a href="http://wrongquestions.blogspot.com/2007/07/beware-politics-ahead.html">Asking the Wrong Questions: Beware, Politics Ahead: What Freedman doesn't acknowledge, however, is that Chabon's aggrandizement of the rootless lifestyle that, at the end of his novel, his characters have been doomed to, is not, as his column seems to suggest, an intellectually dishonest attempt to do away with the need for a Jewish state. It is a response--on Landsman's side, and perhaps also on Chabon's--to what the novel perceives as the great evil of territorialism. When Landsman angrily tells an American power-broker, who has just finished pitching Landsman their plan for establishing a new Jewish homeland, and possibly starting World War III in the process, that "[his] homeland is in his hat. It's in [his] ex-wife's tote-bag," he is not embracing a nomadic lifestyle. He is rejecting all other options in disgust. Over the course of the novel Landsman, driven by his fundamental decency and desire to see justice done, sloughs off all the layers of his self-definition--as a policeman, as a member of a religion, as a member of a nation--until all that's left are his convictions. At the end of the novel, he has narrowed that definition down to two simple predicates: he is the man who loves Bina Gelbfish, and the man who is going to do the right thing. Romantic? Yes. But not insipid or free of consequences.
I don't know Freedman's personal history--whether he has ever lived, even for a brief period, in Israel. If he hasn't, then it's possible that he can't understand just how powerfully The Yiddish Policemen's Union captures the corrosive effect of territorialism. I say this as someone who is a Zionist, who loves her country, and who hopes and plans to live here for the rest of her life: it can be exhausting to constantly define oneself as a member of a group, especially if that group's actions often challenge your most cherished beliefs. The temptation to fling off all but the most fundamental of allegiances can sometimes be overwhelming, and although I don't concur with Landsman's decision to do so at the end of The Yiddish Policemen's Union any more than I can understand Ayelet Waldman's choice to shirk off her Israeli identity because of the actions of a single prime minister, I also don't see that either choice is, as Freedman seems to believe, a refusal to engage with the issue at hand.
Refusal to engage is in fact Freedman's culminating accusation against Chabon and The Yiddish Policemen's Union:
Roth in Operation Shylock and The Counterlife and Roiphe in Lovingkindness drew powerful and often critical portraits of Israel's place (or lack thereof) in the existence of American Jews. Yet as writers of a certain generation, they did not need to eradicate Israel, or at the minimum treat it as a communal embarrassment, in order to depict something vital in the Diaspora experience. Roughly two generations younger, apparently imbued with the belief that Israel is a colonial, imperialistic oppressor, Chabon has found joy in, at least on paper, making it cease to exist.
And there we have the fundamental fallacy of Freedman's argument: the belief that every decision in The Yiddish Policemen's Union was made first and foremost for political reasons. Never mind that the novel's genesis is in an article, "Say it in Yiddish" that Chabon wrote ten years ago, in which he imagines a modern Yiddish nation (for which, as this blog entry reports, he has also been roundly criticized by Yiddish-speakers who claim that the language isn't nearly as dead as he suggests. All I know is that in my personal experience of Yiddish-speaking enclaves in Israel, they are precisely the kind of ghettos Chabon describes in The Yiddish Policemen's Union). Never mind that for the sake of that alternate history, Israel as we know it can't exist. Never mind that the noir anti-hero has to reject the security offered by his corrupt society in exchange for his silence and tacit approval of its sins. Never mind that Chabon has been an outspoken proponent of bringing genre tropes and conventions back into literary fiction. None of these possible reasons for the form the novel ultimately take are as persuasive as the political one, perhaps because Freedman can't imagine any reason to write a novel other than to make a political point.
I was thinking about Freedman's article when I read Nader Elhefnawy's review of Brian Aldiss's latest novel, HARM, in Strange Horizons. According to Elhefnawy, the novel, in which a British cartoonist of Muslim descent is jailed and tortured for making a joke about killing the prime minister, is "unambiguously (and for a publisher, intimidatingly) about the present War on Terror, and Paul's torturers, at the titular Hostile Activities Research Ministry, are unambiguously American and British officials." I was struck, while reading Elhefnawy's review, by how little he actually discusses the novel as a work of fiction. A significant portion of his review is taken up by plot description, and more importantly, by his highlighting of the ways in which HARM mirrors what is happening in the real world today.
Paul also remains in custody even after paranoia has ceased to be an excuse for detaining him, as his interrogators freely admit among each other. The American interrogator, Abraham Ramson, figures out in just one session early in the novel that Paul is not a threat and that it is a waste of time to hold on to him. Algernon Gibbs, the British manager of the facility, simply stubs out his cigarette and remarks "I'd nuke the lot of them, given the chance"—which is all that matters to him.
It's hard to escape the conclusion that for Elhefnawy, HARM's virtue is rooted in its unadulterated mirroring of reality, which is entirely antithetical to my feelings about what makes good fiction. Elhefnawy closes the review by concluding that "HARM richly deserves a place in the canon of dystopian science fiction," but last time I checked, a dystopia was a work that imagined how the future might be, in its worst possible form, not a work that describes the present day. 1984 is powerful precisely because it can't be pinned down to a single era, or a single menace to our freedom and civil rights. It was famously written in response to Stalinism and then appropriated as a response to fascism, and it works equally well for both, as well as remaining a vibrant and terrifying warning in the face of present-day incursions into civil liberties, because its ultimate focus is the universal human tendency to give away freedom for the sake of the illusion of security (this universality is absent from Orwell's other anti-totalitarianism novel, Animal Farm, which is one of the reasons that it hasn't aged nearly as well as 1984). As Elhefnawy describes it, HARM is not so much a work of fiction as a work of fictionalized journalism, the kind of novel, like Operation Shylock, that Freedman deems justified in its criticisms of Israel because it traffics not in fancy but in slices of reality.
I've probably harped on this issue so often that it's become dull, especially in my discussions of Battlestar Galactica and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, but I don't believe it's possible for a work of fiction to be good art and good propaganda at the same time. The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a good novel, partly because it can't be boiled down, as Samuel Freedman attempts to do in "Chabon's Choice," to a political statement. I don't mean to say that art shouldn't be political, or shouldn't have a point of view. On the contrary, I think one of the hallmarks of great art is that it can win you over to a point of view, not in the sense of changing your opinions, but by placing the reader in an emotional frame of mind in which those opinions are inevitable, at least for as long as the pages are turning. James Tiptree Jr. did this in some of her short stories--as I once wrote, one of the marvels of "The Screwfly Solution" is that it makes you frightened of a misogynistic tendency in all males that you probably don't even believe exists. Ian McEwan manages it in Saturday, when he makes us sympathize with an affluent, privileged Englishman who really hasn't done enough to earn his good fortune or try to spread it around. Russell T. Davies manages it in The Second Coming, an atheist fantasy whose fundamental assumption--that humanity has, en masse, outgrown religious belief--is untenable. All of these works, however, have more to offer than an opinion. Disagreeing with Tiptree or McEwan or Davies doesn't make it impossible for us to enjoy their work, and neither is that enjoyment predicated on accepting their viewpoints. This is, to me, the essence of worthy fiction.
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