Escapism

It is 1939, and 19-year-old Josef Kavalier - alone of his family - escapes Czechoslovakia and the growing, insidious restrictions upon its Jewish community. A long, fraught journey via Japan - conducted partly within a coffin that also houses Prague's golem - brings him to the New York apartment of his younger cousin, Sam Klayman. Polite, sensitive and intensely-focused Josef longs to make enough money to bring his family to the safety of the US; unhappy, directionless Sam, a devotee of the pulps, dreams of reaching the creative and financial bigtime, and is swiftly convinced that his cousin is the key.

Thus begins The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, by Michael Chabon, a witty, heartrending and ultimately stunning novel of war, love, family and comic books.

The morning after Joe’s arrival (which "dawns as the most beautiful morning in the history of New York City"), the pair visit Sam’s entrepreneur boss, Sheldon Anapol, and make a deal: if he will fund them, they will make a new Superman for him. The contract that the boys sign royally screws them over, of course, but for the time being all that matters is pouring their dreams into their work. Sam can give free reign to his boundless imagination, while Joe can depict his hero single-handedly taking on Nazi Europe, and winning. Their brainchild is the Escapist, a super-powered escape artist who (in the words of the radio dramatisation), "roams the globe, performing amazing feats", and comes "to the aid of those who languish in tyranny's chains!" He is inspired by Joe’s mentor (an escape artist named Kornblum, architect of his fantastical escape from Prague), by Joe’s own training in sleight-of-hand and escape artistry, and by the hopeful symbol of the golem, saviour of Prague’s Jews.

If war is on the horizon in Europe, it is far from the mind of America, a nation finally recovering from the horrors of the Great Depression – and desperate to rediscover the half-forgotten joys of life through,

[T]he marketplace of ten-cent dreams… Comic books were Kids’ Stuff, pure and true, and they arrived at precisely the moment when the kids of America began, after ten years of terrible hardship, to find their pockets burdened with the occasional superfluous dime.

Chabon places comic books firmly within the cultural milieu of 1930s and 40s America – that of music, surrealist art (Salvador Dali cameos), boundary-shattering cinema (so does Orson Welles), pulp novels, radio serials, and comic books. It is a post-Depression Golden Age, a social and cultural ferment created by its participants from explosive creative innovation, populist hybridisation, rampant consumerism, and fresh hope – and Chabon evokes it with loving attention to detail.

In June 1938, Superman appeared. He had been mailed to the offices of National Periodical Publications from Cleveland, by a couple of Jewish boys who had imbued him with the power of a hundred men, of a distant world, and of the full measure of their bespectacled adolescent hopefulness and desperation.

Comic books are embraced by their readership – and celebrated by Chabon – for the unbridled sense of wonder and joy that they embody. The whole novel is filled with a deep love for comic books, for all their pulp origins and even in their luridly cheap early days:

The comic book cover, in those early days, was a poster advertising a dream-movie, with a running time of two seconds, that flickered to life in the mind and unreeled in splendour just before one opened to the stapled packet of coarse paper inside and the lights came up.

Comic-book motifs crop up repeatedly, in beautifully inventive ways. Chapters written in the present tense lead us into the imagined worlds, like the Escapist’s origin story, or that of Luna Moth (the cousins’ first female superhero). Joe’s encounters with his would-be nemesis (a self-created enemy, naturally) are rendered in the style of high adventure, with cliff-hanger chapter endings. And that old superhero trope of assuming a secret identity in order to blend in with society finds a heart-wrenching parallel in Sam’s efforts to conceal his homosexuality from those around him.

Most of all, he loved them for the pictures and stories they contained, the inspirations and lucubrations of five hundred aging boys dreaming as hard as they could for fifteen years, transfiguring their insecurities and delusions, their wishes and their doubts, their public educations and their sexual perversions, into something that only the most purblind of societies would have denied the status of art.

The emotional and thematic heart of the novel, though, comes in the second half of the story. Here it becomes clear that the book is not so much about the Golden Age as it is about the salvation and transcendence offered by escapism when war and loss bring the illusion – individual and collective - crashing down once again. It is about art as a gesture of defiance and hope and inspiration, even in the darkest times, even for the most powerless. It is about the need for heroes - like the golem, like the Escapist - as symbols in whom that hope can be invested and nurtured, and imagination be rewarded.

But it seemed to Joe that none of these were among the true reasons that impelled men, time after time, to hazard the making of golems. The shaping of a golem, to him, was a gesture of hope, offered against hope, in a time of desperation. It was an expression of the yearning that a few magic words and an artful hand might produce something – one poor, dumb, powerful thing – exempt from the crushing strictures, from the ills, cruelties and inevitable failures of the greater Creation. It was the voicing of a vain wish, when you get down to it, to escape […] truly to escape, if only for one instant; to poke his head through the borders of this world, with its harsh physics.

[Critics of] comic books always cited ‘escapism’ among the litany of injurious consequences of their reading, and dwelled upon the pernicious effect, upon young minds, of satisfying the desire to escape. As if there could be any more noble or necessary service in life.

Highly recommended!

~~Nic

Comments

[Victoria]

>"[Critics of] comic books always cited ‘escapism’ among the litany of injurious consequences of their reading, and dwelled upon the pernicious effect, upon young minds, of satisfying the desire to escape. As if there could be any more noble or necessary service in life."

Huzzah! Finally, a worthy response to the "escapism" question. Still it also seems true to me that "After you grow up, you should start reading for other purposes..." (M. John Harrison) ;-)

[Nic]

Substitute 'escape' for 'transcendence' and you get something even worthier. That seems to be what Chabon is driving towards in certain passages: a fundamental requirement of the human spirit to reach beyond oneself through Story (whether it be by setting, character, plot, or simply the placement of words one a line).

You should read for other reasons, perhaps, but if you lose the play of imagination, the leap of empathy with the imaginary construct, why bother reading fiction? :-)