Popular Culture Review Vol. 1, December 1989 | Page 47

the next.
Through its famed detectives, California is the homeplace of
interpretation. Academics all live in a California of the mind; we
have learned to hunger for problems so simplified that they have
elegant solutions, like detective stories.
The Italian novelist Italo Calvino explains us to ourselves in
Mr. Palomar. Like the California observatory he is named for, Mr.
Palomar is an observer/interpreter. Calvino brings him toward the
end of the novel to look at a great pyramid in Mexico, where his
anthropologist guide explains every symbol to him, every detail
standing for something. Quetzalcoatl legends come alive to him as
his guide explains. As they walk around, they cross paths with a
group of local Boy Scouts following a native guide, who points out
the same serpents and skulls, always ending “But we do not know
what they mean.” The two guides engage in a duel over interpre
tation. The native guide explains to the Boy Scouts: ‘T h is is the
Wall o f the Serpents.'Each serpent has a skull in its mouth. We
don’t know what they mean.” Mr. Palomar’s friend cannot contain
himself: “Yes we do!” he shouts. “It’s the continuity of life and
death; the serpents are life, the skulls are death. Life is life because
it bears death with it, and death is death because there is no life
without death....” Sound familiar?
We are all, expecially academics, hardboiled detectives. It is
no blind chance that academics’ favored casual reading is detective
stories. They give us a chance to flex our interpretative muscles—
without reference to the untidy reality around us.
California is the natural home of the hardboiled detective
story. Juxtapose Dorothy Sayers to Raymond Chandler to see why.
In Sayers’ Murder Must Advertise the murderer is driven to crime
by being sent to an inferior public school. He is finally helped to
do the right thing (a face-saving suicide) by Lord Peter W imsey,
who went to the right school. Sayers’ solutions are politically

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