The Reading Life: Aris Janigian on the fire last time

A couple 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.

Jacket Copy: “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. The story drops in and out of a typical day in the life of a 20-something Angeleno, and 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, with two other published novels under my belt, 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.”

JC: Los Angeles is notoriously oblivious to its history. Did this weigh on you at all in working on a novel about events 20 years in the past?

AJ: History is by definition a narrative of what has happened, so I’m not sure Los Angeles is so much oblivious to its history as it is obsessed with controlling the narrative. There is too much at risk to let it get out of control, which is one reason that nobody, at least that I know of, had written a novel about the riots until I took the subject up. This was frankly surprising to me but, in another way, made perfect sense because the riots made so little sense for so many people. In the face of all that, I felt a certain exhilaration alongside a definite anxiety in writing this book. I timed the publication to coincide with the riots’ 20th anniversary, so review copies were on the desks of every radio, TV, or print producer or editor in town. Except for a couple of people, the media’s answer to my breaking the silence was to turn up the silence on their end. It’s almost as though people were saying, “How dare you think you can tell our story!” Out of the gates, at least, I had gotten more coverage for my two prior novels, which were about Fresno farmers, circa 1960.

JC: 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.

AJ: 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. He writes that poem as a mythic or allegorical retelling of that coming into being. 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.

JC: The novel is narrated by Eric, Adam’s brother, yet he’s in New York during the riots, so the story he tells is largely secondhand.

AJ: Eric — like Adam, a refugee of the Lebanese civil war — is loath to leave Lebanon, but when he arrives in America he decides to dive in as deeply as possible, even to disappear. He moves to New York, and eventually becomes a filmmaker who makes a small name for himself documenting the destruction of architecturally significant buildings in New York and New Jersey. His distance from the events mirrors the distance he put between himself and his family, especially his brother. As the narrator, he embarks on a kind of discovery, just as I embarked on a kind of discovery in writing the book.

JC: There are a number of guru-like figures in the novel: the Kurd, the Wizard. Why blur that line between character and archetype?

AJ: I like working with archetypal characters for lots of reasons. As readers, we feel we know them because archetypes reflect the different parts of our personalities as well as different parts of society. At the same time, archetypes need to be refreshed, brought up to date. I enjoy that challenge — working in a tradition dating back thousands of years and at the same time reworking it for my own times. But the Wizard and the Kurd also serve more mundane purposes in the novel. When Adam’s family comes to America, his father, an engineer in Lebanon, fails to find a footing. He is incapable of guiding Adam in the new land. His older brother more or less abandons him, so Adam is forced to search for stand-ins. As much as he loves his family, like so many Angelenos who come here from somewhere else, he is forced to create an alternate family.

JC: 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, too, creates an archetypal air.

AJ: I felt the obligation to re-create 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.

JC: Eric and Adam’s background allows you to connect the Lebanese civil war and the riots. What are the confluences?

AJ: The choice of refugees as main characters gave me many opportunities. First, having watched their world get wrecked, there is no way either could be accused of being part of the privileged class. Second, their status as refugees allowed me to explore themes of memory, ruination, scarring and healing that I believed Los Angeles hadn’t faced in the aftermath of the riots. Third, I like the idea of exploring the American experience from the perspective of someone becoming American. I’m intrigued by something the Kurd says — that only someone with one foot in the country and one foot out can possibly tell the American story. Once you’re in with both feet, it’s already too late.

JC: To reflect this, perhaps, 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.

AJ: 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.

JC: How much of the book is reflective of your experience?

AJ: The book is deeply reflective of my experience. There was a Wizard in my life, and there still is the Kurd. Nearly all the characters are based on “real” people, except, of course, the family. And the two main characters, Adam and Eric, are constructed from scratch. I was born and raised in Fresno, as was my father, although my mother did emigrate from Egypt. My father was a farmer, and as a kid, I had little exposure to high culture but plenty of exposure to local Armenian culture. I left Fresno more or less as soon as I could for Southern California.

JC: Are you comfortable with the book being read as about the riots? Or do you see the riots as more of a lens?

AJ: There is no question that the riots provide the setting for this book, but that setting, I believe, also becomes a lens, as you put it, for a discovery of America. The riots were fueled by systemic injustices, long-standing injuries and pent-up 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. We have substituted a spiraling approach for a nesting approach and are unwilling or unable to situate our narratives in the larger transformations of our culture.

JC: Throughout the book, you use script format to evoke newscasts. This creates a tension between the novel’s front and back stories, what’s happening in the media and what’s happening in people’s lives.

AJ: Most people, including me, were glued to their TVs during the riots. The coverage was 24/7. On occasion, what you were watching was actually happening right outside your front door. I experienced this firsthand watching Samy’s Camera set ablaze. It was a strange doubling of reality, a kind of on-the-ground déjà vu. I later realized that we in Los Angeles experience this on a regular basis: Just watching TV programs set in neighborhoods we recognize, or watching the finals of “American Idol” at the Nokia Theatre as though it were a world away, we are weirdly participants and spectators at the same time. This technique allowed me to express that reality. But it also served other purposes: The news itself is scripted; a way of tidying up reality for presentation as entertainment. But during the riots the whole artifice was cast into jeopardy. Newscasters who at first reported in spiffy suits and dresses were soon looking haggard, and stumbling over their words, even cursing. It was fascinating to watch. Lastly, since Eric, the narrator, is a filmmaker, that form would come quite naturally to him in re-creating the event.

JC: Adding to this doubling are many of Adam’s relationships, which seem built on the tension between understanding and misunderstanding, between what binds us and what tears us apart. This, too, is what the riots were about.

AJ: 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 neo-tribalism 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.