Maps and Legends by Michael Chabon

Maps and Legends is a collection of essays about things like the preconceived notions about genre fiction, writing, His Dark Materials, comics, The Road, Will Eisner, Sherlock Holmes, Norse mythology or M.R. James, among others. For those who know me, this list will be enough to give you an idea of just how much I loved this book. But even when Michael Chabon was writing about things I never thought I was particularly interested in, I remained absolutely fascinated. His writing is a pleasure to read, and he makes everything sound interesting.

Maps and Legends is not quite a book about books in the same sense that Nick Hornby or Michael Dirda’s essay collections are, because Chabon does cover other topics. But the majority of what we find here is indeed essays on reading, writing or particular authors, genres and mediums. And like the two aforementioned essayists, Michael Chabon is someone with whose views I fully identify.

My very favourite essay was “Trickster in a Suit of Light – Thoughts on the Modern Short Story,” which isn’t just about the modern short story. It’s also about genre fiction, the reason why the concept of entertainment has become disreputable, and connecting with other human beings. Just look at this passage:

The original sense of the word “entertainment” is a lovely one of mutual support through intertwining, like a pair of trees grown together, interwoven, each sustaining and bearing up the other. It suggests a kind of midair transfer of strength, contact across a void, like the tangling of cable and steel between two lonely bridgeheads. I can’t think of a better approximation of the relation between reader and writer. Derived senses of fruitful exchange, of reciprocal sustenance, of welcome offered, of grasp and interrelationship, of a slender span of bilateral attention along which things are given and received, still animate the word in its verb form: we entertain visitors, guests, ideas, prospects, theories, doubts and grudges.
At some point, inevitably, as generations of hosts entertained generations of guests with banquets and feats and displays of artifice, the idea of pleasure seeped into the pores of the word. And along with pleasure (just as inevitably, I suppose) came disapproval, a sense of hollowness and hangover, the saturnine doubtfulness that attaches to delight and artifice and show: to pleasure, that ambiguous gift.
(…)
Yet entertainment—as I define it, pleasure and all—remains the only sure means we have of bridging, or at least of feeling as if we have bridged, the gulf of consciousness that separates each of us from everybody else. The best response to those who would cheapen and exploit it is not to disparage or repudiate but to reclaim entertainment as a job fit for artists and for audiences, a two-way exchange of attention, experience, and the universal hunger for connection

Isn’t he brilliant? Just one more:

And so as with our idea of entertainment, our idea of genre—one of those French words, like crêpe, that no one can pronounce both correctly and without sounding pretentious—is of a thing fundamentally, perhaps inherently, debased, infantine, commercialized, unworthy of a serious person’s attention. The undoubted satisfactions that come from reading science fiction or mystery stories are to be enjoyed only in childhood or youth, or by the adult reader only as “guilty pleasures” (a phrase I loathe). A genre implies a set of conventions—a formula—and conventions imply limitations (the argument goes), and therefore no genre work can ever rise to the masterful heights of true literature, free (it is to be supposed) of all formulas and templates.

Haha, yes. Because, as he goes on to say, realistic fiction follows no conventions at all, oh no. This is actually pretty similar to that passage from an essay by Ursula Le Guin I posted just the other day, I know, which goes to show that great minds think alike. You’re all probably tired of me borrowing someone else’s words to make this point again and again by now, but I just love seeing authors I so admire articulating everything I've always thought and felt about literature in such brilliant ways.

A few words on some of the other essays: “Of Dust and Daemons” is – you guessed it – about His Dark Materials, and while I disagree with some of what he says (namely that the third book sacrifices character for the sake of plot and theme), it was fascinating to read. “Golems I have known, or why my elder son’s middle name is Napoleon” is a fake memoir, which I guess makes it a short story, and a great one at that. “My Back Pages” is about how he began to write his first novel, Mysteries of Pittsburgh. I’ve had that on my tbr shelf for a few months now, and I want to read it more than ever.

“Kids’ stuff” was another favourite of mine. In it, he argues that in their quest to become Respectable, comics have become almost exclusively adult, and that unfortunately you don’t see all that many quality comics for kids anymore. This reminded me of something I sometimes wonder about. I wonder if some of the regard for comics like Maus and Persepolis, especially in academic circles, doesn’t come from the fact that they deal with such unarguably serious issues. And while a novel, because its status has been established for a couple of centuries now (though not as long as we tend to think. All this hullaballo about whether or not comics are "real literature" often reminds me of the debates people were having about whether anything other than poetry should be considered " true art" a few centuries back), is allowed to be playful or light or cheerful, a comic’s status is still too fragile. Therefore, if it wants to be taken seriously it has to be Very Serious Indeed. I’m really just thinking out loud here. Obviously I like seeing Maus and Persepolis being appreciated because they are indeed wonderful books. But it’s not like the only worthy novels are, say, Beloved and The English Patient. And the same goes for comics.

Anyway. I’ll shut up now. One last thing: this book has one of the coolest covers I have ever seen. See the three different colours? They’re separate overlapping dust jackets. How cool is that? And look! J.S. Peyton has detailed pictures.

A few more brilliant bits:

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 spaces in the map that our favourite 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.

We all grew up—all of us, from the beginning—in a time of violence and invention, absurdity and Armageddon, prey and witness to the worst and the best in humanity, in a world both ruined and made interesting by Loki. I took comfort, as a kid, in knowing that things had always been as awful and as wonderful as they were now, that the world was always on the edge of total destruction, even if, in Maryland in 1969, as today, it seemed a little more true than usual.

For the central story of M.R. James, reiterated with inexhaustible inventiveness, is ultimately the breathtaking fragility of life, of reality, of all the structures that we have erected to defend ourselves from the constant nagging suspicion that underlying everything is chaos, brutal and unreasoning. It is hard to conceive of a more serious theme, or a more contemporary plot, than this. (…)
Ultimately all stories—ghost stories, mysteries, stories of terror or adventure or modern urban life—descend from the fireside tale, told with wolves in the woods all around, with winter howling at the window. After centuries of refinement, custom fittings, and mutations introduced by artistry and marketplace, the short story retains its fundamental power to frighten us with its recognition of the abyss at our backs, and to warm us with its flickering light.

Other Blog Reviews:
Madness Abides
The Bluestocking Society

(Let me know if I missed yours.)