Old haunts revisited

ALMOST a decade has passed since Norman M. Klein published “The History of Forgetting.” A difficult book to categorize, it was among other things a history of the once largely Mexican American neighborhoods in and around downtown Los Angeles -- Temple-Beaudry, Bunker Hill, Chavez Ravine -- or, more accurately, a history of their disappearance. When Klein was writing in the 1990s, Bunker Hill had already been buried in sterile glass and steel, and Chavez Ravine had long since been reborn as Dodger Stadium. Temple-Beaudry, though, was still in ruins. Now, bulldozers and cranes are everywhere. Schools and apartment complexes are going up, erasing even the scars the old neighborhood left behind.

So it’s fitting that Klein ends his latest book, “Freud in Coney Island,” by revisiting those old haunts. He writes of the Belmont Tunnel, where the old Pacific Electric tracks emerged from beneath Bunker Hill en route to Echo Park and other points northwest. The yard surrounding the tunnel’s mouth was left untended for decades, “probably the largest urban ruin in the United States.” Graffiti artists turned the perimeter walls into an enormous concrete canvas. On weekends, immigrants from the Mexican state of Michoacan played a pre-Columbian ball game among the rubble. Now, bulldozers are at work there too, clearing the way for an apartment complex. The walls have already been torn down. Only the tunnel’s mouth and a small power station will be preserved, but hidden from view, locked behind the developer’s gates. What little of the neighborhood’s history that has not already been razed will be literally walled off. “[O]nly the shallow historical surface is maintained,” Klein writes, “while the historical memory around it -- even inside and behind it -- is distracted into tourist amnesia .... The future of forgetting is clearly upon us.”

Klein is no nostalgia junkie. It’s not the past he yearns for; he mourns history’s transformation into kitsch and spectacle, and the concomitant impoverishment of the present -- and of the self. He isn’t concerned with the loss of bygone days so much as with the invasion of the collective unconscious by commerce and its vast arsenal of special effects. He sees us turning “into tourists in our own cities; and then in our own bodies,” and he is scared.

Such fears are hardly new and hardly less relevant than they were 40 years ago, when Guy Debord published “The Society of the Spectacle.” But if Debord favored the sharply honed aphorism, Klein’s rhetorical toolbox is a good deal larger and -- to his credit -- far less tidy, ideologically and otherwise. “The History of Forgetting” included sections of more or less straightforward historical narrative: chapters of film criticism, anecdotes about Klein’s neighbors, a full novella about a Vietnamese refugee going mad in Angelino Heights and a fantasy about what might have happened if German literary critic Walter Benjamin had not taken his life but survived to immigrate to Los Angeles. (He moves to Boyle Heights, eats at Clifton’s Cafeteria.)

“Freud in Coney Island” takes its cue from that last bit of make-believe. Klein, who teaches at the California Institute of the Arts’ School of Critical Studies, interweaves fiction with social criticism, reportage and confessional memoir, but it’s fiction he seems to enjoy most -- fiction of a loose and absurdist sort, separated from fact by the blurriest of boundaries. We live in a society, after all, in which “lies and facts become equivalent fictions, nothing more.” (Or, as Debord put it, “In a world that is really upside down, the true is a moment of the false.”)

Sigmund Freud did visit Coney Island in 1909. That much is true, but we know next to nothing about his day at the beach, so Klein takes the opportunity to fill in the blanks. And who could resist the chance to write a sentence like this: “There is reason to believe that Freud walked into Dreamland, the last and most bourgeois of the three amusement parks in Coney Island”? Or to point out that to enter the park, the famed explorer of unconscious desire would have had to walk through a tunnel carved directly between the thighs of a sculpted 30-foot nude with breasts “larger than haystacks”?

Klein’s conceit is that Freud’s memory of Coney Island came to haunt him and not just because Al, one of his companions for the day -- a patient possessed by the voice of someone identified as “the Dead Relative” -- flipped out and began spinning like a dervish after spotting “a dwarf on Surf Avenue who completely, I mean utterly resembled the Dead Relative.” For Freud, Klein suggests, Coney Island came to symbolize a possibility too horrible to consider -- that the individual unconscious might be “colonized” on a mass level by entertainment culture, “by a globalized Coney Island, by machines that harvest and industrialize collective desire;” that we might be “hollowed out,” left with nothing but “a looming sadness, a void.”

The sobriety of this message is leavened by Klein’s whimsy. Al and his cousin Frida leave New York for Budapest, to be treated by a colleague of Freud’s. Frida has an affair with “a married man of limited potential named Moscowitz, who changed his name to Klein in order to dance as a gentile in the Austrian Empire.” Klein’s grandson immigrates to the U.S., settles in Coney Island and bears a son, “Norman (often confused with the author of this piece) ... an anxious, fretful child, afraid of his own shadow.”

Klein writes of his wife’s death from cancer, his mother’s sadistic hypochondria, his own rheumatism. He writes of Susan Sontag, of the inventor of the shopping mall, of “nanoscopic” searches, whereby sounds from the distant past can be recovered from the molecules in which they’re stored (“The space between atoms is not silent”). He writes of a cuckolded husband who painstakingly re-creates miniature Venices in a 60-foot pit beneath his garage. “Freud in Coney Island” is a terrific and sometimes maddening mess. But then, order would not be appropriate. “Nothing is solid,” Klein quips, echoing Marx, “when you can industrialize desire, don’t you think?” *