Ambience of the Mojave’s mixed with musical elements by Floating Points
The desert, much like the open road, deals with nature, and thus, the ground. While the desert fuels the desire to embrace nature before abandoning it yet again, the open road acts as a means to temporarily escape the unwanted grip nature has over the man-made (further explored in ‘Bandini’s Earthquake Vision’ and ‘Living Life in the Fast Lane: The Open Road‘).
In the context of Fante’s Ask the Dust, the desert is a symbol of desire. Cooper states that ‘Ask the Dust is about desire, […] the external city again comes to be linked with Bandini’s innermost impulses’.[1] This is evident through the way the desert is described in the novel: ‘dying in a blazing desert, and the cool homelands from whence they came were so near’,[2] ‘the air was so clean. […] There was no dust here’,[3] and ‘the restless dust of Los Angeles fevered him’.[4] The desert is portrayed as fiery, pathetic fallacy used to compare the heat of the Mojave’s to the burning desire of Bandini. The air being ‘so clean’ reads as though it allows Bandini to clear his mind of the desire within him until the dust touches Los Angeles, arriving from the eastern Mojave desert. Bandini, an autobiographical character, moved from the east as Fante did when moving to the city, abandoning nature. This is when the desire intensifies, when Bandini considers the fact that he wants what Los Angeles can not offer him, unobstructed nature.
The idea is only further supported by Camilla, who Bandini’s desire to sleep with is only due to her foreign origins. ‘Camilla’s land, Camilla’s home, the sea and the desert, the beautiful earth, the immense sky’.[5] Camilla is a symbol for nature itself. ‘As I closed the door all the desire that had not come before seized me’[6] is how Bandini describes his encounter with Camilla as she leaves, having nearly had sex with her. As how many people do not appreciate nature until it is taken away from them, Bandini only appreciates the beauty of Camilla once she leaves. His desire to remain within her company only appears through its absence, furthering the evidence of the complicated relationship between the city / the man-made and nature that Los Angeles literature shows us.
[1] Stephen Cooper, ‘Fante’s Eternal City’ in Los Angeles in Fiction (University of New Mexico Press: Albuquerque, 1995), 83-99 (p.93) <https://moodle.brookes.ac.uk/pluginfile.php/2955138/mod_folder/content/0/Stephen_Cooper_John_Fantes_Eternal_City.pdf> [accessed 4th December 2021]
[2] John Fante, Ask the Dust (Canongate: Edinburgh, 2018), p.56
[3] ibid., p.71
[4] ibid, p.53
[5] ibid., p.188
[6] ibid., p.76