Long Beach 1933, an earthquake that occurred six years before its reimagining in Fante’s Ask The Dust, was one of the first earthquakes to spur scientific interest into how to predict and prevent these natural disasters from reoccurring. Linked below is footage from the aftermath of this event, providing useful context behind what Fante portrays:
The idea Chambers presents that ‘the land, although seemingly passive and dumb, replies’[1] to the ‘exploitation of the terrain’[2] is also supported by Fante’s writing in Ask the Dust. ‘It was an earthquake. Now there were screams. Then dust. Then crumbling and roaring’[3], this is how Bandini describes the earthquake in Long Beach. I argue that the personification of the ground through the use of ‘roaring’ is what Chambers describes, an expression of discontent resulting from its invasion.
How Bandini reacts to the aftermath further supports this. As earlier mentioned, this was one of the first earthquakes which caught scientists’ attention, the Richter scale being invented just two years later. Bandini panics, believing that ‘someone should warn them. It would come again: it had to come again, another earthquake to level the city and destroy it forever’.[4] There is a clear fight between the natural ground and the man-made city built upon it, with Bandini believing it is the ground that will achieve victory in the end. He intentionally avoids sidewalks, fearing that ‘the tall buildings were black canyons’[5] acting as ‘traps to kill you when the earth shook’.[6] Bandini fears that debris such as that seen at 6:57 in the video linked above would land on him, resulting in his death, a message of protest from the natural ground against the man-made that invades upon it.
The evidence as seen in Fig. 1 (located in ‘Instability and Disaster Imagery’) shows that Bandini may be right about this, as although the final disaster of Los Angeles has not occurred, the fault lines are forever present, simply waiting to unleash the ground’s final roar.
[1] Iain Chambers, ‘Ground’ in City A-Z, ed. by Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 93-94 (p.93) <https://moodle.brookes.ac.uk/mod/resource/view.php?id=1787700> [accessed 30th November 2021]
[2] ibid., p.93
[3] John Fante, Ask the Dust (Canongate: Edinburgh, 2018), p.113
[4] ibid, p.117
[5] ibid, p.117
[6] ibid, p.117