The promise of Malamud's fiction

Bernard Malamud is a much more sophisticated writer than has been recognized. The rhetorical strategy that he employs in his fictions has gone largely unacknowledged by critics because it functions to undermine his stories and their morals and conventional themes. Malamud extensively employs radical heteroglossia, labile tonality, and equivocal parody to subvert narrative mythos and create an unreconcilable tension between the lisible and the scriptible in his fictions. The humanistic promise of Malamud's work, as well as the remarkable and remarkably elusive appeal of his writing, lie--paradoxically--in this frustration of narrative expectation.;This promise is continuous with the prophetic biblical tradition, most specifically with the recovery from conative impasse that is accomplished in the Book of Job. Malamud's excessively suffering and unaccountably balked protagonists, like Job, are nevertheless called to begin again. Where satisfaction or conclusion is impossible, the possibility of departure can still be preserved in the rhythms of our narratives. Rather than a theme or ethic, Malamud's fictions develop a temporal sensibility that prescinds from eschatology. In ambivalence and the oppositions that defeat narrative closure lies the mystery of renewal or the reopening of time to meaning.;This paper proposes a revisionary reading of Malamud that elicits the prophetic dimension of his fiction. Approached from this revisionary perspective, Malamud's first novel, The Natural, reveals its fundamentally parodic force and reverses conventional interpretations of its moral import. Extensive readings both of the Book of Job and of Malamud's last novel, God's Grace, develop Malamud's extraordinarily complex parody of the Book of Job and allow us to appreciate the codes by which both texts structure their readers' sensibilities. Malamud's effect in God's Grace, the most ambitious of his novels, is literally to project within the sensibility of his readers the proto-ontological possibility that the phenomenologist Emmanuel Levinas argues is hidden within the burden of conscience: a new beginning in the irremissible responsibility of each for all. In a demystified and ideologically fractured world, this exigent freedom to begin again is the humane promise of Malamud's fiction.