Clouding the Horizon: Nationalism and Queer Utopias in Michael Chabon’s Kavalier & Clay
By Everett Cheng
Michael Chabon’s novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay takes place around the era of World War II, a time when instilling American national unity was a greater priority than ever before. The novel, with its careful exploration and imagination of a queer relationship between Sammy Clay and Tracy Bacon, has much to say regarding queerness, its status in the future realm, and the timeless nature of its struggle for normalization. These explorations of queer imagination, though, are largely filtered through and contrasted with elements of the ubiquitous “nationalist imagination”; for this reason, I will dedicate most of this essay to examining queerness from the perspective of nationalism in the novel. In order to discuss nationalism, however, we should introduce a theory to describe it, and for this purpose I reference the work of historian and political scientist Benedict Anderson. Beyond Anderson, I will largely build on and engage with the work of queer theorist José Muñoz in his book Cruising Utopia. Muñoz’s claims regarding the queer imagination and concrete utopias are particularly relevant to my discussion of Sammy’s relationship with Tracy. I consider Muñoz’s work to be an important theoretical foundation for my discussion, especially when placed in conversation with Lee Edelman’s work No Future, and yet I will also use Chabon’s novel to complicate some of his claims about the viability of utopian imagination. After this, I introduce the New York World’s Fair of 1939 as having nationalistic value, before finally moving into a discussion of queer imagination in Kavalier & Clay. What I will find, overall, is that by recounting the experiences of Sammy and Tracy, who fail to uphold the “shared national identities” which are imposed upon them by their societies and national circumstances, Chabon’s novel emphasizes the dangers of imagining Utopia in a unifying, nationalist context. With a measure of lamentation, I claim, the novel warns that manifestations of Muñoz’s queer futurity are systematically displaced by nationalist imaginations, which standardize both the American identity and the American Utopia, and accordingly that queer imagination can assert itself only within the confines of the occasional lapse in nationalistic hegemony.
In Benedict Anderson’s influential book titled Imagined Communities, he defines the nation as exactly that. The nation is a community, since it “is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship,” and it is imagined, since “the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or hear of them, and yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (Anderson 6–7). As a rule, nations cannot be completely explained by any kind of shared experience or any objective similarities between their inhabitants, although such notions are particularly important and ubiquitous when studying nationalism for the reason that they are socially constructed. Indeed, Anderson makes the key observation that national communities “are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined” (6). In particular, Anderson recognizes that the relevant national act is not to experience the nation but to “think the nation.” The key element of Anderson’s theory to consider in this paper is that the act of “thinking the nation,” although it is by definition decentralized and individual, is always guided and enforced by the numerous centralized elements of a national culture. Because it is socially constructed, the American identity is subject to manipulation by concrete cultural agents—for example newspapers, popular films, comic books, and Fairs—in such a way that it comes to normalize or exclude particular modes of American existence. I will revisit this idea later. For now, I turn my focus more specifically to the case of the public Fair, considering its role as the setting for an important chapter in Chabon’s novel.
The particular Fair in question is the 1939 New York World’s Fair, which has already been the subject of considerable analysis. In his essay “The People’s Fair: Cultural Contradictions of a Consumer Society,” Warren Susman engages the 1939 New York Fair through a cultural and ideological lense. To preface his discussion, Susman points out that 1930s American rhetoric was filled with references to “the people” as a collective. This term was “meant to cut through divisions of class, ethnicity, and ideological distinctions of left and right to form a basic sentiment on which a national culture might be founded” (17). Usage of the term hopes to evoke a kind of fraternity which each citizen of the American nation is compelled to feel with each other, one which is a central object in any theory of nationalism. According to Susman, this terminology was merely the indicator of a broader sentiment, one which
suggest[ed] that a basic unity underpinned the whole social and cultural structure of America. Divisions within society seemed superficial. … A search was launched for some method of measuring and defining this unity … The concept of the average was born, a kind of statistical accounting for people seen as a unit. For a culture that originally had enshrined individualism as its key virtue, interest in the average was now overwhelming. The Average American and the Average American Family became central to the new vision of a future culture. (Susman 18)
As much as it would like to see itself as grounded in scientific and statistical data, the broader rhetorical device of “the people” and of the “Average American”[1] is inescapably, even blatantly a nationalist one. The consideration, and indeed imagination of such an Average American provides a sturdy foundation for the nationalist’s position—if all Americans share some sort of national experience and voice, then naturally we should all treat each other as members of a mutual and special community. As it turns out, the staging of the New York World’s Fair of 1939 played into these sentiments eagerly. One brochure “announced that the Fair was for ‘everyone’ and that its purpose was to ‘project the average man into the World of Tomorrow.’” A statement approved by the Fair’s board of directors “referred to their enterprise as ‘everyman’s fair,’ dedicated to ‘bearing on the life of the great mass of the people,’ and offering special insights for ‘the plain American citizen’” (Susman 19). Whether it passed under the name of “the people,” the “Average American,” or the “plain American citizen,” the imagination of a shared, national American identity was always a prerequisite for expressing the Fair’s ideological and metaphorical messages. It is important to notice, however, the selective idealization inherent in imagining the Average American—if one person can stand as the average and therefore “true” image of the American, than what do we make of those who absolutely fail to conform? More than just a statistical average, the “shared American identity” is a construction which tends to elevate certain individuals and their lifestyles, and to force certain others even further into the corners of social consciousness.
The 1939 New York World’s Fair features in Chabon’s novel only for one short chapter, but it is one in which Sammy Clay and Tracy Bacon share a particularly significant adventure. Although the Fair is already closed, they decide to visit what remains, and eventually find themselves in the pitch-dark interior of the Perisphere, a giant spherical structure which houses a diorama of a utopian future land:
[Bacon:] “Yeah. This is the way. I don’t think I would have liked just floating over it near as much.”
Sammy went over and stood beside Bacon for a moment. Then he eased himself down on the ground beside him. He folded an arm under his chest and, inclining his head slightly, squinted his eyes, trying to lose himself in the illusion of the model … . He was a twentieth of an inch tall, zipping along an oceanic highway in his little antigravity Skyflivver, streaking past the silent faces of the aspiring silvery buildings. It was a perfect day in a perfect city. … His fingertips were on fire.
“Ow!” Sammy said, dropping his lighter. “Ouch!” …
They lay there for a few seconds, … with Sammy’s sore fingertips in Tracy Bacon’s mouth, listening to the fabulous clockwork of their hearts and lungs, and loving each other. (Chabon 380)
The small number of pages for which Sammy and Tracy are allowed to be alone befits their status as an afterthought—free in their solitude and yet confined to the unseen temporal shadow of the utopia called “Democracity.” Considering the later incident in which police shut down a gathering for queer men, arresting Tracy and nearly Sammy, it is clear that the couple could never have publicly shared such an intimate moment during the Fair’s season. When Tracy remarks his satisfaction at being able to see the exhibit close-up, then, he expresses a kind of romance inherent in their position as having been excluded—both from the group of people who stood in line to see the Perisphere during its actual commission, and from the ever-present image of the Average American. Insofar as the Fair exhibit represents a future utopia designed for the Average Man, their expedition into its core rebrands it as a queer imagination, but one which can only exist inside their private societal afterthought. I see this invocation as particularly relevant to the work of José Muñoz, which I will now briefly introduce.
In Cruising Utopia, Muñoz claims “[q]ueerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world” (1). He is also concerned with the “concrete utopia,” which he characterizes as reflecting “the hopes of a collective, an emergent group, or even the solitary oddball who is the one who dreams for many.” Concrete utopias, he says, “are the realm of educated hope,” and he argues they are largely the products of queer imagination during a not-yet-queer time (Muñoz 3). But through the scene referenced above (which develops inside the shadow of a utopia), Kavalier & Clay delivers a somewhat different picture of Sammy’s and Tracy’s queer imagination. The image of Democracity, filled with thousands of future Americans, and dually the image of millions of present-day Average Americans peering down into the Perisphere, carries not a feeling of educated hope, but one of unreachability and resignation for Sammy and Bacon. Sammy tries to imagine himself as part of the utopia, but the moment he does so he is pulled back to the present by burning his fingertips; likewise, his educated hope cautiously awakes as he imagines a queer utopia, but is always chased away by the pains and persecutions of the present. The idea of the future Average American itself is a denial of queer futurity—if the future is to uphold a nationalistic narrative of continuity with the present, then queer imagination is destined to feel “other” even in the future realm. This exclusion is what makes Sammy’s and Tracy’s delight in roaming Democracity’s shadow remarkable. Indeed, the couple’s adventure at the Fair displays a breed of queer imagination which can firmly ground itself neither in the present nor in the future, and yet which (by necessity) thrives on its own “otherness”—an imagination which revels in its own impossibility, but simultaneously guards a propensity for momentarily forgetting it.
I maintain that at least in the context of Chabon’s novel, this particular act of forgetting is only ever momentary, since if it were to last, it would become the same kind of queer utopian imaginary which Muñoz advocates but which Kavalier & Clay critiques. A key point in my reading of Sammy’s and Tracy’s adventure is that their future is systematically excluded from utopian imagination, and that even they come to recognize it as such. Later, when Sammy suddenly decides at the train station not to accompany Tracy to Los Angeles, he violently and emphatically acknowledges to the reader that no one can “chase the queer” forever. We might say his realization that “he would rather not love at all than be punished for loving” (Chabon 420) comes like the waking from a dream. This makes sense—only an illusion or a dream may blend together such contrasting images as the “average American’s future” and Sammy’s future with Bacon. After all, if queerness is “visible only in the horizon,” (Muñoz 11) then it might be periodically occluded by the looming facts of the here and now.
I would like to distinguish my argument from that of Lee Edelman in his book No Future, a so-called “anti-relational” work to which Muñoz responds. In particular, Edelman examines the important role of the Child in constructing the future, noting that political arguments tend to promise a better future by “fighting for the children.” Through the absolute inarguability of their importance, Edelman claims, political argumentation uses the image of the Child—a device in which queerness may have no share—to enforce heteronormativity. His response, then, is to advocate a project of queerness which impossibly rejects the great future-oriented value of the Child as a symbol, and which should come to “figure the bar to every realization of futurity, the resistance, internal to the social, to every social structure or form” (Edelman 4). This represents Edelman’s principal disagreement with Muñoz, who directly responds by arguing that “queerness is primarily about futurity and hope” (Muñoz 11). In fact, while my reading of Chabon’s novel involves the widespread and even systematic denial of queer future imagination, it significantly supports many aspects of Muñoz’s claim. Importantly, although Muñoz’s picture of queerness as a futurity is attractive, it does not render queerness invulnerable. The queer can still be persecuted, or “chased out,” but this must happen inside the arena of futurity. Accordingly, the standardized American identity privileges a future in which there is decidedly no room for queerness; yet this denial is itself no more than a marginalization of queerness in the present. As Muñoz claims, queerness may well be primarily about futurity and hope—what I claim, then, is that queerness will be “here” precisely when it becomes standardized, and indeed privileged, to imagine a future in which queerness exists alongside other modes of experience.
Of course, in my critique of Muñoz’s optimism for queer utopian imagination, it is important to admit some limitations inherent to the gap in time periods. Although Muñoz declares that even in today’s world “we are not yet queer,” (1) the cultural landscape of modern-day America is more friendly to queer people, and consequently to queer imaginations, than was the setting of Chabon’s novel. In a separate point, I have not in this paper examined the role of nationalist imagination in Josef’s experiences. Such a discussion, I believe, would lead to equally important conclusions, especially when considering his various quests for revenge against the Germans, but the topic is better left for further works of analysis. Regardless, the usefulness of nationalist imaginations in studying queer futurity should not be underestimated. Michael Chabon’s novel provides a painfully intricate picture of simultaneous romance and tragedy, which is evoked by nationalist imaginations, and for different reasons by queer ones. In particular, the theory of nationalism is intimately linked with the “queer” imagination of utopias, and the former’s tendency to strictly regulate the latter has motivated my analysis. Accordingly, one of my most important conclusions is that when imagining these utopias, we must look for nationalist influences as the site of an unseen struggle. Queerness, we know, is manifested in imaginations of the future, especially in concrete utopias; the marginalizing force of nationalist imagination, however, acts on queerness as much in the future realm as it does in the present.
Works Cited
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso, 1991. Print.
Chabon, Michael. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. New York: Random House, 2000. Print.
Edelman, Lee. “The Future is Kids’ Stuff.” No Future: Queer Theory & The Death Drive. Durham: Duke UP, 2004.
Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York UP, 2009. Print.
Susman, Warren I. “The People’s Fair: Cultural Contradictions of a Consumer Society.” Dawn of a New Day: The New York World’s Fair, 1939/1940. Ed. Helen A. Harrison. New York: The Queens Museum and New York UP, 1980. 17–27. Print.
[1] My capitalization of this phrase reflects its position as a single, centralized imagination, replete with its own sort of identity, and existing on a much greater scale than any individual person’s imagination. As much as it is a product of nationalistic ideology, the Average American is itself an ideology, capable of validating or invalidating entire lifestyles through mere appearances.