Michael Chabon's America

by Jesse Kavadlo

  At first glance, then, it does seem that Craps and Buelens are correct when they posit that The Final Solution “is less a detective story than an elegy for the detective story, a mournful reflection on the loss of the rational and moral order of the world, which is a necessary precondition of the genre” (572). They argue that because traditional dictates of the mystery genre that demand an unequivocal return to the consolatory status quo are denied in this case, The Final Solution demonstrates the ultimate failure of the mystery genre. For, as John Cawelti has argued, “In mystery formulas, the problem always has a desirable and rational solution, for this is the underlying moral fantasy expressed in this formulaic archetype” (Adventure 42–43). And The Final Solution has as its only solution the return of a pet to his owner; it cannot restore this world to a rational state. Indeed, a deep look into the novel implies, as I have said, that the world never was rational and “the true nature of things” is actually reflected, not in the rational solutions the old man has spent his life deducing, but rather in the “false leads and the cold cases” (Final Solution 131). However, although the central tenet of the mystery story is betrayed here, I would not go so far as Craps and Buelens to say that The Final Solution portends the death of that genre.

  Instead, I would argue that The Final Solution maps out the consolatory terrain yet available to the mystery genre in contemporary culture. It is true that the old man is unable to solve every piece of the mystery, and even if he could, he would not be able to return Linus to wholeness, stop the war, or undo the events of the Holocaust. It is even true that he is unable to solve the central mystery of the German numbers. But the old man’s detective skills are not completely irrelevant: he returns the bird to Linus, thus providing some small consolation to a seemingly inconsolable child. Further, the mystery of the missing bird has also served to open the hearts of the Panickers to the young boy and possibly, once again, to each other: as Mr. Panicker hands the caged bird to Linus and ruffles his hair, Mrs. Panicker offers him her hand, saying, “Well done, Mr. Panicker” (128). So, although the novel does not end with all loose ends tied and status quo restored, there is yet a small glimmer of hope that these three devastated fragments of people can come together and form some semblance of a unit. Just as The Final Solution provides a partial, postmodern solution to the mystery, the Panickers interweave Linus into a sort of postmodern bricolage of a family, cobbled together from disparate sources, necessarily incomplete but nonetheless fragments potentially shored against the ruin of the devastated postwar world.

  In this postmodern mystery story, solutions are incomplete, mysteries only partially solved, characters not fully satisfied. Yet, The Final Solution, since it takes place at the dawn of the postwar period in a world physically and psychically devastated by conflict, is an apt depiction of the insufficiency of Victorian empire and Enlightenment rationality. What is left to Linus at the end of the novel is similarly what is left to the mystery genre: the potential for continued, albeit diminished life in the face of unredeemable loss.

  Notes

  Works Cited

  Cawelti, John G. Adventure, Mystery and Romance. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1976.

  ———. “Canonization, Modern Literature, and the Detective Story.” Theory and Practice of Classic Detective Fiction. Ed. Jerome H. Delamater and Ruth Prigozy. Westport: Greenwood, 1997. 5–15.

  Chabon, Michael. The Final Solution: A Story of Detection. New York: Harper, 2004.

  ———. “On Daemons & Dust.” Maps and Legends. San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2008. 67–85.

  ———. “Trickster in a Suit of Lights: Thoughts on the Modern Short Story.” Maps and Legends. San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2008. 13–26.

  Cohen, Ralph. “History and Genre.” New Literary History 17. 2 (Winter 1986): 203–18.

  Conan Doyle, Arthur. “His Last Bow.” 1917. The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Vol. II. Ed. Leslie S. Klinger. New York: Norton, 2005. 1424–43.

  Craps, Stef, and Gert Buelens. “Traumatic Mirrorings: Holocaust and Colonial Trauma in Michael Chabon’s The Final Solution.” Criticism 53. 4 (Fall 2011): 569–86.

  Evans, Christine Ann. “On the Valuation of Detective Fiction: A Study in the Ethics of Consolation.” Journal of Popular Culture 28.2 (Fall 1994): 159–67.

  Malmgren, Carl D. “Anatomy of Murder: Mystery, Detective, and Crime Fiction.” Journal of Popular Culture 30.4 (Spring 1997): 115–35.

  Richardson, Anna. “In Search of the Final Solution: Crime Narrative as a Paradigm for Exploring Responses to the Holocaust.” European Journal of English Studies 14.2 (August 2010): 159–71.

  Zizek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real. New York: Verso, 2002.

  1. Carl D. Malmgren differentiates between “mystery fiction”—such as the “whodunit” novels of Agatha Christie, driven in plot by the mystery being solved, and “detective fiction,” which he describes as having at its center a hard-boiled man of the streets—the detective—who is the focus of the narrative, found in works by Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler. Sherlock Holmes stories belong to the former category for, although they feature a strong detective figure, their plots are driven primarily by the effort to solve a particular mystery.

  2. And of course this idea has been broadened by semioticians, deconstructionists, and others to suggest that all instances of writing refer only to other instances of writing, not to the world they are attempting to but ultimately are unable to access through language.

  3. Unlike most of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories and novels, however, The Final Solution is narrated in the third person (most Holmes stories are narrated by his sidekick Watson). The third-person narration of The Final Solution thus indicates a direct connection to Conan Doyle’s very last Holmes story, “His Last Bow,” which is also narrated in the third person. This echo is particularly resonant, because The Final Solution depicts an aged and ailing Holmes solving, presumably, his last mystery, his “final solution.”

  4. In contrast to the conception of the Holocaust as an event of absurd irrationality, however, some philosophers, such as Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Zygmunt Bauman, have argued rather that the Holocaust was the culmination of Enlightenment rationality combined with the principles of modernism (Craps and Buelens 580). I will address this idea more directly later in the chapter.

  5. In “His Last Bow,” Holmes tells Watson that after this caper, in which he acts as double agent for the British in World War II, he plans to retire to the country to keep bees in the South Downs.

  6. The old man’s episode is described this way: “When he came into the garden he saw a number of familiar objects and entities set about on an expanse of green. . . . Regarding them the old man experienced a moment of vertiginous horror during which he could neither reckon their number nor recall their names or purposes” (33–35). This moment could be considered in conjunction with Slavoj Zizek’s evocation of the Lacanian “Real,” the momentary peeling back of the discursive structures that make order of our world to reveal the chaotic meaninglessness underneath. Clearly, such a revelation would be deeply disconcerting to one so associated with logic and rationality and could be linked to the revelation of the horrors of the Holocaust that have yet to occur. This moment is also significant in a novel that toys with and challenges the traditions of a particular narrative genre, suggesting as it does the artificiality of all such structures.

  7. Bletchley Park was the location during World War II of the primary British decryption effort that produced the code-breaking protocol known as “Ultra.” It was here in 1940 that Alan Turing developed his decryption machine called “the Bombe,” which was used to break the German naval code called “Enigma,” to which Shane and Parkins suspect the parrot is somehow possibly linked.

  Chapter 9

  Genre for Justice

  Monica Lott

  The Final Solution and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union as Reflections of Golden Age Detective Fiction Texts

  In T
he Final Solution (2004) and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), author Michael Chabon demonstrates both a familiarity and respect for the classic detective fiction novel and a willingness to engage classic tropes of the detective novel. I argue that The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is closer to fitting in with other works from the golden age of detective fiction than does The Final Solution, though the latter ostensibly features the detective that inspired the writers during the golden age. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union extends the issues of trauma and recovery from the golden age of detective fiction and, alternative setting notwithstanding, should be categorized as a contemporary representative. Chabon ironically uses the alternate setting to toy with the conventions of detective fiction, making the Alaska of an alternate timeline more in keeping with the classic detective novel than his novella featuring the quintessential British detective, an unnamed though clearly identifiable Sherlock Holmes. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is not so much a new blend of genres as it is a current depiction of themes that were highlighted during the golden age. Though the “golden age of detective fiction” has been broadly defined chronologically, Stephen Knight, in his 2004 book Crime Fiction 1800–2000: Detection, Death, Diversity, claims that Howard Haycraft, in 1942, was the first to use the term golden age to categorize detective fiction between 1918 and 1930. For the purposes of this chapter, I refer to works produced between 1918 and 1945 as products of the golden age. Novels produced between World War I and World War II demonstrate a culture coping with the trauma of World War I and preparing for a second period of upheaval. In dealing with the trauma of World War I, detective fiction offered an idealized setting that promised justice would be served. The distrust for authority that would become one of the hallmarks of modern literature is prominent throughout the golden age novel, with the established authority of the police shown to be inadequate to ensure that the villain will be discovered and that the innocent will go free. These novels feature protagonists who work outside the law and are able to deliver closure through their sleuthing. Chabon extends this distrust of authority through Meyer Landsman’s deal with the American Evangelical government, which has provided assistance in the destruction of the Dome of the Rock. Landsman, though he is a police detective, serves as an Other because of his faith and his conflicts with the American government. Yet, by serving as an Other to the government, Landsman, with his rumpled suit and predilection for alcohol, is found to be part of the sleuthing brotherhood with hard-boiled heroes like Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade or Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe.

  The Golden Age and the Question of Literary Legitimacy

  Texts in the genre of detective fiction have long featured a self-conscious aspect that questions the place of these works in the high/low divide. Maria DiBattista states that “high and low have come to define not only a vertical differential in aesthetic ‘positioning’ vis-à-vis popular or mass culture but also to indicate a new historical dialectic unleashed by the advent of technological and economic modernization and all its stresses” (Introduction 5). The rise of detective fiction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly with its popularity in the early twentieth century and the flood of inferior writers eager to cash in on the genre, gave way to a movement by its most popular writers to ensure that the genre could be legitimized with standards of quality. In “The Typology of Detective Fiction,” Tzvetan Todorov asserts, “A work was judged poor if it did not sufficiently obey the rules of its genre” (43).

  In addressing issues of genre in detective fiction stemming from the golden age, it is necessary to highlight the seminal role played by the Detection Club and its members. The struggle for legitimacy was a real concern for members of the Detection Club—a coterie formed in the 1930s by detective fiction writers Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, G. K. Chesterton, Freeman Wills Crofts, H. C. Bailey, Baroness Emmuska Orczy, and twenty-two other popular detective fiction authors—as they worked to codify guidelines in a burgeoning genre whose quality was threatened by its popularity. In “The Detection Club,” a 1933 article for the Strand magazine, Chesterton refers to the Detection Club as

  in short, a small society of writers of detective stories; and its only object of amusing itself is best summed up in two statements: (1) That a detective story is a story, and subject to the same literary laws as a love story or a fairy story or any other form of literature; and (2) That the writer of a detective story is a writer; and is just as much bound in the sight of God and man to be a good writer, as if he were the writer of an epic or a tragedy. (462)

  This acknowledgment that the club members’ writings are subject to the same “literary laws” as works of literature culturally recognized as important is one of the earliest examples of detective fiction writers making a case for the seriousness of their craft. The internal fight to be respected as an author while advancing a genre that is often not taken seriously frequently appears in the critical analysis of detective fiction, though its importance has been downplayed by critics and practitioners of the craft. Critic Marjorie Hope Nicolson claims in her 1929 essay “The Professor and the Detective” that the detective story’s best feature was its opportunity for the reader to escape: “Through tales of abduction and poisoning, shooting and stabbing, we are able to wallow for a moment in adventures we cannot share, to lose ourselves for an evening in a world of excitement, and return next day to our dry-as-dust lectures, refreshed by vicarious violence” (112–13). She even decries the “unworldly, unnatural academics, who would deny us our brief moment’s respite!” (113). Marjorie Nicolson claimed that detective fiction was a refuge from modernism because it established a “rebelief in a universe governed by cause and effect” (114).

  While Nicolson attributed enjoyment of detective stories as a reason they are not literature, critic Edmund Wilson believed that his lack of enjoyment in the plot was what affected issues of literary merit. Wilson states in his 14 October 1944 essay “Why Do People Read Detective Stories?” that, after reading works by Rex Stout, Agatha Christie, and Dashiell Hammett and comparing them to childhood exposure to Conan Doyle’s canon, he was left bored and frustrated. He claims, “As a department of imaginative writing, it looks to me completely dead” (“Why” 236). He asserts that “the detective story proper had borne all its finest fruits by the end of the nineteenth century” (236) and states that the genre’s popularity was a response to the trauma and guilt of World War I and World War II. As a result of public outcry, Wilson responded with “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?” three months later. In answer to his readers’ letters, he read works by Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, and Margery Allingham; in anticipating reader outcry about his reviews of their works, he says, “The enthusiastic reader of detective stories will indignantly object that I am reading for the wrong things: that I ought not to be expecting good writing, characterization, human interest or even atmosphere. He is right, of course” (“Who Cares” 260).

  Detective fiction writers and critics, like some science fiction writers, have made a different case, arguing for the importance of the genre yet eschewing any claims to high literary value. P. D. James, famous late twentieth-century writer and critic of detective fiction, apologetically states in Talking about Detective Fiction (2009): “We do not expect popular literature to be great literature, but fiction which provides excitement, mystery and humour also ministers to essential human needs. We can honour and celebrate the genius which produced Middlemarch, War and Peace, and Ulysses without devaluating Treasure Island, The Moonstone and The Inimitable Jeeves” (195). James makes the case that detective fiction should not be judged as though it were “great literature.” Similarly, science fiction writer Joanna Russ has argued in “Towards an Aesthetic of Science Fiction” that science fiction requires modes of critical appraisal different from high literature, suggesting that critics need to modify criteria to include standards other than those applied to traditional literature. At the same time, she does argue that science fiction �
�presents an eerie echo of the attitudes and interests of a pre-industrial, pre-Renaissance, pre-secular, pre-individualistic culture” (Russ), suggesting a similarity of thematic content with high literary works. Although the comparison to science fiction is useful, David Trotter argues that detective fiction is “the most frequently and the most intensively theorised of all popular genres. It suits the hermeneutic requirements of almost any form of theoretic enquiry you care to imagine: narratology, Marxism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction. The emergence of cultural studies has if anything reinforced the prevailing assumption that to think critically about detective fiction, or indeed any other popular genre, is to think theoretically” (66).