FIVE FIRES: Race, Catastrophe, and the Shaping of California.<i> By David Wyatt</i> .<i> Addison Wesley: 288 pp., $25</i>

“Five Fires” originated, David Wyatt informs us, from a spark of insight from poet Robert Hass, who proposed that California be imagined as the story of four fires, events “that swept--like a fire--through California to leave a dramatically altered physical and cultural landscape.” Such a “scheme” proposed a “way of condensing California’s story into a pattern as ordered and economical as a poem, a poem with a central metaphor and a pattern of recurrence.” California’s cultural history, he suggests, shares the same cataclysmic rhythms as its fabled landscape, which in a sense it has internalized as an inner fire of unquenchable rage.

The Big Four are the introduction of the Spanish wild oat, the Gold Rush, the San Francisco earthquake and fire, and World War II. The author quickly adds a fifth fire: “the fire of race,” which is, as it were, the vestal flame from which the others derive. Nothing has so shaped life in California as its “mix of peoples”; this “fifth fire has in fact burned from the beginning of California’s recorded history through all the others.” This phenomenon illuminates “a catastrophic history of violent and consuming surprise.” The author then confounds the elements with discourses on water, illegal immigration, Japanese internment, “twice divorced” women, Chinatown, post-Cold War Los Angeles, Yosemite Valley, the Zoot Suit riots, the Bear Flag republic and the Rodney King riots, and concludes with a Bruce Springsteen concert at Constitution Hall in Washington. Along the way, the informing conceit gets buried like so many metaphorical coals banked in the gray ash of cultural criticism.

“Five Fires” is not about historical events but the ways in which participants and observers--notably writers--remember and record them. Writing gives personal order to the “flashpoints” of California history and to the smoldering personal rage that is the conflagration’s pilot flame. California is a place “dedicated to symbols.” Writing about it “has been a deeply metaphorical enterprise, a continuing and contested act of the imagination.” Professional history cannot penetrate to the felt truth of those events; cultural criticism can. A dialogue of voices can replace imposed chronicles. Like a good postmodernist, Wyatt inserts his own story into the book and bids “Five Fires” to join the ranks of those creating, listening to and analyzing California’s chorus or cacophony of voices. His merging of personal narrative with public events in the final chapter, “From Watts to South-Central,” provides the book’s best writing.

The chapters build in rough chronology to a thematic climax with the 1965 and 1992 Los Angeles riots, as recorded, respectively, by Luis Rodriguez in “Always Running” and Anna Deavere Smith in “Twilight.” The former recapitulates Wyatt’s metaphor of fire; the latter exemplifies his celebration of voice as an alternative to historical narrative. Wyatt describes Smith’s triumph in this way: “Her work is a work of writing and of imagining, and as such, it does its part in changing the world. Insofar as the catastrophes that have shaped California’s history are made possible by collective and continuing acts of repression or distanced spectator-ship, Smith then joins that company of watchers and listeners who, in the diligence and shapeliness and immediacy of their efforts at memorial, encourages Californians to return upon and understand their past--without, perhaps, repeating it.”

Rodriguez asserts that “fire for me has been a constant motif,” and so allows Wyatt to bring closure to his own metaphorical structure. “Throughout his narrative, Rodriguez works toward the recognition that while the condition of his people may be fire, they can learn to channel its energies. . . . Writing his memoir is Rodriguez’s primary act of self-kindling. . . . It is precisely in its deployment and mastery of the complex metaphor of fire that ‘Always Running’ demonstrates the capacity of the responsive and responsible individual to meet the violence from without by a salutary and transforming violence from within.” Through literature, individuals, like communities, can “educate themselves toward an understanding of their place in history and of the political dimensions of rebellion, thereby externalizing its power as they internalize the fire.”

Readers for whom such passages ring with the clangor of insight will welcome this book. For those to whom the judgment seems orthodox and the symbolism scrambled, Wyatt’s argument may resemble a kind of rhetorical pyromancy in which a literary shaman stares into the fire and chants the fragments of visions that present themselves. Insights, persons, stories, books and events arise and vanish like flickering flames.

In one respect, the misapplied metaphor doesn’t matter. Fans of Wyatt, cultural critics of California and others will read its messages by illumination other than firelight. The book suffers from what Bernard DeVoto termed the literary fallacy, the exaggerated claim that literature is a means of cultural analysis. But all writing suffers the limitations of its genre.

The flaw lies within and it matters because Wyatt declares throughout the book that writing is how we organize our world and that he will organize his writing with fire. If contested experiences are decided by narrative, voice and metaphor, and if, as the author claims, “the most compelling writing about California reveals its truth through and because of its style,” then this book may be fairly judged by the author’s own style and the power of his narrative to inform. A failure of metaphor dooms analysis because, in such criticism, metaphor is analysis.

Since it is hard to look anywhere in California history and not see something burning, it would seem indecently easy to exploit fire as an informing conceit. California is a virtual fire sermon, its history a scripture of theophanic flames, in which one might expect to find whatever meaning one chooses. The single requirement is to keep fire in focus. (“Focus,” after all, derives from the Latin word for hearth. For that matter, “ink” comes from the Greek verb “to burn in,” so landscape can become the parchment onto which its record is inscribed.) Instead of metaphors, Wyatt employs much weaker allusions.

The likely reason for this choice is that fire, real fire, is not the source of the metaphor. The four elements that structure the geography of Wyatt’s California are not Aristotle’s earth, air, water and fire, but the Academy’s race, gender, ethnicity and class. His metaphor has no authentic referent. For Wyatt, the true fire is the fire in the mind, not the fire on the mountain, the product of friction between peoples, not between people and nature. The only voices heard are those that speak in tongues (and not necessarily in tongues of fire). Fire’s rage is bottled into tidy vials of imagery.

California would burn even if every human vanished, and because fire is not exclusively human, it cannot be wholly subsumed within a humanized metaphor or an ecology of texts. Much as the writers of Wyatt’s California, full of internal fire, resist narratives imposed on them by others, so also do the fires of a California crammed with mountains, high deserts, chaparral and conifers and Santa Ana winds subvert Wyatt’s conceit, like those others with bravura, irony and guile, but unlike them with a transcendent indifference that makes natural fire at once universal and alien.

Fire is an ideal conceit for a book about crossed borders, a landscape of disturbances and a history of contested records. It is both natural and cultural, both fact and symbol, and had he allowed it to speak (as it were) in its own voice, fire could have done everything Wyatt asks of it. Those free-burning fires in the hills could have positioned his text outside the self-referential echo-chamber of literature, however variously re-privileged and deconstructed.

Instead of concluding with a concert in which Bruce Springsteen sings around an imagined “campfire,” the author might have witnessed the all-too-real fires that regularly ring the Greater Los Angeles area and watched the meltdown of artificial borders and witnessed the fallacy of control, a post-ironic inquiry into the status of humanity as titular keeper of the planetary flame. Even the contemporary attempt to replace a strategy of suppression with one of controlled burning, in the belief that frequent, small fires will reduce the potential for catastrophic eruptions, could have complemented the author’s sublimation of “Five Fires” into a symbolic internal fire. The social analogue is that small rituals of private rage, acted out in literature, might prevent social riots.

The controversy over fire use and fire control is an old American debate, one centered, interestingly enough, in California. It is a story--one of many--Wyatt ignores, and so denies his metaphor the historical and factual fuel it needs to propagate. Instead of flaming, the promised poetry subsides into symbolic embers.