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Oct. 21st, 2014 05:29 pmMichael Chabon's Telegraph Avenue opens with this epigraph:
Call me Ishmael.
~Ishmael Reed, probably
It is one of the gutsiest, most stunning opening moves I've ever seen a novelist make. I couldn't get past it for about five minutes. I mean, preceding your own opening line with one of the boldest, most famous opening lines in the history of American literature is gutsy on its own. Your own opening line is guaranteed to be pedestrian in comparison.
Chabon's opening line, in fact, is "A white boy rode flatfoot on a skateboard, towed along, hand to shoulder, by a black boy pedaling a brakeless fixed gear-bike." As far as I can tell (I'm only 50 pages in), the boys are not characters in the novel, just scenery on the eponymous Avenue. Their relationship hints at Chabon's principal social theme: the tension of the push and pull between "black culture" and "white culture" in 21st century America. This opening passage, which lasts a mere half page before subsiding into the Brokeland Records storefront that houses the novel's primary characters, is like Steinbeck's turtle in The Grapes of Wrath: an ungrounded, ambiguous metaphor that creates a mood more than it states a thesis. And sure enough, it seems pedestrian, aimless, and unmotivated in comparison to the epigraph.
I don't know what "Call me Ishmael" means- In the comments to my post on.the opening chapters of Moby Dick, I suggest that on one level it's a callback to sailor Odysseus's introduction to Polyphemus: "Call me Nobody". Ishmael's presence in Moby Dick wavers between solidity and ephemerality as the narrative progresses, as uncertain within the novel as the idea that there is such a thing as Americanness for Ishmael to embody. Certainly Moby Dick's greatest claim to being the Great American Novel is that it is gloriously imperfect. We engage with Moby Dick by critiquing it thoughtfully, not by consuming it.
[And in particular, one major strain of Moby Dick's imperfection is Ishmael's relationship with the Southern Pacific islander harpooneer Queequeg. Ishmael endlessly exoticizes Queequeg, with a form of liberal paternalism that treats his every habit as evidence of his humorous primitivism. Or to put more simply, one of the glaring flaws in Moby Dick is that it is very, very racist. ]
So Chabon doesn't use "Call me Ishmael" as his opening line to celebrate Melville, or even necessarily to claim some sort of literary inheritance from Ishmael. He doesn't even attribute the line to Melville. There would be little point, since we all know the line belongs to Melville. Instead, he proposes a hypothetical (probable) retransmission by Ishmael Reed, a leading writer of the 1960s "Black Art" movement whose novels, like Telegraph Avenue, often speak of race and white/black tension in Berkeley, California. Further, Reed is a novelist whose novels, like Melville's, are messy hodgepodges of style and form, defiant shouts against the tyranny of genre. (I have read and reviewed three of Reed's novels for 50Books_POC)
I'll acknowledge the obvious joke in order to set it aside. Ishmael Reed has probably said "Call me Ishmael", Chabon is saying, since it is his name and in order to introduce himself to others it is likely he used the phrase or at minimum something similar. This is not Chabon's point, it's just his justification to use the line. In fact, the second level of the joke is that Chabon doesn't know for a fact that Reed has ever said the line, hedging himself with an absurd 'probably'. It's an advertisement of Chabon's inexpertise, that Chabon is a white dude writing about kyriarchy, so clueless that he doesn't even pretend to know what the novel's apparent patron saint is thinking.
Chabon is therefore going to write a novel digging deep into Ishmael Reed territory, but he's not going to do it with Reed's authority. Because authority is the major thing Reed's novels have going for them, authority is why Reed's novels are unsettling and powerful. Reed says things that are not easy to accept and he says them as if he expects everyone is already on the same page as him. It is not possible while following the trajectory of an Ishmael Reed novel to question the trajectory of an Ishmael Reed novel. He's moving too quickly , too surely, too confidently. That's how you can make your way through an entire novel about something called Louisiana Red without being entirely sure what Louisana Red is.
Telegraph Avenue is not going to be like that. Chabon's going to explain everything, contextualize everything, wallow in his context. He's going to take his time exploring his place and his theme. And yet still his novel will live in the shadow of Ishmael Reed, in the shadow of being a white dude writing about things he only knows from the privileged side.
And still his novel will live in the shadow of Herman Melville, because Chabon's been marked as a guy who might some day make a run at the Great American Novel since Kavalier and Clay, and Telegraph Avenue marks Chabon's most deliberate run at the title yet, though he seems ambivalent about the point. Perhaps the corner of Berkeley near the Oakland border, where he grew up, is Chabon's whaling- the thing he knows better than anything else, and is using to tell the biggest story he knows how.
It's certainly a big beginning.
Call me Ishmael.
~Ishmael Reed, probably
It is one of the gutsiest, most stunning opening moves I've ever seen a novelist make. I couldn't get past it for about five minutes. I mean, preceding your own opening line with one of the boldest, most famous opening lines in the history of American literature is gutsy on its own. Your own opening line is guaranteed to be pedestrian in comparison.
Chabon's opening line, in fact, is "A white boy rode flatfoot on a skateboard, towed along, hand to shoulder, by a black boy pedaling a brakeless fixed gear-bike." As far as I can tell (I'm only 50 pages in), the boys are not characters in the novel, just scenery on the eponymous Avenue. Their relationship hints at Chabon's principal social theme: the tension of the push and pull between "black culture" and "white culture" in 21st century America. This opening passage, which lasts a mere half page before subsiding into the Brokeland Records storefront that houses the novel's primary characters, is like Steinbeck's turtle in The Grapes of Wrath: an ungrounded, ambiguous metaphor that creates a mood more than it states a thesis. And sure enough, it seems pedestrian, aimless, and unmotivated in comparison to the epigraph.
I don't know what "Call me Ishmael" means- In the comments to my post on.the opening chapters of Moby Dick, I suggest that on one level it's a callback to sailor Odysseus's introduction to Polyphemus: "Call me Nobody". Ishmael's presence in Moby Dick wavers between solidity and ephemerality as the narrative progresses, as uncertain within the novel as the idea that there is such a thing as Americanness for Ishmael to embody. Certainly Moby Dick's greatest claim to being the Great American Novel is that it is gloriously imperfect. We engage with Moby Dick by critiquing it thoughtfully, not by consuming it.
[And in particular, one major strain of Moby Dick's imperfection is Ishmael's relationship with the Southern Pacific islander harpooneer Queequeg. Ishmael endlessly exoticizes Queequeg, with a form of liberal paternalism that treats his every habit as evidence of his humorous primitivism. Or to put more simply, one of the glaring flaws in Moby Dick is that it is very, very racist. ]
So Chabon doesn't use "Call me Ishmael" as his opening line to celebrate Melville, or even necessarily to claim some sort of literary inheritance from Ishmael. He doesn't even attribute the line to Melville. There would be little point, since we all know the line belongs to Melville. Instead, he proposes a hypothetical (probable) retransmission by Ishmael Reed, a leading writer of the 1960s "Black Art" movement whose novels, like Telegraph Avenue, often speak of race and white/black tension in Berkeley, California. Further, Reed is a novelist whose novels, like Melville's, are messy hodgepodges of style and form, defiant shouts against the tyranny of genre. (I have read and reviewed three of Reed's novels for 50Books_POC)
I'll acknowledge the obvious joke in order to set it aside. Ishmael Reed has probably said "Call me Ishmael", Chabon is saying, since it is his name and in order to introduce himself to others it is likely he used the phrase or at minimum something similar. This is not Chabon's point, it's just his justification to use the line. In fact, the second level of the joke is that Chabon doesn't know for a fact that Reed has ever said the line, hedging himself with an absurd 'probably'. It's an advertisement of Chabon's inexpertise, that Chabon is a white dude writing about kyriarchy, so clueless that he doesn't even pretend to know what the novel's apparent patron saint is thinking.
Chabon is therefore going to write a novel digging deep into Ishmael Reed territory, but he's not going to do it with Reed's authority. Because authority is the major thing Reed's novels have going for them, authority is why Reed's novels are unsettling and powerful. Reed says things that are not easy to accept and he says them as if he expects everyone is already on the same page as him. It is not possible while following the trajectory of an Ishmael Reed novel to question the trajectory of an Ishmael Reed novel. He's moving too quickly , too surely, too confidently. That's how you can make your way through an entire novel about something called Louisiana Red without being entirely sure what Louisana Red is.
Telegraph Avenue is not going to be like that. Chabon's going to explain everything, contextualize everything, wallow in his context. He's going to take his time exploring his place and his theme. And yet still his novel will live in the shadow of Ishmael Reed, in the shadow of being a white dude writing about things he only knows from the privileged side.
And still his novel will live in the shadow of Herman Melville, because Chabon's been marked as a guy who might some day make a run at the Great American Novel since Kavalier and Clay, and Telegraph Avenue marks Chabon's most deliberate run at the title yet, though he seems ambivalent about the point. Perhaps the corner of Berkeley near the Oakland border, where he grew up, is Chabon's whaling- the thing he knows better than anything else, and is using to tell the biggest story he knows how.
It's certainly a big beginning.
