Maps of Misreading

[Dave Monroe]

Maps of Misreading
Michael Chabon fills in the blank spaces
By Anthony Miller

A number of writers have begun to exult in print about the uncanny
realms where the influences of pulp and pop (comic books, science
fiction and fantasy, mysteries, rock & roll) meld with those "higher"
and more established echelons of literature. Michael Chabon, the
author of Wonder Boys, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, and
The Yiddish Policemen's Union, relishes secret transactions between
authors and their readers. When I realized that the two Japanese
students Takeshi and Ichizo in The Mysteries of Pittsburgh bore the
same names as the kamikaze pilots in Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, the
shock of recognition ushered me into yet another story. Here was one
lesson about how one kind of fiction could subtly and surprisingly
infiltrate another.

Maps and Legends (McSweeney's, $24), Chabon's first essay collection,
unearths some of the author's source texts and offers his exuberant
ruminations on the role of the writer as protector and defender of
artistic ancestors. His intention to cast us out and off into
alternate worlds is made clear from the outset with a deft touch to
the book's epigraph, transforming the way we read a Melville quotation
about those who have written about whaling before him merely by
appending the mischievously explanatory phrase "on the writing of fan
fiction." Chabon's 16 essays ponder those landscapes, whether
mythological, alternate-historical, or post-apocalyptic, where
entertainers and tricksters, ghosts and golems dwell. He is an
exacting cartographer of those speculative spaces where only the genre
of nurse romances (like Cynthia Ozick's Ruth Puttermesser, R.N.) was
allowed to flourish or where one might catch a glimpse of a zeppelin
("that colophon of alternate-world fiction from Ada to The League of
Extraordinary Gentlemen") screaming across the sky. In an essay on
Sherlock Holmes, Chabon writes:

And yet there is a degree to which, just as all criticism is in
essence Sherlockian, all literature, highbrow or low, from the Aeneid
onward, is fan fiction. That is why Harold Bloom's notion of the
anxiety of influence has always rung so hollow to me. Through parody
and pastiche, allusion and homage, retelling and reimagining the
stories that were told before us and that we have come of age loving –
amateurs – we proceed, seeking out the blank places in the map that
our favorite writers, in their greatness and negligence, have left for
us, hoping to pass on to our own readers – should we be lucky enough
to find any – some of the pleasure that we ourselves have taken in the
stuff we love: to get in on the game. All novels are sequels;
influence is bliss.

As he roams across literary and cultural borderlands, Chabon
investigates comic-book deity Will Eisner, Road warrior Cormac
McCarthy, the urban sprawls of Howard Chaykin's American Flagg! and
Ben Katchor's Julius Knipl, the supernatural tales of M.R. James, and
the contrarian cosmology of Philip Pullman. Sadly, there is only brief
mention of August Van Zorn, the little-known acolyte of H.P. Lovecraft
so beloved of Chabon that he includes him in Wonder Boys. Chabon also
provides observations on his own literary endeavors, from the Sherlock
Holmes story he wrote at age 10 and the place where he penned his
first novel to his problematic second novel, Fountain City, which,
although uncompleted, provided essential inspiration for the runaway
magnum opus Grady Tripp toils on in Wonder Boys. His final two essays
contemplate artistic approaches to questions of exile and faith. The
last essay is the text of a public talk Chabon delivered in 2003 and
2004 about the author's stumbling upon a writer and Holocaust survivor
named C.B. Colby resulting in a peculiar inquiry into history and
storytelling.

Maps and Legends is swathed in a marvelous Jordan Crane dust jacket
with three blue, green, and yellow-gold layers, populated with
storybook characters scattered within the scenery, each of which can
be peeled back to reveal – what else? – the letter x to mark the
title. Maps and Legends is a treasure trove of intriguing and
revealing looks at where Chabon goes to make up his worlds and how he
tells his fables of the reconstruction.

http://www.lacitybeat.com/cms/story/detail/maps_of_misreading/6986/