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THE WORK of MICHAEL CHABON a Dissertation Submitted to Kent State HISTORY, MYTH AND SECULARISM ACROSS THE “BORDERLANDS”: THE WORK OF MICHAEL CHABON A dissertation submitted to Kent State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy By Seth William Johnson May 2014 ! Dissertation written by Seth William Johnson B.A. University of Minnesota, Duluth, USA, 2000 M.A. Minnesota State University, Mankato, USA, 2006 Ph.D. Kent State University, 2014 Approved by, Lewis Fried, Chair, Doctoral Dissertation Committee Babacar M’Baye, Committee Member Yoshinobu Hakutani, Committee Member Sara Newman, Committee Member Carol Salus, Committee Member Accepted by, Robert W. Trogdon, Chair, Department of English Raymond Craig, Associate Dean, College of Arts and Sciences ! ii! ! TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION…………………………………………………………………………….v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS………………………………………………………………..vi CHAPTER 1: Introduction……..…………………………………………………………1 1.1 Reading Michael Chabon……………………………………………………………1 1.2 American Jews and Insider/Outsider………………………………………………14 1.3 The Borderlands……………………………………………………………………17 1.4 The Argument……………………………………………………………………...24 CHAPTER 2: “One More Pittsburgh Heartache”: The Evolution of Identity in The Mysteries of Pittsburgh…………………………………………………………………..29 2.1 Discovering Art Bechstein…………………………………………………………36 2.2 Cleveland: Looking Out and Looking In…………………………………………..47 2.3 The Generation Gap………………………………………………………………..53 CHAPTER 3: Wonder Boys: A Portrait of the Artist……………………………………65 3.1 A Portrait of the Artist……………………………………………………………..71 3.2 “A Religion of Choice”…………………………………………………………….84 CHAPTER 4: Mythologizing the American Experience: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay………………………………………………………………………….98 4.1 The Golem………………………………………………………………………..111 4.2 Creating Mythology………………………………………………………………139 4.3 Escapes and Escapists…………………………………………………………….145 CHAPTER 5: Summerland: They Myth of America and the National Pastime……….160 ! iii! ! 5.1 An American Mythology…………………………………………………………176 5.2 Baseball as Metaphor for American Life…………………………………………185 5.3 The Cult of Baseball……………………………………………………………...198 CHAPTER 6: “Strange Times to be a Jew”: Alternate History, Messianism, and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union……………………………………………………………..204 6.1 Messiah in their Midst……………………………………………………………220 6.2 The Intersection of Politics and Religion…………………………………………237 CHAPTER 7: Michael Chabon’s Adventures in Genre: The Final Solution and Gentlemen of the Road………………………………………………………………….251 7.1 The Sherlockian…………………………………………………………………..254 7.2 “Jews with Swords”………………………………………………………………272 CHAPTER 8: Conclusion………………………………………………………………292 WORKS CITED………………………………………………………………………..300 ! iv! ! DEDICATION To my parents, Bill and Rosie Johnson ! v! ! ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Over the past several years I have had the pleasure of working with Professor Lewis Fried, a true professional of immeasurable knowledge. I came to Kent State University with a vague idea that I wanted to study American-Jewish literature, but without a particular direction in mind. As my interests began to solidify around Michael Chabon’s work, Professor Fried has tirelessly directed me through every turn this project has taken. This project could not have happened without his wisdom and guidance. For that I am eternally grateful and trust he can now relax and enjoy his retirement. I would like to express my gratitude to my entire dissertation committee, Babacar M’Baye, Sara Newman, Yoshinobu Hakutani, and Carol Salus for their sincere attention to this project and in helping to make me a better scholar. I would also like to thank the many teachers and faculty who have helped me along the way, especially my exam proctors, Tammy Clewell and Kevin Floyd, as well as Robert Trogdon, whose World War I literature class birthed my first publication. Both professionally and personally I have learned a tremendous amount from everyone in the English department, whose classes I have taken, and whose advice I have sought and was so graciously given. I am grateful to and for my family, Dad, Mom, Annie, Lynn and Alyssa, for the encouragement throughout the years. You all sat patiently while I explained my research, exams and through countless hours of Chabon, whether you wanted to know or not. In addition, I’d like to thank my friends here at Kent State, who have all gone, or will eventually go through this process. And I’d like to give a special acknowledgement to two friends outside of Kent, Amanda MacGregor, my friend since eighth grade study hall and sounding board for innumerable ideas, good and bad, and Angela Lopez, whose intelligence and keen eye for detail has consistently made me look better than I would have on my own. Thanks for being such brilliant and supportive friends. I could not have made it through without you all. Finally, big thanks Michael Chabon for kindly responding to my emails, clearing up many questions that arose during the writing of this dissertation, and generally proving Professor Fried right. I have greatly enjoyed my time here at Kent State, working through this program, and I cannot possibly express my gratitude to all who have given me guidance, support, and the push I needed to finish. I am surely a better scholar and a better man for all of your efforts. Seth Johnson 30 Oct. 2013 ! vi! ! 1! CHAPTER 1 Introduction 1.1 Reading Michael Chabon Chabon is an important author because he represents two shifts in American literature. He offers a different perspective than his predecessors on what it means to be Jewish in America. In addition, Chabon is one of the most public faces of a movement to reclaim space for maligned genres in the literary canon. Most importantly, he remains a powerful and compelling voice in contemporary American literature. Though critics are not always enamored with his forays into genre writing, they almost always concede that Chabon is a talented writer who is unafraid of taking literary chances. His body of work shows him to be willing to risk his well-earned reputation as a leading voice in contemporary American letters by attempting genre novels, comic books, and children’s literature instead of continuing to return to an old but successful formula. Unsatisfied critics generally wish for more from Chabon, not less. And, as this dissertation will show, even in those novels that do not seem to live up to the potential set by his finest works, such as Mysteries, Kavalier & Clay, and the Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Chabon still manages to create stories that are both readable and thought provoking. However, at his best, Chabon intelligently and with uncommon nuance engages his readers in topics of critical social and cultural importance. Mysteries is an astonishingly honest examination of human sexuality, frankly depicting both the physical and emotional love shared by Art Bechstein and his friend and lover Arthur Lecomte. ! ! 2! The novel is all the more remarkable for its being published in 1989, a time when homosexuality was very much a taboo subject and the extent of the AIDS epidemic just being realized. Kavalier & Clay is a blockbuster of a novel that illuminates the ways in which the events of the Holocaust reached out beyond Europe, across the Atlantic, and continued to haunt even those who escaped. This novel also demonstrates that hope can be found in folktales, superheroes, and tales of the fantastic that have handed down over the generations and repurposed. And in the Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Chabon seeks to better understand the psychological effects of Diaspora on those who are about to be evicted from their homes, the fear and uncertainty. Yet he also shows that hope and redemption can exist through faith in the Messiah. All this he accomplishes in a hard- boiled detective novel, and is seen through the eyes of a down-and-out, cynical detective. Over the course of six novels, two novellas, two collections of short stories, and two volumes of essays, Michael Chabon has cultivated a literary reputation as a gifted writer of “literary” fiction as well as a champion of genre fiction. His first two novels, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1989) and Wonder Boys (1995), are novels about the internal machinations of characters trying to find their place in the world, and fit firmly into the category of a “literary” novel. Mysteries is a coming-of-age and a coming-out story about a young man discovering his bi-sexuality during his first tumultuous summer after college. Wonder Boys follows a formerly successful writer and creative writing teacher, suffering from writer’s block, on a drug-hazed weekend in which his life falls apart. ! ! 3! Having established himself as a writer of “literary” fiction Chabon moved toward exploring genre, beginning with the Pulitzer Prize winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000), an historical novel about the young men who created the modern-day comic book superhero. In the two novels, Summerland (2002) and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), and two novellas, The Final Solution (2004) and Gentlemen of the Road (2007), that follow, Chabon shifts from merely extolling the virtue of various genre fictions, to writing those types of stories: mystery, hardboiled, fantasy and adventure. My objective for this study is simple: to engage in the first extended academic study of the work of Michael Chabon. What this dissertation proposes to do is to look at each of Chabon’s novels in succession in order to gain a sense of his evolution as a novelist. Because of the nature of this study I am not attempting to read each novel through the exact same theoretical lens of, for instance, Masculinity studies, as many contemporary Chabon scholars do. Instead, I will trace several themes that continue to recur and develop throughout his body of work, such as male sexuality, generational divides, modern Jewishness in America, and the lingering affects of the Holocaust and the Second World War. Chabon was born in Washington, D. C. in 1963 and raised in Columbia, Maryland, until the age of eleven when his parents divorced, after which he split time with his mother in Columbia and his father in Pittsburgh, a city that would become the setting for his first two novels.
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