Michael Chabon's America

by Jesse Kavadlo

  A charitable reading of Myers’s attack on Chabon might see it as a reaction to the scandal of fiction and its outrageous temerity in handling and thus profaning the real stuff of history—particularly the history of the Holocaust—the “real suffering, which is a form of sacred truth” demanding the “scrupulous historical accuracy that fiction trivializes” (Scanlan 506). Less charitably, however, one might see it as a small-minded attempt to legislate vital and ultimately private questions of personal and communal identity, as the enraged posturing of a patriarchal figure displeased with what he sees as the misconduct of the young. A follower of Jewish American literary history is forcibly reminded of Irving Howe’s 1972 attack on Philip Roth in the pages of Commentary. However, for all of the unpleasant tartness of Myers’s censure, he does put his finger precisely on the central thematic drive of not just Gentlemen of the Road, but of all of Chabon’s fiction.

  Myers dismissively describes Gentlemen of the Road as being uninterested in “the formulation of ideas,” but this is in fact exactly what it is concerned with, exploring in the guise of a simple heroic adventure a group of ideas concerning how life might best be lived (582). This may seem at first counterintuitive, for surely an adventure novel is a vehicle for light entertainment rather than rational thought. However, a number of critics have recognized the ability of this and other forms of popular fiction to contain and articulate challenging ideas. Ernst Bloch, for instance, distinguishes between mass-market, best-selling material intended for passive consumption, which reinforces the overall value system of capitalist society, and what he calls “colportage.” This is a category that also includes popular works—ranging from adventure stories to fairy tales to detective novels—which are “united by their utopian charge” and are as such a persistent irritant to those who embrace the status quo (Geoghegan 58). The dream, Bloch writes, of colportage is “never again to be trapped by the routine of daily life” (“Castles” 183). It is a free literature with the potential to “preserve meanings that have been lost or are no longer officially condoned” (“Philosophical” 256). This type of writing, then, for all its apparent simplicity can be profoundly concerned with the exploration of alternatives to widely accepted yet personally stifling social norms, and is a category that seems to apply particularly well to Gentlemen of the Road. Chabon does, both here and elsewhere, incite and respond to the type of criticism put forward by Myers while attempting to formulate an alternative version of how life might be lived beyond the restraints and strictures of ethnically or religiously defined identities. In Gentlemen of the Road, he offers his readers a quest narrative that ultimately rejects communal definitions of identity, such as a monolithic Judaism, in favor of a utopian ethics of personal independence and interpersonal friendship.

  Subverting the Quest Narrative

  According to Joseph Campbell, perhaps the best known authority on the structure and signification of quest narratives, the prototypical heroic journey consists of three stages: “a separation from the world, a penetration to some source of power, and a life-enhancing return” to the community (35). The hero, and this model would apply to any hero from the Buddha to Luke Skywalker, is in some way taken out of the quotidian realities of his (or her) time and place, “the comparatively unconscious civic and tribal routines” that shape the lives of most people most of the time (23). Once separated from the restrictions and limitations inherent in this conventional life, the hero ventures into “a region of supernatural wonder” where “fabulous forces are . . . encountered and a decisive victory is won” (30). To this point, the two heroes of Gentlemen of the Road, Amram and Zelikman, a version of what Chabon calls the “central heroic duo,” correspond with reasonable fidelity to Campbell’s model (“Fan” 25). Zelikman has left his home in Regensburg, separated from his community by “violence, circumstance, the recklessness of the apostate,” and Amram has long wandered far from his home in Abyssinia in search of “the spirit of his stolen daughter, Dinah” (19, 33). While their adventures in Gentlemen of the Road are not literally supernatural, they do involve a journey into the fantastic, as represented by “the fabled kingdom of wild red-haired Jews on the western shore of the Caspian Sea,” the legendary Khazaria where “a Jew rules over other Jews as a king” (Gentlemen 22). However, at this point Chabon’s adventurers apparently depart from the standard model of the hero’s quest. For Campbell, the key point of the quest lies in its conclusion, in the hero’s return home “with the power to bestow boons on his fellow men” (30). This “return and reintegration with society” is for Campbell, “indispensable,” and is in fact the only justification for the hero’s long withdrawal from the group, which could otherwise be seen as a betrayal of social duty (36). Yet this redemptive return is precisely what Amram and Zelikman refuse to do: they belong to no community larger than that of two individuals who have “contrived to share” their solitude though the mysterious bonds of friendship (Gentlemen 196).

  Chabon is in fact at work on something different in import from the standard heroic quest, for in Gentlemen of the Road it is paradoxically a rejection of limiting notions of communal identity that is the very boon that Chabon’s adventurers win, asserting a notion of individual identity free from the bonds of communal or essential restrictions. Thus when a critic like Myers attacks Chabon for a failure to articulate a socially acceptable form of Jewishness, he is on one level perfectly correct, while simultaneously missing the point entirely.

  A Quest against Community

  Chabon’s rejection of limiting notions of personal identity in Gentlemen of the Road is primarily articulated through the novel’s main characters and their adventures. Amram and Zelikman are, firstly, two very unusual, and very different, Jews. Zelikman is a “fair-haired” Jew from Bavaria, and as such hardly corresponds to the stereotypical vision of a Semite (Gentlemen 5). Further, although related to the great rabbi Elkhanan, Zelikman is an atheist who holds that creation “occurred without divine will or intention, like the snarl of wrack and shells in a tide pool” (32). Amram is no more typically Jewish. Repeatedly described as an “African,” his skin is “lustrous as the tarnish on a copper kettle,” and while he thinks of himself as a Jew, “a son from the line of the Queen of Sheba when she lay, amid the hides of ibexes and leopards, with Solomon, David’s son,” he is no more traditionally religious than Zelikman, worshipping only “fat luck and starveling misfortune” (Gentlemen 4, 17). They could not, as one character they meet on their travels notes, “differ more,” yet neither of Chabon’s heroes correspond to the sort of normative definitions of Jewishness that Myers is proposing (Gentlemen 49). Their very difference highlights the individuality that underlies all communal definitions of identity: to be a Jew is not to be, in spite of what Myers seems to imply, a state reducible to a limited and stable set of characteristics and habits. Judith Butler has written that gender is “a kind of imitation for which there is no original,” and the same observation could be made with regard to a purported essential Jewishness, or indeed to any other form of restrictive group identification (21).

  When we first encounter Amram and Zelikman, they are engaged in the fraudulent acquisition of wealth through a series of faked duels which, interestingly, exploit the human tendency to typecast for their effectiveness: few people will put their money on the youthful stripling when he is facing the enormous “homicidal” African with his vicious-looking ax, and thus the pair’s profits when they stage Zelikman’s victory are considerable (Gentlemen 10). This money, derived from the common human inability to separate the individual from the type, is used to support their extensive but aimless wanderings: these gentlemen of the road are precisely that, possessed of no home but their journey. Once they have accidentally, and initially unwillingly, become involved in the affairs of Filaq, the orphaned daughter (masquerading as a boy) of the murdered bek, or secular king, of the Khazars, their journey takes on a more precise direction than the “Caucasian jaunt” it began as, becoming, in fact, something mu
ch closer to a quest (Gentlemen 41).

  This is in accord with the Campbellian template, as initial selfish reluctance to risk life and limb for the greater good is overcome by a desire to see wrongs righted, although Amram and Zelikman’s reluctance to help Filaq is slow to dissipate. At one point, for instance, they set off not to rescue the captured Filaq but the impiously named horse Hillel, and when they discover that Filaq has been recaptured by the army of the usurper Buljan, it is only a failure of ruthlessness, a sign of his “waning powers to live life as it must be lived” that sends Amram after her (Gentlemen 64). Amram’s capture in turn leads Zelikman to pursue an army of Muslim mercenaries, the Arsiyah, as they return to Buljan, and this set of decisions gradually involves them in Filaq’s attempt to revenge her father and restore her brother Alp (sold as a slave to the raiding Northmen) to the throne.

  The ultimate goal of this gradually developing quest is closely related to a rejection of discrimination on the grounds of religious and communal identity. Buljan has betrayed his people by striking a deal with the Northmen for support in return for euphemistic “trading rights,” a license to rape, pillage, and plunder the largely Muslim people of littoral Khazaria. This is justified by similar atrocities committed against Jews in other Muslim states: if “Jews are burned” in Baghdad, Muslims should “receive the same treatment” in Khazaria (Gentlemen 94). The journey thus becomes an attempt to restore the lost ideal of the Khazaria ruled by Filaq’s father, a place of “kindness and consideration” for all of the bek’s subjects “sworn to the solitary god of the clear blue sky, whether that god was called Tengri, Jehovah or Allah” (88, 80). In place of this utopian era of interdenominational peace, Buljan’s rule is based on schism, discrimination, and interfaith violence. In theory, if Amram and Zelikman can help restore Khazaria’s lost state of grace, its prelapsarian freedom from ethnic and religious strife, then they will have granted their community, broadly construed, a boon indeed. As Joseph Hirkanos, a Radanite or traveling Jewish merchant who has the misfortune to arrive in Khazaria in the midst of the rebellion wonders, “If the Khazars, that tolerant and pragmatic people, had fallen prey to doctrinal strife, what hope was there for the world?” (Gentlemen 107).

  However, the ultimate results of Filaq’s rebellion are by no means certain to be positive: Zelikman for one has his doubts. The rebels are motivated, he argues, by “greed, religion and other such vanities,” and this is but one more instance of the tendency of groups of people, as opposed to individuals, to behave with terrible, cruel stupidity: “All the evil in the world derives from the actions of men acting in a mass against other masses of men” (Gentlemen 96). The individual may, according to this worldview, be capable of good, but people acting in concert—in other words as a community—are not. Zelikman’s belief in this pessimistic philosophy leads him to abandon, if only temporarily, the quest, and also Amram, who has decided to see the thing through to its end. However, on the verge of returning with the Radanites to Regensburg in order to be reconciled with his father, and by implication to be reintegrated with the Jewish community, Zelikman finds that he cannot abandon his friend. For him, the relationship of two individuals to each other carries more weight than the relationship of the individual to the broader community.

  The ultimate resolution of the plot of Gentlemen of the Road continues to develop the theme of individual resistance to communal identity. When Amram and Zelikman realize that they are unable to defeat Buljan by conventional means, they decide instead to exploit the peculiar leadership arrangements of the Khazars to do so. They seek out the kagan, or religious leader, whose “word is sacred” but who lives “in imperial isolation” and reigns “at once absolute and powerless for a strict term” until he is “strangled with a silk garrote” (Gentlemen 156, 113). No clearer submission of the individual to the social role is imaginable than this, as Zachariah, the person, is condemned to life imprisonment and eventual execution as the kagan. Zachariah agrees to order Buljan to abdicate—his command is absolute and unquestionable—but only on the condition that Amram and Zelikman fake his death and help him escape the city and thus his socially ordained fate. He is next seen in the guise of “a huge, fat Radanite with an unaccountably regal bearing” on his way out of the country (Gentlemen 177). In return for aiding the rebellion the kagan demands the freedom to live as an individual rather than as an embodiment of his social role.

  Filaq’s fate is, however, less kind: she must renounce her own identity and assume that of her brother Alp, who has died in captivity, in order to destroy Buljan and save the Khazars. Her renunciation of identity is staged by Chabon in terms that emphasize her loss of independent agency. She must give up the “the giant illuminated Ibn Khordadbeh,” or The Book of Roads and Kingdoms, “that had so enchanted her as a child, with its maps and preposterous anatomies and flat-foot descriptions of miracles and wonders, page after page of cities to visit and people to live among and selves to invent, out there, beyond the margins of her life, along the roads and in the kingdoms” (Gentlemen 167). In place of this freedom of the road, the very type of freedom to wander, explore, and experience that Zelikman and Amram embody so clearly, she must be content with the “paltry self that fortune had chosen for her” (Gentlemen 169). Filaq eventually accomplishes her goal, revenging her family and saving her people from divisive tyranny. But the price is high: she becomes Alp, “bek and kagan of Khazaria,” uniting secular and religious power in her person, but in the process losing her real self: her “true name” is a secret known only to her, and after a night of love with Zelikman, “no one will ever touch her as a woman again” (Gentlemen 195). Zachariah escapes his social role; she has become hers.

  Amram and Zelikman represent, in the terms established by Chabon’s tale, an alternative to this subsumption of self into its social position for the greater good of the community. Zelikman refuses to return to Regensburg, instead sending his elderly father a “florid letter of apology” as the price for the Radanites’ assistance during the rebellion (Gentlemen 193). Amram in turn refuses to stay in Khazaria with his lover, Flower of Life, and the two heroes end the novel riding out of the city together, “each of them wrapped deep in his thick fur robes and in the solitude that they had somehow contrived to share” (Gentlemen 196). This conclusion offers a different form of life to that delineated by Filaq’s submission to her family, her history, her culture, her religion, and her people. While pure solipsistic isolation, the ultimate loneliness of the individual cut off from the world, is not a viable option, the unity-in-separateness of the type of friendship imagined here is. In fact, for the atheist Zelikman, it is only through friendship that “the sound of prayer,” of, in other words, organized and codified religion, can find “some kind of grateful echo” in his heart (Gentlemen 78). The friendship of independent individuals, or as he has written elsewhere “wildly limited men who find in each other, and only in each other, the stuff, sense, and passion of one whole man,” is Chabon’s community, and his religion (“Fan” 27).

  Intertextuality and the Rejection of Tradition

  This insistence on resistance to socially constructed forms of selfhood is carried out not just through the internal events of the novel, but also through a clear set of intertextual references that associate Gentlemen of the Road, its characters, and their adventures with a canonical series of genre novels that also reveal a mistrust of traditional forms of social identity. While “intertextuality” is perhaps one of the more slippery terms in the literary-critical lexis, I am using it here in a relatively straightforward structuralist sense. By this I mean that a literary work exists not in isolation, but as part of a larger system (indeed, as part of many larger systems) of cultural signification. By explicitly or implicitly referring to specific parts of these systems, a literary text can activate particular responses or resonances in an attentive reader. As William Irwin has pointed out, this is very similar in many ways to what has more traditionally, and perhaps more comprehensibly, been desc
ribed as “allusion and influence” (228). This process, whatever we call it, works on a number of levels.

  For instance, by situating Gentlemen of the Road in relation to the broad genre of swashbuckling adventure fiction, Chabon accomplishes a number of things. Firstly, adventure fiction, Chabon has argued, acts not to “reinforce or validate the dominant social order but to transcend it, abandon it,” and this feature of the genre corresponds very clearly to the themes of resistance to social order articulated in the novel (“Fan” 37). Secondly, Chabon’s choice of genre is in itself a rebellious assertion of individual freedom in the face of communal imposition of identity. If literary authors do not, traditionally, write adventure fiction, this is perhaps doubly true of Jewish literary authors. Chabon’s working title for the novel—and he says, the “true title”—was Jews with Swords, but when he told people this “it made them want to laugh” (Afterword 197). This is not, as Chabon acknowledges, an unusual reaction, perhaps arising from what Royal describes as the close association of Jewish American literature with a particular and limited set of cultural experiences such as immigration (“Unfinalized” 7). The antisocial adventures of two roving bandits in a nearly legendary Jewish kingdom lies outside of the expected range of Jewish American narrative. And finally, this intertextuality activates a range of responses based on our previous encounters with and knowledge of the genre as a whole. Zelikman’s aversion to bloodshed, for instance, and his resulting tendency to use some sort of chloroform on his adversaries may strike a reader of adventure fiction as being fundamentally different from the novel’s more traditionally sanguinary intertexts: Conan and his generic brethren, for instance, have no reservations about killing, and this tells us as readers that while we are dealing with an adventure story, it is different in significant ways from other adventure stories we may have read.