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Worlds Without End Blog

Automata 101: The Artist as Golem Maker – Part One Posted at 8:23 AM by Rhonda Knight

Rhondak101

Rhonda Knight is an Associate Professor of English at Coker College in Hartsville, SC. She teaches Medieval and Renaissance literature as well as composition courses. This blog will outline her experiences teaching an Honors English Composition course about created entities, beginning with the golem of Jewish legend and continuing through cyborgs, robots, androids, and artificial intelligence.


Note: I’m not sure why I feel the need to announce spoilers here since I have not done so with my previous blogs, but be warned I give away a lot of plot here.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and ClayThe last book that we read was Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. I highly recommend this book. I think it is much more interesting than the Hugo-winning The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, and it has convinced me that I need to read everything that Chabon has written.

I put this book last on the syllabus for a couple of reasons. First, it is very long (636 pages), so I wanted to spread the reading out. The students were working on their research papers at the same time, so there were writing and research days interspersed. Second, because the book is recent, I was not sure how much research existed on it, so I placed it late in the semester so that it would not be an obvious choice to be the subject of the research paper. While the students did not like the length of the novel (and had a hard time keeping up with the reading schedule), they did like the book very much. I think that they were appreciative of a non-science fiction book at this point in the semester. One thing that I’ve learned is that habitual readers of speculative fiction grasp an author’s constructed world very quickly and therefore, understand the culture, laws, etc. without much effort. Many of the students, either through age or reading experience, were not facile in their grasp of Dick’s or Piercy’s dystopias. Therefore, Kavalier and Clay gave them a world that they knew something about and operated in much the same way as their own.

Michael ChabonTeacherly confession: I loved Kavalier and Clay when I read it in July, but I had no idea how I was going to teach it or how I was going to tie it into the other texts. I decided I’d figure it out, and luckily I did. I could have never made the book work if I had not taught Piercy’s He, She and It. In Piercy’s novel, Malkah’s interwoven story of Joseph the golem laid the foundation for Chabon’s golem. The students entered the first section with most of the background they needed to understand Josef Kavalier’s escape from Czechoslovakia.

Our discussion opened with a look at the narrative voice. The book is written in the third person, but not in the typical third person omniscient manner. One feels that the narrator is a scholar, historian, biographer or comic book fan, as the book’s first sentences show:

In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier’s greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini. “To me, Clark Kent in a phone booth and Houdini in a packing crate, they were one and the same thing,” he would learnedly expound at WonderCon or Angloulême or to the editor of The Comics Journal.

In support of this voice, the book contains footnotes (although not to the level of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell) that informs the reader of such things as $42,200 was the selling price of Amazing Midget Radio Comics #1 in 1998 and Roy Lichtenstein might have been inspired by an enlarged comic page framed in Sammy’s office that revealed the lithography dots. I taught the students to look for such textual clues that reveal the humanity of the narrator.

In the second class, I told the students that I wanted to look at the protagonists’ names, Josef Kavalier and Sammy Klayman. We talked about their meanings: Kavalier = Cavalier = Chevalier = Knight; and Klayman = Clay Man = Golem. I admitted to them that I was unsure what to do with those meanings but suggested that we think about how to apply them as we continued to read. We came to the meaning of Joe’s surname quickly. If we took “knight” to mean “knight in shining armor,” then it is easy to apply the cliché and find a hero and a rescuer in Joe. His commitment to his Czech relatives and his actions during WWII are heroic in their own way. In his return after the war, he becomes a superhero, like one of his creations, with a secret lair and a disguise.

The EscapistSammy’s role as the golem was harder to understand. Once we started to think about the golem’s role as a protector of the Jews, we were able to see that Sammy becomes the protector of Joe’s fiancée, Rosa, and her unborn child. Sammy, who was planning on moving to L.A. with his male lover, marries Rosa after Joe runs away and joins the Navy. Instead of protecting the ghetto, Sammy as golem makes a family and moves it to the Long Island suburbs. He suppresses his own sexuality to play the straight family man for Joe. In our discussion of He, She and It, we looked at the callous way that the Rabbi “deactivates” the golem Joseph. We felt that the ambiguity of Kavalier and Clay’s ending indicated Sammy’s deactivation as a golem: his job was done, and he became disposable. I stressed to the students that everything the narrative voice had been telling us about Sammy demonstrated that Sammy had a good life after he left. We decided that his golem, unlike all of the golems we had encountered, received his freedom.

I’ve managed to demonstrate only a portion of our discussion. In my next blog, I will talk more about Chabon’s use of the superhero and its relation to the golem.

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