| Articles: The Rebirth of the Postmodern Flâneur (1/6) | ||
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| Source: Jan Susina, Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies |
 Notes on the Postmodern Landscape of Francesca Lia Block's Weetzie BatYou can't explain Hollywood. There isn't any such place. It's just the dream suburb of Los Angeles. --Rachel Field, To See Ourselves (qtd. in McWilliams 330) Francesca Lia Block deftly weaves descriptions of real and imaginary places in her contemporary literary fairy tales set in a dreamy, mythical Los Angeles. Grounded in an urban landscape fueled by the entertainment industry, Block's stories celebrate the fantasy of Hollywood, while simultaneously examining the details of contemporary Los Angeles. Her first novel Weetzie Bat, published in 1989, is a slender postmodern fairy tale intended for adolescent readers. In subsequent novels, Block has revisited the same group of characters and locations to produce the five-volume collection Dangerous Angels: The Weetzie Bat Books (1998) which consists of Weetzie Bat and its three sequels Witch Baby (1991), Cherokee Bat and the Goat Guys (1992), Missing Angel Juan (1993); and the one prequel, Baby-Bop (1995). In the addition to her Dangerous Angels series, Block has explored a similar combination of fairy tales and contemporary adolescent culture in novels such as I Was a Teenage Fairy (1998), and the short-story collection The Rose and the Beast: Fairy Tales Retold (2000). While Block is justly celebrated as one of the most innovative and challenging writers of contemporary adolescent novels, the Dangerous Angels series and, Weetzie Bat in particular, remain her most powerfully written literary fairy tales. Whether Weetzie Bat is an accurate representation of the author's hometown or a dreamy fantasy has been debated since the book's publication. [End Page 188] Horn Book printed an exchange between Patrick Jones and Patricia J. Campbell concerning the genre of the book. Jones situated the text in the tradition of young-adult texts, such as S. E. Hinton's The Outsiders (1967), which deal with controversial topics; he found Weetzie Bat more focused on alternative lifestyles rather than the frequently censored issues of sex, violence, or language. Jones praised the language of Block's novel calling it a "pop-culture-driven, fable-laden, sentimental-tone prose poetry," and essentially read it as a fantasy, calling it both "strange" and "dream-like" (700). Block has acknowledged the strong influence of magic realism on her writing, and has mentioned Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (1970) and Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits (1985) as influential texts ("Genie Story" 27). Campbell took exception to Jones's description of Block's novel as fantasy while acknowledging that there are "magical elements" in the book and that the tone is "pure fairy-tale" (57). But as a former Los Angeleno, Campbell insists no other writer has "written so accurately about the reality of life in Los Angeles" (57). She argues far from being a fantasy, Weetzie Bat is "documenting a very particular time and place" and that the author has "got it exactly right" (60). A year after Block published Weetzie Bat, Mike Davis published City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (1990), his idiosyncratic and highly-politicized interpretation of the cultural geography of Los Angeles. Block and David seem to be discussing two different cities: Block presents a magical Los Angeles framed as a fairy-tale Hollywood, while Davis's sociological study of the urban landscape, which he describes as "Fortress L.A.," verges more on the nightmare and apocalyptic than the fairy tale. But the unattributed epigraph that Davis uses to introduce City of Quartz is useful for understanding both Block's metaphorical and Davis's literal rendering of Los Angeles. Davis extracts the second and third sentence from Walter Benjamin's "The Return of the Flâneur": "The superficial inducement, the exotic, the picturesque has an effect only on the foreigner. To portray a city, a native must have other, deeper motives--motives of one who travels into the past instead of into the distance. A native's book about his city will always be related to memories; the writer has not spent his childhood there in vain" (qtd. in Davis 1). Benjamin's "The Return of the Flâneur" is a review of Franz Hessel's Spaziern in Berlin (On Foot in Berlin), published in 1929. The same passage from "The Return of the Flâneur" appears in the second volume of Walter Benjamin's Selected Writings, in a slightly different translation by Rodney Livingston: "The superficial pretext--the exotic and the picturesque--appeals only to the outsider. To depict a city as a native would calls for other, deeper motives--the motives of the person who journeys into the past, rather than to foreign parts. The account of a city given [End Page 189] by a native will always have something in common with memories; it is no accident that the writer has spent his childhood there" (Benjamin 262). |
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