Art/Chabon
Like Art Bechstein in The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Michael Chabon, whom we might call the implied author of the novel, the writer at the time of composition, age “twenty-four” (Chabon, Maps 154–55), was also struggling to define his sexuality. Chabon writes, “There were lots of young women walking around in swimsuits and negligibly short pants and I suppose I probably wondered how many of them I would never get to sleep with. I was kind of on a losing streak with women at the time” (147). He goes on to note, “I had slept with a man whom I loved, and learned to love another man so much that it would never have occurred to me to want to sleep with him” (153). Despite these honest pronouncements, Chabon also reveals his terror in admitting his nonnormative sexuality:
When I wrote The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, I feared—correctly, as it turned out—that people would think, reading the novel, that its author was gay. In part it was a fear of being misunderstood, misjudged, but in my apprehension there was a fairly healthy component of plain old homophobia—and the fear of homophobia. Turning in, to the Irvine writer’s workshop where I was working on my MFA, the portion of the novel containing a brief but vivid love scene between two men, remains one of the scariest moments of my life as a writer. (166)
Despite sleeping with a man, Chabon had no interest in assuming the identity of a gay man, partially due to his admitted homophobia but also because just as he could not honestly identity as a straight man he could not honestly identify as a gay man, either. Chabon notes, “I’d had no readers then, no book contract, no reputation, nothing but an MFA thesis to be written and a vague sense that in stringing together the seven thousand sentences of that thesis I was forging an identity for myself” (158). In writing the novel Chabon acknowledges attempting to forge an identity not only as a writer but also as a man. The difficulty stems from a lack of available models for a sexuality and gender that transcend the available binaries. Similarly, in the novel, the narrator Art Bechstein confronts his confused and loose grasp of his own sexual identity. Early on Art admits, “There had been a time in high school, see, when I wrestled with the possibility that I might be gay. . . . At night I lay in bed and coolly informed myself that I was gay and that I had better get used to it. . . . I never forgot my period of profound sexual doubt. . . . I would wonder, just for a moment, by what whim of fate I had decided that I was not a homosexual” (Mysteries 40). Chabon’s own struggle to assume a comfortable sexual and gendered identity plays out in the novel in the character of Art Bechstein.
Hypermasculinities
In his book Iron John Bly attempts to reclaim hegemonic masculinity[4] as the proper form of masculinity that men should pursue in response to what he views as slipping male dominance over the decades of the sixties and seventies. Bly writes, “The male in the past twenty years has become more thoughtful, more gentle. But by this process he has not become more free. He’s a nice boy who pleases not only his mother but also the young woman he is living with. In the seventies I began to see all over the country a phenomenon that we might call the ‘soft male’” (2).
While Bly tries to cover his tracks early in the book with passing references to women and gay men, his version of ideal masculinity is decidedly male and heteronormative: “There is male initiation, female initiation, and human initiation. In this book I am talking about male initiation only. . . . Most of the language in this book speaks to heterosexual men” (x). Bly’s ideal masculinity jibes with a global form of hegemonic masculinity that drives patriarchy, misogyny, and homophobia. His version configures masculinity as a closed system that rejects traditional femininity, similar for instance, to hegemonic Mexican masculinities outlined by Octavio Paz. Paz notes, “[The] ideal of manliness is never to ‘crack,’ never to back down. Those who ‘open themselves up’ are cowards. Unlike other people, we believe that opening oneself up is a weakness or a betrayal” (30). The notion of opening oneself up references one’s sexuality and the notion that only women literally open themselves up during intercourse and figuratively in relation to traditional characteristics of femininity, including emotional and verbal openness. Strikingly similar to Bly, Paz further delineates the concomitant misogyny that accompanies this belief system: “Women are inferior beings because, in submitting, they open themselves up. Their inferiority is constitutional and resides in their sex, their submissiveness, which is a wound that never heals” (30). Bly contends that because of the static nature of femininity, contact with the feminine results in male homosexuality and emasculation: “If the son learns feeling primarily from the mother, then he will probably see his own masculinity from the feminine point of view” (25). To Bly, women represent deterrents to proper maleness and “hide in the ground in the hope of luring light-headed men down to the ground of marriage, jobs, and long-range commitment” (59).
What Bly seems to lament the most about the possibility of a feminine masculinity is the loss of patriarchal power: “There’s a general assumption now that every man in a position of power is or will soon be corrupt and oppressive. Yet the Greeks understood and praised a positive male energy that has accepted authority. They called it Zeus energy, which encompasses intelligence, robust health, compassionate decisiveness, good will, generous leadership. Zeus energy is male authority accepted for the sake of the community” (22). Bly feels that soft men who have not accessed their Zeus power and claimed their rightful mantle of power and authority contribute to the rise of feminine power: “Women are coming out into activity just as the men are passing them going the other way” (60–61). Bly’s answer for this paradigmatic shift in power is for men to access what he calls the Wild Man, whom he posits exists in every man’s psyche: “What I’m suggesting, then, is that every modern male has, lying at the bottom of his psyche, a large, primitive being covered with hair down to his feet. Making contact with this Wild Man is the step the Eighties male or the Nineties has yet to take. . . . Contact with Iron John requires a willingness to descend into the male psyche and accept what’s dark down there” (6). According to Bly, men ought to reacquaint themselves with the master narrative of male dominance hardwired into their psyches from time immemorial. His admonishment decocts into a homophobic and misogynistic worldview obscured by dated mythologies and metanarratives that breed oppression.
As a way to combat recent adductions about the social construction of gender, for example, Bly emphasizes gender difference: “Geneticists have discovered recently that the genetic difference in DNA between men and women amounts to just over three percent. That isn’t much. However the difference exists in every cell of the body” (234, emphasis mine). While he suggests that a man must learn to be a man, he asserts that a woman’s body is her destiny: “A boy cannot change into a man without the active intervention of the older men. . . . A girl changes into a woman on her own, with the bodily developments marking the change” (87). The objectification of women or the idea that the most salient marker of femininity is the body is at the root of sexism and misogyny.
Joe Bechstein and Cleveland as Wild Men
In The Mysteries of Pittsburgh Art struggles to assume a comfortable male identity that encompasses all his multiple selves in part because of the limiting models of Iron John hypermasculinity available to him. Art’s father, Joe Bechstein, exemplifies the dominant image of masculinity in the novel up to the point where Art meets Arthur. Art says of his father, “My father believed in the sports page brought up to his room on a tray with the java in the morning, and in the cigarette girl who prowled the bar with her Luckies and Philip Morris Commanders. Although he was in many ways a man of modern tastes, for music, hats, and hotels he looked to the Depression, and loved nothing but Goodman, snap brims, and the Duquesne” (Mysteries 102). Art’s father evinces a taste for the days of absolute patriarchy and its signifiers, including hats, service women, and sports. “The moneyman for the Maggio family” (105), he exemplifies a version of gangster hypermasculinity that Art initially wishes to emulate: “I enthusiastically de
clared that I wanted to follow in his glamorous footsteps” (20).
Joe Bechstein’s gangster hypermasculinity is based on violent homophobia and a rejection of traditional femininity. Late in the novel when his father finds out that Art is involved in a homosexual relationship, Joe sends some of his thugs to intimidate his son’s lover: “Some of your father’s associates came to see me today. . . . They wanted me to know I was lucky they didn’t tear off my pretty fag face” (293). Further, the novel implies that Art’s mother was accidentally killed because of his father’s shady underworld dealings, a taboo subject between father and son, and that her death resulted in the etiolation of Art’s access to his feminine self: “‘They killed my mother instead of him?’ For an instant this seemed to explain everything” (290). Art’s father represents a version of the kind of global hegemonic masculinity espoused by Bly.
The character in The Mysteries of Pittsburgh named Cleveland signifies another example of the hypermasculine Wild Man Bly embraces. Perhaps even more so than Art’s father, Cleveland actively attempts to seduce Art into the folds of Wild Man masculinity. Even before Art meets Cleveland his reputation precedes him: “Cleveland, Cleveland, Cleveland! They had spoken of nearly nothing but his exploits. Cleveland riding a horse into a swimming pool; coauthoring a book on baseball at the age of thirteen; picking up a prostitute . . . living in a Philadelphia garret and returning to Pittsburgh six months later . . . with a pair of dirty tattoos and a scholarly, hilarious twenty-thousand-word essay on cockroaches” (38–39). Interestingly, Chabon chose to equip Cleveland with dreams of becoming a writer, suggesting an intimacy between the character Cleveland and the implied author Michael Chabon.
Cleveland attempts to acculturate Art into the fold of hypermasculinity by among other things teaching him “to cup a windblown match, ‘like the Marlboro Man,’ and then how to flick the cigarette butt twenty-five feet” (128). Cleveland ingratiates himself with Art in order to get close to Art’s father and make a name for himself in organized crime beyond the unglamorous job of “pickup and delivery for a loan shark” (129). In spite of himself, Art finds that he is attracted to Cleveland’s Wild Man lifestyle: “It was very difficult for me to admit it to myself, almost as difficult as it would have been to express admiration for my father’s job and associates . . . but collecting illegal interest on loans, although perhaps not fun, was terribly fascinating work” (191). Art further admits, “It was at these times . . . my fists full of hot black leather, my helmet clicking against his, that I felt most linked to him, most understanding. I knew why he did the things he did. . . . The speed and the roar and the nothing that isolated us were more exciting, more true and intimate, than anything I ever felt that summer with either Phlox or Arthur” (203–4). Like Joe Bechstein, Cleveland marginalizes Art’s homosexual relationship with Arthur: “In my corroded opinion, I think you’re just clowning around with your sexual chemistry set” (237). He reminds Art of the social boundaries of sexuality and what is at stake: “You’re all fucked up. . . . I’m normalized” (233). Cleveland ultimately attempts to pressure Art to follow his father and become a gangster, likely so that Art can help Cleveland ascend the wiseguy ranks: “Your father’s a wise guy, Bechstein, he’s big. I told you. And by extension, see, you’re big too. You partake of the bigness of your father” (201). Art resists and sees Cleveland as a grotesque version of his father, mishandling Art as a symbolic son: “On the left-hand night table was another gold bracelet . . . and an old blond doll, the kind with eyes that close for doll-like sleep when the rubber baby is laid on her back. He grinned, pulled the head off with a rather disturbing soft pop, and poured all the jewelry into the hollow body” (276). The doll represents Art, and Cleveland, Art’s surrogate and deadly, destructive father.
Chabon’s lifetime interest in comic book heroes makes its first appearance in The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. He likens both his father and Cleveland to superheroes, an association that would eventually suggest destructive hypermasculinities in Chabon’s later work. The narrator Art says of his father, “Before the day of my bar mitzvah I was certain that, with his incredible but rarely displayed powers of mind and body, my father had a secret identity. I realized the secret identity would have to be my father. Hundreds of times I looked in his closets, in the basement, under furniture, in the trunk of his car, on a fruitless hunt for his multicolored superhero (or supervillain) costume” (19). Art describes Cleveland as wearing glasses that he calls “Clark Kents” (62). He refers to him at various times as “the Fell Biker” (63) or just “Death” (64). At one point in the novel Cleveland admits to sleeping with a girl who may or may not have been Phlox and “[dressing] as Batman and she as Robin and then [rolling] around on the floor of a dark garage” (71). Finally, just before Cleveland’s demise, as a childish demonstration of his illusory superpower abilities, he pulls apart the metal wires of a chain-link fence and “[leaves] behind . . . two hand-sized bulges in the fence. You could still make them out from fifty yards away, two little blurs in the pattern of white” (183). What is most notable about Chabon’s early association of his hypermasculine characters with superheroes is that in his later work, especially The Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, as Louise Colbran points out, superhero “masculinity is not a viable or relevant paradigm for contemporary America” (119). Colbran notes about the novel Kavalier & Clay, “Superheroes . . . encapsulate the sublimated desires of young Jewish men who want to fight Nazi atrocities. The novel, though, complicates the matter further by exposing the destructiveness of this phenomenon. The reality is that these superheroes employ the tactics of the enemy in order to do battle with them and, therefore, are ultimately no better than the men they were created to challenge” (122). In the same manner that The Mysteries of Pittsburgh rejects hypermasculinity in favor of a feminine queer masculinity, “Throughout Summerland and Kavalier & Clay, Chabon presents a new paradigm for heroism, one that eschews a static hegemonic masculinity and embraces culturally ‘feminine’ values alongside those identified as ‘masculine’” (135).
In The Mysteries of Pittsburgh Art’s female love interest Phlox represents a character who is deeply invested in heteronormativity. Chabon writes, “Everything about her . . . was like a B-girl or a gun moll, a courtesan in a bad novel, or an actrice in a French art movie about alienation and ennui” (Mysteries 143). Phlox’s identity is inextricably linked to her role as a man’s lady and when this role is threatened she rebels. She and Art perform their roles as heterosexual lovers in relation to internalized cultural images of U.S. American heterosexual lovers: “I lifted her and swung her and kissed her, through all three hundred and sixty degrees, like a soldier and his girl” (141).
When Phlox finds out that Art has cheated on her with another man she argues that Art has broken natural laws of human behavior: “Oh, how can you? It is so unnatural, so obviously wrong, when you really think about it” (230). Because Phlox sees heterosexual sex as natural and homosexual sex as unnatural she finds the latter “disgusting . . . terrible [and] that . . . [men] who sleep with men are just big cowards” (95). Evincing the tenability of Phlox’s socialized gender role, she desperately tries to satisfy what she assumes is Art’s desire to be feminized by assuming the male role and saying to him during intercourse that “she wished she could fuck [him], that there must be a way” (264). Toward the end of her relationship with Art she is willing to do anything and be anybody. Ultimately her weak identity as a persona and a character in the novel facilitates her characterological demise.
Arthur and Queer Masculinities
The moment in the novel where Art meets Arthur the protagonist’s latent queerness quickly rises to the surface: “When I first met Arthur Lecomte, I immediately settled in to await his revelation. I formulated a hundred questions about homosexuality, which I didn’t ask. I wanted to know how he’d decided that he was gay, and if he ever felt that his decision was a mistake. I would very much have liked to know this” (21). Initially, Art’s hypermasculine
socialization prevents him from authentically befriending Arthur without feeling wary of Arthur’s intent and his own gay desire:
All at once I liked him, his firm grace with others, his unlikely modesty, the exotic parties he attended. The desire to befriend him came over me suddenly and certainly, and, as I debated and decided not to shake his hand yet again, I thought how suddenness and certainty had attended all my childhood friendships, until that long, miserable moment of puberty during which I’d been afraid to befriend boys and seemingly unable to befriend girls. (29)
Michael Chabon's America Page 29
