Michael Chabon's
Maps and Legends.
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To buy
Maps and Legends,
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Michael Chabon's sparkling first book of nonfiction is a love song in 16 parts—a series of linked essays in praise of reading and writing, with subjects running from ghost stories to comic books, Sherlock Holmes to Cormac McCarthy. Throughout, Chabon energetically argues for a return to the thrilling, chilling origins of storytelling, rejecting the false walls around "serious" literature in favor of a wide-ranging affection. His own fiction, meanwhile, is explored from the perspective of personal history: post-collegiate desperation sparks his debut, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh; procrastination and doubt reveal the way toward Wonder Boys; a love of comics and a basement golem combine to create the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay; and an enigmatic Yiddish phrasebook unfurls into The Yiddish Policemen's Union.
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Published Reviews.
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The Times Literary Supplement
"The Rise of Fan Fiction and Comic Book Culture: From Book-Burning and Prohibition to Pulitzer Prizes and Prestige"
By Michael Saler
June 4, 2008
"When I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun." This infamous statement of Nazi sentiment is not limited to Fascists: many critics become combative when discussing culture. They prefer to patrol boundaries rather than venture into the no-man's-land of hybridity. In the 1950s, for example, C. P. Snow posited a hostile stand-off between the "Two Cultures" of the arts and sciences, ignoring important qualifications to his stark antithesis—including over a century's worth of science fiction since Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Similarly, recent discussions of "culture wars" and the "clash of civilizations" have a martial tone and apparently clear parameters. On closer inspection, however, the combatants wear a variety of uniforms. If culture is often war by other means, we are finally witnessing a truce in one longstanding conflict: that between so-called elite and mass cultures.
Skirmishes do continue. Like Japanese soldiers fighting the Second World War long after it ended, some still draw a cordon sanitaire around "literature" to protect it from "genre", regardless of how closely the two commingle. Jeanette Winterson proclaims "I hate science fiction", even though her recent The Stone Gods includes robots and a post-apocalyptic future. Certain critics still insist that Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize primarily for The Golden Notebook (1962), even though this Guest of Honor at the 1987 World Science Fiction Convention considers her futurist "Canopus in Argus" novels "to be some of my best work". (David Langford gleefully tracks anti-genre comments at http://news.ansible.co.uk)
But critics of genre are increasingly counter-balanced by prominent proponents and practitioners, including Haruki Murakami, David Mitchell, Joyce Carol Oates, Jonathan Lethem and Junot Diaz. The Library of America has published elegant editions of authors who only two generations ago gave libraries across America pause, H. P. Lovecraft and Philip K. Dick. Genre films and books are no longer a minority interest. They top the bestseller lists and popularity polls: we are all geeks now. The establishment's disdain for genre, and the populists' suspicion of experimental techniques, are largely things of the past. Generations weaned on cultures "high" and "low" have become the producers and arbiters of the arts, enabled by the expansion of the internet since the early 1990s. (Even the "establishment" is being overtaken by the less euphonious but more democratic "blogosphere".) Two eminent figures in the effort to reconcile mass entertainment with intellectual respectability, the music critic David Hajdu and the novelist Michael Chabon, have taken stock of the irrational intolerance faced by genre artists in the past. Neither overtly celebrates today's relative catholicity of taste—battles remain to be fought—but the simultaneous publication of their works reflects a broader cultural turning point.
Hajdu's The Ten-Cent Plague is a thoroughly researched, engagingly written account of a modern witch-hunt: the public hysteria over horror and crime comics in the United States during the early 1950s. Many of these were excessive in their gratuitous depictions of violence, as Hajdu admits, but the reaction to them was even more extreme. Schools and churches organized public burnings of comics, when Nazi book-burnings were still a recent memory; laws were passed to prohibit sales; publishers were forced out of business and artists lost their livelihood. The industry responded to the outcry by creating a self-censoring body whose code was so restrictive that comics lost their vitality and much of their audience.
At first glance, this sad episode of censorship and paranoia seems to coincide with the chilling climate fostered by McCarthyism. There were clear overlaps: the panic was promoted by Dr Fredric Wertham who, like Joseph McCarthy, found a cause that would bring him the national attention he craved. Wertham's scientific credentials in psychiatry seemed to legitimate his specious claim that comic books caused juvenile delinquency, and made oracular his pronouncement that "Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic book industry". His Seduction of the Innocent (1954) led parents to believe that Superman promoted Fascism, Batman and Robin homosexuality, and Wonder Woman sadomasochism. (Wertham wasn't entirely wrong about the last: Wonder Woman enjoyed using her "golden lasso" and "bracelets of submission" on villains; her creator, William Moulton Marston, claimed she "satisfies the subconscious, elaborately disguised desire of males to be mastered by a woman who loves them".) Politicians, such as Senator Estes Kefauver, joined Wertham in order to advance their careers.
Hajdu notes these similarities, but argues that while McCarthyism represented anti-elitism, the crusade against comics was "anti-anti-elitism, a campaign by protectors of rarefied ideals of literacy, sophistication, and virtue to rein in the practitioners of a wild, homegrown form of vernacular American expression". American elites had deemed comics a debased form of expression since the emergence of newspaper comic-strips in the late nineteenth century. This new art, created largely for and about immigrants, engaged in deliberate self-parody that baffled establishment critics. Charges of illiteracy and bad taste continued to be levelled at the nascent comic book industry of the 1930s, as it employed outsiders—immigrants, women, minorities and iconoclasts. Comics were largely created by "cultural insurgents" who exploited the creative licence of a new art form with few rules and little critical oversight.
Because comics were intended for children, it was easy for critics to mock the medium's lack of literary sophistication. What many of them missed was the visual sophistication of such pioneering artists as Will Eisner, Jack Cole and Jack Kirby, or the brilliant stable of artists at EC Comics, which popularized horror comics in the 1950s. (Hajdu's book can be faulted for having too few illustrations.) Critics also missed the singular aesthetic pleasure that comes from the sequential narration of words and images working together. And while they insisted that comics were dangerous because they promoted juvenile delinquency—a catch-all complaint—they were often oblivious to the genuinely subversive content of some. For example, romance comics challenged gender norms by portraying young women as active agents in stories like "My Mother Was My Rival" and "I Joined a Teen-Age Sex Club".
A generational divide exacerbated this cultural conflict over issues of class and taste. By the 1950s, a youth culture was emerging, with its own codes of expression, dress and music. Hajdu maintains that the battle between adults and adolescents over horror comics was the first step in the creation of post-war popular culture, soon to be followed by rock 'n' roll. EC Comics transformed their satirical comic Mad into a magazine to escape the straitjacket of the comics' code; it and the pre-code comics were to be seminal influences on the creators of the uninhibited underground comics of the 1960s. The Ten-Cent Plague is a compelling story of the pride, prejudice, and paranoia that marred the reception of mass entertainment in the first half of the century, and a cautionary reminder of how easily art can be demonized during insecure times.
Hajdu focuses on comics and the triumph of youth culture, but the medium is no longer child's play: today's comic books are pitched well above the heads and purchasing power of most children. Following Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize–winning account of the Holocaust, Maus (1992), "graphic novel" has become the preferred term for many of the medium's most exciting and original works. A castaway art form that began in the "funny papers" now finds a welcome berth in the New Yorker, while Chris Ware's challenging Jimmy Corrigan won the 2001 Guardian First Book Award. Fredric Wertham must be turning in his grave (no doubt in horror-comic fashion), but as Michael Chabon declares in Maps and Legends, "the battle has now, in fact, been won. Not only are comics appealing to a wider and older audience than ever before, but the idea of comics as a valid art form ... is widely if not quite universally accepted".
Chabon's first non-fiction essay collection charts the struggles of mass culture to attain respectability, and displays the nuanced perceptions we have come to expect from his fiction. Success, he knows, has its costs; in the case of comics, their creators have abandoned the children's market, depriving a new generation of the pleasures that Chabon recalls from his own youth. He proposes solutions, for "we who make comics today have a solemn debt to pass it on". These essays present aesthetic creativity as a discharge of debts, the grateful response of the artist to the sense of wonder sparked by all forms of culture. Not only is this the central refrain of the collection, it is also the key to Chabon's intertextual fiction: "All novels are sequels; influence is bliss".
Several essays are autobiographical, providing a portrait of the artist as a young littérateur wrestling with his inner geek. Chabon grew up a passionate reader of genre fiction; from an early age he dreamed of emulating his literary heroes. But as a student who also responded to "literature", he was aware that writing genre books would probably end his career as a serious artist before it had even begun: "A detective novelist or a horror writer who made claims to artistry sat in the same chair at the table of literature as did a transvestite cousin at a family Thanksgiving". He resolved his dilemma by setting aside plans to write a science-fiction novel, producing instead a realist, coming-of-age work, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), which established his career at the age of twenty-five. He also abandoned Judaism and married a non-Jewish woman. "I guess I was trying to fit in."
After his first success, Chabon spent five years writing drafts of a 1,500-page novel that went nowhere; his first marriage collapsed. He gradually regained his own voice by returning to his roots in genre fiction and Judaism. A sense of equanimity is reflected in the later essays, which are less strident than the initial pieces about the misguided vilification of mass culture. The path he ultimately chose has met with critical and popular approval, and has contributed to a wider acceptance of his own view that there are no necessary distinctions between genre and literature—that each work must be taken on its own terms. However, his earlier, more polemical essays do make important points about the promises and limitations of mass entertainment.
Like Hajdu, Chabon defends mass entertainment against the accusation that it is merely a formulaic product. At times it is; yet commercial culture's focus on deadlines and profits can also act as a "quickening force" on an artist's imagination. He demonstrates this with discerning essays on Arthur Conan Doyle, Will Eisner and Howard Chaykin, all of whom, like Chabon himself, attained the ultimate goal of the "pop artisan": a delicate balance between "the unashamedly commercial and the purely aesthetic". He disagrees with those who equate literary entertainment with mindless escapism, passive consumption or unproductive activity ("guilty pleasures" is "a phrase I loathe"). Instead, he finds that different forms of writing offer distinct satisfactions to an alert reader. There is no single standard for literary merit; Chabon's personal list of pleasurable encounters includes "the engagement of the interior ear by the rhythm and pitch of a fine prose style; the dawning awareness that giant mutant rat people dwell in the walls of a ruined abbey in England; two hours spent bushwhacking through a densely packed argument about the structures of power as embodied in nineteenth-century prison architecture".
Other essays explore how innovative artists roam the aesthetic borderlands, playing with conventions and deriving inspiration from numerous sources. He has intelligent (and usually mellifluous) things to say about M. R. James, Cormac McCarthy, Philip Pullman, Norse Myths and the comic strips of Ben Katchor. For Chabon, artists such as these disprove Harold Bloom's concept of the "anxiety of influence". Rather than trying to outdo and replace their forebears, they honour those who inspired them, drawing sustenance from the entire spectrum of culture. Munificent artists can't be contained within the arbitrary distinctions between literature and genre, the "serious" and the "entertaining". Chabon doesn't need to reach for his gun to dispatch such distinctions. He simply redefines them: "All literature, highbrow or low, from the Aeneid onward, is fan fiction".
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Los Angeles CityBeat
"Maps of Misreading: Michael Chabon Fills in the Blank Spaces"
By Anthony Miller
May 7, 2008
A number of writers have begun to exult in print about the uncanny realms where the influences of pulp and pop (comic books, science fiction and fantasy, mysteries, rock & roll) meld with those "higher" and more established echelons of literature. Michael Chabon, the author of Wonder Boys, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, and The Yiddish Policemen's Union, relishes secret transactions between authors and their readers. When I realized that the two Japanese students Takeshi and Ichizo in The Mysteries of Pittsburgh bore the same names as the kamikaze pilots in Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, the shock of recognition ushered me into yet another story. Here was one lesson about how one kind of fiction could subtly and surprisingly infiltrate another.
Maps and Legends (McSweeney's, $24), Chabon's first essay collection, unearths some of the author's source texts and offers his exuberant ruminations on the role of the writer as protector and defender of artistic ancestors. His intention to cast us out and off into alternate worlds is made clear from the outset with a deft touch to the book's epigraph, transforming the way we read a Melville quotation about those who have written about whaling before him merely by appending the mischievously explanatory phrase "on the writing of fan fiction." Chabon's 16 essays ponder those landscapes, whether mythological, alternate-historical, or post-apocalyptic, where entertainers and tricksters, ghosts and golems dwell. He is an exacting cartographer of those speculative spaces where only the genre of nurse romances (like Cynthia Ozick's Ruth Puttermesser, R.N.) was allowed to flourish or where one might catch a glimpse of a zeppelin ("that colophon of alternate-world fiction from Ada to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen") screaming across the sky. In an essay on Sherlock Holmes, Chabon writes:
And yet there is a degree to which, just as all criticism is in essence Sherlockian, all literature, highbrow or low, from the Aeneid onward, is fan fiction. That is why Harold Bloom's notion of the anxiety of influence has always rung so hollow to me. Through parody and pastiche, allusion and homage, retelling and reimagining the stories that were told before us and that we have come of age loving—amateurs—we proceed, seeking out the blank places in the map that our favorite writers, in their greatness and negligence, have left for us, hoping to pass on to our own readers—should we be lucky enough to find any—some of the pleasure that we ourselves have taken in the stuff we love: to get in on the game. All novels are sequels; influence is bliss.
As he roams across literary and cultural borderlands, Chabon investigates comic-book deity Will Eisner, Road warrior Cormac McCarthy, the urban sprawls of Howard Chaykin's American Flagg! and Ben Katchor's Julius Knipl, the supernatural tales of M.R. James, and the contrarian cosmology of Philip Pullman. Sadly, there is only brief mention of August Van Zorn, the little-known acolyte of H.P. Lovecraft so beloved of Chabon that he includes him in Wonder Boys. Chabon also provides observations on his own literary endeavors, from the Sherlock Holmes story he wrote at age 10 and the place where he penned his first novel to his problematic second novel, Fountain City, which, although uncompleted, provided essential inspiration for the runaway magnum opus Grady Tripp toils on in Wonder Boys. His final two essays contemplate artistic approaches to questions of exile and faith. The last essay is the text of a public talk Chabon delivered in 2003 and 2004 about the author's stumbling upon a writer and Holocaust survivor named C.B. Colby resulting in a peculiar inquiry into history and storytelling.
Maps and Legends is swathed in a marvelous Jordan Crane dust jacket with three blue, green, and yellow-gold layers, populated with storybook characters scattered within the scenery, each of which can be peeled back to reveal—what else?—the letter x to mark the title. Maps and Legends is a treasure trove of intriguing and revealing looks at where Chabon goes to make up his worlds and how he tells his fables of the reconstruction.
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