Houdini and Chutzpah

Permit me 500 words to summarize a 625 page novel, before diving into some analysis.

I just finished reading “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay” by Michael Chabon. The title characters are Jewish cousins from Prague and Brooklyn, respectively. Josef, the Czech, escapes 1930s Europe just before his hometown begins corralling its Jews – including his mother, father, and younger brother Thomas – for shipment to concentration camps. His parents send him off with their blessing, but Josef exits Europe only with the help of his mentor Bernard Kornblum, a magician and escape artist. Kornblum ships Kavalier out of the country in the pinewood coffin of the Golem of Prague, a much-venerated mess of mud from the Vltava River.

Kavalier arrives in Brooklyn and shacks up with his cousins, the Klaymans, in Brooklyn. Samuel Klayman – who Anglicizes himself into Sam Clay – already works in the mailroom of a publishing house that peddles cheap novelties through pulpy comic books. An avid reader of the comics, Sam enlists his cousin, now become Joe – who, it turns out, had studied art and drawing at a prestigious Academy in Prague – to help him develop a superhero pitch in the vein of the recently-popularized Superman comics. Joe's first drawing depicts a film noir Golem walking down a moonlit street of Prague. The cover art of their inaugural issue, for which they enlist several cohorts, depicts a spandex-clad superhero called the Escapist slugging Adolf Hitler.

The boys make it big, meet Orson Welles and Salvador Dali, and become legends of their genre. Joe is plagued by an escapist's guilt and saves all of his money for the imaginary day when his family will come join him in America. He spends years working to secure the passage of his younger brother until, tragically, the boat carrying him is sunk by U-Boats in the Atlantic. Meanwhile, Sam cultivates a romantic relationship with a man named Tracy Bacon, who plays the Escapist on the character's radio serial, but Bacon later dies off-page. Joe's girlfriend, Rosa, becomes pregnant, but after Pearl Harbor Joe enlists in the Navy and leaves in the night, unaware of the impending child.

While spending time in Antarctica on a remote base, Joe nearly loses his mind, learns through Rosa's letters that she has married Sam, and sees photographs of the child they have named Thomas and call their own. He eventually emerges after decades of living in the Empire State Building, carefully drawing a 5,000-page graphic novel about the Golem of Prague. Joe meets Thomas and re-enters the lives of his cousin and girlfriend. Sam is publicly outed as a homosexual in the Kefauver hearings on juvenile delinquency; The Golem's pinewood coffin inexplicably arrives at the Clay's suburban home in Long Island; and Sam chooses to move to Los Angeles, leaving Joe and Rosa to raise Thomas.

The tropes of “Kavalier and Clay” include Jewishness, the Golem, homosexuality/homosociality, superheroes, and Harry Houdini. Old world Jewish mysticism, embodied by the Golem and which Joe explores in reading the Kaballah, collides with the new world fascination with death-defying, hyper-strong crime fighters.

The Golem – a figure forged from the mud of Prague's great river; imbued with magical, super powers to defend the Jewish people from Evil; who enables Joe's escape from Europe – recurs so frequently that we cannot afford not to dissect its presence. The Golem appears at the beginning, as literally the vessel of Josef's escape. It reappears as his first attempt to draw a superhero, that particular breed of person who works to save good from evil. It returns as the subject for Joe's ultimate comic book, the story that prompts Sam to say that he wants to return to the business, which subsequently causes Joe to purchase the dying Empire Comics. Finally it shows up, unannounced, on the doorstep of Joe's new suburban home. Heavier than before, this mysterious crate has found Joe, its kindred spirit, and now rests with the wait of a soul.

Harry Houdini. The Golem. Impossible escapes. Wondrous feats of strength. Destroying the Nazis one panel at a time. Joe uses the comic book form to act out his agonies and frustrations over the family he left in Prague and the holocaust. Art for social change, he hopes his work will catalyze American youth toward war with Europe. Whether his small books can make such change he remains uncertain and usually despondent. The magic of the Golem remains symbolic, mythical – as impossible as the Escapist's adventures, tying tank-guns into knots. The magic of Houdini, however, is of a different realm. From Kornblum Joe learns the tricks and the details, the slights-of-hand and the misdirections that allow the human, material, and physical to appear metaphysical. Comic books remain the mythical, Golem-esque stories that may represent collective fears and allay misery and hopelessness. Escapism, indeed, becomes Joe's favorite reason for reading them. And yet this escape does not produce change. Joe's escape does not end the war; not even his joining the American armed forces can he help, doomed as he is to the Antarctic post. Even Houdini's escape is all flair, a show that has no substance behind the curtain.

How can I relate these observations to Chabon's book? His language often veers on the hyperbolic, describing the microcosmic feelings and moments of his characters' lives. He often speaks of the sound of one's own blood in one's ears. His book won't change the cycles of the Earth or produce political change. He won a Pulitzer Prize for this novel, however, which suggests some socio-political importance beyond flashy writing or bold storytelling. The Pulitzer website claims that the fiction award is for a novel that deals with “American life.” They do not demand political relevance from this category. Nevertheless, given the scope of the Pulitzer's interests and their focus on journalism and international affairs, one has to wonder why a book about how books cannot make political change won a Pulitzer Prize.

Maybe the book won because the Pulitzer committee would like to hope that we go on believing in the influence of culture in relation to political and social change, enrichment, guidance, alignment. Should culture only reflect on the politico-social, or should it affect and create political realities? That is the question which Chabon's book never really solves.

Sam does not pursue his own latent homosexuality, which may or may not compel him to write in young sidekicks for all of his muscled, spandex-clad superheroes. Sam seems to view his affair with Bacon as a one-time, unique love. Tracy Bacon's name evokes frivolous, tactile pleasure rather than substantial nourishment. A desirable snack that transgresses the norms of conduct in both society and family. Judaism, or Jewishness, rather, dominates this novel. Chabon's choice of Bacon as a name for a character who actualizes the breaking of one of society's most dominant codes – that of heterosexuality – must be examined. Bacon, the pork product, symbolizes a traditionally stigmatized food in the Jewish community. Bacon as a character himself is trafe – he represents what, for a time, Sam cannot have because of a rigid custom, this time that of heteronormativity. Ironically, Sam and Rosa mention toward the end of the novel that they do eat bacon, although not pork.

Bacon is also aggressively goyish. Chiseled jaw, blonde hair, tall, muscular – he reeks of the superhero fantasies drawn by Kavalier and fleshed out by Clay. In this way he also represents a transgression from Clay's Jewish roots. In consuming Bacon, Klayman truly becomes Clay. But can we really associate the dietary laws of Judaism with the dominant codes of heterosexuality? Traditionally Jews in society have been viewed as transgressive, as radicalized, as communists and corrupters of all sorts. The HUAC trials and the Juvenile Delinquency hearings tended to focus on Jews in showbusiness. What do we do with this?

Whether the comic books were symbolic vehicles for Sam's own frustrated desires and social marginalization does not become 100% clear. The average, unschooled-in-comic-history reader does not know if the Kefauver hearings made much ado about nothing or whether they analyzed the works perceptively. Certainly book burning and censorship are abhorrent, but I'm digressing. My point is that Sam, relatively underdeveloped by Chabon relative to Joe, also has a social cause, no matter how veiled it is or how unaware of it he may remain. The difference is that Joe talks about it explicitly through his work, while Sam does not. While Joe's work at time turns the Nazis into Razis, his flagship cover-art villain had the unmistakable mustache and haircut of the Fuhrer. Sam's characters are barely clothed and have young male companions, but they don't go out on dates and call them meetings. The characters do not inject their work with subtexts in equal measures.

Joe may be vindicated at the end of the novel. He writes the first graphic novel for adults and reunites with his girlfriend and son after many years of seclusion. Sam heads off to California after living a lie for a decade. They serve as stand-ins for the social forces that determine art and the political climates that art informs or inflects. The author's message about identity defines it as a fluid, but not of uniform viscosity.