Shaenon Garrity has a post about the comics-related aspects of Michael Chabon’s Kavalier and Clay. She points out that the main characters in the novel invented every comics innovation worth inventing because they were just that cool, according to Chabon. Then she notes:
Also, just to put on my irritable-feminist hat for the day, I’ve noticed a tendency in fiction where these superhuman feats of intellect and inspiration are only considered plausible in male characters. While Joe and Sammy come up with every brilliant innovation in the history of American comic books, their lady Rosa Saks gets to be… the second-best artist of romance comics. Sure, in real life there weren’t many women during that period drawing great comic books, but neither were there any men who simultaneously combined all the best qualities of Siegel and Shuster, Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, and Will Eisner in their prime. Why must our ridiculous wish-fulfillment fantasy characters be confined to fanfiction.net?
I sympathize with the feminist critique. But I think you might want to be careful what you wish for. After all, Kavalier and Clay is in fact aimed at recuperating and/or glorifying a (arguably) minority group already. And speaking as a POJ (Person of Jew), I have to say that the gratuitous, oleaginous ethnic boosting in which Chabon engages is so viscerally nauseating that I fervently wish he’d just ignored my people altogether. Oh…oh, their so…ethnic! And their pasts are so colorful! Their genius…it is so distinctively Jewish — and therefore so American! How I love my country and the cute little mensches who inhabit it!
My point is, having Michael Chabon take up your cause is just not necessarily the thing for which to wish. You’re better off with the fan-fic folk taking care of your wish-fulfillment fantasies, Shaenon. They write better.
The moral of Kavalier and Clay is that everything important in the world was invented by Jews, gays, and gay Jews. Which is actually true.
I’m fine with that, as long as we stipulate that one of those important things was not “Kavalier and Clay.”
Feminist fiction did go through that annoying phase of superwomen doing everything awesome back in the ’80s. Remember “Clan of the Cave Bear”? The thing is, everyone realized “Clan of the Cave Bear” was just porn for women in power suits and they didn’t give it a Pulitzer Prize.
(I do like Kavalier and Clay, though Chabon really needed an editor who was willing to cut the back third off every sentence.)
Well, and of course there’s Wonder Woman. Where superwomen do everything awesome while getting tied up.
Did Kavalier and Clay get a Pulitzer Prize? That would be depressing if it weren’t so utterly unsurprising.
I’m not feeling too sympathetic with Garrity’s feminist argument. (Although in all fairness, I don’t think Garrity’s post should be taken as more than a random off the cuff aside)
For one thing, it seems to be saying that the artist’s role is, foremost, to write propganda, so that a book about the friendship between two men must be rewritten, despite the artist’s vision, towards an agenda.
Furthermore, it seems to demand some sort of soviet revisionist reading of history. Apparently, if the artist is to take any liberties with historical fiction at all, he or she is obligated to take every and all liberties possible in order to match whatever progressive goal liberals have in mind.
So all our historical fiction must be like the Flinstones, with historical characters preaching modern values, and acting like good liberal modern people, or something.
Hey Pallas. Nice to see you round these parts again.
I think it’s reasonable to point out that male power fantasies end up with Pulitzer prizes while female power fantasies tend to be treated with scorn.
Chabon ascribed to his composite genius of the forties storytelling techniques that were not developed until the sixties… in particular he appropriated the life and work of Steranko , and didn’t properly credit him. All in all, a fake version of comics history that given Chabon’s popularity might supplant the real history… feeble and unimaginative.
Chabon is a great writer…when it’s non-fiction. I love his book of essays “Maps and Legends” but always have trouble with his stuff when it comes to fiction. Maybe it’s because when he does non-fiction he can just say what he thinks, instead of not-so-subtly repeating it in his books ad-nasuem until he is sure we get it. Man, I sound mean.
K&C is a thrilling, crazy, reckless book that displays a writerly love of writing that I found fairly intoxicating. I found it a pleasure to read, and, more recently, to teach. So nuts to you naysayers.
Hey Charles; nice to see you round these parts.
I have to point out, though, that for all my scoffing, at least I didn’t call Chabon “writerly.” That’s just mean.
I think…ok, I didn’t really like K&C at all, so I am not the best person to be rehearsing why it deserved the Pulitzer, but I think the point Shaenon dings him about historical accuracy on is actually very useful for executing the part of the book’s overall conceit that involves American masculinity: he’s not really representing a particular historical moment: he’s representing all the things from History that create and constitute some cultural phenomenon — in this case the escapist power fantasy of superhero extraordinariness, which historically has been more meaningful for men than women.
Chabon sets up the parameters of the fantasy and then debunks it in the Radioman section, where we learn that adventure and power and revenge and justice aren’t as simple as we thought they’d be.
He’s working with the idea of “power fantasy in American masculinity”, not any specific historical power fantasy; but there’s a limit to the liberties he can take without losing the referent. If he’d just used a simple historical one-to-one metaphor, there wouldn’t have been as much space to let the conceit play out.
I don’t think it would have worked with women characters, not because Chabon didn’t want to do women characters or didn’t think you could make a believable power fantasy with women characters or even say something interesting about masculinity using women characters, but because 1) the book riffs on the masculine (super)heroism fantasy that is equally operable in comic books and actually existing war and that has been very powerful in creating an idea of what it means to be an American Man and 2) power fantasies, and fantasy in general (as the pre-dominance of women writers in fanfic will attest) work differently for conventionally gendered women and men and therefore you can’t easily substitute one for the other.
I think the gay themes are one trick he uses to get some of the gender-identity issues into the book without actually hampering the historical conceit about masculinity. He does deal with gender in the book; just not “feminism”.
It’s just a very literary way to put a conceit together and I’m not sure I can think of a lot of predecessors to Chabon who manage to merge this postmodern notion of history with the readability and “story-full-ness” of modernist fiction to this extent. It’s the offspring of Saul Bellow and Thomas Pynchon — and that’s at least part of why he got the prize.
Pulitzer Fiction’s hardly the worst on gender: 1/3 of its recipients have been women writers. Shaenon’s right, though, that literary women writers just don’t seem to write power fantasies — or get them published — but it really is an aside (and probably was intended as such) with regards to K&C.