On Maps and Legends
Michael Chabon is clearly as bright as he is talented. To fully reap the benefits of Maps and Legends, it helps if the reader is as well. This is not a light-hearted look at pop literature. It is, instead, a compendium of brilliant insights gleaned from seminal works in genres that have delighted and defined a generation: mysteries, epic fantasies, ghost stories, horror, dystopian science fiction, and comics.
I will endeavor to take you through Chabon’s meanderings, highlighting key insights along the way. Be sure you are wearing your most comfortable walking shoes.
1. The book begins with a journey into the unknown. For which, of course, you will need a map. Maps have the power to fire the imagination. The most seductive maps are the ones with unmarked, unexplored territories at their outer edges. This is where the doubts begin and conjectures are spawned.
2. Victorians had a habit of seeing double. Success was invariably haunted by failure and marital fidelity seemed to always conceal an adulterous love. Sherlock Holmes, like other classic Victorian narratives, is a series of dualities, of “braided pairs”. None more so than the archetypal pair of Holmes and Watson, who have only Quixote and Sancho “as rivals in the hearts of readers and in the annals of imaginary friendship”.
In creating the detective novel genre, Conan Doyle reengineered the process of story telling. Nearly all of Holmes’ stories are “stories of people who tell their stories and, every so often, the stories those people tell feature people telling stories (about what they heard or saw on the night in question)”. All these stories, which enable the reconstruction of the crime, mesh neatly, one folding into and engaging the other. Conan Doyle did not invent the nested story, but he may have perfected it.
Another aspect of Conan Doyle’s genius was his ability to convince Sherlock followers that every word they were about to read was true. In fiction, as in stage magic, the pleasure depends entirely on the audience’s knowing perfectly well that it is being fooled and is, in fact, prepared to participate in creating the illusion. This unwritten contract between magician and audience, between writers of fiction and their readers, is the essential difference between fiction and lies. In fiction, the writer and the reader are in it together.
3. We, as a species, are drawn to the darkness. Doom and decay, crime and folly, sin and punishment…these are things we have brought upon ourselves. In the Bible and in Greek myths, the world had begun with light and been spoiled. The world of Norse gods and men and giants, depicted by Ingri D’Aulaires in a stunning series of lithographs “of whimsical and brutal delicacy”, begins in darkness and ends in darkness. In the context of that darkness, everything that is beautiful in the Norse world is something that glints.
Thor was my favourite Norse god. A close second was the mischievous Loki. Loki, Chabon reminds us, “cooked up schemes and foiled them, fathered monsters and stymied them, helped forestall the end of things and hastened it; he was god of the endlessly complicating nature of plot, of storytelling itself.”
4. The epic fantasy, like J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings or Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass, is that “once upon a time” world we knew in our childhood imaginations, a world where animals spoke and magic worked. But all that has disappeared. Epic fantasy is “haunted by a sense of lost purity and grandeur, deep wisdom that has been forgotten, Arcadia spoilt”. Chabon calls it a “thinning”, a diminishing of humankind that invokes in all of us the ache of nostalgia.
5. Plot and its “gloomy consigliere”, Theme, are, in many ways, the enemies of Character. Character brings “roundness”, describes our humanity, our contradictions and desires absent of any abstractable message or moral.
6. Chabon rues the decline of comic books as a diversion. Children, he points out, did not abandon comics; comics in their drive to attain respect and artistic accomplishment (mostly in the form of graphic novels), abandoned children. He then prescribes the cure: do not tell stories that we think kids of today might like; rather, “we should tell stories that we would have liked as kids: twisted endings, nobility and bravery where it’s least expected, and the sudden emergence of a thread of goodness in a wicked nature”. Children are also fully capable of managing an intricate, involved, involving mythology as long as it is also accessible and comprehensible at any point of entry. The “layering of intricate lore and narrative completeness” was a hallmark of the Superman comics and their kin.
7. Ambivalence toward technology is the underlying theme of apocalypse-based fiction like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. We are, as such, accustomed to thinking of stories that depict the end of the world and its aftermath as essentially science fiction. These stories typically deal with “the changed nature of society in the wake of cataclysm”: strange new priesthoods, theocracies in which mutants and machinery are taboo, etc. Inevitably these new societies mirror and comment upon our own. “That they can hide behind the fig leaf that a satiric or religious purpose provides, that they portray the conventional realism of a world without supercomputers, starships or eight-foot feline warriors from the planet Kzin, gives them the status of relative legitimacy.”
The underlying model for the post-apocalypse adventure story is Robinson Crusoe… “depicting as heroic, if problematic, a lone attempt to impose a bourgeois social order on an irrational empty wilderness” after the bomb or virus or windstorm strikes.
8. A great ghost story, like M.R. James’ Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You My Lad!, is all psychology. There is a perception that the impossible is vying with the clear and undeniable evidence of the senses; and there is the range of emotions brought on by that perception.
The protagonists are often innocents who brush up against “the omnipresent malevolence of the world”. The sins for which they are punished are more than likely to be virtues – curiosity, honesty, a sympathy for bygone eras and long-gone ancestors. And, often, their punishment is grim.
Ghost story writers, like James and H.P. Lovecraft, share a hyper-acute sense of the past, with “a taste for old books and arcane manuscripts, for neglected museums and the libraries of obscure historical societies, and for ancient buildings, in particular those equipped with attics and crypts”.
9. The comic strip is and has always been a literary form that “braids words and pictures inextricably into a story”. Chabon decries the fact that, today, “the pictures have dwindled to a bare series of thumbnail sketches…while the notion of story has atrophied almost to nonexistence”.
10. Here’s the final leg of the journey through Chabon’s fertile and somewhat foreboding literary mind. Evoking the spirit of the golem (the concept and conception of which has fascinated him since childhood), Chabon removes from the author the cloak of anonymity and the protection of any and all disclaimers. “If a writer doesn’t give away secrets, his own or those of the people he loves; if she doesn’t court disapproval, reproach and general wrath, whether of friends, family or party apparatchniks; if the writer submits his work to an internal censor long before anyone else can get their hands on it, the result is pallid, inanimate, a lump of earth.”
