The idea of a shared language constructed from synthesized popular forms is emphasized in Telegraph Avenue in the idea of musician Cochise Jones’s personal performance style of “Brokeland Creole” (373). In a long passage Archy Stallings eulogizes the recently deceased Jones (371–74). It is unclear if Stallings (or Chabon) is linking Jones’s playing to theories like Thomas Fiehrer’s of the “Creole Origins of [early] Jazz,” although Stallings does note Jones’s childhood in Louisiana (372). Regardless, Archy Stallings describes Jones’s organ playing as a synthesis of styles, a “creole . . . that means you stop drawing those lines. It means Africa and Europe cooked up in the same skillet. Chopin, hymns, Irish music, polyrhythms, talking drums. And people” (373). When Stallings explains the endless arguments about style at Brokeland Records—“Church music, jump music, rock and roll, hard bop, soul-jazz”—he notes that “Mr. Jones never took part in those discussions” (373). Instead of individual particularity or postmodern appropriation and self-reflexivity, Archy Stallings’s discussion of “Brokeland Creole” follows Chabon’s own style by synthesizing a variety of popular forms to communicate between different entertainment languages and audiences. It is difficult to read Archy’s description of “Brokeland Creole” and not think of Chabon’s metaphor of the “map of fiction” in McSweeney’s Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Secrets (xliii–xliv) and its entertainment-oriented revision, “Trickster in a Suit of Lights.” Stallings suggests, as Chabon has argued with respect to fiction writing, that “we are foolish to restrict ourselves to one type or category” (Maps 17).
Stallings suggests that the space on the map where all these musical languages meet is at the failing Brokeland Records. Chabon identifies the store as a potential “utopia” in full recognition of both senses of the word. Brokeland Records is repeatedly described as a community not only for its loyal music-loving customers but also for the memories of an entire neighborhood (275, 374). It is a “space where common sorrow could be drowned in common passion as the talk grew ever more scholarly and wild” (465). Archy Stallings describes the store as “an ideal” and an “oasis” that serves as a place to “forg[e] that Creole style” of communication between the “human[s]” who are “‘the people’” (374, emphasis Chabon’s). It is this ideal possibility, cherished with religious zeal, to which Archy refers with his image of “the church of vinyl” (211). At the same time, Stallings also recognizes “the address of utopia” as “the day after tomorrow,” a place endlessly deferred to the point of nonexistence (277).
It is here that Chabon differentiates Telegraph Avenue not only from self-reflexive postmodern aesthetics but also from his own earlier articulations of the communicative potential of popular forms. Archy’s utopian ideal is, paradoxically, made impossible by the nature of popular culture identified in Telegraph Avenue. The central paradox of entertainment in the novel is that its entertainment forms are simultaneously broadly and personally appealing. If Brokeland Records represents Archy Stallings’s ideal of the “utopia” of “Brokeland Creole,” its counterexample is the labyrinth of self that is represented by Cochise Jones’s own record collection. This subterranean space is presented as a place where “the crates were stacked into alleys and bends that lacked only a Minotaur” (345). Jones’s record collection represents his specific music interests and his personal history. Seeing the record sleeves in the context of Jones’s life, rather than as a continuum of popular music to be argued over collectively, Archy Stallings recognizes the “vandalism” of Stallings’s own “breaking up [of] estates” for sale at Brokeland Records (347). Brokeland Records, and the popular utopia it might theoretically represent, offers middle ground, a “space for . . . talk” between various members of a broad listening public. In its specific context, however, it is “scholarly,” focused, and inward looking. Cochise Jones’s actual collection, rather than the imagined ideals of his music performance, suggests the paradox of the popular in Telegraph Avenue. Every customer of Brokeland Records collects a different type of music and at the end of the day all of these customers return to their own versions of Jones’s labyrinth. These individual record collections become “estates,” or personally specific legacies.
Something similar happens for other characters in Telegraph Avenue as a variety of popular forms offer a potential for connection that is simultaneously constrained by personal vision. Julius Jaffe is inspired to approach Titus Joyner after they see Lady Snowblood because Julius has seen his version of Lady Snowblood. What he has seen is described in terms that evoke the novel’s earlier descriptions of the intense loneliness exhibited by Julius’s writing journal (84–85). Julius’s father (and Archy’s record store partner) Nat often cannot communicate with others because he has a tendency to become lost in the music that he hums according to the dictates of his own inner ear (184). State senator Barack Obama claims that he intuitively understands something about Archy’s bass playing on Stevie Wonder’s “Higher Ground.” Obama “didn’t know what it was” until he was told (161). The paradox of popular culture in Telegraph Avenue is that the deeply personal meanings that individuals find in the broad commercial forms of entertainment atomize the audience for these forms, constructing “self-reflexive and hermetic” universes of personal vision that inhibit communicative possibilities.
Telegraph Avenue simultaneously offers an extension, intensification, and reconsideration of Michael Chabon’s stylistic and thematic examination of entertainment in the years since the publication of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay at the turn of the twenty-first century. If Telegraph Avenue recognizes Chabon’s uncharacteristic acknowledgment of the inherent limits of entertainment in terms of its potential for communication, Chabon nevertheless continues to use popular forms to try to make “contact across a void.” Suffusing the final pages of the novel with an appropriately and characteristically Chabonesque note of nostalgia, Chabon describes a meeting between the former friends Julius and Titus. No longer moving in the same social circles in the physical world of Oakland, California, Julius and Titus still share entertainment in common as they make plans to “meet” in the virtual world of an online game (463). If there are limits to the communicative potential of popular idioms in Telegraph Avenue, Michael Chabon nevertheless suggests the necessity of the effort to transcend these limits that cannot be escaped.
Notes
Works Cited
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1. See Hess, “Michael Chabon’s Amazing Adventures with Dark Horse Comics.”
2. Summerland offers a novel for the pre– and post–Harry Potter worlds of youth fiction by mixing a contemporary fantasy narrative with Chabon’s knowledge and love of the old-fashioned summertime fun of baseball. His novella The Final Solution links a Holocaust narrative with the adventures of a retired Sherlock-Holmes inspired sleuth. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union grafts a middle-aged domestic drama about failed love to the political concerns of an alternative history narrative about a Jewish homeland in Alaska. All of this is described in the tradition of the detective fiction and film of the 1940s. Gentlemen of the Road offers a tenth-century swordplay adventure in a nineteenth-century newspaper serial format as it was originally serialized in the New York Times (Gentlemen of the Road copyright page). Chabon’s first novel of his third decade as a novelist, Telegraph Avenue, considers race and gender relations in Oakland and Berkeley, California, in the summer leading up to the 2004 election for president of the United States of America. These relationships are shaped by economic and political concerns as well as by interests in the popular films and music of the 1970s and of the first decade of the twenty-first century.
3. For a discussion of Chabon’s use of Sherlock Holmes in The Final Solution, of detective fiction in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, and a concise account of the general differences between literary and genre fiction as they are often understood by popular reviewers, academic critics, and general readers alike, refer to J. Madison Davis’s “Mix and Match: Michael Chabon’s Imaginative Use of Genre” (10). See also Gordon Bigelow’s “Michael Chabon’s Unhomely Pulp” (2008) and Anna Richardson’s “In Search of the Final Solution: Crime Narrative as a Paradigm for Exploring Responses to the Holocaust” (2010).
4. For a recap of Chabon’s adventures in screenwriting as well as his discussion of Hobgoblin, the HBO pilot he created with his wife, Ayelet Waldman, see Michael Mechanic’s “Michael Chabon’s Vinyl Draft” (2012).
5. Telegraph Avenue, which mentions both Herman Melville (epigraph, 31) and James Joyce (114–15), is also Chabon’s most stylistically dense fiction.
6. For Chabon’s discussion of Tarantino’s films, see Mechanic’s “Michael Chabon’s Vinyl Draft.”
7. While True Romance (1993)—directed by Tony Scott and based on a Tarantino screenplay—was included in the career-spanning retrospective Blu-ray set Tarantino XX (2012), the Oliver Stone–directed Natural Born Killers (1994)—a movie based on a Tarantino story and often included in discussions of Tarantino’s work against his wishes—was not. A focus on Tarantino’s eight directed feature films—Reservoir Dogs (1992), Pulp Fiction (1994), Jackie Brown (1997), Kill Bill, Vol. 1 (2003), Kill Bill, Vol. 2 (2004), Death Proof (2007), Inglorious Basterds (2009), Django Unchained (2012)—and “The Man from Hollywood,” the Tarantino-directed segment of Four Rooms (1995), allows for a more narrow consideration of films whose visual and narrative aesthetic are more clearly the product of Tarantino’s control.
8. It is this aspect of Tarantino’s work that film critics have often found most objectionable. A succinct critique of the frequently noted use of violence in Tarantino may be found in David Thomson’s discussion of Reservoir Dogs and Kill Bill, Vol. 1 in The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (2004).
9. For more on the ethical possibilities of Tarantino’s films, please also refer to Fred Botting and Scott Wilson’s The Tarantinian Ethics (2001), which includes a chapter-length examination of “romance” in Tarantino’s early films and screenplays.
10. I am indebted to James Ford for directing my attention to the emphasis on love in Tarantino’s Django Unchain
ed. This conversation inspired me to reconsider Tarantino’s thematic use of love in his earlier works. This analysis of the films written and directed by Tarantino (rather than only written by Tarantino) suggests, in fact, that as with his use of violence, the logic of Tarantino’s thematic investigation of love remains remarkably consistent. The carnival of violence that concludes Reservoir Dogs is somewhat balanced by the commitment of Mr. White (Harvey Keitel) to Mr. Orange (Tim Roth) as the film concludes with White cradling Orange in a bloody embrace. When the story of Pulp Fiction is straightened out, the final chronological sequence of the film becomes Butch riding off into the sunrise with Fabienne after he escapes gangsters and a pair of rapists. The double-crossing of Jackie Brown is enabled entirely by the complicity of Max Cherry (Robert Forster), the bail bondsman who loves both Jackie (Pam Grier) and the Delfonics. Kill Bill, Vol. 1 allows little room for love in the retributive scheme of Beatrix Kiddo’s death list but in Kill Bill, Vol. 2 the revelation that Kiddo’s daughter has, in fact, survived, causes her love for her daughter to become merged with her own desire to kill Bill. Tarantino returns to Jackie Brown’s use of love as central component in a complex scheme in Inglorious Basterds when the explosive, nitrate-based film revenge of Shoshanna (Mélanie Laurent) is assisted by her lover Marcel (Jacky Ido). Django Unchained presents the clearest articulation yet of Tarantino’s thematic interest in love as Django (Jamie Foxx) and Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), inspired by Django’s love for his wife and the mythic love of Siegfried, risk reenslavement and death in order to save Django’s wife, Broomhilda von Shaft (Kerry Washington). Where Tarantino’s films seem not to consider love, as in the extended car chase of Death Proof, his work again remains consistent since Lee (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is endangered by an absence of love generated by the fetishistic love of Zoë (Zoë Bell) for a vintage automobile. The vintage automobile conceit itself relates back to Tarantino’s “The Man from Hollywood” segment of Four Rooms in which the bet between Leo (Bruce Willis), Norman (Paul Calderon), and Chester (Quentin Tarantino) centers on Chester’s vintage automobile.
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