SOURCE: Brown, Peter C. “Negative Capability and the Mystery of Hope in Malamud's ‘The First Seven Years.’” Religion and Literature 29, no. 1 (spring 1997): 63-94.

[In the following essay, Brown explores Malamud's “radical dissent from contemporary despair” in “The First Seven Years.”]

“Negative capability” is the capacity to register a faithful incongruity or vital mystery. John Keats, who first identified this quality of literary sensibility for us, associated it with a kind of incongruous verisimilitude or self-effacing willingness to let be. In this, he seems to have assumed that “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts” are our native condition—to be preserved by the true poet (and betrayed by the philosopher). However, the post-Romantic temper of our technological age leaves little enough in the shadow, including those shadings of human possibility or hope long associated with the humanism of the West. In particular, the black sun over Auschwitz has cast in sharp relief the bitter fact that within the modern bureaucratic state everything human—everything—can be taken away. Human hope has perhaps never seemed less real or more contingent. Yet, Bernard Malamud's forty-year writing career embodies a profound exception to this conclusion. All of Malamud's work testifies to his belief in inextinguishable human possibility, possibility inextinguishable in spite of everything that devalues the human. As Malamud explained in his last interview, speaking of his apocalyptic novel, God's Grace, his work is an attempt to “find a way for man to have a possible future” (“Interview” 142). In his fictions, this unlikely hope depends on a robust negative capability or calculated capacity to register mystery. Malamud believed that in the present age, when to the sophisticated eye everything—especially human being—seems less than it is, the poet's job is “the exemplification of mystery” (Kegan 131). Thus, hope becomes more than a conventional theme in Malamud's fiction; in a sense, it becomes an incongruous effect of his texts: “exemplification of mystery is the creation of mystery” (Kegan 139).

Malamud's radical dissent from contemporary despair of the human has not been fully appreciated, however, because his writing explores hope on two very different, but not clearly distinguished, rhetorical levels: hope as theme and hope as mystery. When his humanistic faith takes conventional literary moral forms in his fiction (as it very often does), it not only falls short of the mystery of hope but also has led readers and critics to misjudge or ignore the more subtle effects of his writing, to miss his sensible and symbolic capacity for mystery. Conventionally, Malamud concludes most of his novels and many of his stories with arresting images of qualified promise. His protagonists are fixed in the reader's mind in the act of creating unlikely futures for themselves by deepening their sufferings—choosing in spite of themselves to be human. In The Assistant (1957), for example, Frank Alpine in the end chooses—to his own chagrin—to accept suffering (as a “Jew”) rather than to cause it (as a goyish holdupnik). In A New Life (1961), S. Levin sacrifices romantic desires in favor of taking on quotidian responsibility for another man's family. In The Fixer (1966), Yakov Bok remains a prisoner but nevertheless can embrace his identity as a Jew and a revolutionary. In Dubin's Lives (1977), William Dubin, with the erotic help of a mistress, rushes home in the moonlight to love his anxious wife (and life). Thematically, Malamud explores the various margins within which human fulfillment is thinkable. When masochism, self-hatred, unfavorable circumstance, or ineptitude frustrate the chance for simple human satisfaction, Malamud gropes toward a residual, if often faintly absurd, dignity and choice for his characters. But, supple and consoling as these conventional Malamudian themes can be, they are in a sense merely hopeful. And, thus, they are finally unconvincing when confronted with the most deeply dispiriting events of modernity—in particular, when confronted with the defining event of the mid-twentieth century: the dehumanization and annihilation of European Jewry by Nazi Germany.

HOPE AFTER THE HOLOCAUST

Hopefulness (mere hopefulness) depends on a vision of the future that allows for some marginal human fulfillment. The event of the Holocaust has once and for all eclipsed faith in the durability of human fulfillment. The Mussulmen of the camps or the survivors' death-in-life of memories are the discovery that everything can be taken away—even choice. No humanistic idea is antidote or prophylactic to this realization. In Elie Wiesel's angry words, “If you have not grasped it until now, it is time that you did: Auschwitz signifies death—total, absolute death—of man and of mankind, of reason and of the heart, of language and the senses” (234).¹ Thus, as Lawrence Langer has pointed out, the Holocaust creates a radical discontinuity for the literary moral tradition that Malamud inherits (stretching from Job and Oedipus to Camus and Bellow). Langer argues that the Holocaust cannot be construed as an heroic challenge for its victims when its ordeal reduced them to a level of bare survival. He considers the griefs of the Holocaust inexpressible and its atrocities “often not commensurate with spirit of any kind” (154). Conventional hopefulness becomes impossible or self-deluding in the face of the Holocaust and its “shrunken human possibilities” (150). For Langer, this explains the diffidence and indirection with which Malamud addresses the Holocaust in his fiction: “The critical vocabulary relevant to Malamud's vision can do little to illuminate the problems of character and fate, choice and chance, moral vision and moral failure in a Holocaust setting, since atrocity provides for the writer a perplexing barrage of abnormalities undreamed of in the worst nightmares of a Morris Bober or a Yakov Bok” (147). Thus, Langer insists that immurement in a failing grocery store or imprisonment and torture in a czarist prison is not successful as a metaphor for the Holocaust.² And where Malamud does allude directly to the Holocaust, Langer reads the allusion as actually undermining didactic and hopeful interpretations. In such stories as “The Loan,” “The Lady of the Lake,” and “The Last Mohican,” the inexpressible experience of Holocaust survivors apparently defeats understanding and compassion and hope. Langer concludes in general that “Malamud's indirect, tentative, circumscribed inroads on the Holocaust reality leave untouched vast areas of harsh and unbearable experience that require fresh explorations of the conventional bond linking the word and spirit” (155). Langer's perceptive analysis of the limitations of Malamud's conventional themes is deaf to the tone of Malamud's writing, but for that very reason it offers us a departure point for understanding the deeper implications of Malamud's imaginative project. The mystery of hope in Malamud's writing lies deeper than any themes or ideas of the human because the Holocaust is the central event to which he is responding.³

Malamud is a masterly storyteller, but it has often been remarked that there is something elusive about the appeal of his stories.⁴ Critics find their effect on the reader unaccountable and often complain of Malamud's apparently maladroit handling of language and idea.⁵ This disturbed and disturbing quality of his writing is, I shall argue, essential to the adumbrative effect by which he insinuates what must escape delineation in order to exist at all. For Malamud, finally, our hope must lie in incongruity and the unencompassable rather than in closure and totality (and this instinct for a radical textual openness makes him essentially postmodern—or premodern!⁶). Malamud's rhetorical breakthrough came early and in his characteristic short stories. His first exceptional story, “The First Seven Years,”⁷ is a tale about a Holocaust survivor. It wonderfully illustrates for us, in Dorothy Seidman Bilik's phrase, “his unique brand of negative capability” (59).⁸ On first reading, the story seems to promise restoration to life and love. On second reading, this thematic promise is “deconstructed”⁹ in favor of a much more elusive promise. In “The First Seven Years,” Malamud uses a variety of rhetorical devices to undermine the narrative and thematic unities of his story—and its conventional hope. But this intentional diffusion of artistic and moral authority in turn allows readers to register an openness to future meaning that lies beyond our reading and, thus, beyond our temporal horizons—and, in a sense, beyond even our desires. In this diachronic suspension of the thematizable lies the mystery of beginnings—and the hope of new beginnings. Malamud's uniquely robust brand of negative capability reopens time to mystery. It reopens history to a hope that does not depend on anticipation, a hope that admits the Holocaust.

EQUIVOCAL PARODY AND TEMPORAL LABILITY

The adumbrative disturbance of our rereading of “The First Seven Years” is, in the first instance, a function of the subtle and suggestive inappropriateness of the story's title to its narrative outcome. Malamud's story is a retelling of the tale of Jacob and his labors for his beloved bride, Rachel. The allusion promises narrative closure and vatic authority. As the story unfolds, however, this vatic authority suggestively dissipates, particularly in view of the specific reference of the title. Initially, the parallels are exact. Sobel, the helper in a shoe shop, is a Polish refugee from fratricidal Europe. Feld, the Landsman for whom he works with the diligence of a son-in-law, has a daughter, Miriam. Sobel has been in love with her for the five years he has worked for Feld, and, unconsciously, Feld has sensed that love was the wages that purchased his assistant's labor and, thus, his own relative security. When Feld tries to interest Miriam in Max, a college boy, Sobel quits, which ultimately forces Feld's reluctant agreement that in two more years, when Miriam is twenty-one, Sobel can ask for her in marriage: the seven years that Jacob labored for Rachel. The story concludes with Sobel seated again at his last “pounding leather for his love” (16). However, as we know, Jacob got Leah, not Rachel, for his bride. For Rachel, he had to labor a second seven years—as the title insists. Thus, while Malamud's story seems to end on a note of fulfillment or satisfaction, the specific allusion of the title focuses us instead on deceit, disappointment, and delay. The more we develop the allusion the more strongly it stands in parodic¹⁰ tension with the sentimental themes of the story it frames.

At the purely narrative level, the story appears to tell a modest but morally gratifying tale of the triumph of spirit over matter, love over need, and tradition over assimilation. Feld and Max, Feld's candidate for a match with Miriam, are satirized as “materialists”: “‘What means this word?’ ‘He has no soul. He's only interested in things’” (11). Feld's interest in education as status and income compares unsubtly with Sobel's diligent reading of the classics in order “to know”: “But to know what, the shoemaker demanded, and to know why? Sobel never explained, which proved he read much because he was queer” (13). Feld, who is “if anything, … a practical man” (3), cannot see that under his nose he already has the shtetl ideal of a Jewish son-in-law. Sobel is a secular Talmudist devoted to Feld's daughter and, in an American reversal of the tradition, supporting him in his old age. Sobel has wooed Miriam with his books and the profuse pages of commentary with which he accompanies them. (Max, on the other hand, wants to see a picture before he will consider meeting Miriam.) Thus, when in the end Sobel is promised the woman he loves, the story rejects materialism, pragmatism, and the American dream of success in favor of soul, devotion, and an ideal of service.

The allusive context, however, ironizes the story's theme of love's fulfillment. Most obviously, Jacob gets Leah with her “weak eyes” (Gen. 29.17) rather than Rachel. Moreover, while Sobel/Jacob eventually gets Miriam/Rachel, it is Leah in the Old Testament story who begets Judah and the covenantal line. Rachel is buried alongside the road—Leah is buried with her husband and Isaac and Abraham. And, unlike Jacob, Sobel has no birthright or homeland to which he may return. Nor will repairing worn shoes for his prospective father-in-law ever make Sobel “exceedingly prosperous … [owning] large flocks, maidservants and menservants, camels and asses” (Gen. 30.43). The shoemaker's helper, “bald and old with his miseries” (15), his “soft blue eyes prone to tears over the sad books he read” (7), is no resourceful Jacob. Nor is Feld the refuge and wily and powerful opponent that Jacob finds in Laban. Instead, it is Sobel who has rescued his hapless employer “at the moment of his [Feld's] darkest despair” (7). There is no suggestion that Sobel will ever depart taking daughter, grandchildren, goods, and gods with him. Most importantly, Feld's “strange and gripping sorrow” for his daughter married to Sobel, “all his dreams for her … dead” (15), stands in sharp contrast to the promise of Jacob's covenantal future. Finally, Jacob returns to the land of his fathers as the patriarch Israel, in spite of the fact that he was the offender of his brother. Sobel, his family, his village, his unoffending people, have been annihilated by their neighbors. The allusive promise of the Covenant makes the Holocaust a bitterly ironic background to Malamud's story.

At the level of narrative point-of-view, the allusion also introduces an equivocating complication. The allusion in the title is to Jacob (Sobel), but the story is about Feld (Laban), about his perspective, his insensibility, and his transformation. The story begins with Feld lost in reverie, old regrets, and daydreams peering “through the partly frosted window at the near-sighted haze of falling February snow” (3). By the end of the story, Feld will see much more clearly who his daughter is, who Sobel is, who he himself is, and what life could be. His new insight transmutes his anger at Sobel into pity, and pity reopens possibility within poverty and disappointment. “‘Ugly I didn't mean’” (15), he says to the weeping Sobel. He agrees to the strange courtship and leaves: “He went slowly down the stairs but once outside, though it was an icy night and the crisp falling snow whitened the street, he walked with a stronger stride” (15). Thus, the critic Sidney Richman concludes that “for Feld there is an instant of real though muted triumph, a gesture which … stamps the story with a spectral promise of salvation through love” (103). Or, as Robert Solotaroff argues:

Having confronted some of the truth in his heart, Feld is now free to confront as well the compassion and moral intelligence that also lie there. … Having behaved like the essentially moral man that he is, Feld … is able to walk home “with a stronger stride.” For once, Malamud quickly rewards ethical behavior in material terms.

(25)

These plausible narrative morals are, however, at right angles to the background tale. We can imagine Laban more cynical or at least more cautious, but there are no hints of his transformation in the biblical story. And besides, the biblical story is not Laban's—it is Jacob's. Jacob not Laban, Sobel not Feld, must wait and serve the seven years—and the second seven as well.

As we shall see, Malamud's extensive reliance on intertextuality to confuse his story and prevent narrative closure is a crucial part of his negative capability. In “The First Seven Years,” the biblical allusion and parody ironically undermine the story's resolution of sentimental issues of purity of heart or of virtue and its intrinsic rewards—and in doing so finally leads us back to the story and its genuine mysteries. Jacob's first seven years of service point up a biblical groundnote: the temporal lability of disappointment and fulfillment within the covenantal relation. It is this groundnote that finally sounds within Malamud's story as well—although in a different rhetorical register. The overall context of Genesis presumes covenant and promise, but the more particular reference in “the first seven years” to deceit, disappointment, and rivalry creates a diffidence that the biblical story deepens rather than resolves as it unfolds. Jacob, who will be Israel, has been exiled from the land of his sojourning, the land promised as an everlasting holding to Abraham and his descendants. His efforts to temporize a future for himself by taking away his older brother's birthright and blessing threaten instead a fruitless death at Esau's hands. Intention fails of accomplishment, and his mother urges him to flee. But exile and threat are unaccountably bent in the shape of promise. Isaac bids Jacob to return to Abraham's native land to take a wife from among the daughters of Laban, his mother's brother and his father's father's grandnephew. Jacob departs with his father's blessing, which will eventually bring him, or at least his offspring, back into possession of Abraham's promised land. The paths that point toward satisfaction lead to disappointment. The paths that point away from desire lead to fulfillment.

The haziness of Jacob's future is itself a form of temporization and is underscored by the continuing details of Jacob's history, which consistently emphasize the temporal lability of disappointment and fulfillment. Abraham in his old age had also decreed that his son's wife should be from the land of his birth. The differences in the two cases are instructive. Jacob mounts a campaign for a wife, taking his fate into his own hands as he has before, but this time he will be the deceived rather than the deceiver. Isaac's wife, by contrast, falls to hand without any effort on his part and without the slightest delay or deception. The contrast between the two courtships, Isaac/Rebekah and Jacob/Rachel/Leah, carefully highlights indirection and delay in the latter episode. Because, of course, after laboring and waiting for seven years, Jacob does not get Rachel—he gets Leah, the older sister with “weak eyes.” For the promise of another seven year's service—and after Leah's bridal week—Laban will give him Rachel as well. In spite of his self-willed efforts and the long period of service, he does not get what he wanted and must wait and serve some more. And even after a twenty year exile Jacob's homecoming is threatened first by Laban's wrath and then by Esau's anticipated enmity. At the ford of the Jabbok Jacob contends in darkness with an angel who leaves him halting on his hip—the figure for his broken progress toward his promised future. Jacob crosses over the Jabbok toward his promised destiny, but only after an impossible struggle that leaves him crippled—with the realization of that destiny still lies indefinitely, unanticipatably in the future of his distant descendants.

Jacob's self-assertion is linked to anxiety, fear, threat, rivalry, enmity, loss, and exile, as well as to deceit, betrayal, theft, and supplication. His lust produces delay, disappointment, barrenness, and intimations of death. (Isaac's obedience, by contrast, is connected to graciousness, familial love, fruitfulness, continuity, and timely fulfillment.) Yet Jacob through Judah is the inheritor. For Jacob, time is apparently both threat and hope, history both accident and fulfillment. Delay and fulfillment, self-assertion and grace are inextricably mixed in the cycle of Jacob's stories, nowhere more so than in the first seven years of Rachel's bride-price. Somehow Jacob is to be understood as more than simply temporizing his future, but less than merely instantiating a mythic archetype. In Genesis, Jacob exemplifies the mystery and the radical temporal lability of a finite human being who is in a covenantal relationship with the Unnameable.

What then does Malamud's allusive title reveal as it interrogates his story? The parody seems to cut both ways. Jacob's story ironizes and elevates Sobel's story. The parody ensures that what we see in and through the story is not quite what we get—it is less and it is more, which is the genius that Keats recognized in Shakespeare's “negative capability.” The profoundly developed images of delay, disappointment, and deceit embodied in the allusion vaguely trouble the story's apparent moral themes of spiritual triumph and of virtue rewarded. At the same time, the “inappropriate” title points us outside the frame of the story toward the second seven years and a radically different future than Jacob/Sobel expected or labored to produce. While Malamud's story is manifestly a story of waiting and delay, the parody deepens Sobel's waiting toward a superb patience. It is as if some indefinitely delayed destiny awaits Sobel beyond all temporizations of desire.

In spite of Malamud's morally satisfying storytelling, no sensitive reader of the story can entirely miss this suggestive tug into shadowy depths that lie beyond the story's power of resolution. The allusion of the title pulls us beyond Sobel at the shoemaker's last “pounding leather for his love” and retrospectively echoes Feld's interrogation of Sobel “to know what, the shoemaker demanded, and to know why?” Sobel labors for what—and why? Because he has chosen? Or because he has been chosen? For a Sobel—after the Holocaust—can the future be anything but temporization and the satisfaction of desire? Are we—in our age—still capable of living toward an unknown fulfillment to be purchased by an incalculable service? This is Malamud's fundamental question in “The First Seven Years.”

Are we still capable of living in a covenatal relation? Is human hope still possible? For Malamud, the question turns on the difference between choosing and being chosen, between making up our lives as we go along and living our lives in response to a demand beyond our understanding or satisfaction. In many of Malamud's classic stories, the impulse to create a better life for others (or oneself) is thwarted by failing to grasp this difference. In “Take Pity,” “Black Is My Favorite Color,” and “Rembrandt's Hat,” for example, friendship and sympathy poison relationships where they are forced on their recipients. And, in “The Last Mohican” or “The Lady of the Lake,” the protagonist's insensitivity to the distinctive needs of others mocks the expansive spirit in which he has sought deeper relationships. The Natural (1952), Malamud's first novel, extensively analyzes the ironic collapse of hope when promise and possibility are misread as promissory and are forced toward fulfillment. And Malamud's least hopeful novel, The Tenants (1971), reorients us to the nature of hope by parodically disabusing us of the fatal fantasy that hope is an imaginative formula or supervening revelation.¹¹

Hope paradoxically relies on what is still always unfulfilled and unconcluded in the stories we tell ourselves about our lives. Thus, characteristic stories like “The Mourner,” “Idiots First,” “The Magic Barrel,” “The German Refugee,” and “The First Seven Years” disorient the reader by insinuating incongruous possibility within the very moment when defeat, shame, or despair seems to overwhelm the protagonists' hopes. At the moment when choice is eclipsed, a novel responsiveness and responsibility dawn. At the same time, the collapse of the future makes this incursion of meaning relatively incomprehensible. Even The Assistant, A New Life, The Fixer, and Dubin's Lives shade their conventional affirmations with this incongruent or exigent responsibility, which exceeds what is reasonable or necessary for their protagonists' achieving of a liminal dignity. Malamud's last and most riotously parodic novel, God's Grace (1982), takes this incomprehensible scenario as its subject: how can human possibility be preserved at the end of the world? A structural reading of God's Grace reveals that the conceptually unencompassable may still be thinkable diachronically, as a movement (not a possession) of the mind.¹² Thus, in the most provocative of Malamud's thematically elusive texts, such as God's Grace and “The First Seven Years,” the mystery of hope is embodied concretely in the reading process itself, through what might be called—following suggestions in Emmanuel Levinas—a “diachrony” of reading. The rhetorical strategies by which Malamud facilitates “diachronic” reading are the elusive substance of his unique negative capability.

DIACHRONIC READING

The contrast Levinas draws between the synchronic and the diachronic in our experience of meaning provides an important clue to the nature of Malamud's robust brand of negative capability. The point of resonance of Levinas's ethical metaphysics and Malamud's fictions is striking and fundamental. The key to both is the exploration of a superlative passivity or irremissible responsibility with respect to the Other. What Levinas solicits dialectically, Malamud suggests rhetorically.

According to Levinas, the “dia-chrony” of time or time's very movement and flow must always escape the simultaneity or synchronicity of the moment of consciousness, whether we attempt to assemble the temporal flow in conscious experience or in communication within or between consciousnesses. As he notes in Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, diachrony is a past and a future “refractory to the simultaneity of the present” (38). In “Diachrony and Representation,” he describes this phenomenologically elusive temporality as the “primordial intrigue” of time (103), as the past that is not our self-conscious past and the future that is not our self-consciously projected future. This literally “immemorial past” and this referentially “pure future” offer us the only possibility of nondiscursive beginnings and endings, “a plot that is not reducible to phenomenology, that is, to the thematization of the said” (Otherwise 46). This unthematizable plot or “prophetic eschatology,” as he calls it in Totality and Infinity “institutes a relation with being beyond the totality or beyond history and not with being beyond the past and the present” (Totality 22). The mystery of human hope reverberates in this phenomenologically opaque and discursively incoherent “relation with being … beyond history.”

History holds no hope for Levinas. Levinas introduces Totality and Infinity with the frank metaphysical acknowledgement that war is “the pure experience of pure being,” wherein “individuals are reduced to being bearers of forces that command them unbeknown to themselves” (21). After the Holocaust, we share “the anguished certainty of the inexorable march of history towards goals that surpass the intentions of men” (Difficult 185; emphasis in the original).¹³ From this perspective, even messianism, the desire to bring history to an end by instituting justice once and for all, contains the seed of the worst violence of which we are capable: virtuous murder. History cannot be made to vindicate or compensate. But, if human hope cannot wait on time's fulfillment, neither does it need to. Instead, history itself can be judged from within every moment: “Independence in the face of history affirms the right possessed by human consciousness to judge a world that is ripe at every moment for judgement, before the end of history and independently of this end—that is to say, a world peopled by persons” (Difficult 201). Diachrony or prophetic eschatology is the possibility of judging history; it is testimony to the transcendence of human meaning and to the hope of living a human life in this world.

The covenantal relation with the Unnameable Creator, narrated in the Hebrew Bible and interpreted in the Talmud and the Christian New Testament, is our most powerful cultural figure of this prophetic eschatology. Human hope dawns within this relation as the possibility of genuinely redemptive endings (endings unprojectable from articulated beginnings) and genuinely creative beginnings (beginnings unforeseeable within articulable endings), endings and beginnings preserved precisely in the present moment when there seems to be no hope. Human hope is Father Abraham with the knife at his son's throat. On the one hand, the violence of the Akedah alienates man from God, father from son, and father from himself—it disrupts both past (the covenant) and future (the promise). Levinas explains that “violence does not consist so much in injuring and annihilating persons as in interrupting their continuity, making them play roles in which they no longer recognize themselves, making them carry out actions that will destroy every possibility for action” (Totality 21). Thus, as Kierkegaard makes evident in Fear and Trembling, hope or the “content” of Abraham's faith on the mountain in Moriah must always remain a mystery because his every avenue of action has been foreclosed. His hope is literally unwitnessable and unarticulable because the violence of his situation prevents its assembly in our consciousness as a story or thematizable plot or narrated temporality—as a hopeful fiction. Yet, on the other hand, Abraham's obedience in binding Isaac, his recognition of an incomprehensible obligation, is crucial to the deepening of the Covenant (“now I know you fear God”). The transcendence of the Akedah is “pure testimony, pure because prior to all disclosure; it is subjection to an order before understanding the order. … As a transcendence, refusing objectification and dialogue, it signifies in an ethical way. It signifies in the sense in which one says to mean an order; it orders” (Levinas “God” 171). God's Revelation (“Take your son …”) and the human response (“Here am I”) generate a temporal meaning that cannot be assembled in phenomenological time, a meaning that is beyond the time of history. Hope differs radically from all our hopeful fictions in its reliance on the mysteries of a present elusively commanded in an “immemorial past” and improbably bound to a “pure future”—under order but not ordered.

Levinas's central philosophic insight is that the mystery of this plot that “precedes” and “succeeds” our being in history can only be approached from the ethical. Ethics, he argues, takes its moment, not from our being among beings nor even from the tension between Being and its manifestations, but from an exposure or liability that surprises and questions our intentions toward beings or within Being. Ethics is already transcendence. Levinas describes this exposure as “proximity,” or the primordial restlessness that brings us to address the world (precedent to all relationship to the world). Alphonso Lingis explains:

The appeal and contestation of alterity … affect me without any mediation. … The subject is exposed to alterity before it can gather itself up and take a stand. This closeness without distance, this immediacy of an approach which remains approach without what approaches being circumscribable, locatable there, Levinas calls proximity.

(xix)

Proximity somehow “precedes” consciousness, phenomena, and discourse, not as their a priori condition or horizon, but, according to Levinas, as “a disturbance of the rememberable time” (Otherwise 89). Ironically, the subject's experience and speech necessarily elide this pre-origin, but its trace persists in this diachronic disturbance that is beyond being or otherwise than being. This disturbance is ethics, my responsibility for the Other as I face him in his vulnerability and mortality. Without having done or chosen anything, before all reasoning and commitment, this vulnerability of the Other in his otherness makes the ego hostage, answerable for the Other's suffering and death: “Transcendence as signification, and signification as the signification of an order given to subjectivity before any statement, is the pure one-for-the-other. Poor ethical subjectivity deprived of freedom!” (“God” 173). Consciousness finds us always already charged with the indigence and weakness of the Other. Proximity “puts in question the ego's natural position as subject, its perseverance—the perseverance of its good conscience—in its being” (“Diachrony” 108). Subjectivity—unaccountably and irremissibly—is encroachment and usurpation. Thus, ethics transcends ontology. The Good judges Being. The mere proximity of the Other, as an irrecupable alterity prior to its apprehension, obligates me immemorially and beyond death: “Responsibility for the Other … vows itself to an alterity that is no longer within the province of re-presentation. This way of being avowed—or this devotion—is time” (“Diachrony” 115). Diachrony is our ethical exposure in proximity to the Other. Thus, diachrony is “beyond being” or “otherwise than being” as challenging the self-identical fullness of being within the very constitution of our subjectivity. Consciousness dawns in the world and being reveals itself at the very point of being's non-coincidence with itself: a subject among others. While subjective intention may be at the mercy of the violence of history, ethical signification to a subjectivity puts history itself—being-in-time—under judgment: a prophetic eschatology.

Proximity to the Other cannot be “said”—it is precisely what must escape reduction to the said. As the re-presentation of being, the said always tends toward the synchronic and totalizing.¹⁴ But Levinas points out that all “saying,” or the turning of the ego toward the Other through the said, is also an approach to the Other as the exposure or uncovering of oneself in the intention to communicate:

Saying is communication to be sure, but as a condition for all communication, as exposure. … The plot of proximity and communication is not a modality of cognition. The unblocking of communication irreducible to the circulation of information, which presupposes it, is accomplished in saying.

(Otherwise 48)

However, “in [the] said, we nonetheless surprise the echo of saying, whose signification cannot be assembled” (Otherwise 27). Thus, according to Levinas's analysis, all communications (the said) are shaded by the echo or an-archic trace of their com-munication (saying) or proximity to the Other. This an-archic trace allows us “to catch sight of an extreme passivity, a passivity that is not assumed, in the relationship with the Other, and, paradoxically, in pure saying itself” (Otherwise 47). Diachronic reading is reading that listens for the echo of this primordial semiotic anarchy or textual passivity.

As we have already seen, Malamud's parodic strategy in “The First Seven Years” suggestively troubles the moral integrity of his story. Malamud uses a number of additional rhetorical devices to compound the subtle or subliminal semiotic disarray of his text. As Levinas explains, the “trace” means without signifying because it is a peculiarly subtle kind of disarray:

The disarray is not a movement that any stable order in conflict or in accord with a given order presupposes, but a movement that already bears the significance that it brings. The disarray upsets the order without disturbing it seriously. It intervenes in a way so subtle that it already withdraws unless we retain it. It insinuates itself, withdraws before entering.

(qtd. in Wyschogrod 148)¹⁵

A diachronic reading of “The First Seven Years” will show that the elusive disturbances of the order of the text, Malamud's negative capability, are the traces through which we can glimpse our extreme passivity in the face of the Other, our anachronistic responsibility for the Other. This diachronic reading will be a kind of unreading, a readerly diffidence sensitive to the text's reluctance to assemble its meaning in story, theme, or kerygma, a readerly patience alert to the echo of the unthematizable plot “beyond being” and to the shadings of hope “beyond history.”

NARRATIVE INCONSEQUENCE AND THE HOPE OF NEW BEGINNINGS

Malamud is a riveting storyteller who nevertheless carefully displaces the focus of his narratives by embodying within his texts traces of a primordial semiotic anarchy. This fine imbalance or suggestive inconsequence registers what escapes registration. It is Malamud's unique brand of negative capability. To maintain this subtle disorder within order, which of course he sometimes fails to sustain, he must both preserve the momentum of his story and at the same time subtly switch the narrative off its rails in the direction of a trackless destination.

James Mellard in The Exploded Form: The Modernist Novel in America places Malamud in the tradition of “pastoral/performative” American fiction, extending from Hawthorne and Twain through Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway. Within this tradition, the aesthetic authority of the writer lies “in the performance, in its posited relationship between the audience and the voice of the storyteller” (149). As opposed to the more intellectualist and iconic modernist tradition deriving from James, this performative tradition is audial, playful, emphasizing “the old values of storytelling, the entertainer's values, the necessity to keep the audience attentive, to move it from moment to moment, to play on its conditioned responses to various formulae—of ‘reality,’ of artists and audiences, of literature itself” (133). It is precisely this vatic presumption of congruence between author's voice and audience's unconscious expectations that is subtly undermined in Malamud's narratives. Mellard acknowledges that this pushes Malamud's narratives in a surprisingly postmodern direction:

Malamud can employ very simple people as his protagonists, antagonists, and supporting characters; these people can accept their own most foolish, as well as their own most heroic, actions in the most matter-of-fact ways; and they can talk about themselves, their world, and its values in the most uncritical vocabularies available to the popular mind. Moreover, the pastoral mode permits him to structure his plots as if they belonged to the mythoi of tragedy and comedy. But, while Malamud's voice seems to validate the ways in which his characters see the world, in his best novels—The Natural, The Assistant, The Fixer—there is always a note of parody that comes out of his use of popular “myths” such as the tragedy of the ball player Shoeless Joe Jackson, the ecstatic romance of St. Francis of Assisi, and the nightmare terrors of Russian Bolshevism. That undercurrent of parody, as one expects in a modernist work, leaves forms and meanings subtly indeterminate. Like Faulkner, Malamud is disposed—as the Russian formalists say—toward “baring his devices. …” Malamud's exploiting the possibilities of pastoral and the naive popular consciousness, however, pushes him slightly closer than, for example, Saul Bellow to the late modernism of Vonnegut and Brautigan.

(152-53)

This parodic ironizing of his mythoi unaccountably displaces or suspends his stories' vatic power. Again and again, Malamud leaves his stories limping—toward a new and unidentifiable destiny.

The opening passage of “The First Seven Years” immediately plunges us deep into the story—or stories. Malamud's narrative voice entangles the reader in at least a dozen different time frames, past, future and present.

Feld, the shoemaker, was annoyed that his helper, Sobel, was so insensitive to his reverie that he wouldn't for a minute cease his fanatic pounding at the other bench. He gave him a look, but Sobel's bald head was bent over the last as he worked and he didn't notice. The shoemaker shrugged and continued to peer through the partly frosted window at the near-sighted haze of falling February snow. Neither the shifting white blur outside, nor the sudden deep remembrance of the snowy Polish village where he had wasted his youth could turn his thoughts from Max the college boy (a constant visitor in the mind since early that morning when Feld saw him trudging through the snow-drifts on his way to school), whom he so much respected because of the sacrifices he had made throughout the years—in winter or direst heat—to further his education. An old wish returned to haunt the shoemaker: that he had had a son instead of a daughter, but this blew away in the snow for Feld, if anything, was a practical man. Yet he could not help but contrast the diligence of the boy, who was a peddler's son, with Miriam's unconcern for an education. True, she was always with a book in her hand, yet when the opportunity arose for a college education, she had said no she would rather find a job. He had begged her to go, pointing out how many fathers could not afford to send their children to college, but she said she wanted to be independent. As for education, what was it, she asked, but books, which Sobel, who diligently read the classics, would as usual advise her on. Her answer greatly grieved her father.

(7)

We are in a shoe repair shop with two men, a snow storm outside. But Feld is lost in his own private reverie that carries him from childhood memory to gathering hope to old wish renewed to regret over lost opportunity and, finally, to grief at the immediate past. This reverie is framed by the sight of Max trudging to school earlier in the morning and by the present sound of Sobel pounding intrusively at the last. The slow rhythm of Max's progress and the steady metronome of Sobel's work at the last counterpoint the wayward flow of Feld's drifting thoughts. Similarly, Max's educational diligence through the years and Sobel's advice to Miriam over the past five years are the context for Feld's anticipation and anxiety as the story unfolds them. Finally, the paragraph rehearses the continuing argument between father and daughter that Feld thinks to trump with a possible date with Max. (The first sentence of the second paragraph of the text reintroduces Max in the flesh and returns the reader to the present in the shoe shop—a present temporally compounded at this point by a host of present pasts and futures.) Malamud brilliantly exploits the narrative power recognized in Frank Kermode's observation in The Sense of an Ending that “in the kind of time known by books a moment has endless perspectives of reality” (71). Each perspective suggests a familiar story, if not a particular plot. Yet none of them is finally relevant to the irresolvable plot of the story—no more than any temporal perspective would be. As we have already observed, the title's opaque allusion will preclude all attempts to temporize a definitive plot line.

There are, however, three “plots” more or less explicitly prepared in this remarkable initial passage. They are traditional and deeply familiar: the marriage of true minds, the reconciliation of different generations, and the power of spiritual transcendence and transformation. None of them is the plot inconnu of this text. Feld's matchmaking hopes for Max and Miriam dominate two-thirds of the story and are the vehicle of the story's satire and comic resolution. This initial plot line is both superficial and a red herring (for Feld and reader alike!). But a second plot line soon suggests itself as the “real” story. It introduces a complex tension between father and daughter encompassing a very wide array of cultural, psychological, and character issues centered on differences of gender, generation (first or second generation immigrant), experience (suffering and sacrifice or security and independence), and attitude (naive practicality or bookish romanticism), and raising questions of love, knowledge, and identity. These tragicomic questions receive a perfunctory and enlightenedly sentimental resolution but are virtually displaced in the last scene of the story by the third plot line secreted in the opening passage of the story. This tertiary plot turns out to be the real story—but not the ultimate plot. It is a romance celebrating Sobel's extraordinary devotion to Miriam and exploring Feld's dawning awareness of the ambiguity of experience and the obscurity of desire. Yet the first story line is not simply abandoned; the satire is continued into the third scene and is the most vivid and plausible element in the narrative. And the continuing hints of the third tale, Sobel's tale, are quite indecipherable until the end of the first scene when Sobel smashes the last and dashes out when he learns of Max's date with Miriam. Even then, Sobel's presence and behavior in the second scene is treated as an interruption or complication of the first two plots. And the climactic third scene, as we shall see, suspends rather than concludes this romance of self-transcendence.

This narrative equivocation (what's the story here?) is reinforced in the narrative itself by the mystery of Sobel's motivations. Sobel is introduced to us in the text as an enigma:

Feld could trust him with anything and did, frequently going home after an hour or two at the store, leaving all the money in the till, knowing Sobel would guard every cent of it. The amazing thing was that he demanded so little. His wants were few; in money he wasn't interested—in nothing but books, it seemed—which he one by one lent to Miriam, together with his profuse, queer written comments, manufactured during his lonely rooming house evenings, thick pads of commentary which the shoemaker peered at and twitched his shoulders over as his daughter read page by sanctified page, as if the word of God were inscribed on them.

(11)

What does Sobel want: not money, but books; not books, but Miriam; not Miriam (the seven years), but (the “second” seven years) what? As Feld asks a few sentences later, “what keeps him here? why does he stay?” (11). This double question, what? and why?, is precisely echoed in the last scene of the text by Feld's question to Sobel “to know what, the shoemaker demanded, and to know why?” These questions of what? and why? are elaborated by a third question asked by Feld at the crux of his and Sobel's confrontation. The ostensible answer to the first two questions has already been given: “‘For Miriam,’ he blurted—‘for her’” (17). But how does she know?

“Miriam knows?” he muttered hoarsely.

“She knows.”

“You told her?”

“No.”

“Then how does she know?”

“How does she know?” Sobel said, “because she knows. She knows who I am and what is in my heart.”

Feld had a sudden insight. In some devious way, with his books and commentary, Sobel had given Miriam to understand that he loved her. The shoemaker felt a terrible anger at him for his deceit.

(17)

The author, like Sobel, is incapable of articulating what he would have us know, why he would have us know it, or how he would have us know it. Yet in the devious ways we are tracing, the author shapes the reader's response—or, better yet, the reader's ability to respond.

By the end of the tale(s), the desires of Max, Miriam, Sobel, and even Feld are scarcely any longer to the point. Feld's unassimilable acknowledgement of Sobel's claims and Sobel's unlimited devotion to Miriam mark obligations that surpass all temporizations, all gatherings of the passing moments within the intentionality of the ego. Characteristically, their articulable and self-willed desires have been set aside by the irresolvable plot of the text, a plot experienced as an unmotivated openness to an unknown future or, in Levinas's phrase, as “pure time.” Thus, in The Assistant, Frank Alpine's apparently unpayable debt to Morris Bober and his family is not assumed so much as it is acknowledged in bewilderment. In A New Life, Levin's career-destroying commitment to a chronically dissatisfied woman—whom he no longer loves—is something he can neither explain nor justify to himself. Yakov Bok, in The Fixer, plays the roles of cuckold and scapegoat assigned to him, even as he resists the cruel and accidental circumstances that entangle him. In Dubin's Lives, carnal desire itself is bent for William Dubin toward its stultification in the neediness of his wife, daughter, and son. These gratuitous acts of self-stultification mark obligations that fall “outside” the conatus of human temporality and are, thus, strictly unplottable and unthematizable. As Arthur Foff perspicaciously observed in his review of the stories in The Magic Barrel, “The impossible demand becomes the imperative debt” (30). Anticipation and regret, disappointment and fulfillment, that is, human temporality itself, are functions of desire in relation to its object. The temporizations of desire are all the ways we find of making time count by protecting ourselves in the present from future loss and disappointment and by assuring ourselves in the present of continuing possession and satisfaction. In short, we struggle in time to transfigure the future and claim the past in accord with our drive to be, our will to power, our conatus essendi. Malamud confounds this narcissistic spiritual presumption in favor of fulfillment. Indeed, Mark Shechner describes Malamud's characters as “case studies of conscience gone haywire” (80)—as they are from the perspective of conscious desire. This is precisely the transcendence of the Good over Being: “Poor ethical subjectivity deprived of freedom!”

Malamud disorders his narratives with the traces of a more primordial plot that “puts in question the ego's natural position as subject” but also, as we have seen, that redeems desire for the temporality of hope. On first reading, the beginning of “The First Seven Years” is all energy and possibility, Sobel pounding, Feld dreaming, and the ending is all fulfillment and closure, Sobel pounding, Feld reconciled. Ironically and suggestively, the anachronic beginning and tableau ending disappear on second reading, leaving us in a much more equivocal relation to past and future. Feld's hopes are disappointed: “All his dreams for her—why he had slaved and destroyed his heart with anxiety and labor—all these dreams of a better life were dead” (15). Yet once outside he walks “with a stronger stride” (15). Sobel's passion is deferred—perhaps indefinitely and inexplicably—but “the next morning, when the shoemaker arrived, heavy-hearted, to open the store, he saw he needn't have come, for his assistant was already seated at the last, pounding leather for his love” (16). What? and why?, those teleological questions, receive no answer, yet life is renewed. Feld, adrift in risible fantasy, narcissistically blind to his daughter, felled by a heart attack, is restored—in the frustration of his desire. Sobel, a refugee “who had by the skin of his teeth escaped Hitler's incinerators” (17), choked with unspoken words of love, old before his time, is revived—by the postponement of his desire. Thus, the story is not finally a story of desires and their frustration and fulfillment in marriage, reconciliation, or transcendence. At the end of “The First Seven Years,” we are at the beginning of a new unknown story, a new and mysterious time frame, new kinds of relationships, beyond anticipations. Malamud's stories leave us responding to an inscrutable call—beginning again rather than ending. Frank Alpine's circumcision at the conclusion of The Assistant enters him with Abraham in responding to YHWH's: “Lekh lekha!” Get up and go into a new land! In A New Life, Levin's answer to Gerald Gilley's mocking question, “Why take that load on yourself?” is “Because I can, you son of a bitch.” The prisoner Yakov Bok travels not toward vindication but toward the ordeal of revolution. William Dubin stumbles up the road, “half-stiffened phallus in hand,” to his wife's bed where nothing and everything has changed. Malamud perceives the unending possibility of remaking our lives in response to a meaning that has always already interrupted their making, a diachrony always open to the impress of human judgment.

Malamud's stories display the unbridgeable distance between the temporizations of desire, kairos, and the temporality of obligation, diachrony. But this distance is not, as it has been misread, a neurotic despair of fulfillment. As Levinas has shown us, it is instead the possibility of hope as the transcendence of history and its violence. We no longer share the premise of the traditional storyteller that incident mythically bridges past and future, every tale an odyssey relating events to a crisis and a homecoming or an exodus bridging homeleaving and transfiguration. It still remains true, as Frank Kermode notes in The Sense of an Ending, that “plots have something in common with prophecy for they must appear to educe from the prime matter of the situation the forms of a future” (83). But, as Kermode argues, in our latter day we know “so desolately” that “none of our fictions is a supreme fiction” (155). So modern fiction as fiction is a cheat in its pretense to give life to the world, to make time meaningful. History, we have discovered, is not myth. Nevertheless, “tracts of time unpunctuated by meaning derived from the end are not to be borne” (163). Art, Kermode suggests, has compensated for its inevitable penultimacy with “a certain complexity and a sense of failure” and by making of time a “thickening web of contingency” (164, 177). Thus, the discursive disparity between kairos and chronos, our “poverty” as Kermode calls it, invites despair (or absurd play) from the modernist artist. But Kermode insists that the best fictions maintain us in the long perspective with a kind of wistful apocalypticism: “those [fictions] that continue to interest us move through time to an end, an end we must sense even if we cannot know it; they live in change, until, which is never, as and is are one” (179).¹⁶ For Kermode, modernist art is our nostalgia for myth in the face of the accidental inevitabilities of history.

In sharp contrast to Kermode's alternatives, Malamud's fictions are neither escapist nor ironically apocalyptic. They invite us to renewal and departure, which can only exist in the gap between as and is. The divergence is decisive and crucial to understanding Malamud's unique negative capability. The apocalyptic (and ontotheological) imagination of modernity insists that time must be meaningful, that human desire (kairos) must master chronos. The covenantal (and ethical) imagination of the ancient Hebrews, which Malamud shares and Levinas revives, insists instead that it is meaningful to live in time—even if the meaning of time escapes us. Diachrony is the metaphysical openness of chronos to meaning in our relationship to the Other. The pervasive insistence in the Hebrew Bible on the limits of comprehension is the inverse of the miraculous convergence of myth and human life in the apocalyptic imagination. As Gabriel Josipovici has argued in The Book of God, “There is always a gap in the Bible between what we might expect and what is, a gap which at times seems deliberately created in order to force us out of any easy moral position. … We are made to sense at so many moments the way in which life always runs ahead of meaning” (205-9). Hope is not to conclude in some promised land where as and is are one. Hope is to be able to respond to the call to set off again here and now for an unknown destination—if only we can hear the echo of the call in proximity to the Other.

RADICAL HETEROGLOSSIA AND PROXIMITY TO THE OTHER

The most distinctive element of Malamud's style is a radical or hyperintensive heteroglossia. Robert Solotaroff and Shelton Grebstein have carefully distinguished for us the shadings and blendings of Malamud's diction and syntax in, as Solotaroff puts it, “an extremely diverse narrative voice, one that could range in the same paragraph from formal American English, to colloquial American English, to the syntax and diction of Yinglish” (18). Grebstein identifies three styles whose confluence creates the particular literary idiom or “fused style” that he considers among Malamud's chief distinctions as an artist. The first is a standard belletristic style balancing informal elements with formal literary phrases. At the opposite extreme from this style with its familiar syntax and common diction is a dialect style that deliberately evokes the sound of Yiddish. The third style, which Grebstein identifies as “the most complex and resonant and that which Malamud has impressed with his own signature,” combines both belletristic and dialect styles:

The fused style gathers additional force from the juxtaposition or combination of lyric, eloquent, soaring phrases (the belletristic) and homely idiom and vulgate (the dialect). The belletristic exalts the vulgate, infusing it with dignity and seriousness; the vulgate pulls down the belletristic from its literary eminence and makes it speak for ordinary men and coarse experience. The juxtaposition of the two also makes possible that remarkable bitter comedy we observe in Malamud, Bellow, and Roth.

(33)

In addition, Malamud extensively uses both free indirect discourse, to allow a third person narrative to represent a first person perspective, and selective omniscience (which Grebstein identifies as Malamud's most typical narrative mode), to allow seamless shifts into interior monologue or perception. As James Mellard observes, “In Malamud, style is primarily a function of character, and not only in dialogue, because the author's point of view is almost always assimilated into that of the character” (“Versions” 77). Malamud is a master at rhetorically melding a character's ironically or comically awkward voice with the implied author's own voice.

The initial passage of “The First Seven Years” not only includes direct comic or ironic parody of both common and literary language, but is replete with the hybrid constructions or double-voiced prose that Mikhail Bakhtin in The Dialogic Imagination associates with “character zones” (315-16), in which a character's voice encroaches upon the author's voice, either expressively through tone, punctuation, or narrative order or through fragments of character speech ironically accented within the author's voice.

Feld, the shoemaker, was annoyed that his helper, Sobel, was so insensitive to his reverie that he wouldn't for a minute cease his fanatic pounding at the other bench. He gave him a look, but Sobel's bald head was bent over the last as he worked and he didn't notice.

“The shoemaker” swells this beginning, and the high diction of “cease” and “reverie” and the formal inclusion of the two “that's” continue this tone. As Solotaroff points out (19), the diction of the first sentence establishes a distance between the narrator and Feld that the next “Yinglish” phrase tends to collapse: “He gave him a look. …” However, the first sentence itself overloads the semantic context with Sobel's “fanatic pounding.” “Annoyed,” “insensitive,” “reverie,” and “cease” are all the narrator's description. “Fanatic,” by contrast, is obviously too harsh and too unjustified to stand as an objective narrator's judgment. “Fanatic” must be quoted, as it were, from Feld's perspective. Emotional tone is borrowed from Feld's annoyance to justify the adjective “fanatic” and, as Bakhtin would put it, mimic the irritation of the character. But the choice of diction departs from Bakhtin's typical examples of the field of action of a character's voice. As Solotaroff notes, “were a ‘real’ Feld to have articulated the thought he would probably have substituted some Yiddish word—meshugganah, for example” (20). And “fanatic” lacks the satiric thrust we would expect were the narrator adding his own ironic accent by refracting Feld's annoyance through an exaggerated judgment. If we are not quite in Feld's mind in the first sentence, neither are we quite in the narrator's. This raises a question. If neither narrator nor character would consider Sobel's pounding “fanatic,” who is being ironized?

This question of point of view is made doubly imponderable when the retrospective effect of the unraveling allusion in the title redounds on the judgment. “Fanatic” begins to seem appropriately objective within the intertextually reframed narrative context: an unknown fulfillment purchased by an incalculable service. It is not that the narrator is unreliable but that we seem to hear the faint trace of a third accent framing both character's and narrator's voices. This triple-voiced word, “fanatic,” introduces a disturbing hint of dignity that undercuts the comic irony that otherwise encompasses Feld. This makes the character himself “double-voiced,” but from an unknown or non-didactic ideological perspective, from a perspective he himself cannot share. On Bakhtin's analysis, “the speaking person in the novel is always, to one degree or another, an ideologue, and his words are always ideologemes. A particular language in a novel is always a particular way of viewing the world, one that strives for social significance” (333). In this case, however, the ideological world that contests both shoemaker's and narrator's worlds is scarcely given voice. At best it is an extratextual echo from deep within the parodic context of the allusive biblical narrative. At most we intuit it as a subtle trace that disturbs the author's comedic irony—and his artistic authority. But this takes us an important step beyond Bakhtin.

According to Bakhtin, the genius of the novel as a form is the abrogation of the author's ideological authority in favor of dialogism. Authoritative discourse, which he contrasts with novelistic discourse, demands our unconditional allegiance and as such it cannot be represented or artistically framed. Novelistic discourse constitutes an arena of struggle with others' words. By representing within the authorial voice the image of an alien language, novelistic discourse allows the other's voice to be heard in “a living, tension-filled interaction” (279). However, Bakhtin also insists that only an artistic organization of this diversity of voices successfully converts ordinary social stratification of language into dialogue:

An artistic hybrid demands enormous effort: it is stylized through and through, thoroughly premeditated, achieved, distanced. This is what distinguishes it from the frivolous, mindless and unsystematic mixing of languages—often bordering on simple illiteracy—characteristic of mediocre prose writers.

(366)

Thus, relinquishing ideological authority in novelistic prose requires asserting artistic authority over that prose. The controlling authorial voice is requisite for contrastive purposes, for adding the second accent to the intrusive alien voice. As such, it is normative and must be consistent in itself and in the mode in which it refracts the alien voice that it incorporates and represents as an image of a contrasting, if semantically inferior, social world.

It is precisely at this point that Malamud's particularly intensive use of heteroglossia disturbs the artistic authority of a controlling authorial voice. There is a third accent inconnu, an inconsistency of artistic tone, an unspoken trace of yet another voice, framing and refracting the author's voice as it refracts the character's voice. This carefully calibrated impurity of tone defers interpretative closure as if from a semantically superior point of view. It displaces the normative social world of the author with the suggestion of a more primordial judgment that already disturbs the conscience of that world. Malamud's radical heteroglossia converts the novel's refusal of semantic hegemony into an even more equivocal openness or superlative passivity. Malamud's unique voice bears the traces of a suppression from beyond the text, from a height that strictly surpasses the horizontal relativization of Bakhtinian dialogism. In Levinas's terms, it is the trace of the proximity of the Other, for whom and before whom we are always already responsible, in the face of whom no ideological justification suffices.

The satire with which the narrator regards Feld is even more unaccountably qualified a few sentences later.

Neither the shifting white blur outside, nor the sudden deep remembrance of the snowy Polish village where he had wasted his youth could turn his thoughts from Max the college boy (a constant visitor in the mind since early that morning when Feld saw him trudging through the snow-drifts on his way to school), whom he so much respected because of the sacrifices he had made throughout the years—in winter or direst heat—to further his education. An old wish returned to haunt the shoemaker: that he had had a son instead of a daughter, but this blew away in the snow for Feld, if anything, was a practical man.

Given the narrator's unequivocal description of Feld's state of mind, it is disturbingly inappropriate when the restrictive dependent clause “where he had wasted his youth” reintroduces the character's point of view and voice into the very middle of this omniscient judgment. This evaluation, “wasted his youth,” must be Feld's own, since such a condemnation by the author would be completely unprecedented and egregious. But unlike the typical hybrid construction described by Bakhtin, this appearance of a character zone within the third person authorial voice is unquoted or unrefracted through the author's irony or comedy. The ironic and bitter accent is Feld's own and contrasts his schoolboy understanding and hopes with his mature unillusioned perspective. Feld's refusal of nostalgia and his capacity for ironic self-judgment again lend him a note of dignity, suggesting trials and difficulties that may have deepened feeling if not built character. By enfolding this moment of unmediated character speech within the omniscient third person, the narrative lends it a degree of poignancy and sympathy that no dialogue, interior monologue, or stream of consciousness could communicate on its own. The overall effect is almost the inverse of Bakhtin's point: the author's voice is refracted through the character's voice. This displacement of authorial artistic authority or loss of control of authorial tone not only attenuates the tentative satire of the rest of the sentence, but gives the satiric turn a slightly cruel or aggressive cast. The satire almost becomes the author's reassertion of control against some indefinable resistance—against an alien and unrepresented ideological world that unaccountably disturbs his artistic representation. It is as if Feld's otherness surpasses his role as character.

This unaccountable locus of resistance heard within and against the author's voice immediately sounds again in the next sentence and further qualifies the predominantly satiric tone of the rest of the paragraph: “An old wish returned to haunt the shoemaker: that he had had a son instead of an daughter, but this blew away in the snow for Feld, if anything, was a practical man.” Without transition we are securely returned to the artistic authority of the author by diction (“haunt”) and an intrusively belletristic metaphor (“blew away in the snow”). The ghostly regret, a son instead of a daughter, temporarily balances another element of sympathy against the satire, but the literary metaphor sweeps this away for reader as well as character: “for Feld, if anything, was a practical man.” The central irony around which the story revolves is finally introduced—but with the highest degree of equivocation.

The wonderful polysemy of “practical” in this context is virtually irresolvable. On first reading, it is nothing but the author's observation, a conclusion supported by its role as an explanans, a similar role to that played by the authorial judgments at the beginning of the previous sentence. Take away this explanatory function and the narrator becomes both dramatized and radically unreliable—and there is no evidence for this anywhere in the narration. Moreover, the apparent univocacy of “practical” is consistent with Feld's occupation and his respect for outcomes (Max furthering his education) and with his subsequently developed materialism. Feld is a practical man—the author has told us so. However, Feld is not a practical man—“reverie” announced this in the very first sentence. The complex mix of bitterness, hope, and regret, of fantasy, memory, and wish that isolates Feld from sight, sound, and relationship in the first few sentences confirms that he is actually a man who lives by his inner life. His problem is not that he has no soul, but that he has so little understanding of himself and so strongly resists the vulnerabilities to which soul is subject. A practical man does not badly misread who Max, Miriam, and Sobel are. He does not jeopardize the two things that matter most to him, his daughter's happiness and his own livelihood, by failing to grasp their basis. A practical man does not alienate his posterity for fantastic, unsatisfiable, unsatisfying desires. Feld, far from being a practical man, is lost in his unworthy dreams. There is no way to reconcile this fundamental disparity between narrative situation and rhetorical force: the author's story subtly gives the lie to the author's satire.

It is no accident that the narrative stakes are also raised at this very juncture. Max the college boy is a disproportionate focus for Feld's rapt contemplation. But a deep disappointment in life, deepened further by a “wasted” youth, the strained or underdeveloped relationship of a daughter and a father, and the hope of finding a son(-in-law) offer much more profound narrative potential. This is the first moment where the reader is forced to ask, what is this story really all about? However, the question, as we have seen, is deeper than the reader can yet know. As the story unfolds, the author's judgment that Feld, if anything, is a practical man is consumed by the fundamental irony that Feld, rapt in illusion, neglects everything vital to his own well-being. Is Feld a practical man? Yes, no; in a way yes, in a way no. What is the author's point of view? How does he represent the image of Feld's ideological world, the “what” for which he acts and the “why” for which he acts? No more than Feld grasps the what and why of Sobel's reading does the narrator or the reader grasp the what and why of Feld's matchmaking. It is improvident and delusive—and it works: Sobel gets Miriam—maybe. It is precisely this irreconcilable quality that marks the depth of the allegorical parallel with the similarly convoluted and unlikely story of Jacob, Laban, Rachel, and Leah. The covenantal relationship is fulfilled, not because of desire and strategy—yet not despite them either. Thus, the irony expands to include author and reader. The author is reliable, but not to be trusted to have the final word as it turns out. The reader's narrative anticipation is led astray at the very moment it becomes self-conscious. The story confounds us with something that has the capacity to force us toward the limits of rhetoricity.¹⁷

THE RHETORIC OF HOPE

An allusive ideological world temporally disturbs the narrative of “The First Seven Years.” Its traces are echoed in Malamud's extraordinarily refracted diction. It is a world that escapes the temporizations that form the narrative. It is a world that would make discursive sense only in an impossibly removed retrospect—from God's point of view. But it is a world guided ethically in immemorial prospect as a superlative, “fanatic” devotion: in Levinas's phrase, “a thought which at every moment thinks more than it thinks” (“Philosophy” 56). The question of point of view is central to this discursive mystery. From what point of view—with what desires—can we here and now read this narrative? Not, it seems, from the ideological point of view with which the author addresses his characters, but from the point of view by which the author is addressed, a point of view necessarily incapable of ideological representation except as an extraordinary passivity and through a unique negative capability. Malamud's stories require a diachronic reading and, thus, the paradoxical desire to register the radically other than our desires.

From this perspective, Sobel at his last pounding leather for his love or Jacob working the second seven years for Rachel can be seen as figures for Malamud's art. The possibility of beginning again—and again—rather than the expectation of concluding is the brunt of Jacob's long passage through his birthright and of Sobel's survival of the Holocaust and its aftermath. The hopefulness of Jacob or Sobel, or of Frank Alpine, S. Levin, Yakov Bok, or William Dubin, is not so much disappointed or deferred, as simply abandoned. Yet in hope they wait and serve. Thus, their labors for their loves are in a sense their own ends—and so are the rhetorical techniques by which Malamud disturbs the finality of his prose. Malamud's texts open up possibility simply by being possible, not by promising closure. The human conatus that would see and seek fulfillment or reconciliation is disturbed by this intimation of a non-discursive perspective that makes any narrative of realization always incomplete and thus fundamentally “impractical.” But this rebuke to our egoistic anticipations is at the same time the mystery of hope. Malamud's texts register an openness beyond fulfillment or closure, an openness felt as inscrutable demand and lived as inexplicable patience. They are testimony that the mystery of hope may lie in a certain negative capability to register proximity to the Other.

Human hope in Malamud is not prospective but responsive. In his texts, we—readers, author, and characters—are addressed beyond the power of narrative to reconcile. In this proto-discursive call to response, a new present can sound. While in the course of time our most profound desires may never be fulfilled, this does not mean that history and circumstance have the last word. So long as there are human beings to hear and respond, we can always “begin” again.

Notes

1. This judgment marks a crucial dividing point for any thought about the Holocaust. Either we regard the Holocaust as explicable within familiar historical, psychological, moral, and theological categories (the Holocaust “reduced to the level of anecdote,” as Wiesel considers it), or we find the Holocaust conceptually unencompassable (“a story unlike any other”) (219). James Young puts the point judiciously: “the Holocaust may not be a breach in knowledge, or in history, or in the continuum so much as it is a traumatic breach in our uncritical belief in the kinds of knowledge we have of it” (98).

2. Robert Alter and Michael Brown, for example, do read The Fixer and The Assistant as developing metaphors for the Holocaust. According to Langer, this misreading is due to the critical attractions of a familiar literary stance and to the critics' need for sources of consolation.

3. Malamud's focus on the Holocaust is evident from beginning to end of his career. As Edward Abramson notes, “Malamud was greatly affected by World War II. He was not particularly concerned about his own Jewishness until the events of the Holocaust, and said, ‘The rise of totalitarianism, the Second World War, and the situation of Jews in Europe helped me to come to what I wanted to say as a writer’” (5). The very first story of his career, “Armistice” (written in 1940), opens with an unflinching and strikingly proleptic image for the desolation of the Nazis' war against the Jews: “When he was a boy, Morris Lieberman saw a burly Russian peasant seize a wagon wheel lying against the side of a blacksmith's shop, swing it around, and hurl it at a fleeing Jewish sexton. The wheel caught the Jew in the back, crushing his spine. In speechless terror, he lay on the ground before his burning house, waiting to die” (103). Later in the story, when Lieberman, a Brooklyn grocer, learns of the accord between France and Germany on June 22, 1940, he “looked around to see if the street had changed, but everything looked the same, though he could hardly understand why” (107). Malamud seems to have grasped intuitively from the beginning that the events then unfolding in Europe would change everything. Malamud's last novel (God's Grace), published forty-two years later, begins with “that story” (3): God has turned His head, and, greedy for death, man has produced the Devastation, a final Holocaust. This time there will be no human survivors. The very last published words Malamud wrote before his death in 1986 (the last sentence of The People, a work in progress) allude indirectly but unmistakably to the victims of the Holocaust: “The moaning of the Indians began as the freight cars were moving along the tracks” (97). Malamud knew very well that fiction cannot change history but also that it must respond to it.

4. Sidney Richman, one of the earliest and best commentators on Malamud's fiction, repeatedly exclaims at the “inexplicable,” the “unaccountable,” or the “uncanny” power or achievement of the best of Malamud's work (118, 143, 145). Similarly, Norman Podhoretz confesses that the effect of Malamud's work when it is good, “seems a kind of miracle,” the stories possessing a quality that “very nearly beggars description” (590). As Sheldon Hershinow comments, this “elusive quality … has for a generation both intrigued and frustrated commentators on his work” (2).

5. For instance, Frank Kermode notes “the occasional corruptness of style and invention” and remarks on the impurity of Malamud's “grotesque, bombastic prose” (Continuities 217-19). Burton Raffel flatly states that “it cannot be for stylistic reasons that Malamud disturbs or lingers” (149). And when Samuel Bellman inquires after the secret of Malamud's literary power, he too concludes: “Style, surely, it cannot be, for Malamud's diction is not seldom gratingly inappropriate” (12).

6. “Postmodernism” is a notoriously fluid concept, but Malamud—on my reading—would be paradigmatically postmodern according to Jean-François Lyotard's classic definition: “the postmodern would be that which in the modern puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself” (81). Writing in 1976, Ihab Hassan debated whether Malamud is best read as modernist or postmodernist. The question turns for Hassan on whether Malamud's irony is radically subversive of the claims of fiction: “There is neither nihilism in Malamud's vision nor radical revision of the nature of human desire and its representation in the arts” (56). Yet Hassan also admits that he is “not certain that the limits of Malamud, sharp as they are in my own eyes, will finally prove less liminary of our exhaustion than, say, the work of John Barth” (57). Thus, Malamud remains elusive for Hassan, who admits that he is puzzled “why [his] admiration of Malamud is not more fluent, and [his] criticism of him more candid” (61). While Malamud's extensive use of parody and self-reflective irony is distinctly postmodern, the radical openness this produces in his texts has perhaps more in common with the underlying effect of Talmudic commentary than with the subversions of a Coover, Barth, Pynchon, Bartheleme, or Vonnegut. (Cf. Marc-Alain Ouaknin, The Burnt Book: Reading the Talmud: “Talmudic reading is an operation of dissemination that restores life, movement, and time to the very heart of words. Here words are no longer finalized by the meaning; reading breaks up the authority of meaning and all elements of the text echo and converse with each other” [294].) The means Malamud uses are postmodern; the aims are traditional. In some ways, Malamud might plausibly be heard as a “sacred parodist” (in David Roskies's phrase), in the tradition of those who resort to parody to keep the faith under conditions so extreme that the traditional archetypes of the covenantal relation seem inadequate.

7. Originally published in 1950, “The First Seven Years” is the lead story in The Magic Barrel, which won the National Book Award in 1959. In his recent study of Malamud's short fiction Robert Solotaroff chooses “The First Seven Years” for extensive analysis as consolidating “the most crucial component of the style that made The Assistant and the majority of the stories in The Magic Barrel distinctively, arrestingly, his own” (18). Similarly, Richman in his early study of Malamud's fiction singles out “The First Seven Years” as exemplary of Malamud's attaining “what many writers, and even better ones, must struggle for years to attain: a voice which is distinctively his own” (100).

8. Commenting on critics' inability to analyze the meaning of the striking last image in Malamud's famous story, “The Magic Barrel,” Bilik responds that “no explication suffices or seems really called for. … Malamud's critics may not have recognized his unique brand of negative capability.”

9. My reading borrows from the sensibility of poststructuralism but to very different ends. See note 14 below, for the distinction between “diachronic” reading and “deconstructive” reading.

10. I am using the notion of “parody” in the extended sense developed by Linda Hutcheon. She defines “parody” as repetition with a difference: “it is imitation with critical ironic distance, whose irony can cut both ways” (37).

11. The Natural and The Tenants are both remarkable examples of Malamud's use of equivocal parody to defeat the reader's hermeneutic expectations. My readings of these two novels appear in The Rhetoric of Prophecy in Bernard Malamud's Fiction, forthcoming from Peter Lang Publishing.

12. An “impossible” transition always invites a structural or “process” reading. In general, as Claude Lévi-Strauss has demonstrated for us, incomprehensible transitions or unsurpassable oppositions are mediable structurally. I give a structural reading of God's Grace in my forthcoming study of Malamud's rhetoric (see note above).

13. Levinas, a Lithuanian Jew by birth and French by citizenship since the thirties, was interned in a Nazi work camp for Jewish prisoners of war. His parents and brothers in Eastern Europe were murdered by Nazi collaborators.

14. As Jacques Derrida and others have helped us appreciate, the synchronic assemblage of meaning by a reader only tends toward compresence in a moment of understanding. But the deferral and dispersal of meaning in the play of signifiers that deconstructive reading exploits is an irremediable equivocation within the moment of the reader's consciousness or apprehension. It is a kind of freedom from the intention of the author and a holiday from the anxieties of the reader. Deconstruction, no less than structuralism, clides the subject. Diachrony, however, is not merely the subversion of what is said. As the trace of proximity to the Other, it “puts into question the ego's natural position as subject.” Diachrony challenges the sufficiency of the subject. Diachronic reading will differ from deconstructive reading as the biblical Job differs from the Nietzschean Übermensch. Neither discovers reconciliation in the text, but the latter reads this as release into endless becoming while the former “expects an awaited that infinitely surpasses expectancy” (Levinas, “Transcendence” 183-84). Both deconstructive and diachronic readings require an unusual alertness to what usually is not heard in the readerly text: in the one case, impasses; in the other, proximities.

15. Wyschogrod is translating from Levinas's En découvrant l'existence avec Husserl et Heidegger (Paris: Vrin, 1949), 208.

16. Kermode alludes here to Wallace Stevens's lines from “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven”: “A more severe, // More harassing master would extemporize / Subtler, more urgent proof that the theory / Of poetry is the theory of life // As it is, in the intricate evasions of as, / In things seen and unseen, created from nothingness / The heavens, the hells, the worlds, the longed-for lands.”

17. Solotaroff observes that Malamud's “often centripetal plots are charged by language so subtly varied that they strain toward the centrifugal” (21). Indeed, as we have seen, the plot of “The First Seven Years” is itself powerfully centrifugal. Consequently, it becomes a continuing challenge for Malamud to hold together the illusion of storytelling with its “unself-conscious” confluence of author's voice and audience's expectations. In compensation for these multiform centrifugal effects, he strongly develops the structural elements of his narrative. The opening passage of the story is an elaborate chiasmus in terms of voicing and point of view and also develops a delicate and precise narrative counterpoint. These stylistic and thematic architectonics are pervasive. The entire first scene is a chiasmus. The matchmaking encounter between Feld and Max is isolated as its crux. It is nailed in place by Sobel's pounding, which introduces the story in the first sentence of the first paragraph, interrupts the matchmaking scene with silence when Sobel stops briefly in an attempt to overhear the negotiations (just before the discourse shifts to dialogue for the first time), and ends the scene when an infuriated Sobel shatters the iron last. The story's coda reintroduces the pounding, now beneficent, in the last sentence. This last sentence—and last paragraph—forms one of Malamud's tableaux. Frank Kermode argues that “In the broadest terms Malamud's method is to conduct his characters through a more or less plausible series of events to a climax by which they are frozen into ritual attitudes, and to allow this tableau to close the work” (Continuities 217). In this particular case, in addition to returning the reader to the opening sentence and a possible rereading of title and story, this frozen tableau immobilizes or terminates the narrative suspense initiated by the profoundly anachronic beginning of the story. The story has apparently gone nowhere narratively, preferring the structural resolution of a chiasmus.

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