Seven Red

OK. I’ll admit it. I literally teared up, lip quivering and all, at the end of Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which I finished yesterday after clutching it as train reading for about two weeks. Then again, I literally teared up, lip quivering and all, at the end of Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude, my train reading for the previous two weeks. she tells me that I probably won’t cry like a baby at the end of Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, but I think she underestimates my capacity to be affected. I remember reading a line in Gravity’s Rainbow when Enzian gives a light to his Russian brother – neither aware that they have the same father – and Pynchon goes into some melodramatic contemplation of all the times two brothers, unknown to each other, must have exchanged such small cordialities; I damn near lost it on the 7 line for that one.

That admission out of the way, I want to quote a passage from Kavalier and Clay that may relate to some of what I’ve been saying about exit here (or show it up for the aesthetic and apolitical fluff that some may already think it is). It’s a bit long, but worth it. If you’ve read K & C, you know that the novel revolves around a comic book character called “The Escapist,” one of whose creators is a Czech Jew trained in the escape artist trade. Here’s the passage, which I’ll quote without commentary, if only to shield myself from comparisons to Chabon’s prose:

He thought of the boxes of comics that he had accumulated, upstairs, in the two small rooms where, for five years, he had crouched in the false bottom of the life from which Tommy had freed him, and then, in turn, of the thousands upon thousands of little boxes, stacked neatly on sheets of Bristol board or piled in rows across the ragged pages of comic books, that he and Sammy had filled over the past dozen years: boxes brimming with raw materials, the bits of rubbish from which they had, each in his own way, attempted to fashion their various golems. In literature and folklore, the significance and the fascination of golems – from Rabbi Loew’s to Victor von Frankenstein’s – lay in their soullessness, in their tireless inhuman strength, in their metaphorical association with overweening human ambition, and in the frightening ease with which they passed beyond the control of their horrified and admiring creators. But it seemed to Joe that none of these – Faustian hubris, least of all – were among the true reasons that impelled men, time after time, to hazard the making of golems. The shaping of a golem, to him, 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. To slip, like the Escapist, free of the entangling chain of reality and straitjacket of physical laws. Harry Houdini had roamed the Palladiums and Hippodromes of the world encumbered by an entire cargo-hold of crates and boxes, stuffed with chains, iron hardware, brightly painted flats and hokum, animated all the while by only this same desire, never fulfilled: truly to escape, if only for an instant; to poke his head through the borders of this world, with its harsh physics, into the myterious sporot world that lay beyond. The newspaper articles that Joe had read about the upcoming Senate investigation into comic books always cited “escapism” among the litany of injurious consequences of their reading, and dwelled on the pernicious effect, on young minds, of satisfying the desire to escape. As if there could be any more noble or necessary service in life. (582)

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