SOURCE: Pifer, Ellen. “Malamud's Unnatural The Natural.” Studies in American Jewish Fiction 7, no. 2 (fall 1988): 138-52.

[In the following essay, Pifer discusses Malamud's use of artificial, highly stylized narrative devices in The Natural.]

In The Natural, a host of literary devices draws attention to the “unnatural” landscape, the deliberate design, of Malamud's first novel. Most discussions of the novel have focused not on these devices, however, but on the ancient lore of Arthurian romance, particularly the myths of the Grail Knight and the Fisher King. As critics have pointed out, the novel's ample allusions to the grail legend underline its mythic theme: a hero's quest, ordeal, and ultimate redemption.¹ While the significance of this traditional material can hardly be overlooked, preoccupation with the novel's mythic elements has led critics to overlook some of the most telling, and original, effects of its narrative structure. A network of seemingly magical events, interlocking images, linguistic motifs, and self-conscious narrative devices distances the reader from the novel's setting and characters. Yet these stylized effects do not simply foster a sense of fantastic “nonreality” or “unreality,” as is generally assumed.² To the contrary, Malamud employs the devices of literary artifice to dramatize the inexorable conditions of human existence—calling attention to the operation of moral law in human character and fate.

In the famous “Custom-House” chapter of The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne employs a simile drawn from nature to illustrate how a novelist may deliberately create unnatural effects in order to convey his unique “truth.” Hawthorne's specific account of this fictional process has particular relevance for Malamud's methods. The writer's “imaginative faculty,” says Hawthorne, operates like “moonlight in a familiar room, falling so white upon the carpet” that all objects in the room are “spiritualized by the unusual light,” investing all with “strangeness and remoteness.” Transformed by imagination, the “familiar room” becomes “a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other” (38-39).

The landscape of The Natural, although the novel was published a century after Hawthorne's, constitutes just such a “neutral territory”—a realm existing “somewhere between” the world of fact and that of dream. Here “the Actual and the Imaginary” meet, as authorial imagination transforms the daylight world of midcentury America into the moonlit “territory” of art.³ The novel opens, appropriately enough, on a scene drenched in evocative moonlight. The protagonist, Roy Hobbs, sits at a train window gazing out at the “moon-hazed Western hills.” As he observes the passing landscape, Roy suddenly sees a “bone-white farmhouse … alone in untold miles of moonlight, and before it this white-faced, long-boned boy [who] whipped with train-whistle yowl a glowing ball to someone hidden under a dark oak.”

That this “long-boned boy” and the “bone-white farmhouse” emanate from Roy's imagination and memory, rather than the external landscape, is both suggested and deliberately left ambiguous: “Roy shut his eyes to the sight because if it wasn't real it was a way he sometimes had of observing himself, just as in a dream” (3). In The Natural, literary artifice sustains a highly ambiguous, but morally telling, relationship between the realms of fantasy and fact, dream and reality. As the reader comes to recognize, neither of these apparently exclusive realms, “the Actual and the Imaginary,” is sufficient by itself to create the fateful moral landscape—the whole human truth—conveyed by the subtle interpenetration of the novel's natural and unnatural dimensions.

Even the title of The Natural points to the ambiguity that underlies, and undermines, the apparently natural world of appearances. When Red Blow, trainer for the New York Knights, deems Roy Hobbs a “natural,” he is expressing admiration for the player's innate skill and grace (74). Yet Roy Hobbs is a “natural” in another, and opposing, sense as well. He is a man who rejects moral knowledge and, for most of his career, remains blind to his own moral responsibility. A network of related definitions, listed in the OED, helps to illuminate this aspect of Roy's identity. According to traditional usage, a “natural” is “one naturally deficient in intellect; a half-witted person,” or “one who is morally in a state of nature”—“without spiritual enlightenment; unenlightened, unregenerate.” The novel's title thus announces from the outset Roy Hobbs's ambiguous status as a “hero.”⁴

The self-reflexivity of the novel's structure further contributes to the sense of ambiguity complicating and undermining “natural” appearances. Divided into two sections, the latter constituting the bulk of the narrative, The Natural tells the story of a player obsessed with the game of baseball and, at the same time, announces itself to be a literary “game.” The novel's brief “Pre-game” chapter introduces us to the nineteen-year-old aspiring pitcher, Roy Hobbs; then the subsequent, much longer section, “Batter Up!,” resumes the narration of Roy's life and career fifteen years later. When, at the end of the “Pre-game” section, the mysterious stranger, Harriet Bird, fires the “silver bullets” of her gun into Roy's “gut,” both his life and his baseball career appear to be over (12, 34). The second section resumes, fifteen years later, without offering any explanation for Roy's mysterious survival. Only much later in the novel do we learn how Roy managed to recover and slowly rebuild his shattered career. By delaying, and at times entirely omitting, their plausible explanation, Malamud invests even the most seemingly natural events with, in Hawthorne's phrase, “a quality of strangeness.” Exploiting this technique throughout The Natural, the author calls attention to the mysterious operation of fate.

As the novel opens, nineteen-year-old Roy Hobbs, whose talent has recently been discovered by an old baseball scout, Sam Simpson, is traveling east “to Chicago, where the Cubs are,” for a tryout (5). Even the speeding train cannot keep pace, however, with the inward “train” of Hobbs's ambitious yearning: to the “body-shaking beat of his ambitions,” he is racing ahead even faster “on the train that never stopped” (16, 39). Fate abruptly shows its hand when the speeding train begins “to slow down,” halting to receive on board an unknown young woman, in a “dressy black dress,” who will delay the “train” of Hobbs's ambitions by fifteen years. Like the bird-omens of ancient Greek mythology, the appearance of Harriet Bird is premonitory; blinded by lust, however, the “natural” man fails to heed these warning signs. As clues in the narrative repeatedly suggest, Harriet Bird is a deranged hero-worshipper, whose search for the heroic ideal in a fallen world has already resulted in her pursuit, and slaying, of two celebrated athletes.

Seating himself next to Harriet on the train, Roy gazes out at a moonlit landscape that alerts the watchful reader, but not Roy, to ominous fate. Outside the train window, the stark landscape is bathed in the atmospheric glow of art. The “tormented trees fronting the snaky lane” gesticulate their warning—“trees bent and clawing, plucked white by icy blasts from the black water, their bony branches twisting in many a broken direction.” Paying no heed to this “unreal forest,” Roy fails to detect the signs of Harriet's derangement—her “arms” flailing like the “broken branches” of “a twisted tree” (28-29). When Harriet, a disappointed as well as demented idealist, questions Roy about the “meaning” and “values” of his life, he does not see that she is searching for a “hero” who believes in “something over and above earthly things” (27). Nor does he perceive, in his blindness, that his superficial answers provoke her anger and despair. A moral simpleton, or “natural,” Roy values only those “earthly” or material rewards Harriet disdains.

The point is graphically made when Roy, stymied by Harriet's questions but aroused by her body, literally grasps hold of what he wants: “As they went through a tunnel, Roy … casually let his hand fall upon her full breast. The nipple rose between his fingers and before he could resist the impulse he had tweaked it” (29). The violence of Harriet's reaction startles Roy. With a “high-pitched scream” she rushes down the train aisle “like a dancer,” shouting, “Look, I'm a twisted tree.” “Stricken” by the realization that he “had gone too far,” Roy remains deaf, all the same, to Harriet's warning cry (28-29). Later, in the hotel room to which she lures him, Harriet again wildly dances before Roy's “stricken” gaze. As bullets from her gun topple Roy, he blankly gazes as “the forest flew upward,” and she “danced on her toes around the stricken hero” (34).

Before these scenes take place, however, and only shortly after Harriet herself boards the train, a second character mysteriously interrupts the train's progress. A “fat old man,” wearing “a broad-brimmed black hat” and carrying a “doctor's satchel,” waves the train to a stop. The contents of “a yellow telegram,” which the doctor holds in his hand, represent the apparent cause for this delay (17). “Got a telegram,” he later tells the passengers, “says somebody on this train took sick.” Oddly, no one is able to locate the sick person. Eventually the doctor, “flustered and morose” with frustration, disembarks and drives away. Meanwhile, the train's progress, the conductor ventures to note, has been delayed by “a good hour” (24).

Like Harriet Bird, the doctor is implicated in the mysterious operation of fate that delays both the actual train and the inner “train” of Roy's racing ambitions. Strangely, it is only after the doctor gives up his search for the “sick” person, that this person materializes. The doctor, it appears, has simply arrived too early. The skein from which the web of fate is woven, it would seem, has been oddly knotted or crimped. The reader's sense of the mysterious patterns underlying events is borne out by an additional clue. Roy, trying to establish the time, observes that the train, speeding east, “lost an hour” when it “left Mountain Time and lost—no, picked up—yes, lost an hour” in “what Sam called the twenty-three hour day” (6). Noting the premature arrival of the doctor, the reader wonders whether the timing of the mysterious “yellow telegram,” and of the doctor's appearance, has been thrown off by this arbitrary shift in time zones. Having “lost an hour,” the train and its passengers are trailing behind fate's schedule.

Whether or not Malamud is drawing attention to his manipulation of the novel's artifice here, this apparent fold in the fabric of time seems mysteriously aligned with the doctor's premature arrival on the scene. It is only after he disembarks, and the train to Chicago resumes its progress, that Sam Simpson suddenly collapses on board. What is more strange, Sam would not even be ailing if the doctor had not arrived, in the first place, to delay the train.⁵

To unravel this intricate web of events we must backtrack a little. When the locomotive halts in response to the doctor's request to board the train, the conductor announces a “half hour” stop so that the doctor can search the train for the alleged sick person. The conductor informs the passengers “that anyone who wanted to stretch, could.” Those who disembark quickly notice that a carnival has been set up nearby; in its midst stands “a gigantic Ferris wheel that looked like a stopped clock” (17). This fateful delay, signaled by the “stopped clock,” leads Roy Hobbs to engage in a “contest of skill” with another disembarked passenger, Walter Wambold, “leading hitter of the American League” and “three times winner of the Most Valuable Player award” (19, 13). With Sam Simpson acting as catcher, the “slam-bang young pitcher” strikes out the Whammer under Harriet's excited gaze (13). Defeated, the Whammer trots “off to the train, an old man” (23). Roy has “tumbled” an “idol” and unwittingly sealed his own fate. Harriet will now look to Roy as her hero, find him sadly wanting, and exact her revenge.

Sam Simpson's fate is also sealed by this event. Roy's third pitch to the Whammer “caught Sam in the washboard”—which he had “buttoned underneath his coat” for protection—“and lifted him off his feet” (19, 24). Severely “dented,” the washboard testifies to the force of the blow Sam receives, in midbody, from Roy's fierce pitch. Indeed, the blow is fatal in two senses: it brings on Sam's death and also foreshadows the blow that Roy is to receive, in the same part of his body, from the bullets of Harriet's gun. In both cases, moreover, Roy's character plays a significant role in determining his fate. It is Roy's single-minded ambition—to win a victory over his rival, the Whammer—that brings on the contest, Sam's death, and the fifteen-year setback in Roy's career.⁶

Adding to this atmosphere of doom and foreboding, Sam has a prophetic dream just before his fatal collapse. In the dream, the first doctor, the one in the “broad-brimmed black hat,” reappears in altered guise. Already feverish and ailing, Sam dreams that he is trying to cross a “foaming river before it flooded the bridge away.” Setting out, “all bespattered, to cross it,” he encounters “a queer duck of a doctor in oilskins, an old man with a washable white mustache and a yellow lamp he thrust straight into your eyeballs.” Trying to prevent him from crossing, the doctor swears to Sam that “the bridge was gone.” As Sam, in his dream, grapples with this mustached figure, he suddenly experiences an onslaught of pain, as though “a knife had stabbed him,” and collapses. Once again “the Actual and the Imaginary” merge to create strange truth: in his dream, as in actuality, Sam is unable to cross the bridge that leads back to the world of the living.

An even more eerie intersection of “the Actual” with “the Imaginary” occurs in the dream figure of the doctor with whom Sam wrestles on the bridge. This “old man with a washable white mustache” not only recapitulates the appearance of the doctor who delayed the train but foreshadows the arrival of a second doctor, summoned by the “trainman” after the dream ends and Sam collapses. More mysterious still is the way that the dream-doctor, with his “white mustache,” prefigures the appearance of a third doctor, who also has “a white mustache.” This “specialist,” whose “white mustache” is repeatedly noted, appears more than fifteen years (and nearly 150 pages) later; and he serves as Roy Hobbs's ultimate messenger of doom (176-77). By linking the dream-doctor with his various “actual” manifestations in the narrative, Malamud deftly interweaves the planes of past, present, and future—creating an inextricable link between “the Actual and the Imaginary,” the mythic and mundane. At the same time, moreover, that the spell of “the Imaginary” tends, like Hawthorne's “moonlight,” to “spiritualize” the world of material phenomena, it also attests to intractable reality—and to the moral knowledge by which mortal beings do not escape, but can make meaningful, their suffering.

As the planes of “the Actual and the Imaginary” intersect throughout the novel, they offer, each time, a different combination of magical effects and moral vision. In one noteworthy scene, Roy takes Memo Paris, Pop Fisher's red-headed niece, for a drive to Long Island. Now a thirty-four-year-old player for the Knights, Roy has finally tasted fame and success; but he is no closer to satisfaction. Continually put off by Memo, and prey to a relentless sense of emptiness that makes him insatiably “hungry,” Roy is still driven by that “inside motion—that which got him nowhere, which was where he was and [Memo] was not, or where his ambitions were and he was chasing after.” Miserable, Roy thinks back to a time in his life when he was content: “Sometimes he wished he had no ambitions—often wondered where they had come from in his life, because he remembered how satisfied he had been as a youngster, and that with the little he had had—a dog, a stick, an aloneness he loved (which did not bleed him like his later loneliness), and he wished he could have lived longer in his boyhood.” Forsaking any responsibility for his own fate, however, Roy simply hopes “for a better fate in the future” (105).

Soon Roy tries, and fails, to make love to Memo. (In a scene faintly reminiscent of the earlier one with Harriet Bird, she spurns Roy as soon as he touches her breast.) Disappointed, he lets her take the wheel of his Mercedes. Refusing to turn on the car lights, because she “like[s] it dark,” Memo impulsively turns “down a hard dirt road.” Fortunately, “the moon bobbed up and flooded the road ahead with bright light.” In this “white moonlight,” which “shot through a stretch of woods ahead,” another strange event, halfway between dream and reality, occurs before Roy's eyes. Just as Roy is longing to “go back somewhere, go home, wherever that was,” he “looked up and saw in the moonlight a boy coming out of the woods, followed by his dog. Squinting through the windshield, he was unable to tell if the kid was an illusion thrown forth by the trees or someone really alive” (110). Recalling the novel's opening scene, when Roy sees a boy throwing “a glowing ball” in the “moon-hazed” landscape, the effect of the moonlight is, in Hawthorne's words, to “spiritualize” the material landscape—unearthing “strange things” hidden to the naked eye.

Here, as in previously cited passages, the border between “the Actual and the Imaginary” is deliberately blurred; Roy cannot be sure whether the boy he sees is a shadowy “illusion” or “someone really alive.” In the moonlight, the distinction becomes irrelevant. That is, in the unnatural landscape of art, where “the Actual and the Imaginary” intersect, the boy is both an “illusion” and someone “really alive.” As a figment of Roy's longing, and of Malamud's art, he is real insofar as he embodies that self or being Roy once was—and perhaps may still recover. Under Memo's influence, however, he is sure to remain in “the dark.” The point is underscored when, after “the moon is gone,” she still refuses to turn on the car lights. Fearing that the boy he has seen may be trying to cross the road, Roy orders Memo to switch on the lights: “She sat there stiffly so he reached over and switched them on. As the road flared up, Memo screamed and tugged at the wheel. He felt a thud and his heart sickened. It was a full minute before he realized they hadn't stopped.” “For Christ's sake,” Roy shouts to Memo, who keeps on driving, “stop—we hit somebody.” Again she refuses. And when Roy says, “I heard somebody groan,” she tells him: “That was yourself” (110-11).

Memo's observation is more perceptive than she realizes. If the boy “coming out of the woods” is the imaginative embodiment of Roy's own potential for self-recovery—for his emergence from the moral wilderness and “the dark”—then Roy's fear that Memo has killed him is especially telling. It is Memo's seductive beauty, resembling Harriet Bird's, that operates on Roy like fatal ambition. A “beautiful doll with a form like Miss America,” Memo is both the object and embodiment of Roy's lust for the American “bitch-goddess”—success (150). Later, describing his dire encounter with Harriet Bird to Iris Lemon, the only woman in his life who genuinely loves him, Roy tells Iris: “I was just a kid and I got shot by this batty dame on the night before my tryout, and after that I just couldn't get started again.” It is this “defeat in sight of his goal” that he identifies as “the shame of his life”—“his fate, somehow.” What he fails to recognize, as has already been suggested, is his own moral responsibility for that “fate.”

Unlike Memo and Harriet, Iris pledges not to “hurt” Roy. Yet her candor has a troubling effect upon him. In contrast to Memo, who cannot “stand being with people who are blue,” Iris appeals to his “inner self,” stirring memories of the suffering and pain Roy is determined to bury and forget: “talk about his inner self was always like plowing up a graveyard” (151, 141). Iris gives voice to knowledge that Roy would deny. The fact that she is a grandmother, at the young age of thirty-three, further spoils her attractiveness in Roy's eyes. Convinced that age and happiness, like age and beauty, are mutually exclusive, he refuses to confront his own mortality. He is repelled when Iris admits to being a grandmother and, worse yet, insists upon the meaning of suffering. “It teaches us,” she says, “to want the right things” (143).

Like Jay Gatsby, Roy Hobbs must pay a price for “living too long with a single dream”—the American Dream that, by idealizing success, would deny the reality of suffering (Gatsby 162). The enduring power of that dream, as Fitzgerald so convincingly demonstrates, is not simply the promise of ample riches and success. The far greater promise, as compelling as it is impossible to attain, is that through these riches and this success the dreamer will gain entry into a magical realm of existence, where one is “safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor” and mortal misery (Gatsby 150). It is this ideal world, radiant with ease and grace, that “the natural” appears to incarnate, for his fans, on the playing field. Yearning to enter this perfect world—which, as both Fitzgerald and Malamud reveal, is “nowhere” but in the elusive future conjured by mortal longing—Roy feels compelled to deny his own past.

The weight of that past, his own reluctant knowledge of suffering and defeat, threatens to invalidate Roy's dream. Thus he rejects, “in disgust,” Iris's contention that “we learn” from suffering. “All it taught me,” he says, “is to stay away from it” (143). To “stay away from it” Roy must also stay away from Iris. He must keep racing forward, away from the painful past, forever on that “train to nowhere.” A man for whom “appetite” is all, Roy rejects Iris in favor of Memo, whose seductive “Miss America” form becomes equated, in his mind, with entry into that promised land of bliss, satisfaction, and ease. On the night before the Knights are scheduled to play three last games against the Reds—games crucial to the Knights's bid to stay in the Series—Memo lures Roy to a party bankrolled by Gus, the bookie. Holding out the promise of her body, she literally loads Roy down with mounds of proffered food. “And every mouthful seemed to have the effect of increasing his desire for her.” As the biting hunger persists, even Roy begins to wonder at its source. “What must I do not to be hungry?” he asks himself. Sensing that he is “searching for something that he couldn't find,” he keeps eating away, all the same, at “the mountain of stuff Memo handed him” (168-71).

Later, entering Memo's hotel room, Roy finds his femme fatale “lying naked in bed, chewing a turkey drumstick.” Failing to heed this warning sign, which directly links her with several ominous references to “dead birds,” Roy expectantly approaches her bed (177). But before he can grasp the object of desire, the would-be hero keels over with stomach cramps and passes out. In the hospital where he wakes up, the “white-mustached” doctor, announced so long ago in Sam Simpson's prophetic dream, performs his mission. After playing the pennant game, Roy must, says the doctor, “say goodbye forever to baseball—if he hoped to stay alive” (177).

On the eve of the pennant game, a powerful villain named Judge Banner, who has gambled that the Knights will lose, offers Roy 35,000 dollars to throw the game. Before Banner visits his room, Roy has a dream that prefigures his emergence from the “state of nature”: the condition of false innocence, and willful ignorance, that has been his peculiar refuge and downfall. In the nightmare, Roy dreams of a “rat-eyed vulture, black against the ceiling,” flapping “around the room and dripping deep fat [that] spiraled down toward his face” (184). Subliminally identifying Banner with the devil, one of whose traditional guises is the bat, Roy is repulsed by his vision of soiling contact: the bat's “dripping” excretions spiral down from its black body onto Roy's face.

Dream and reality once again intersect as Roy, waking up, finds Banner standing at the foot of his bed. “In dark glasses and [a] hairy black fedora” covering his “thick black wig,” Banner maintains, in actuality, his dream-identity as a “rat-eyed vulture,” or “hairy” black bat (185, 190). Like a bat, moreover, Banner dwells in an “absence of light,” preferring “a dark to a lit room” even when he is in his office (89). A petty Prince of Darkness, and a master of seductive sophisms, the Judge tries to persuade Roy to throw the playoff game. Slyly appealing to Roy's “honor” to keep the bribe a secret, Banner speaks in flowery abstractions. Recounting various anecdotes, he seeks to illustrate “how one moral condition may lead to our become its opposite” (188).

As Banner delivers his pronouncements on moral relativism it is, of course, already midcentury—by which time two world wars and the Holocaust have decimated any confident claim, on the part of Western culture, to moral knowledge. Indeed, Banner's emphasis on material results rather than innate principles might even appear particularly appropriate to the ambiguous universe of The Natural. After all, if we cannot distinguish between “the Actual and the Imaginary,” or dream and reality, how can we clearly distinguish between good and evil? And if the deliberately ambiguous, highly self-conscious effects that Malamud sustains throughout his novel evoke, as they seem to, the problematic nature of reality, is not Banner here making a doubly convincing argument?

Surprisingly, it is Roy Hobbs who lays such claims to rest when, at the end of Banner's speech, he tells him: “You should be selling snake oil.” Dissatisfied, afraid of suffering and wracked by insatiable longing, Hobbs can still tell, nonetheless, the difference between good and evil. He turns Banner down, but the Judge now adopts a more successful strategy, slyly reminding Roy that he “may lose Miss Paris to someone else” if he cannot find the money to support her. Convinced that “the only way” to quell the hunger and “intensity of his desires” is to win Memo, Roy agrees to “the fix.” Still, he remains undeceived by Banner's fancy talk and recalls the wisdom of an “old saying”: “Woe unto him who calls evil good and good evil” (189-91).

It is not only Judge Banner who “calls” things by their opposite in this novel. As Banner's middle name, “Goodwill,” serves to point out, the gap between word and thing, signifier and signified, is treacherously wide. Calling attention to language's problematic nature, the novelist accords his evil tempter the dubious name of “Goodwill Banner.” And, in another bold reminder that human beings can manipulate language in order to “call evil good and good evil,” Malamud names the nasty sportswriter, who mercilessly hounds his victims, Max Mercy. With “voracious eyes” that advertise his true character, Max Mercy ruthlessly invades people's lives in pursuit of a story; to him “a private life is a personal insult” (13, 46). It is Mercy who exposes, in a screaming newspaper headline at the end of the novel, Roy's suspected “sellout.”

Ultimately thwarted in his attempt to foil Banner's scheme and exposed by the merciless Mercy, Roy Hobbs is, at the end of the novel, a defeated man—sick, penniless, crushed by “self-hatred.” The report of his suspected “sellout” not only compromises but obliterates his ephemeral identity as the “King” of the Knights. Having longed for a hero's immortality, Roy must live to see “all his records forever destroyed.” More bitter yet, the official end of “Roy Hobbs in organized baseball” does not put an end to the relentless “train” of his longing. To the inner rhythm of “chug chug choo choo,” the “insides of him [were] beginning to take off. … Pretty soon they were in fast flight” (217). Still prey to the old longing, “the natural” knows he is finished; the novel ends, appropriately, with the hero's “bitter tears.” Significantly, however, the end of Roy's bid for glory marks the dawn of moral knowledge. In this sense, too, “the natural” is finished: no longer can he deny responsibility for his fate. The “bitter tears” that close the account of Roy Hobbs's career announce his painful awakening—to knowledge as well as defeat. “I never did learn anything out of my past life,” he admits, “now I have to suffer again” (217).

A “natural” no longer, Roy affirms the knowledge he formerly rejected: that, as Iris Lemon has told him, human suffering is not meaningless and can “teach us to want the right things.” Reality may be ambiguous and problematic, but to those morally alive, there are lessons to be gained from experience. And while words, too, can be misleading—Max Mercy and Judge Goodwill Banner obviously bear names that belie their scurrilous natures—the capacity of language to reveal as well as to conceal truth is borne out by Iris's own name. In Greek mythology, Iris signifies both the goddess of the rainbow and the messenger of the gods. Acting as Roy's messenger and muse, Iris helps “the natural” to redeem himself in two senses: to salvage his honor as an athlete by refusing, at the last minute, to throw the pennant game and, perhaps more important, to accept the moral knowledge that rescues him from an unregenerate “state of nature.”

Not coincidentally, Roy's personal revelation of Iris's benevolent role or identity occurs at the same time that he awakens to Memo's suspect one. At the beginning of the pennant game, he glances up from the playing field and is “not exactly surprise[d] … that Memo, still in black, was standing at the window next to the Judge, blankly gazing down at him. Anyway, he knew where she was now (199). As Roy begins accurately to place Memo—in the moral as well as physical landscape—he gleans her role, as Banner's decoy, in arranging “the fix.” Meanwhile, Iris's location in the same landscape offers a marked contrast to Memo's. “Standing alone amid the crowd,” Iris, “in a white dress” that pointedly contrasts with Memo's “black” one, has risen to show her support for Roy. When she is struck by a ball Roy impulsively fouls into the stands (character once more demonstrating its relevance to fate), he rushes off the field to see if she is all right. Iris's injury, like her name, alerts us to her role as messenger and rainbow-goddess. “The left side of her face was hurt, bruised and rainbow-colored” (205).

In contrast to Memo—whose preference for “the dark” is revealed early in the novel, when she refuses to turn on the car lights—Iris, like the rainbow-goddess, brings Roy illumination. The contrast between Iris and Memo emerges even more clearly when, after Roy rushes to her side, Iris tells him she is pregnant with his child, urging him to “win for our boy.” A creative force in Roy's life, Iris is the mother not only of his actual child but also of that imaginary “boy” symbolizing his buried “inner self.” Memo, we recall, behaved with cruel indifference to this “boy”—whom Roy saw emerging, like the memory and promise of a long-buried “inner self,” from “the woods.”⁷ To this telling reality, a convergence of “the Actual and the Imaginary,” Roy is, for once, not blind. For the first time in the novel he is overtaken not by desire or selfish appetite, but by love: “He kissed [Iris's] hard belly, wild with love for her and the child” (205-06).

In a passage that marks a turning point in Roy Hobbs's life, as well as the climax of his career, he assumes, for one fleeting moment, the identity of “hero” that his prowess as a “natural” has failed to win him. Inspired by his love for Iris and his spontaneous moral resolve to thwart Judge Banner, Roy takes up his beloved bat, Wonderboy, determined to win victory for his team. Startled by Roy's “burning eyes,” the pitcher, Vogelman, is “almost hypnotized. He saw a different man and didn't like what he saw.” (Later in the game, Vogelman faints at the vision of Roy, a true Knight “in full armor, mounted on a black charger” [212].) After three balls, Vogelman pitches to Roy “almost in desperation,” and Roy mightily swings his bat. And here Malamud deftly wields the devices of artifice to create, once again, a heightened, or magical, sense of reality: “Thunder crashed. The pitcher stuffed his maimed fingers into his ears. His eyes were blinded. … Some of the fans had seen lightning. …” On first reading, these events seem truly wondrous. Whipping his “golden bat” with such intensity, Roy appears to have summoned both thunder and lightning—the heavens acclaiming the mythic hero's feat.

When, however, the umpire announces that the ball lands “foul,” the reader is abruptly recalled to the prosaic world of causal relationships: “Allie had raced in to score, so had Flores, and Roy was heading into second, when the umpire waved them all back. The ball had landed clearly foul. The fans groaned in shuddering tones. Wonderboy lay on the ground split lengthwise, one half pointing to first, the other to third” (207). The odd marriage of magic and the mundane once more gives rise to textual ambiguity. Readers may ask themselves whether the lightning perceived by “some of the fans” is aligned with natural or unnatural causes. Is the crack of Roy's bat the suggested cause of the thunder and lightning; or, after Roy hits the ball, do thunder and lightning occur coincidentally? Has Roy's bat, Wonderboy, been “split lengthwise” by the superhuman power of Roy's hit or by lightning that struck the bat independently?

While a literal-minded reader may insist on interpreting events in a “natural” light, the supernatural aura surrounding Roy's momentous swing works its magic. And because this magic is grounded in Malamud's “unnatural” landscape—where the difference between “good” and “evil” is starkly revealed—the “moonlight” creates moral illumination. Roy's “lightning” decision to reject Banner's evil offer and to uphold his loyalty to the Knights is both charmed and heroic. His swing for victory over the Pirates is, despite the Knight's ultimate defeat in the game, a moral triumph. Rejecting the blandishments of Memo and Judge Banner, the player forfeits material reward—those “earthly things” he has craved—for the sake of love, honor, and what he knows to be “good.”

Although the “unnatural” elements of the novel's landscape magically highlight the significance of Roy's moral victory, they do not remove the novel's characters, or readers, to a region of sheer fantasy or wish-fulfillment. Despite Roy's valiant attempts on the field, he is decidedly fallible. Impulsively swinging at a bad pitch, he strikes out and the Knights lose the game. But Roy refuses to accept Banner's payoff. Going to the Judge's office, he throws the money back in Banner's face. And when the Judge pulls a gun, Roy grabs it away from him and begins to beat Banner with punishing blows. As Memo and Gus look on in terror, Roy pounds the Judge, who, squealing like a “pig,” “hit the floor with a crash and had a bowel movement in his pants” (216). Yet even here, in the midst of the novel's most “natural,” crudely scatological effects, “the Actual and the Imaginary” merge. Like the “dripping” bat excreting its filth in Roy's dream, Banner evinces his foul nature. Having failed to corrupt Roy, he dirties himself. With appropriate timing, moreover, Memo chooses this moment to grab the Judge's pistol and shoot at Roy. “The bullet grazed his shoulder and broke the Judge's bathroom mirror” (216). Both “the glass” and Roy's delusions are shattered by this graphic demonstration of Memo's true nature.

Patently “unnatural” in its effect, The Natural has been accused of excessive schematization and a self-indulgent display of authorial handiwork. On the other hand, Malamud's belief in the power of art to reflect moral truths has been deemed old-fashioned. Citing the author's “humanism,” Ihab Hassan wonders whether Malamud's fiction reflects “historical” rather than contemporary reality (47). Quite obviously, the tension between natural and unnatural effects in The Natural suggests a hybrid species of the novel, adhering neither to “realism” nor to “postmodernism.” Like other contemporary writers experimenting with the devices of artifice, Malamud invites his readers to explore the indefinite border between subjective perception and objective reality. At the same time, the moral landscape evoked by his use of these devices contrasts markedly with the ambivalent or absurd vision of reality conveyed in so much postmodernist fiction.

Lacking the moral ambivalence that Hassan deems “a crucial element of postmodern sensibility,” The Natural offers a vision of reality that is provocative in its own way. By grafting postmodernist techniques to a deeply rooted moral vision, Malamud challenges contemporary assumptions about human nature. Despite the ambiguous terrain of our perceptual world, he suggests, each individual—no matter how primitive or naive—possesses the innate knowledge of good and evil. Hence the concept of the “natural” man—one who exists outside or beyond moral imperatives—is perhaps the greatest fabrication, the most deceptive fiction, of all.⁸ In more ways than one, then, The Natural fulfills the goal Hawthorne prescribes for works of “magic moonshine.” In the “territory” where art meets reality and the familiar fades, the author conveys his “strange” truth: truth that tends, in the harsh glare of daylight and its norms, to vanish from view.

Notes

1. See, for example, Helterman (23-36), Hershinow (16-28), and Richman (28-49).

2. Most critics tend to equate the “unnatural” elements of Malamud's landscape with the patently unreal. Thus, Hershinow speaks of its “wondrous nonreality” (25-26); similarly, Richman speaks of the “unreality” resembling “a fairy tale.” In Richman's view, Malamud's “denial by method of a real external world” prevents the novel from achieving “deeply felt experience” (47-49).

3. Bluefarb notes the affinity between Malamud and Hawthorne but stresses “the darkness,” rather than the moonlight, permeating the “neutral territory” mapped by both writers (74). On the subject of this “neutral ground” Malamud is playfully evasive, telling an interviewer: “I write fantasy because when I do I am imaginative and funny and having a good time” (Field 10-11).

4. Helterman confines his discussion to the title's positive connotations: “To the Middle Ages, a ‘natural’ was an innocent fool,” who, “touched by God, retained his Edenic nature and seemed a fool to the rest of mankind” (23-24).

5. Hershinow notes only that “the train is mysteriously delayed” (17), as does Richman, who says it is “mysteriously halted” (32).

6. William Freedman also finds Roy responsible for his own fate, but he assumes that the novel's “unnatural” effects obscure rather than illuminate the operation of moral laws (159).

7. “As in much of Malamud,” Helterman notes, “the hero has a choice between a woman who represents life-giving fertility and one whose power lies in her seductive vanity.” Iris Lemon's fertile nature, he points out, is suggested by her name—that of a flower and a fruit. On the other hand, Memo Paris's last name suggests the destructive wiles of Helen of Troy, “who was abducted to Troy by Paris” (27).

8. Richman similarly remarks Malamud's “criticism of the myth of nature” and of the “shibboleths of innocence and its related phenomenon, the celebration of the natural man” (42).

Works Cited

Bluefarb, Sam. “The Syncretism of Bernard Malamud.” Bernard Malamud: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Leslie A. Field and Joyce W. Field. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1975. 72-79.

Field, Leslie, and Joyce Field. “An Interview with Bernard Malamud.” Bernard Malamud: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Leslie A. Field and Joyce W. Field. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1975. 8-17.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner's, 1925.

Freedman, William. “From Bernard Malamud, with Discipline and with Love.” The Fifties: Fiction, Poetry, Drama. Ed. Warren French. Deland, FL: Everett/Edwards, 1970. Rpt. in Bernard Malamud: A Collection of Critical Essays. 156-65.

Hassan, Ihab. “Bernard Malamud: 1976; Fictions Within Our Fictions.” The Fiction of Bernard Malamud. Ed. Richard Astro and Jackson Benson. Corvallis: Oregon State UP, 1977. 43-64.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter and Other Tales of the Puritans. Ed. Harry Levin. Boston: Houghton, 1960.

Helterman, Jeffrey. Understanding Bernard Malamud. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1985.

Hershinow, Sheldon. Bernard Malamud. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1980.

Malamud, Bernard. The Natural. New York: Avon, 1952.

Richman, Sidney. Bernard Malamud. New York: Twayne, 1967.