
the quest is to mine deep below the surface of California for
the real treasure: historical meaning.
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History as Media
Given the fact that so much of California is made out of the
stuff of dream and imagination, one of the empires upon which
the state was built is especially important to Califia:
media. Ultimately, the novel is less interested in gold
than it is in the media that tell us about the rush for gold (and
for "Paradise" in general) that built California. It
is media that is the real treasure trove that the novel seeks.
We might even say that in the novel it is the history of media
that enacts the history of California:
| Ancestral Environment of Signs
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landmarks
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Oral Culture |
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oral culture
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Numeracy and Early Literacy |
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accounts and deeds, etc.
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genealogical lists
and charts |
Manuscript Culture |
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manuscripts, letters, journals, etc.
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Print Culture |
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newspaper clippings, legal documents,
etc. |
Audiovisual Culture |
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photos |
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film |
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music (e.g., Grateful Dead) |
Digital Culture |
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digital media (e.g., GIS maps)
Calvin's "docudramas" |
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Marjorie Luesebrink, from "Historical
Background of Califia" (2001):
For the Docudramas I have relied upon actual documents, sometimes
slightly altered or recreated. Here, of course, I needed to
draw some fine lines that would conform to the intent of copyright
law and protect my publisher. As it happens, I am a fifth-generation
Californian; my predecessors lived at the margins of the historical
events in Califia. They also saved a great deal of the paperwork
from the past - everything from letters to worthless stock
certificates to photos of the 1913 hot air balloon show. Where
it was feasible, I "doctored" my own family documents
and photographs to create the generations of the Summerlands,
Beveridges, and Lugos. When I ran out of family photos, I
adopted from my friends (readers may be interested to know
that Ruben Lugo, for example, is really Kate Hayles' son,
Jonathan). I also borrowed liberally from old family stories,
my own and others', as sources for plot elements, character
types.
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A hypothesis:
- The "story line" related to the three foreground
characters (Augusta, Kaye, Calvin) is actually the thinnest
and least interesting aspect of the work—at least as the
characters are developed in the early journeys. The timing of
the characterization and plot is such that the characters do
not become really interesting until later (e.g., Augusta's tears
for her dad and mourning for her mother; Calvin's piercing discovery
of his identity and his mother; Kaye and Calvin's budding love
affair)
- In fact, what Califia really asks is that we surrender
our hold on the foreground or surface story line and commit
ourselves to the bottomless depths of the historical documents.
(This is the quintessentially hypertextual moment in the work:
the point where it diverges from print narrative.)
- Because of the way the material is timed in Califia
(i.e., the timing of our encounter with various materials),
the thick historical documentation is actually more compelling
earlier
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What We Learn About History in Califia
The experience of history in the documents: a history of history
itself:
- Superficial layer: history as narrative (e.g., Augusta's chronological
narrative, genealogical lists)
- Deeper: history as annals
(related to early literacy)
- Deeper yet: history as myth
(related to oral culture)
- Deepest: "no gold", but history as instability and
change:
- The displacement of the Chumash people (the "Diggers")
- The migration of the "Seekers," "Players,"
and "Builders" to California (from Samuel Walker
ultimately to Augusta "digging" in her backyard)
- The "floating" of property boundaries, contracts,
and other great California scams
- The contemporary California of the "drive-in"
- Underlying all the stories of displacement and instability:
the "geological certainties" of the land itself:
earthquake, fire, wind, water
- Califia is about the mobility of the two great human
"certainties": memory ("Keeper") and desire
("Seeker"). Somewhere between memory and desire in
the work lies that great uncertainty, historical Truth
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