Confronting L.A., post-riots
Acouple of months ago, I wrote an essay for the Sunday Arts & Books section lamenting the lack of a coherent literary response to the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Then Aris Janigian’s third novel, “This Angelic Land,” came across my desk. In its pages, Janigian, a longtime L.A. resident and former humanities professor at SCI-Arc, uses the riots as a filter through which to contemplate not just Southern California but America itself. Recently, Janigian and I corresponded via email about the book.
David Ulin: “This Angelic Land” revolves around the 1992 riots, but it just came out this spring. Why did it take so long to write?
Aris Janigian: At the beginning of 1992, I started a semi-autobiographical novel set in Los Angeles. The narrator was a hip guy living in Mid-Wilshire who wakes one morning to find he’s suffering from vertigo. … It was going on 100 pages when the riots hit. I dropped that story for the time being and began writing feverishly about what I was experiencing, the strange fear and awe I felt smack in the middle of the storm. When I returned to my Los Angeles story, I discovered that the riots had changed everything. I could no longer write about Los Angeles without taking into account what had happened. But what had happened? And just as important, how would I write about it? I approached these questions timidly over the next 18 years. Eventually, two years ago, I decided to make a serious go of it again. I pulled out that L.A. story, married it to my observations of the riots as I had gone through them, and that became the basis for “This Angelic Land.”
Let’s talk about the title. It emerges late in the novel, when one of the central characters, Adam, reflects on the glories of Southern California even in the middle of the riots.
The title comes from the last lines of William Blake’s poem “America — a Prophecy”: “And so the Princes fade from earth, / scarce seen by souls of men / But tho’ obscur’d, this is the form / of the Angelic land.” From the other side of the Atlantic, Blake is watching America come to a violent birth. … Two hundred years later, the
L.A. riots proved another kind of uprising, where, as I envisioned it, America was undergoing a different kind of birth. I like to think that Adam straddles the two realities; in the crucible of the riots, he is a witness to this transformation. He sees the glory of America, the wonder of Los Angeles, and he feels the sheer grace of living in that place, but at the same time, he is forced to square those feelings with the wanton destruction he witnesses.
The novel opens with a prologue in which you describe the Rodney King beating and its aftermath — including the attack on Reginald Denny — without naming names. This creates an archetypal air.
I felt the obligation to recreate the beating and the aftermath, but 20 years later I also felt the obligation to raise the event to another level of understanding. So, drawing my inspiration from Blake, I charged the scene with a mythic quality. That explains the absence of names, as well as the occasional use of archaic language — actually drawn from alchemy.
You pull back from the riots throughout the novel — giving Adam’s back story, telling the story of the Wizard, addressing ethnic and racial issues in L.A. prior to 1992.
The events of 1992 are in many ways just the springboard for talking about a much larger disjuncture in the city as well as the country. Adam’s travails reflect his personal journey, but at the same time, they reflect the journey of so many people in this country. Even his status as a refugee has this characteristic. I often feel that America has evolved to a place where even those born here feel like they don’t quite belong, can’t quite fit in, that they are from somewhere else.
Are you comfortable with the book being read as about the riots? Or do you see the riots as more of a lens?
The riots were fueled by systemic injustices, longstanding injuries and pentup rage, but the issue of how a society can turn on itself with such fury raised for me a bigger question, of the viability of the American project. I might add that whether one agrees with me or not that the riots were a pivotal event in American history, the quest for discovering just what America has become is something American novelists should be pursuing with a vengeance. But with only a few exceptions, we have forfeited the realm and are turning our sights in ever-narrowing circles on our psyches and personal relationships.
Many of Adam’s relationships seem built on the tension between understanding and misunderstanding, between what binds us and what tears us apart.
One of the disjunctures in the book has to do with communication between people, but for me, this was a metaphor for America in general. We share a place we have constructed, but there is little sense of stewardship. The American experiment was one of building a society based upon intelligent regard for one another, but it seems we’ve devolved into warring factions, and a kind of neotribalism has taken root. This is why burning and looting our city, even our neighborhoods, could feel more like burning and looting those of someone else.