Revenge of the Regressive Avant-Garde

You may have seen a small and strange article in last Monday's New York Times, buried beneath the fold in the back of the business section: "Fiction, Hoax or Neither? A Literary Dust-Up." The article reports on an essay by Paul Maliszewski in the April/May issue of Bookforum, in which he argues that a lecture given several times by Michael Chabon constitutes a deliberate and dodgy attempt to hoax his audience. In the lecture, titled "Golems I Have Known," Chabon describes, among other hoaxsters, a Jewish writer writing under a good Waspish pseudonym, CB Colby, who then publishes a Holocaust memoir in his own name, Joseph Adler. But it seems that Adler isn't his real name either, and the author of the memoir is not a survivor but a Nazi named Fischer. As it turns out, Colby/Adler/Fischer never existed, and the fake Holocaust memoir The Book of Hell, which Chabon says is owned by his father, his father-in-law, and perhaps by members of the audience, and from which he goes on to quote a passage, is a novelistic invention of one Michael Chabon. Maliszewski argues that Chabon is taking advantage of his audience's gullibility in order to show off, and thereby edits out history's CB Colby, a real man with no connections to Nazis or Jews whatsoever. In Maliszewski's eyes, this amounts to unethical fiction writing.

The Times does not actually address the substance of Maliszewski's essay; instead it casts doubt on it by attacking the author's credibility in the plainest possible way. He is said to have "admitted" perpetrating a hoax on The Business Journal of Central New York, when in fact he mentions that hoax, a brilliant send-up of a right-wing paper described in Baffler #11, as proof of his interest in and sympathy for hoaxsters, not as newspapery "full disclosure." The Times then opens the floor to Maliszewski's former employer, Dave Eggers, who accuses him of writing "blasphemous" emails about McSweeney's while serving as that magazine's web editor. This is a smear and an unethical one. As for Chabon, he gets off without comment, an established artist whose "work" is allowed to "speak for itself."

So what does Chabon's lecture say? In rapid response to the Bookforum article, Nextbook, the Jewish writers' organization that sponsors the series, put it up on their website. It turns out that "lying" is the big theme of the lecture, as in much of Chabon's writing. The young novelist in Wonder Boys is a compulsive liar, and his brilliant first novel is described by the narrator as "irremediably false … a fiction produced by someone who knew only fictions." But Chabon has never risen to the challenge of this early self-diagnosis. His more recent work features trickster characters, magicians, and escape artists who never question themselves so cleverly or intently. In his young adult baseball novel, Summerland, he even revives Loki and the Native American hoaxster Wile E. Coyote. "Golems I Have Known" is no different, except it is a more directly autobiographical fiction featuring Chabon's own father, a compulsive liar, the kind of man who would forge Carl Yastrzemski signature on a bat and give it to his son as a birthday present. He is also, as it turns out, the kind of man who would, on Chabon's wedding day, take him aside and lament, privately, the fact that his son was not marrying Jewish.

Given this explicit engagement with fakes, lying, and tall tales, how can anyone accuse Chabon of hoaxing anyone? And yet it does seem that Maliszewski was right to sense something fishy about the lecture. Chabon's Holocaust story isn't a hoax in the way of, say, Alan Sokal's article for Social Text, which exposed the poor judgment of the journal's editors and undermined the authority of "French Theory." Chabon's faux Holocaust memoir is part of a writerly tactic to get the audience on his side by appealing to deep-seated prejudices and fears. It strengthens existing authority. True hoaxes are radical. Chabon's posturing turns out to lend support to a conservative a vision of Jewish identity that's ideologically noxious and, ultimately, cruel. As I listened, I found myself laughing and impressed, but I also listened to the audience's enthusiastic clapping and wondered whether they were applauding the entertainment or the sentiments behind it.

+ + +

The lecture is an aesthetic triumph, a three-part metafiction about a character called "Michael Chabon." It makes liberal, even extravagant use of an authorial tactic old as the Arabian Nights, mise en abîme, or stories within stories. The effect on the reader, as Jorge Luis Borges, no stranger to the technique, notes in his lecture on the Arabian Nights and forgery, is "a sort of vertigo." This vertigo effect calls attention to the artifice of fiction, but at the same time it reveals the conceit of authorship and makes all identity a fiction. In a medieval Muslim world where a sultan can execute his storytelling wife if she bores or offends him, and the imams are on the lookout for blasphemy, you can understand why a teller of secular tales might try to disclaim responsibility for her own words, and why a tradition of "fake" authorship might come into being. But why should Chabon do it in the protected land of the free, unless he too fears judgment and some part of him feels uncomfortable with what he's saying?

Chabon works his mise en abîme trick this way: while we can all understand how the Michael Chabon telling the story is different from Michael Chabon the character, it's more complicated when Chabon says that the fictional Colby/Adler/Fischer bears a resemblance to "the figment of an author, August Van Zorn, a character from my novel Wonder Boys." And again, when Chabon recounts his first meeting at age 12 with Colby/Adler/Fischer, "he told me my glasses were too big for my face. Something I've been uncomfortable about ever since." At these moments, Chabon disappears inside himself. The author of the lecture becomes identical with the character in the lecture, and neither are real. This technique allows Chabon to disclaim any responsibility for the truth, or any authority for what he goes on to say about Judaism. Or, put another way, the only authority he allows is a "true-to-life" experience he acknowledges to be false.