Kavalier & Clay Part 6 - What is Love? Baby Don't Hurt Me

In Part Six, we bear witness to the reunification of the splintered Kavalier & Clay clan, and watch as the relationships between its members shift as various forms of love become realized. Love is generally known to be among the most potent of human emotions, and many (if not most) people regard it as the single most powerful force in a person's life. This power takes many forms, and often it can be found to be capable of completely overwhelming a person's rational thinking, warping their lives–sometimes in a good way, other times negatively. To put it in an escapist's terms, love could be said to both entrap people and to free them.

Though Sammy's love for Tommy is indeed fatherly, his love for Rosa is not romantic–for it never could be. Certainly he loves her, but as a companion and collaborator in the raising of their son and the making of their comics. Ever since that night at the beach home of James Haworth Love, Sammy has been petrified by what may happen to him if he dares to love as he is meant to. His love and its impossibility have entrapped him in a perpetual state of misery, as his whole life has become "fueled or deformed by a lie" (623). However, after being outed at the Senate hearing, and after acknowledging to George Deasey (a surprisingly fatherly figure throughout the novel to Sammy) that he "'ought to feel really bad. Ashamed or what have you," he instead admits to feeling "'Relieved'" (622-623). As Deasey theorizes, Sammy has been gifted by "'Senator C. Estes Kefauver and his pals'" his own "'golden key'" (623); the fear of discovery is no longer a factor, and Sammy's love has been freed, bringing with it from its prison cell deep in his heart the feelings of happiness that were arrested as co-conspirators that fateful night. 

In Joe's case, his love for his family has not allowed him to forgive himself for abandoning them and the the love they bestowed upon him. Thus, true his guilt-ridden nature, he is trapped in self-isolation. But of the Clay trio of Sammy, Rosa, and Tommy, there exists one person who has no knowledge of what Joe thinks of as his betrayal: his son. It is a sighting of this boy at Louis Tannen's Magic Shop that awakens Joe's love from its slumber. He sees in Tommy a small first step on the journey back into the lives and hearts of Rosa and Sammy, befriending the boy not as his long-lost father, but as his first cousin once-removed. Eventually, his interactions with Tommy lead to a reintroduction with Sammy on the 83rd floor of the Empire State Building. Soon after, Joe's own love draws him back to his cousin and his former lover, while their love, undiminished despite his disappearance, welcomes him back into the fold with open arms. There, under the Clay family's suburban roof, Joe's romantic love for Rosa, always having been in the background, resurfaces, as does hers for him. 

Yet another power of love is its inevitability. The nature of Sammy's love was brought to light despite his efforts. The love between Joe, Rosa, Sammy, and Tommy put the family on a collision course for whic Joe's best attempts at life as a hermit was no match. Even the Golem of Prague, having traveled across borders and an ocean, turns up at the doorstep of a home Joe Kavalier is not even an official resident of. Though it has lost its physical form, it has gained a weight it did not possess when he smuggled it out of the Nicholasgasse building with Kornblum. In the legend of the Golem, this is said to happen once the Golem regains its soul and reanimates in defense of the Jewish people. Now, Joe speculates that "there could be more than one lost soul embodied in all that dust, weighing it down so heavily" (612). The Golem has taken on the protection, now, of this one singular Jew, embodying in its silty remains the souls, it seems, of Josef's family, their love having found its way back to him.