Michael Chabon's America

by Jesse Kavadlo

  Notes

  Works Cited

  Berger, Alan L. “Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: The Return of the Golem.” Studies in American Jewish Literature 29 (2010): 80–89. Print.

  Bloch, Chayim. The Golem: Legends of the Ghetto of Prague. 1925. Trans. Marry Schneiderman. Blauvelt, NY: Rudolf Steiner, 1972. Print.

  Brod, Harry. Superman is Jewish? How Comic Book Superheroes Came to Serve Truth, Justice, and the Jewish-American Way. New York: Free P, 2012. Print.

  Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. 1949. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1968. Print.

  Chabon, Michael. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. New York: Random, 2000. Print.

  ———. “The Recipe for Life.” Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing along the Borderlands, 151–56. New York: Harper, 2008.

  Fingeroth, Danny. Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics, and the Creation of the Superhero. New York: Continuum, 2007. Print.

  “Golem.” Encyclopaedia Judaica. 2nd ed. 2007. Print.

  Hajdu, David. The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America. New York: Picador, 2008. Print.

  Kaplan, Arie. From Krakow to Krypton: Jews and Comic Books. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2008. Print.

  Ozick, Cynthia. The Puttermesser Papers. New York: Vintage, 1997. Print.

  Piercy, Marge. He, She and It. New York: Fawcett, 1991. Print.

  Ro, Ronin. Tales to Astonish: Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, and the American Comic Book Revolution. New York: Bloomsbury, 2004. Print.

  Schumacher, Michael. Will Eisner: A Dreamer’s Life in Comics. New York: Bloomsbury, 2010. Print.

  Sturm, James. “Marvel Comics’ Troubling Origin Story: Why I’m Boycotting The Avengers.” Slate. The Slate Group. 7 Feb. 2012. Web. 6 Nov. 2012.

  Superman Returns. Dir. Bryan Singer. Perf. Brandon Routh, Kate Bosworth, James Marsden, and Kevin Spacey. Warner Bros., 2006.

  Tye, Larry. Superman: The High-Flying History of America’s Most Enduring Hero. New York: Random, 2012. Print.

  1. The golden age of comics is generally considered to have begun in 1938, with the first appearance of Superman in Action Comics #1, and to have ended around 1952.

  2. This scene is memorably recreated in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” scene in Walt Disney’s film Fantasia (1940).

  3. Wertham famously, and with characteristic hyperbole, said, “I think Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic-book industry. . . . They get the children much younger. They teach them race hatred at the age of four, before they can read” (qtd. in Hajdu 264).

  Chapter 8

  The Chatter of an African Gray Parrot

  Marjorie Worthington

  The Final Solution as Postmodern Detective Fiction

  Yet all mystery resides there, in the margins, between life and death, childhood and adulthood, Newtonian and quantum, “serious” and “genre” literature. And it is from the confrontation with mystery that the truest stories have always drawn their power.—Michael Chabon, “On Daemons & Dust”

  Michael Chabon has long been a defender of “genre fiction”—fiction that traditionally adheres, like science fiction or mystery novels, to a particular set of predictable conventions. He has attempted to defend genre fiction from those who would disparage it, to validate readers who love such fiction, and to utilize his favorite genres to create works that do what “literary fiction” traditionally does: both evoke and transcend genre in order to move the reader and comment on the wider world. Chabon’s most famous work, Pulitzer Prize–winning The Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, is often read as a celebration of the comic book genre. Indeed, Chabon has since published actual comic books depicting the heroes he invented in that novel. He has also written both a highly regarded work of detective fiction[1] (The Yiddish Policemen’s Union) and mystery fiction (The Final Solution). A clearly devoted fan of these various genres, Chabon has managed to gain acceptance in the literary mainstream for his own versions of genre fiction and in the process helped demonstrate the ways that popular genres are relevant to contemporary culture. In particular, Chabon’s novel The Final Solution both lovingly follows the rules of the mystery genre and pushes against the limits of those rules. The result is a novel that provides a satisfying mystery story as well as a commentary on the aspects of life that do not lend themselves to tidy solutions, in this case, World War II and the Holocaust. The novel’s many shifts in point of view democratize what has traditionally been a very authoritarian narrative structure, allowing most of the characters briefly to take on the role of detective and thereby to participate in the making of meaning. The Final Solution thus provides a glimpse of an egalitarian narrative structure in the face of the horrors of totalitarian and imperialist regimes. Furthermore, because it does not end with the traditional consolatory reification of conservative cultural mores, The Final Solution stands as a demonstration of the power of genre fiction to challenge the status quo rather than reinforce it, and to expose the abuses of colonial power structures and the potential brutality of a worldview based solely upon pure objective rationality.

  At first glance, it might seem a bit odd that an author who has had such critical success in the world of literary fiction would be so committed to defending and working in fictional subgenres like mystery stories, detective novels, and even comic books. After all, these are forms supposedly shunned by serious writers and ignored by serious readers, except as the occasional guilty pleasure. Because it stays faithfully close to a standard set of conventions and eschews formal and linguistic innovations, so-called genre fiction has typically been deemed, as Chabon says, “debased, infantile, commercialized, unworthy of the serious person’s attention” (“Trickster” 20). More than that, however, genre literature has often been critically vilified for not challenging the reader’s worldview; the endings of such works typically reestablish the cultural (patriarchal, heteronormative) status quo. As Christine Ann Evans puts it, popular literature has been described by Theodor Adorno and other members of the Frankfurt school as being “structured by and serving the culture industry and the forces of production that give rise to it” (Evans 161). By maintaining cultural norms, the argument goes, genre literature encourages complacency rather than critical thinking in its readership; the purely pleasurable reading experience is said to shape the reader into little more than a cultural consumer.

  Mystery fiction, in particular, is often accused of perpetuating a structure that Evans calls “consolatory” (159); as Carl Malmgren says: “Mystery presupposes an essentially static world, in which neither social order nor human nature is subject to radical change” (119). The formulaic plot structure of a mystery novel typically involves a crime which has somehow put time out of joint—a situation rectified by the dashing and wise detective who deduces the unequivocal solution by arithmetically adding up the clues that only he can discern. These novels assert, therefore, that the absolute truth of a situation is attainable by the human mind, as long as that mind is nimble and observant enough. Since most minds may not be nimble and observant enough, we must rely on the acuity of the greatest among us: the Holmes figures, thankfully, exist to protect us from chaos and to put things right. Thus, mystery plots reestablish cultural—and clearly patriarchal—order, providing what Evans calls “the symbolic reaffirmation of the civilized space,” providing the reader a “consolatory” pleasure after a threat of disorder (164, 159). For this reason, a common objection to genre fiction has been that its predictable structure lulls readers into a complacency that precludes them from being active and critical observers of culture.

  But Chabon himself points out that so-called literary fiction is, of course, a genre unto itself: “what tends to be ignored by ‘serious’ writers and critics alike is that the genre known (more imprecisely than any other) as ‘literary fiction’ has rules, conventions, and formulas of its own: the primacy of a unified point of view, for example; letters and their liability to being read
or intercepted; the dance of adulterous partners; the buried family secret that curses generations to come; the ordinary heroism of an unsung life” (“Trickster” 22). The point Chabon makes is that, of course, all literature is steeped in genre, whether readers and practitioners care to admit it or not. Chabon’s comments echo those of genre scholar John Cawelti, who has explained that any work of literature reverberates between “mimetic” and “formulaic” elements: “The mimetic element in literature confronts us with the world as we know it, while the formulaic element reflects the construction of an ideal world without the disorder, the ambiguity, the uncertainty, and the limitations of the world of our experience” (Adventure 13). What seems, then, to be the major criticism of genre fiction is that it skews more toward the formulaic than the mimetic, toward the construction of a world that is familiar and comforting, inasmuch as it adheres to the expectations of readers, and not toward an innovative or disturbing fictional universe.

  Rather than engage in the kind of structural and linguistic experiments we have come to expect from literary fiction, genre fiction stays within the dictates of its tradition. In other words, genre fiction—and this could be one reason Chabon is so drawn to it—is highly intertextual. Inherent in its forms is a drawing upon other examples of that genre: a work of genre fiction resonates with all other works of that genre; to understand one such work, a reader must have a familiarity with the larger traditions of the genre. A work of genre literature is, in a sense, more an overt reflection of other works in that genre than it is an attempt to construct a true-to-life depiction of the world outside the text. Genre fiction, then, refers more to itself than outside itself. For, while Malmgren points out that even the mimetic aspects of a text are results of literary tradition (“‘Realism,’ no matter how defined, is inevitably a matter of conventions” [117]),[2] genre literature is overt in its intertextuality: a mystery novel consciously and necessarily adheres to the expectations readers have developed through their experiences with other mystery novels, even as it toys with and stretches those expectations. For Chabon, particularly in the case of The Final Solution, the traditional form of the mystery story provides an opportunity, not only for poignant storytelling, but for commenting on the potential relevance to contemporary culture of the genre itself. Or, as Chabon puts it: “When it comes to conventions, [genre writers’] central impulse is not to flout or to follow them, but, flouting or following, to play” (“Trickster” 22, emphasis in original).

  The Final Solution demonstrates Chabon’s intertextual playfulness, for it features none other than the quintessential detective himself: the great Sherlock Holmes. Although Holmes is never mentioned by name, but rather referred to as “the old man,” the clues to his identity abound, and the fan of mystery fiction must become a textual detective in order to tease out the myriad intertextual references to previous Holmes stories.[3] At the same time, however, the novel critiques the deductive reasoning for which Holmes is so famous, suggesting that this reasoning has its limits in decoding the far-reaching mysteries of the modern (and postmodern) world. By drawing upon the world’s most famous detective character and, to some extent, mirroring the narrative technique of one of his stories (“His Last Bow”), The Final Solution brings Sherlock Holmes into indirect confrontation with the tragedies inculcated by World War II, most notably, of course, the Holocaust. This confrontation provides a rather dramatic combination of formulaic impulses with mimetic ones. Thus, while the resulting story adheres in many ways to the tenets of the traditional mystery, it also juxtaposes the foremost totemic image of rationality—Sherlock Holmes—with what is often considered to be the most irrational event of the twentieth century.[4] This connection of mystery story to Holocaust story is, Anna Richardson has said, Chabon’s “subtle attempt to represent the unknowability of the Holocaust in narrative form” (163).

  The Final Solution opens in 1944 in the English countryside with an image of an old man (ostensibly the long-retired Sherlock Holmes, eighty-nine years old) watching with curiosity as a young boy of about nine walks along a railroad track with a gray parrot on his shoulder. Oddly touched by this thin and lonely boy who arouses the old man’s long dormant “sense . . . of promising anomaly” (1), the old man hunts in his pantry for some candy to offer him. While the boy, taking the candy, remains mute, the parrot begins reciting a list of numbers in German “in a soft, oddly breathy voice, with the slightest hint of a lisp,” implying perhaps that the bird speaks for the boy (5). Deducing that the boy must indeed be German, the old man says, “Tell me how you came to be so very far from home” (8). In response, the boy simply sighs, shrugs, and walks with his parrot back the way he came, indicating that, even if he would speak, he could provide no simple answer to that question.

  We learn in the next chapter that the boy, Linus, is a Jewish refugee staying at the boardinghouse of the Vicar and Mrs. Thomas Panicker; Linus is one of several German children relocated to various parts of England by the English Church in Berlin. Linus arrived after his parents were taken to concentration camps; nothing remains to him from his previous life except his parrot, and the two share an extraordinary closeness. Two other lodgers in the Panicker house seem inordinately interested in Bruno, the parrot, and his propensity for reciting strings of German numbers. Bruno recites other things, but the number series have caught the attention of longtime boarder Mr. Parkins who, we later learn, is an undercover government agent working on cracking German codes. Furthermore, Mr. Parkins notices that the parrot and his numbers have attracted another lodger, Mr. Shane, who is ostensibly a salesman but whom Parkins recognizes as yet another undercover agent sent by yet another British agency to determine if Bruno’s numbers hold any strategic wartime significance.

  When Mr. Shane turns up murdered, hit from behind by a blunt object, police inspectors find a service revolver among his possessions and they realize what Mr. Parkins had already discerned: Shane was not a salesman after all, but must have been a government agent of some sort. The detective inspector Bellows appeals to the old man for aid in solving the murder, but the old man finds Bellows’ description of the crime far too mundane to induce him to come out of retirement and to neglect his beehives at a crucial moment in their development.[5] Bellows, as a last resort to interest the old man, blurts out “A parrot is missing!” (25). In return, the old man proceeds to flabbergast the police investigators with what seems to them to be a truly Holmesian bit of deduction: “Yes, of course. An African gray. Belonging, perhaps, to a small boy. Aged about nine years. A German national—of Jewish origin, I’d wager—and incapable of speech” (25). It is this fact of the missing parrot that intrigues the old man enough to begin an investigation of the crime: “I will assist you. . . . To find the boy’s parrot. . . . If we should encounter the actual murderer along the way, well, then it will be so much the better for you” (27–28, emphasis Chabon’s). The parrot, not the murder, is the point of interest for the old man, who had been lately wondering whether the world yet held any true mysteries for him.

  It is interesting to note that, of course, the old man’s information about the parrot’s owner was not the result of deduction at all, but stemmed rather from the old man’s having actually met the boy. His revelation to the policemen of what he knows about Linus is a small but significant moment because, for once, the reader is privy to the astonishing knowledge displayed by the old man, rather than being ourselves astonished by his investigative acumen. The Final Solution, then, offers what Conan Doyle’s stories never did: a glimpse into the great one’s mind, rather than just the fruits of his deductions. One of Chabon’s innovations to the Sherlock Holmes mystery genre is that, for a brief moment, we get to lodge in Holmes’s point of view when we are used to being trapped in Watson’s.

  This adaptation of the traditional point of view represents what Ralph Cohen calls a “distinction” that characterizes any work of genre fiction, as they alternate between “interrelation” to other examples of the genre and distincti
on from them: “Each member [of the genre] alters the genre by adding, contradicting, or changing constituents, especially those of members most closely related to it” (204). One of the ways The Final Solution alters the genre is by featuring a continually shifting point of view which affords almost every character—even the parrot—a chance to act as the detective manqué, attempting but failing to solve the novel’s mysteries. Some characters want to find the murderer, others want to find the parrot, and still others want to determine the meaning of the parrot’s strings of numbers. The boy Linus is the only person who knows any of these answers, and although he eventually relays some of them to the old man, the meaning of the German numbers is never revealed, except to the reader. Linus is also the only character whose point of view is never directly represented, and he therefore remains something of a mystery himself.

  These several shifts in point of view are an important departure from the single point of view of a traditional Holmes story because they serve to democratize what has traditionally been a very authoritarian narrative structure. In this way, the role of detective is more diffused than usual, as each character whose perspective is featured is afforded the opportunity to attempt to contribute to the solving of the mystery, making it more or less a communal effort. The novel thus provides a critique or an updating of narratives featuring a singular perspective (Watson’s) fully concentrated on the singular reasoning mind (Holmes’s), instead suggesting that other perspectives are also important.