Maps and Legends by Michael Chabon
Hardback, 200 pages, £13.99, McSweeney's Publishing
*
reviewed by Niall Harrison
The title of Michael Chabon's first collection of non-fiction is taken from one of the shortest pieces in the book, a brief essay about growing up in the planned community of Columbia, Maryland in the late sixties and early seventies. There is a literal map described, a partial streetmap that Chabon acquired from the city Exhibit Center, and was fascinated by, for its relation to an incomplete reality. Many of the street names alluded to the work of American writers and poets, but to Chabon they were most notable for referring to places that hadn't been built yet. "They were like magic spells," he writes, "each one calibrated to call into being one particular stretch of blacktop, sidewalk, and lawn, and no other" (31). Chabon then describes growing up, and feeling disillusioned about some of the lessons he had taken from life in Columbia, such as the extent to which America is racially integrated. Still and all, he says, he remembers the Exhibit Centre map with fondness, “however provisional” it and Columbia proved to be, and he attributes this fondness in part to the way the map steered him into the literary world. I'm not sure the word "legend" appears anywhere in the essay other than the title, but in that context it seems clear to me that it refers both to the literary legends -- the stories -- implicit in the map, and the legend of his own youth that Chabon is creating, not least because Maps and Legends, as a book, is divided between those two subjects.
Most of the biographical material is gathered together towards the end of the book. "My Back Pages", first published in The New York Review of Books as "On 'The Mysteries of Pittsburgh'" (2005) describes the genesis of Chabon's first novel, written as part of an MFA program when Chabon was in his early twenties. For a genre reader, it makes sometimes poignant, sometimes frustrating reading. "I had," he recalls, "been struggling to find a way to accomodate my taste for the fiction I had been reading with the greatest pleasure for the better part of my life -- fantasy, horror, crime, and science fiction -- to the way that I had come to feel about the English language, which was that it and I seemed to have something going. [...] somehow, my verbal ambition and my ability felt hard to frame or fulfill within the context of traditional genre fiction" (148-9). It would be churlish to make the point too strenuously, given the books we did get, but it's hard not to feel a little wistfulness for the books that might have been if Chabon had made that extra push to frame or fulfill right at the start. I want to read his novel about Percival Lowell exploring the canals of Mars. (I feel a similar wistfulness for the second novel that never was, though it doesn’t sound like sf. Fountain City is described in another essay here as being "about utopian dreamers, ecological activists, an Israeli spy, a gargantuan Florida real estate deal, the education of an architect, the perfect baseball park, Paris, French cooking [...] lost paradises, lost cities, the loss of the Temple, the loss of a brother to AIDS; and the concomitant dream of Restoration and Rebuilding." It may well be that the novel would have been, as Chabon puts it, a mess; but it sounds as though it would have been a glorious mess.) And when Chabon notes that "Most science fiction seemed to be written for people who already liked science fiction; I wanted to write stories for anyone, anywhere, living at any time in the history of the world. (Twenty-two, I was twenty-two!)" (149), all I can think, in response to that parenthetical, is: quite. Or possibly: twenty-two-year-old Michael Chabon, you twit.
Most of the other essays that can be glossed as fitting into the "Legends" part of the collection -- "Diving into the Wreck" (which first appeared in Swing, although the frustratingly incomplete publication history gives no date), the above-mentioned essay about writing his second novel; "Recipe for Life" (2000), a short piece about golems and their relation to his fiction; "Golems I Have Known", the text of a playfully fictitious biographical talk given in 2003 and 2004, plus an afterword -- are relatively minor. The other really substantive personal essay is "Imaginary Homelands", chunks of which are recycled from a piece called "Guidebook to a Land of Ghosts" that appeared in Civilization in 1997 and caused a certain amount of controversy. The original essay described Chabon's discovery of a copy of Say it in Yiddish, a phrasebook edited by Beatrice and Uriel Weinrich, and the "absurd poignance" (176) it inspired in him, in part due to its (it seemed) inherently counterfactual nature. The book was first published in 1958, "a full ten years after the founding of the country that turned its back once and for all on the Yiddish language [...] It seemed an entirely futile effort on the part of its authors, a gesture of embittered hope, of valedictory daydreaming, of a utopian impulse turned cruel and ironic" (177). Hence, fairly obviously, the genesis of the novel that became the Hugo-, Nebula-, Locus- and Sidewise Award-winning The Yiddish Policemen's Union. What sticks in my mind about the essay is not the controversy it records – some Yiddish speakers took exception to what they felt was Chabon’s characterisation of them as adherents to a dead language – but the additional observations it includes about Chabon's development of a writer. Chabon uses the idea of an imaginary homeland to talk about his own search for somewhere he doesn't feel "like a stranger" (170). He notes that the traditional Passover promise of "Next year in Jerusalem" was to him, growing up after the establishment of Israel, "troublesome, puzzling, even a source of embarrassment" (175), and that Israel itself, when he visited provided no homecoming. At the same time, he recalls how, as an English major, his attempts at science fiction met with bafflement, polite or sniffy -- "'I hate science fiction,' went another frequently offered bit of helpful criticism, 'so there's nothing I can really do to help you with this'" (189). And ultimately he links the two, explaining that he turned his back on Judaism and genre at the same time, and that The Yiddish Policemen's Union stemmed, in part, from a desire to rediscover both those elements, and "make myself a home in my imagination" (190). In this light, it is very hard not to see the novel as the culmination of a journey, as an arrival at a destination deferred back in the Spring of 1985.
Perhaps surprisingly, given Chabon's prominent association with the form, Maps and Legends contains only four essays on comics, and none of them are terribly substantive. Two are introductions to other books – “Landsmen of the Lost”, which functionally enumerates the virtues and limitations of Ben Katchor’s Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer (1996); and “Thoughts on the Death of Will Eisner”, which I doubt added much to Bob Andleman’s Will Eisner: a Spirited Life (2005). “Kid’s Stuff” is a revised transcript of a keynote speech delivered at the 2004 Eisner Awards Ceremony, and puts forward an argument for, essentially, YA comics. The most interesting of the four, and the only original essay in Maps and Legends, is “The Killer Hook”, which discusses Howard Chaykin’s early-eighties dystopia American Flagg! It’s the first piece I’ve discussed so far that illustrates Chabon’s virtues as a critic. He delivers his context generously yet lightly, locating Chaykin’s comic relative to the futures of Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination and the New Wave, and describing how it influenced -- or at least prefigured -- works such as Blade Runner, The Dark Knight Returns, and Watchmen. He is specific about his claims -- "I'm not arguing that Chaykin invented dystopian comics or cyberpunk, only that he articulated a set of tropes and 'packaged' them in a way that brought them to durable, ravishing life" (103) -- and precise in his evidence, from the stylistic innovations that make American Flagg! an embodiment of a dystopian aesthetic, to the fact that "The characteristic Chaykin facial expression is the raised eyebrow" (102). When Chabon’s criticism fails to convince, it’s usually because these strengths become unbalanced. In "The Other James" -- yet another revised introduction, this one from Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories, a best of M.R. James published in 1999 -- he links James to everything from the work of Lovecraft to the self-conscious playfulness of "the postmodernists", via Poe, The Blair Witch Project, and David Cronenburg. It ends up feeling a little forced, almost self-parodic. Sometimes, too, he lets a fondness for biographical criticism get the better of him. In an otherwise fine essay about Sherlock Holmes and the fan culture that's grown up around Arthur Conan Doyle's most famous creation ("Fan Fictions", which grafts together material from two essays published in The New York Review of Books in 2005), for instance, Chabon's projection of Doyle's relationships with other men in his life into the fiction fails to entirely convince. On the other hand, albeit a little counterintuitively, his argument that the literary techniques Conan Doyle deploys in the Holmes stories means that they invite such biographical analysis is solid, and his suggestion that Sherlockian fan fiction "led directly [...] to the contemporary, largely Web-based phenomenon that has devotees of various television programs, cartoons, and film series presenting their own prose versions of the adventures, histories, and sex lives of characters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Xena: Warrior Princess" (55) (a rare imprecise sentence, that) is worth thinking about as an alternative to the canonical, Star Trek-centric history of fanfic. And in the light of "Imaginary Homelands", Chabon's way of expressing Conan Doyle's success in defining a literary space to inhabit seems revealing: Conan Doyle found, says Chabon, "a way to locate a land of adventure" (50).
The two most useful pieces of criticism in the book are the extended considerations of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials ("On Daemons & Dust", 2004) and Cormac McCarthy's The Road ("Dark Adventure", 2007), because they tackle works which, while much discussed, have not yet been worn smooth by a consensus interpretation in the way that Holmes has. Both demonstrate Chabon's broad range of reference, and his impatience with genre categorisation. He identifies allusions to Moorcock and Nabokov with equal confidence, and it's a pleasant surprise to see him use and attribute Clute's concept of "thinning" at the start of "On Daemons & Dust", before insisting on its application to literature in general: "Epic fantasy distills and abstracts the idea of thinning -- maps it, so to speak; but at its best the genre is no less serious or literary than any other" (68). And his reading of the book itself is thorough, enjoyable, and challenging. He spends a number of pages providing a beautifully comprehensible plot summary which, in passing, anatomizes the alternate-historical nature of Lyra's world -- its economics and technology -- in a manner that insists on the importance of such elements to the success or failure of the whole. He also suggests that thinning is central to His Dark Materials in a manner unlike most fantasy, in that it is figured not as something done to a landscape, but inescapably done to a person as they grow (while noting that Pullman argues that it is, on balance, a good thing). Tellingly, this reading minimizes the critique of religion built into the books, arguing for the primacy and ultimate triumph of "sheer, unstoppable storytelling drive" (83). "The secret story [Pullman] has told," Chabon insists, "is not one about the eternal battle between the forces of idealist fundamentalism and materialist humanism. It is a story about the ways in which adults betray children" (84).
As with American Flagg!, for Chabon a mark of His Dark Material’s success is that its style reflects its content: he links the increasing complexity and density of the story with the process of growing up. One of the interesting aspects of "Dark Adventure" is a parallel argument that post-apocalyptic literature cannot achieve this synthesis. It is trapped by a "paradox of language", that "to annihilate the world in prose one must simultaneously write it into being". Chabon demonstrates, with admirable clarity, how this tension is visible in The Road both at the level of the sentence, and at the level of the overall architecture of the novel, specifically in the tonal dissonance between the body of the book and the ending. I'm less convinced by the essay's other major argument, about genre. After an introductory preamble that seems extraordinarily (if enjoyably) determined not just to avoid any of the sins that land mainstream-published reviews of genre books in the "As Others See Us" department of Ansible, but to actively refute such sins, noting that "Cormac McCarthy would have suffered no risk to his literary reputation and presented no insurmountable difficulty to his large mainstream readership, therefore, if he had written a science-fiction novel called The Road about a father and son making their painful way across the carbonized waste of a post-holocaust America" (109-10), he goes on to argue that "The Road is most profitably read, however, neither as parable nor as science fiction, and fundamentally it marks not a departure from but a return to McCarthy's most brilliant genre work, combined in a manner we have not seen since Blood Meridian: adventure and Gothic horror" (116). Chabon eloquently makes the case for the importance of an understanding of McCarthy's back-catalogue, and an understanding of the workings of horror, to a full reading of The Road, but to my mind he doesn't make a similarly compelling case for downgrading the importance of the sf elements to such a reading. Indeed, his thorough explication of those elements seems to me to make a case for reading the novel as horror grounded in sf; for instance, he draws comparisons with Stephen King's The Stand and Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, but describes both books simply as horror, where I would consider them sf horror. There's a similar, if to my mind more justifiable, carefully non-stigmatizing refusal of sf in "On Daemons & Dust" -- "Pullman's use of such avant-garde scientific notions as the multiverse and dark matter [...] might incline one to slap the label of 'science fiction' onto his work [...] but the quantum physics in His Dark Materials is mostly employed as a rationale for the standard world-hopping that heroes and heroines of fantasy have been engaging in from Gilgamesh onward" (73). Indeed, if I have a reservation about both "Dark Adventure" and "On Daemons & Dust" it's that the nature of the works under consideration makes it easy for Chabon to give more weight to his professed love of the borderlands of the literary map than to his equally professed love of its genre territories. There is no such thing as a pure genre work, but I would be fascinated to read Chabon's take on a writer whose work's science-fictionality is less amenable to reframing as something else: Ian McDonald, say, or Gwyneth Jones.
To be fair to Chabon, what I'm characterising here as a sort of reluctance to commit fully to genre is, I think, at least partly a matter of audience. For a genre reader, one of the striking things about Maps and Legends is how often it becomes apparent that while Chabon positions himself on “our” side (accepting that an “us” and “them” distinction is itself inherently frustrating), he speaks for us, and not to us. Even in the collection's opening essay, the purest and most forceful articulation of Chabon’s defence of genre, it’s noticeable. "Trickster in a Suit of Lights" combines elements of Chabon’s introduction to Best American Short Stories 2005 with the writing that probably kick-started his current high profile among genre readers, the introductions to McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales (2002) and McSweeny's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories (2004). From the opening sentence ("Entertainment has a bad name"), to the infamous assertion that the dominance of a particular kind of mainstream story in our world is equivalent to the dominance of nurse romances in a hypothetical world, to a portrayal of "serious" writers and critics that I'm sure even some in-genre critics would find one-sided, it is a heartening, vigorous defense of genre’s right to exist and potential for greatness. But most of the time he’s not talking to a genre audience, and sometimes he’s not even talking to readers of any kind. At one point, Chabon states that he would like to argue "for the common-sense proposition that, in constructing our fictional maps as short-story writers, we are foolish to restrict ourselves to one type or category" (17).
In a sense, once again, I'm carping. It is, after all, unarguable that there will be some readers and writers for whom Chabon’s definition of “entertainment”, as found in literature, as "everything pleasurable that arises from the encounter of an attentive mind with a page of literature" (14) is not already an obvious truth; see the MFA student encounters noted earlier. But the occasional evidence that Chabon has a particular audience usually has the unfortunate effect of highlighting the patchwork nature of Maps and Legends. Some attempt has clearly been made to assemble these disparate writings into something that reads like a single book, and with some success -- the first and last essays both invoke the idea of writers as Tricksters, and the sequencing of the other pieces often throws up links between them that might otherwise have been hidden; the discussion of growing up in "On Daemons & Dust", for example, segues neatly into the discussion of YA comics in "Kid's Stuff" -- but there are still a good few disorienting ruts and bumps. Of course, in some ways that’s an inevitable feature of this type of book, and it could even be deliberate; you could argue that it’s style embodying content, the uneven reading experience reflecting Chabon's own chafing against his culture, and literary culture in general. After all, given Chabon's attraction to borderlands and the blank spaces on maps, it seems a sure thing that even the solace apparently found in writing The Yiddish Policemen's Union will be only temporary, that he'll get restless, and head off again for somewhere new. It's his right, and I'll follow him; and I guess my hope is that the quest embodied in Maps and Legends is successful, and that one day he and I and everyone else will inhabit the same literary space, and all be comfortable calling it home.
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Niall Harrison's reviews have appeared in NYRSF, Foundation, and Interzone, among others. He blogs at Torque Control.
I'd be curious to hear more about how you view THE ROAD as science fiction. I tend to agree with Maureen McHugh's take on the novel at http://maureenmcq.blogspot.com/2007/07/cormac-mccarthys-road.html
Posted by: Ted | October 01, 2008 at 07:12 PM
That's interesting, because I also agree with that post. We must be agreeing with different bits of it. I agree that The Road isn't genre science fiction, and won't satisfy if someone tries to read it as genre science fiction. But it's set in the future after some kind of apocalyptic event, which to me clearly makes it some kind of science fiction. Chabon's argument seems to be that the science fiction elements are props, deployed as part of a strategy to evoke horror, and that it is therefore a horror novel. To which I say, fine, but if you can't get that horror without the sf elements, if that horror is specific to the sf premise -- and I think that it is, in the case of The Road -- then it is also an sf novel.
Posted by: Niall | October 02, 2008 at 10:52 AM
I tend to think that arguments over what is and is not SF are utter wastes of time. The reason why the issue comes up is that 'science fiction' lacks conceptual clarity; it means different things to different people.
For precisely these reasons, it's not at all clear to me that it's a useful critical term. a useful critical term is one that deepens one's understanding of a text but I'm not sure how my understanding of The Road is made deeper (or more shallow for that matter) by fixing the term 'science fiction' to it.
Posted by: Jonathan M | October 02, 2008 at 11:37 AM
I'm not sure how my understanding of The Road is made deeper (or more shallow for that matter) by fixing the term 'science fiction' to it.
Calling The Road a "horror novel" tells me something about its affect and goals. Calling The Road a "science fiction horror novel" tells me something about its affect, its goals, and the likely strategies it uses to achieve those goals. Both terms suggest other works it might be useful to compare The Road to. So it doesn't deepen your understanding, but it's a useful shorthand for a number of different aspects of the conversation.
Posted by: Niall | October 02, 2008 at 02:23 PM
Is it a useful shorthand though? these kinds of theoretical shorthands tend to rest upon the ability of the reader to work out what the term is short-hand for.
For example, if I were to say that the Road is a Marxist novel or a work of 'Mundane SF' then I think that an informed reader would take something away from that jargon. But I'm not sure that 'science fiction horror' does.
What is the role of SF in The Road? well... you could write a story about a man and his son wandering across Darfur or provinicial Afghanistan and have the same interplay of hope, fear and love (consider Heart of Darkness).
The most obvious SF elements are the tropes used to underline the horror of the setting; the Mad Max homage, the cannibalism, the talk of ruined cities and stuff like that. But again, given that Heart of Darkness did horror in a similar way without the use of SF tropes suggest that the SF elements here aren't doing that much work.
The only SF element that does real heavy lifting is the suggestion that EVERYTHING is gone. That there's nothing 'out there' to hold on to and to hope for (which explains the elevation of the child into some kind of mystical figure despite there being no real basis for this outside of the psychological uplift that comes with the feeling of exceptionalism and meaning that would stem from protecting such an entity).
To me, the decision to remove all hope from the world is the heart of The Road... that is a purely SF trope. Heart of Darkness showed the savagery of humanity when it's just a few hundred miles from civilisation. It's like that Louis CK bit :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8VlUFpqCqU
(@1 minute 25)
Heart of Darkness is powerful because it isn't an image of some post-apocalyptic humanity. It's just some people who are a boat-ride away from police and courts and families and religion and so on.
By contrast, the hideousness of The Road's setting is very different as the implication is that you wouldn't have cannibalism and blood cults unless everything was gone.
The horror of the setting of The Road is very different to that of the horror in Blood Meridian (which is a lot closer to that of Heart of Darkness) and I think that that horror is purely SF. I also think it's less powerful for it... as CK suggests if you were alone on the planet there's all kinds of stuff you'd do that you wouldn't if civilisation was out there somewhere.
So yeah... I'm not sure what the labeling of the Road as SF actually brings you. I think that the SF elements of the Road are quite precise in terms of the work they do and they need to be unpacked quite a bit beyond a simple label.
Posted by: Jonathan M | October 02, 2008 at 04:19 PM