Paradoxes vs. Contradictions

Abstract

ions enshrining perpetual consumer desire, and naturalising the urban ‘‘dreamworld’’ of modern commodity culture. If Benjamin describes the subjective experience of modern Paris as one of ‘‘shock,’’ the subjectivity produced by postwar Los Angeles might be termed a kind of ‘‘hyper shock,’’ a hypertrophied anxiety before an object-world that seems to resist and destabilise embodied visual agency. () According to Cohen, such ‘‘hyper shock’’ manifests itself within Ellroy’s police detectives as a barely controllable ‘‘masculine anxiety’’ that is ‘‘persistently articulated by way of a displaced rage against an apparently feminised urban ‘object-world’ ’’ ().Women inEllroy’s fiction, then, ‘‘function as repositories of male hysteria,’’ almost always victimized by an ‘‘inarticulably enraged masculine subjectivity’’ that is unable or unwilling to direct revolutionary violence toward ‘‘identifiable forces of political and economic power’’ (). There is one aspect of Ellroy’s writings, however, that Cohen does not discuss, whichwould nonetheless benefit from further Benjaminian/Morettian analysis, namely, Ellroy’s fascination with ‘‘perfect’’ crimes. In Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, Benjamin ( []: –) asserts that ‘‘the original social content of the detective story was the obliteration of the individual’s traces in the big-city crowd,’’ with the ‘‘masses’’ serving ‘‘as the asylum that shields an asocial person from his persecutors.’’ Moretti ( []: ) seems to concur, stating that ‘‘the perfect crime—the nightmare of detective fiction—is the featureless, deindividualized crime that anyone could have committed because at this point everyone is the same.’’ Ellroy’s best novel (The Black Dahlia []), his haunting memoir (My Dark Places []), and his brief piece on the O. J. Simpson case (‘‘Sex, Glitz, and Greed: The Seduction of O. J. Simpson’’ []) record, and capitalize on, attempts to solve what remain, in fact, the unsolved murders of, respectively, Elizabeth Short, Ellroy’s own mother, and Nicole Brown Simpson. Indeed, each of those ‘‘perfect’’ murders may be viewed as a Benjaminian ‘‘monad,’’ a concept defined in the following T s e n g 2 0 0 0 . 5 . 2 2 0 9 : 2 9 6 1 0 4 P o e t i c s T o d a y / 2 1 : 2 / s h e e t 1 7 5 o f 2 1 4