Castillo's novel largely deals with borders and demarcations between languages (Spanish/English), culture (American/Mexican/Native American), genders (female/male), and nations (US/Mexico) to name a few. Like many works of magical realism, the narrative skips forwards and backwards in time to piece together the story of Sofia and her daughters in the unincorporated New Mexico town of Tome.
All of the aforementioned borders blur and/or break down. Spanish words and grammar (the use of the double negative) appear on most pages, and the characters to not identify with a single culture or nationality; gender roles are challenged by La Loca's masculine dress and Caridad's love of another woman. Other borders Castillo blurs are those between science and folk medicine, as seen in the episodes with the invisible surgeon, as well as between the sacred and profane, as seen in the chapter where the passion of Christ is commingled with the plight of the poor and the exploited worker.
The novel also pushes back against the status quo of a male-oriented society. For instance, one of Loretta's growing secrets was that she "planted and harvested according to the moon's cycles, not the sun's" (193), thereby challenging both accepted scientific techniques as well following a female's intuition, as represented by the moon. The novel also ends with the valorization of motherhood and communal togetherness rather than conflict; US wars account for the psychological problems of a number of male characters and also for the loss of Sofia's own daughter Esperanza.
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
"The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay" and "The Yiddish Policemen's Union" by Michael Chabon
While I could write a lot about The Yiddish Policemen's Union as being overtly science fictional or utopian, it seems to me that the best critical analysis can be borrowed from Carl Freedman's excursus on Philip K. Dick's alternate history The Man in the High Castle in his own Critical Theory and Science Fiction, specifically his comments about how "the founding critical strategy...lies in its uncoupling of the necessary from the actual, and thus in its defamiliarization of the historical status quo" as well as how "the 'unthinkable' turns out to be surprisingly familiar" (166), of course trading Dick's Nazi-conquered United States for Chabon's description of the post-war Jews who were temporarily resettled in Alaska. Freedman writes:
"Few novels of its era more powerfully express the critical sense of historicity --- the sense that historical societies are complexly determined and mutable totalities, that historical actuality never possesses any transcendent ontological fixity but is always subject to dialectical interrogation and to the process of material change" (173)
As Freedman says of Dick, such works of alternate history may not bear the trappings of science fictional cliche' but that "the character of the genre lies neither in chronology nor technological hardware, but in the cognitive presentation of alternatives to actuality and the status quo" (180). This all fits perfectly with Chabon's reflections of Jewishness and Jewish culture, disassociating it from the physical location of Israel and relocating it in an alternate space in order to examine it free from the burden of "real" historical events.
The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is a trickier work in that there is only a fleeting glimpse of magical realism in the shape of the golem. The rest of the novel reads as implausible, though not impossible. The golem and the associated magic is bound to the creative impulse:
"The shaping of a golem, to [Joe], was a gesture of hope, offered against hope, in a time of desperation. It was the expression of a 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 got down to it, to escape" (584).
This speaks directly to Tolkien's essay "On Fairie Stories" where he defends the genre against the charges of being merely "escapist." It would be a minor miracle if Chabon didn't have this specific essay in mind as it deals intimately with the process of Creation (big C) and the attempt of people to "sub-create" in order to emulate the one Creator (big C). The primary difference being that Tolkien is referring to a very Catholic conception of God and his works, whereas Chabon seems to be writing about attempting to make sense of life given the conflicting and confusing postmodern condition in which we live and "the impersonal magic of life.... its stock-in-trade was ironies, coincidences, and the only true portents: those that revealed themselves, unmistakable and impossible to ignore, in retrospect" (265). This idea runs contrary to Tolkien's central notion of each person choosing (or refusing to choose) following a divine plan to which they've been assignedl; for Chabon its randomness and cruel, coincidental ironies that fuel many of life's events rather than any neat plan.
"Few novels of its era more powerfully express the critical sense of historicity --- the sense that historical societies are complexly determined and mutable totalities, that historical actuality never possesses any transcendent ontological fixity but is always subject to dialectical interrogation and to the process of material change" (173)
As Freedman says of Dick, such works of alternate history may not bear the trappings of science fictional cliche' but that "the character of the genre lies neither in chronology nor technological hardware, but in the cognitive presentation of alternatives to actuality and the status quo" (180). This all fits perfectly with Chabon's reflections of Jewishness and Jewish culture, disassociating it from the physical location of Israel and relocating it in an alternate space in order to examine it free from the burden of "real" historical events.
The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is a trickier work in that there is only a fleeting glimpse of magical realism in the shape of the golem. The rest of the novel reads as implausible, though not impossible. The golem and the associated magic is bound to the creative impulse:
"The shaping of a golem, to [Joe], was a gesture of hope, offered against hope, in a time of desperation. It was the expression of a 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 got down to it, to escape" (584).
This speaks directly to Tolkien's essay "On Fairie Stories" where he defends the genre against the charges of being merely "escapist." It would be a minor miracle if Chabon didn't have this specific essay in mind as it deals intimately with the process of Creation (big C) and the attempt of people to "sub-create" in order to emulate the one Creator (big C). The primary difference being that Tolkien is referring to a very Catholic conception of God and his works, whereas Chabon seems to be writing about attempting to make sense of life given the conflicting and confusing postmodern condition in which we live and "the impersonal magic of life.... its stock-in-trade was ironies, coincidences, and the only true portents: those that revealed themselves, unmistakable and impossible to ignore, in retrospect" (265). This idea runs contrary to Tolkien's central notion of each person choosing (or refusing to choose) following a divine plan to which they've been assignedl; for Chabon its randomness and cruel, coincidental ironies that fuel many of life's events rather than any neat plan.
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