29 April '08

Chabon as Food

So today finds me two weeks removed from finishing Michael Chabon’s Maps and Legends. I’d recently soured on the essay form—figured it was a stopgap between novels, easier to sell than poetry and slightly more relevant. Trouble was I hadn’t found anything that got me excited. Which should be the point, right?

Until this passage leapt from the pages of Chabon’s essay, Trickster in a Suit of Lights: Thoughts on the Modern Short Story:

I'd like to believe that, because I read for entertainment, and I write to entertain. Period. Oh, I could decoct a brew of other, more impressive motivations and explanations. I could uncork some stuff about reader response theory, or the Lacanian parole. I could go on about the storytelling impulse and the need to make sense of experience through story. A spritz of Jung might scent the air. I could adduce Kafka's formula: "A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul." I could go down to the cafe at the local mega-bookstore and take some wise words of Abelard or Koestler about the power of literature off a mug. But in the end -- here's my point -- it would still all boil down to entertainment, and its suave henchman, pleasure. Because when the axe bites the ice, you feel an answering throb of delight all the way from your hands to your shoulders, and the blade tolls like a bell for miles.

Annotations help a little (“Lacanian” refers to Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst; “parole”—and this gets a little tricky—refers to Lacan’s concept of word or speech, from Lacan’s belief in the primacy of speech as forming human relation), but even without knowing Abelard (you know him, even if you think you don’t) or Arthur Koestler (you should know him, even if you think you shouldn’t), Chabon’s words are vital. 

Not just because they echo stuff I wrote about two years ago, in my book tour journal, and not just because Chabon has the chops—and the awards-cum-legitimacy—to write about slumming it in pulp land. But because he’s right. That Kafka nonsense about ice-axes and frozen souls is the sort of eyeroll-inducing purple prose that attempts to elevate the story qua entertainment (all my complaining about eye roll-inducing and here I go and use qua) to something “better.” As if story by itself isn’t elevated enough. Really. Do we need an ice-axe breaking our frozen souls?

Well, yes. But the writer doesn’t have to lead with that. The writer can lead with cracking good yarns. The ice-axe is better off as a seducer. Get our guard down. Please us. Then slip it in and leave us wondering just what the hell you did. 

Murakami’s Dance, Dance, Dance is the perfect example of my ice-axe-better-off-as-a-seducer alternative.

Of course there’s nothing wrong with fiction for entertainment’s sake. Damn profundity—make it readable. Chabon finally said it. The scholar with street cred. Thank God. Onward...

An emailer from Coldwater, Michigan wondered if I’d seen any of H.P. Lovecraft’s film adaptations. Specifically, Dagon. And if so, why don’t I include it in my list of “fun and terrible” movies.

I don’t consider Dagon that fun. It has its moments, of course—its chase sequence through the rainy, dank alleyways of a New England coastal town comes to mind—but Dagon drags, and sputters, and isn’t inept enough to keep our attention through the slow spots. 

You want fun and not-so-terrible? Rent From Beyond. Fantastic stuff. You’ll never look at a pineal gland the same way. How’s that for a tagline?