SOURCE: Baris, Sharon Deykin. “Intertextuality and Reader Responsibility: Living On in Malamud's ‘The Mourners.’” Studies in American Jewish Literature 11, no. 1 (spring 1992): 45-61.

[In the following essay, Baris discusses the ways in which “The Mourners” highlights collective responsibility in the plight of others.]

The purpose of the writer … is to keep civilization alive … My premise is that we will live on.

—Malamud

And to go write-on-living? If that were possible, would the writer have to be dead already, or be living on?

—Derrida

Bernard Malamud's “The Mourners” is a tale of boarders and border crossings. It tells of immigrant boarders in an American house of fiction whose postwar stories must be heard and understood. It also challenges us as readers to define the physical and mental borders that must be both recognized yet somehow crossed over in order to test ourselves as human beings in a postmodern and post-Holocaust period. This brief work seems simply, if hauntingly, to describe dwellers in a decrepit tenement who fail to exchange social amenities or even to acknowledge one another's grief and isolation.¹ Written little more than a decade after World War II, and set in that same period, it thoughtfully mirrors a postwar moment when so many people felt they could not bear any more tales of human suffering and violence. In this context it is not incidental to note that the two main protagonists are Jewish, that the writer is Jewish, and that this story is called “The Mourners.” Although the Holocaust is not mentioned, we can surmise that the pervasive mood of numbness in Malamud's story reflects a perplexing inability to share narratives of survival in its aftermath. Yet “The Mourners” drives toward a final scene in which Gruber the landlord is at last moved by “the extent of Kessler's suffering” and tries to imagine some “bad news” as an explanation for what is “wrong here” (25). When Gruber unexpectedly joins Kessler in mourning and winds himself in a sheet (whether wrapping himself in the folds of a prayer shawl or in the pages of another person's story), he responds wholeheartedly to his tenant Kessler's condition. His reaction, however, is too sudden and too ready to be true, and such winding sheets seem only to serve as a cover for his self-enclosed version of someone else's grief. As we, in reading the ending of “The Mourners,” in turn weigh our own estimation of Gruber's mourning, we face a fundamental paradox within this fiction or within all narratives: can one ever know another's tale? At stake in the final moments is the larger problem of what it means to respond to someone else's story, and what we can do to acknowledge our responsibility to it. In the double lights of postmodern theoretics and post-Holocaust paralysis, we read a work that thematizes inaction and yet demands reaction and pause to take note of its strange power. We may well wonder just how Malamud's story does its work to make us as readers become responsive, responsible mourners.²

In a 1958 interview, Malamud spoke of his artist's premise that through literature we “keep civilization alive … we will live on” (7). Yet recent postmodernist theories have focused upon the very problem of what it is in reading that can be shared. Jacques Derrida uses that same term, survivre, to describe a dynamic in which words and texts always breed one upon the other “to go write-on-living” (“Living On” 77). Such survival empties a text of exceptional or individual meaning, since each telling—or reading—revises what has already gone before. While vital in one sense, this process can be seen as destructive, for versions are, in Harold Bloom's term, powerful “mis-readings” of the prior text. Gruber, wanting to share Kessler's sorrow, joins him in sheets of mourning. But before doing so, Gruber imagines his own rendition of Kessler's life-story in an ostensibly sympathetic way: “Then it struck him with a terrible force that the mourner was mourning him: it was he who was dead” (25). His reaction, that is, catapults him as listener into the center of his neighbor's tale, projecting his own meanings at the heart of Kessler's grief. In this painful context such a self-centered response, while humorous, is also repellent. But can Gruber avert such solipsism? We turn the question upon ourselves to ask: can we become mourners not simply—or not only—of ourselves?

Recoiling from Gruber's easy sentimentality, we notice that this story presents unmistakable clues to a setting that demands both Gruber's and the reader's statement of the relationship between responding to texts and asserting responsibility to them, as a test here is posed. In a comment at the story's outset, the narrator notes that Kessler has unaccountably walked out on his wife and children; but with this seeming irrelevancy, Malamud prepares us for the unnerving possibility that in viewing “The Mourners” as a literary instance of sorrow and reconciliation, we too could walk out. Kessler “never saw them thereafter because he never sought them”; thereby we are forewarned against following the example of Malamud's characters, never seeing or never seeking certain unbudging conditions that this tale contains (17).

Yet the texture of Malamud's story, I will argue, complicates and nearly confounds the reader's desires to face up to that testing. On the one hand, the plot tells of Kessler's urgent need to communicate with others in a period that is specified as “ten years after the war.” Here are exiles, cut off from their past and from each other, in need of a term ironically mentioned in the first line, “social security.” To that end, this story's action turns upon features such as letters and games: through an emphasis upon semiotic exchange we are reminded of opportunities that ought not to be lost or thwarted. Malamud locates his exiles, moreover, in the specific setting of New York's East Side, as if to have them dwell together in a potential house of nations within a new world scene, there to participate in a postwar era and a land of promise. Appropriately enough, the story includes suggestive references to American precursor texts—literary works that also focus upon shared dwellings, communicative potential, and regenerative or redemptive overtones—as if to include this tenement building as a house of fiction in a row of others constituting a powerful tradition. Such a suggestion is doubly effective, we may feel, since it demonstrates how this author, at least, does acknowledge other texts in an ongoing line of influence and response.

On the other hand it is those textual or metalinguistic features placed against the specified background of an American setting of hope and within an American literary tradition that instead function to underline a haunting sense of defeat for any expectation of communication. They intensify the pain of these characters' unappeased longings. For deeply personal tales of grief can be washed out within the theoretical scope of intertextuality, or within an overpowering—even though hopeful—tradition. In its complex strategy of combining insistent emphasis upon letters demanding to be answered with equally powerful elements of intertextual suggestion, Malamud enacts a problematics for his characters and readers alike.³ It is no wonder, then, that “The Mourners”—so troubling and so unsolvable—has been largely ignored in studies of Malamud and of American fiction.⁴ Its grim quality derives neither from its whiny characters nor from Malamud's inability to convince us of Gruber's sincerity at the conclusion, but rather, I would argue, from our own unremitting stress in the face of its conflicting demands. When we acknowledge that difficulty and assert the relationship between words and deeds, we discover how Malamud's story can do its work upon us.

As if to emphasize some call to action, “The Mourners” as a title, like The Fixer, The Assistant, and others by Malamud, suggests a task to be performed, and the story's first word presents the name of the central figure in a form that suggests some livelihood (Kessler).⁵ All the other characters are similarly identified by names that would seem to indicate an occupation, job, or characteristic behavior: Gruber, Hoffman, Italian, and even Ignace are names suggestive of action.⁶ And yet this story is pervaded by dysfunction and paralysis. Kessler, whose occupation as an egg-candler had been intimately connected with life-potential, is now unemployed, severed from vital occupations of any sort. His precarious position is given in the first line of the story. Although he “lives on social security,” Kessler is so insecure in the tenement he has shared with others like himself since the war that he is unable to participate in any form of social contact and is more-or-less unknown, even by his neighbors. Nor are any of the others gathered together in such a house of nations more able than Kessler to perform physically or socially or in any productive sense. The Hoffmans, whose name suggests courtyards, courtiers, or social figures,⁷ are identified primarily as the ones who “never said hello” to Kessler (17). The Italian mother next door, in contrast to Kessler, lives with her three children; but she is wizened, and the sons are middle aged with limited potential. The Hoffmans add further to this picture of devitalized households; they are “sullen, childless,” and no progeny at all are mentioned concerning the others, including the landlord or the janitor. These last two, Gruber and Ignace,⁸ do perform active, if violent, deeds but only to direct their forces toward Kessler's abrupt eviction—a project that is negative at best.

Some hope for communicative action is signaled early in the story's development by a quirky feature Malamud presents for seemingly little purpose. The janitor and Kessler have cooperated in one pleasant pastime together: “they had several times played two-handed pinochle” (18). Card games are the very essence of semiotic exchange; yet all too soon any promise of shared terms or socialized intercourse degenerates into its extreme opposite. Ignace's losses in pinochle arouse his malicious desire to “spread the word” in the divisive form of bad-naming Kessler (18). After the card game fiasco, Malamud focuses upon the building as site of all kinds of communicative breakdowns, as Ignace's bad language leads to the further estrangement of Kessler from everyone in the house. They reject his decrepitude, shunning him as a dirty old man. When Gruber, stirred up, demands that Kessler “scram outa here,” he cuts off Kessler's attempted explanations by warning him, in specifically linguistic terms: “Don't talk back talk” (20).

With the story's early emphasis upon hellos never said and upon a card game which leads only to further linguistic lapses, the appropriateness of the apartment house as a metaphor for Malamud's disunited nations becomes even more painful: premises aren't truly shared. The action hereafter devolves from failed words and signals: the plot depends upon letters delivered only to be returned, invectives shouted through doors, eviction notices, or even the ghastly eviction itself carried out with desperate shouts and pleas to neighbors for help. Yet they are unresponsive and mute: “they looked on in a silent group outside the door” (21). It is the distortion of language—the shrieks and gesticulations of the Italian woman—that finally arouse her sons (they are unable to think of what else to do) to heft this miserable tenant back upstairs, where Hoffman, too, finally adds his efforts. But all this is minimal—too little, too late—and the woman's inept verbal skills, her shrieks, her gesticulations, “loose mouth working angrily,” are matched by Ignace's similarly inept screeches at everybody, calling them filthy names. Such words and gestures create a bitterly parodic scene of interaction, and at its end, Kessler once again is barricaded in loneliness; his furniture remains all piled up in his bedroom. He weeps and is silent once again. The food set out by that Italian neighbor now congeals on his plate, symbolizing, perhaps, the end of all nourishing interchange.

In such a drama, the small physical prop of a letter box draws our attention. Here is a mundane medium for ordinary communication that only emphasizes the dead-letter quality of this household's sorely limited discourse. Whatever language these characters do manage to use only further betrays a thwarted outlook. Whereas in the beginning of this story there seemed some chance of human attention in the form of personal care or notice on the stairs and in the hallways of their shared tenement, now the humane and active verb “to notice” is wrenched into the harshly abstracting noun form, “notice.” This noun becomes the menace at the very heart of Kessler's misery, when the landlord angrily gives notice. The devitalized existence they all lead is even more violently brought out when Gruber claims he will act, but only to “get a dispossess” (20; emphasis added), further demonstrating the way that language (like the macaroni) will harden in such an environment. Kessler's reply to Gruber is thus appropriate when he responds to his missives with hard cash; but subsequent events show that even such minimal interchange is refused. Worse still, in one terrible moment of confrontation when Gruber is “at first at a loss what to say,” he adds insult to injury, showing the indifference of all his yelling, papers, and demands by then declaring, “Listen, Kessler, it's not personal” (23).

Gruber, who once had sensed his building to be falling apart, now in a fit of deeper despair feels the moment of crisis at hand and has a more specific premonition that it will collapse. He recalls, significantly, that “He had read of such things” (22-23). Gruber, that is, imagines an outcome for this story that matches—even becomes—another version of what he already knows. His willful literary response is imposed upon this story, and “The Mourners,” with its insistent focus upon texts and messages, might develop in his reading into the narrative of such collapse. On the next day, after one more significant confrontation, a final dumbshow in Kessler's apartment presents the climax of Malamud's tale and raises the question whether, indeed, such collapse is doomed to occur. The scene begins when Gruber bursts into Kessler's rooms to find him shoeless, swaying slowly sideways. We are now given a long passage that is rendered as if in Kessler's mind's eye: a series of moments, details, and events are recollected “in all the intervening years” (25). All his thoughts and all these years smite Kessler to the heart, and as he reviews the past without end, he is moved so deeply as to tear his flesh with his fingernails. Gruber, on his side, is frightened at the extent of Kessler's suffering and tries to understand why. He tries to imagine what he ominously calls the “bad news” of Kessler's life story, only then to see himself falling down stairs, lying at the bottom, at the center of the mourning: “it was he who was dead.” His emotion is intense; that we know. He is agonized and feels an enormous weight within him, until his head is nearly bursting. Yet he cannot conjure any bad news other than his own. In the minute that ensues, he endures a stroke of total silence, signaling the very end of all language or tales and their sharing.

Suddenly, however, Malamud shifts the scene to describe the setting of another version that quite miraculously assuages Gruber's bursting silent misery: “When after a while, he gazed around the room, it was clean, drenched in daylight and fragrance” (26). With the words “daylight and fragrance,” Malamud appears to suggest a new and redemptive vision (“it was clean”), of a room that, a short time before, had been but a stinking East-Side tenement. These regenerative terms are appropriate to a new-world habit of turning toward new beginnings in nature, with rebirth always possible in some verdant transcendent version. It is such pastoral elegiac settings that belong to all great transformations of darkness into light and mourning into rebirth and celebration.⁹ In this vein Gruber reads his neighbor's text and self-reliantly presumes to know it, as if in sharing. Only then does he feel remorse for “the old man”—whether for himself or Kessler, since their stories correspond—and he cries as he enwraps himself in sheets of consolation. But the contrast between Kessler's swaying and thinking through of past events that “smote him to the heart” in a process of recalling the “past without end” and Gruber's cry at the prospect of a comforting elegiac vision is enormous. It is in this impasse that Malamud's evocation of a post-Holocaust, East-Side, urban elegy becomes most brilliant and disturbing. It asks us to recognize our conflicting impulses in reading as a means of sharing and solace or of facing our inability to fully share the text of another's private experience, reading another's text as unbudgingly alien and thus feel its call to response and commitment. Harold Fisch, in his study of literature as covenant, points to the essential difference between what he would call poetry “with a purpose,” and the “endlessly self-referential pastoral elegy” (Poetry 63). Texts can in their very “nagging presence” serve as a call to action, he argues, and it is this recognition that would make reader response no consolation at all, but would cause it to become an “urgent historical task.”¹⁰ Malamud's silent hallways, returned letters, failed exchanges, and literary allusions in a house of language that must not collapse, all, have built to a final scene that requires some answer. A great deal hangs in the reply, since, as Kessler's behavior has from the first forewarned us (“never saw … never sought”) and as Gruber's glib interpretive habits (“it's not personal”) have continually shown: escaping this story's conditions can also “do so much wrong” (25).

Books and pages shared in Malamud's works—noticeably within this same volume of The Magic Barrel—serve a particular and forceful function. They can be a medium for courtship, a tool for a successful career, or even an enticement in seduction.¹¹ The question posed for the reader of “The Mourners” is how this text, too, can function. While it is true that Gruber's elegiac vision offers little true consolation for Kessler's grief, we may wonder whether there is some nagging presence within this text requiring a deeper commitment to Kessler's mournful tale. “The Mourners,” as I have noted, uses metalinguistic devices to focus attention upon the hunger for personal communication among the boarders in this text. Yet we can measure the extent of a second pervasive element in “The Mourners”: there are provocative hints of literary reference that point beyond the borders of this text, especially to other challenging and well-known American works. There is, of course, nothing new in noting that Malamud was, in his words, “influenced by literature” (Field and Field, A Collection 11).¹² Many echoes have been identified throughout Malamud's writings—heroes that seem to repeat biblical, mythic, and literary archetypes or other literary precedents. If such references have been overlooked by critics of “The Mourners,” it could be because the story itself has been deemed too frail to carry a weighty message. Yet, as I have suggested, it is not the brevity or frailty of this work which has deterred attention to its pages, but rather its troubling, even haunting quality—a quality in which the very element of literary reference is located at the center. It is the attraction yet danger inherent not only in the games, language, or letters described within this tale, but also in the deeper play of interrelation with other works it evokes that poses this story's fundamental and important paradox.

Two particularly challenging resonances of American precursors recur throughout the pages of “The Mourners”: Herman Melville's “Bartleby the Scrivener,” and Stephen Crane's “The Blue Hotel.” All three works are tales of shared houses characterized by failed communication among the inhabitants—a failure that culminates in threatened ejection of a central figure. Thematically, “Bartleby the Scrivener” (its title also suggesting some -er action), most clearly echoes in Malamud's later tale, as the lone scrivener, like Kessler, refuses offers of food and help. Both elicit at last a strange response when Gruber, like the lawyer, seems compassionate, as if also to sigh in true and mournful understanding, “Ah, humanity!”¹³ Crane's “The Blue Hotel,” like the Malamud tale, centers upon characters who are known by names that suggest action: Easterner, Swede, cowboy, gambler, and so on.¹⁴ In “The Mourners,” after Gruber announces to Kessler, “This is trespassing and you're breaking the law. Answer me,” his startled tenant's reply is hauntingly like that of the cowboy in Crane's tale. The Easterner declares that we are “all kind[s] of an adverb. Every sin is the result of a collaboration,” to which the cowboy responds, “Well, I didn't do anythin', did I?” So, too, Kessler questions his implication or guilt, demanding from Gruber, “What did I do?” (23; emphasis added).

Thus “The Mourners,” like its precursors, dwells upon themes of responsibility in the face of questions posed about what “did I do” or of the onlookers' failure to “do anythin'”; all three, moreover, are linked by being consciously self-reflexive. Crane's “The Blue Hotel,” like Melville's “Bartleby the Scrivener,” offers insistent attention to linguistic or semiotic exchange in the form of letters, proofreading, or signs, and even another failed card game. It is as if these famous works, so appropriately evoked in Malamud's later tale, themselves, are now to be reread as an indication of what it is that one ought, collaboratingly, adverbially, to do.¹⁵ Yet these themes, repeatedly evoked, are only part of Malamud's strategy in this tale of an exilic household longing for meaningful terms or collaborative versions. It is the fact of echoing itself that is enacted in Malamud's problematic telling, as it interposes versions of Melville's or Crane's message in the midst of this postwar household's problems. As Gruber and Kessler weep, the jarring contradictions are not those of light and fragrance as against the stinking environment of the tenement.¹⁶ The contradictions lie, rather, between this story's two powerful textual strategies as they are played off against each other. It is precisely because its call for personal messages and direct responsibility (“what did I do?”) is made within an undercurrent of endlessly repeating, thus decentering, versions of pastoral elegies, themselves self-reflexive, or American redefinitions of redemptive outcomes that, in the end, we as tested readers cannot join Gruber and weep. Parting ways with Malamud's reader of self-gratifying versions, we question the very premise of consolation in literature and will not, after all, walk out on Kessler and his unpleasant tale. Whether Malamud himself fully comprehended the extent of his story's rich challenge, or whether his artist's sensitivity to his place and time (“ten years later” than the Holocaust in an American setting within a national literary tradition newly tested) helped him reach toward profound depths in this very brief work, we cannot know. We feel the weight of Gruber's response upon our shoulders, especially in our time, and see how Malamud's work pushes us toward acknowledging tensions implicit between intertextuality and responsibility (tensions, I believe, that are ingrained in these same American literary precursors and in the American tradition itself—but that is another study).

As a form of acknowledging others' statements or works, intertextuality does promise reaction and renewal. Harold Bloom's explanation of reading as a process of rereading prior texts in newly assertive terms as a form of powerful response would seem the very answer to the needs of Gruber's band of exiles.¹⁷ More promising still for this vitiated tenement would be the concept of survival as linguistic regeneration offered by Jacques Derrida in an essay entitled, appropriately enough, “Living On: Beyond the Borders.” When all language is beyond individually controlled borders, it can never be limited; meanings are derived through shared texts always and already there without fail in the ongoing life of language itself. Thus, instead of the card games that, in Malamud's story, are threatening when not played according to delimited terms, Derrida perceives an everlasting play or jouissance that celebrates the variations inherent in all intercourse. If Malamud's dwellers feel uncertainty, since “None of the tenants in the house had held a written lease since the war” (18), Derrida instead calls attention to the way unsettled conditions, linguistically speaking, are normal (“Living On” 83-84). In contrast to the sterility of Malamud's bereft household, Derrida's theoretics show how narratives thrive when words breed one upon another—to sur-vivre.

Here, then, is reader-responsive action considered in its widest implication as a universal cooperative principle. But, can these concepts provide a cure for the pain felt by those who have dwelt (since the war) in the house that Malamud presents? Despite language of breeding and vitality, these concepts most certainly do not assuage such pain or repair their broken world. Misreading in Bloom's sense presumes a fundamental inability (however powerful one may be) to know the text of some other person's story or version. There is, moreover, as Bloom puts it, an inherent anxiety in the very drive toward incessant misreading, that is no palliative for those who want so desperately to talk back talk and demand to be understood. “The impossibility of reading,” says another deconstructionist critic, “should not be taken too lightly,”¹⁸ and that is precisely the crux of the problem. The fertility that any theory of intertextuality promises can never help the mourners, any more than concepts of living on as linguistic regeneration in some automatic sense can bring assurance to one who wants other to know how it was, barely, brutally, with every mite of personal resource, to survive.

In a story specifically contextualized, the author has evoked a house full of tragic postwar exiles to dramatize their desire to be heard, only then to nearly entice his readers into imaginatively walking out on them through his technique of intertextuality. While Gruber and Kessler live in this decrepit tenement with all their colorful, if quirky and querulous individuality, Malamud's literary echoes place them in an American house of fiction or tradition, headed by authors such as Herman Melville and Stephen Crane. The problem is not whether the literary reference or tradition invoked be the right one—either too American or not enough Jewish;¹⁹ the question, rather, is whether such recourse to literary reference (however elegantly evoked or appropriate the theme of Bartleby's or the cowboy's tales) in the mood of his time—and ours—be morally justified.

Malamud himself at one moment insists upon facing this issue. Although it is true that the names of the characters seem provocatively to imply action in some sense of occupation, livelihood or social intercourse, there is one more case—one that in this paper goes still unmentioned—of a similarly named -er person who could never be identified by some generalized trade or calling and, most certainly, not broadly grouped among those who might learn to become mourners. Malamud's story contains the significant utterance of another name that could suggest a businessman—perhaps a hatter or some related trade—and his name is blurted out in the central climax after Kessler is unceremoniously returned to his apartment. When Gruber angrily confronts Kessler with threats about breaking the law, Kessler first responds to the demand “Answer me,” in broken grammar and halting query (23). Despite his brimming eyes, he slowly gathers courage to pose a terrible moral problem for his accuser: “Who hurts a man without reason?” And finally, gaining an even stronger voice, Kessler raises the question that becomes definitive for Malamud's presentation and for any considerations a reader may have, of responding to this story. Kessler continues: “Are you a Hitler … ?” (emphasis added.)

“A Hitler,” unlike a Kessler, Hoffman, Gruber, or some fiery personality, is a term whose status cannot be reduced to the designation of an occupational category, despite Kessler's use of the “a” before the name. Malamud's inclusion of games, letters, and other linguistic features has emphasized the importance of shared texts and lives. Mention of “a Hitler” disorients the reader, abruptly causing us to question the validity of metalinguistic contexts or playful wordgames in understanding people such as Gruber, Hoffman, and the others. It casts doubt, furthermore, upon the adequacy of any means for imagining Hitler.²⁰ When Malamud shows Kessler facing Gruber (or Schicklgruber, perhaps, in a hint or origins, of Hitler's mother's maiden name), we too face up to this encounter and try to reach beyond the borders of fiction in order to seek some relation between words and the world we know.²¹ We feel it unjustifiable to continually imagine meanings, as this paper has done at the outset, in some playful spirit, spinning out echoes and lively variations possible for each term or text. Despite Derrida's concepts of “living on” or Bloom's powerful “misreadings,” a Schicklgruber's fact, and thus his name, now surely deflects our attempts to theorize it into traces or to defer its certain meaning.²² Malamud's identification of Gruber with Hitler in the crisis of his story foregrounds the unremitting friction between two textual strategies. Kessler's urgent need for some back talk in the form of personal understanding can not be satisfied with recourse to theoretics or broadly cultural terms, even those suggested by the attractive American tradition and the searching moral questions that Melville and Crane, too, evoke. And that is why, after all, the challenge that Malamud presents in the final scene of weeping disqualifies definition in terms of pastoral elegiac consolation.

If Gruber's participation fails to move Malamud's readers, that resistance is aroused not only by the sudden emotion, the elaborate dramatic gestures or the winding sheets that all seem so extravagant; it is because they are irrelevant to Kessler's and the others' private histories. Our very resistance finally emerging at the story's end—whether to Gruber or to Malamud's complicity in such mourning—attests to the challenge this perturbing story presents. Causing his readers to consider what is to confront certain unbudging words, stories, and facts, Malamud's troubling work brings into clearer focus undeniable tensions of the postwar period that he, and we, feel compelled to acknowledge. Sensing his own and others' inability to face historic testimonies, holocaust diaries, or personal stories, Malamud managed in his time to expose a problematics of reading that more than ever confounds us.

James E. Young, for example, reminds us of the cruel fate of survivors who “lived solely to bear witness,” believing their story “could bring the realia of their experiences forward in time through their words,” only to discover in more recent deconstructionist theories that there was no text, and that their diaries' records carried only signs of meanings that would later be deferred and reread or misread by others who swerved from the experiences described (1988; 24-25). Young's point is important; and we can see how Malamud's fiction in 1955 probes those painful lapses between recording and responding that would, with the sophistication afforded by the insights of postmodern literary theory, be iterated three decades later. Malamud's audience, troubled throughout by the story's conflicting demands of self-reflexivity and yet of some moral, historical imperative, finally parts ways with Gruber and his winding sheets of mourning. Malamud's readers find suspect a resort to literature as mere comfort or easy escape to another form of depersonalization. We remember, instead, just what it was that Kessler did or egregiously failed to do when he pathetically asked, “What did I did to you?”

Questioning and remembering, we thus refuse the double deferral of responsibility implicit in the echoing of Crane's story and of Easterner's words: “I didn't do anythin' did I?” Despite brilliant poststructuralist affirmations (that are denials of such responsibility), we face up to the way books can relate to deeds. If the elegiac vision of Gruber's last scene allows him gratefully to sink into a pastoral vision, as a curative sense of sympathetic response, joining as he does some symbolic band of mourners, yet Malamud's story instructs us as readers: that will not suffice. Moving beyond an implicit literary consolation, Malamud in this story has established demanding conditions within which survivors' stories are to be bared. The pain of both readers and tellers will stand exposed, not wrapped in available self-reflexive versions for Gruber to cloak his grief.

Malamud has hinted at his own dilemma in writing “The Mourners” in that numbed and troubled decade after the war. With author and tale thus historicized, we, too, are called to reckon our position. We may read “The Mourners” as resisting readers²³—as women, for example—who use the verb “to notice” and worry about that lone wife and her children whom Kessler has so unaccountably left behind at the story's beginning. What we bring to Malamud's story is our reaction as human beings—women, men, children, Americans, survivors, and dwellers upon this earth—who feel personally challenged, acknowledge our world, and attest to its inhabitants' life stories. Our reckoning becomes an extension of our distinctive experiences; it makes our reading and our mourning both profound occasions for testing and testimony. When we respond to literature in this way, we refrain from formulating what Harold Fisch has described as the pastoral poet's “‘as-if’ statement—a lovely conceit,” akin to Gruber's final sympathetic but self-satisfying cry. We acknowledge instead that others' stories can, as Fisch describes another kind of reading process, “point outwards, beyond themselves [to] remind us of duties” (Poetry 67).²⁴ Reading in this way, we respond to Malamud's disturbing short story not at all as if we have become part of a band of literary mourners in a theoretical, pastoral, or redemptive tradition. We respond, rather, by recognizing how this text with its particular terms and demanding strategies does its work upon us in disconcerting ways. Our testing is the vital good deed that Malamud's story requires. Inverting Gruber's indifferent plea, we each then duly acknowledge: “Listen, it is personal” and remember this story's facts to affirm our humanity. That, I suggest, is what reading Malamud's “The Mourners” can do.

Notes

1. In his last interview, 1986, Malamud echoed a similar call for literary optimism: “I had to find a way for man to have a possible future” (Salzberg 237). Page references to the 1958 edition of “The Mourners” will be given in the text of this essay.

2. Stanley Cavell, speaking of another drama, raises the query: “How does it do its work upon us?” (qtd. in Bruns 622). Cavell's notion of “receptiveness” is especially appropriate to the scene we have followed here: unlike Gruber, who cloaks himself in response to another's grief, Cavell speaks of listening as a process of exposing both the subject and ourselves, “giving up the will to explain and desire for absolute self-possession.”

3. In a challenging essay that focuses on Malamud's use of narrative strategy, Lawrence M. Lasher overlooks “The Mourners,” suggesting that another story, “The German Refugee” (1963), first signals Malamud's “attempt to define the connection between private morality and public events” (72), claiming that “it is the only place in the canon where Malamud allows the Holocaust to emerge from the generalized background of his characters' lives into vivid and compelling imagery.” Another more general study of post-Holocaust consciousness devotes two lines to “The Mourners” and the “uncertainty and tension” Malamud's style conveys (Bilik 69). It is appropriate here to note Rosenfeld's view that “all novels about Jewish suffering written in the post-Holocaust period must implicate the Holocaust, whether it is expressly named as such or not (Reflections 68).

4. One brief study of “The Mourners” is typical in categorizing Gruber as “a stock figure in Yiddish and Malamudian fiction, a schlemiel” (Soltaroff 34-35). In the lengthiest critical look at “The Mourners,” Irving Halperin devotes four pages to an overview of its plot to show the “theme of responsibility” (465). But how it is that Malamud “compels us to recognize” the landlord's spiritual death and later transformation is not discussed.

5. Other variations include “The Glass Blower of Venice,” “The Refugee,” and The Tenants. Many stories, moreover, open with an immediate description of some figure's occupation: “Feld, the shoemaker,” “Davidov, the census-taker,” “Rosen, the ex-coffee salesman,” “Leo Finkle, a rabbinical student,” and so on.

6. On the subject of “name as symbol” Malamud was diffident. His mother's name was Fidelman, we know; but when asked in an interview why he used that name in “The Last Mohican” Malamud replied, “I used my mother's maiden name because I needed a name I liked” (Field and Field, A Collection 14-15). Nevertheless, we have at least one figure in “The Lady of the Lake” whose name switching—from Levin to Freeman—is indicative of personal attitude, and thus in keeping with Levin's play with names, and with reader-response theories later considered in my essay. I here expand upon various possible meanings a reader might derive from the names, taken in the context of Malamud's suggestive drama. One can imagine that since a “kessler” in German might be a kessel, or teapot maker, Kessler's behavior could have been more social—in keeping with the homely utensil and an atmosphere of sociability which often (though not always, to be sure) pervades tea-time. See The Random House Dictionary of the English Language: Unabridged Edition New York: Randon, 1967. Appendix: German-English, 1850.) Malamud's suggestion of action here not only hints at a character's work or personal habits, but also enforces the reader's tendency toward action in the form of linguistic play as well.

7. The Random House Dictionary, Appendix: German-English, offers the following: Hof, court or courtyard, and may be related to another word, hoflich, meaning polite, courteous (1849). German usage can suggest that a hoff-man is a courtier, or a social, courteous person.

8. If Grube is a pit or mine (Random House, 1848), then a grube-er very freely translated might suggest a digger, as in the word Grubenarbeiter. In Yiddish, Grube as an adjective implies an uncouth quality, perhaps related to English usage, in which a grubber is one who grabs for material reward. Ignace, or Ignatius, a name that appears in German and Spanish, conveys a violent or fiery type, since the source in Latin may be ign(is), meaning fire (Random House Dictionary: 708). See also ignace, “akin to L[atin] ignis, hence lit. fiery” (Webster's New World Dictionary, 1957: 722). Ironically, the name may also be an inversion of St. Ignatius, since Malamud's fiery maintenance worker, unlike the famous spiritual ascetic saint, is hateful, hottempered, and basement-located—another clue to his netherworld undertone. See Soltaroff, Gruber's “name (which in Yiddish would signify ‘the gross one’) emphasizes both his physical and moral grossness” (34); and Halperin, “the name evokes the Yiddish term for coarse, grubber yung” (462).

9. Peter M. Sacks comments upon the “necessarily dialectical movement of the work of mourning” (36). “Light” and “fragrance” are associated with rebirth and flowering, characteristic concepts of pastoral elegy (See, for example, Sacks 33). The American romance tradition, with its strains of Puritan utopian and later Emersonian optimism, has been said to express elements of the pastoral. Conflicts within the tradition, however, raise self-doubts, as Sacvan Bercovitch has emphasized (The American Jeremiad. Madison: Wisconsin UP, 1978); and Emily Miller Budick perceives an American skeptical tradition (Fiction and Historical Consciousness: The American Romance Tradition. New Haven: Yale UP, 1989).

10. Fisch presents the possibility of a covenantal relationship between reader and texts as an “urgent historical task” (Poetry 58), denominating such a relationship as “anti-pastoral” (76). Taking Fisch's argument for a covenantal project together with the insights of the above-mentioned critics (note 9), then, one could see how Malamud places himself in an American “anti-pastoral” tradition.

11. In “The First Seven Years,” a courtship is conducted through books borrowed and shared; in another story, “A Summer's Reading,” books read one summer become a tool for a young man's successful career. The reverse may be the case when, in “Lady of the Lake,” a Macy's book salesman is unable to gain a bride because he fails to pass a kind of literary competency test; manuscripts serve as sexual enticements in “The Girl of My Dreams.”

12. There would seem to be a sharp distinction between literary reference and the process theorists call intertextuality. In the case of “The Mourners” I would argue that even Malamud's seemingly purposeful use of reference goes beyond the borders, so to speak, of his control, and thus the problematics of his referentiality remain the same. For a discussion of Malamud's “sources” see, for example, Field and Field, A Collection Introduction, 5ff; see also Bluefarb and Richman.

13. In Melville as Malamud there are deeper references implicit in these onlookers' failure to show compassion; the eviction scenes evoke, I suggest, a Passion, including an echo of Matthew or Luke: “And as they led him away … there followed a great multitude of the people …” (Luke 23:26-28). Leo Marx argues for a redemptive mood at the end of “Bartleby”: the “presence of the grass at Bartleby's death scene is the clue to Melville's affirmation” (73).

14. Throughout his works, Crane's figures are known by their characteristic habits or jobs. These -er names suggest a fundamental rift between our ability to act out our identity and the forces that work upon us.

15. Michael Fried notes the textuality of Crane's numerous allusions to pages, writing, inscriptions. While Fried does not discuss “The Blue Hotel” in these terms, his emphasis upon textuality in Crane is useful in stressing a focus upon readers or beholders—both within and outside the framework of Crane's text itself. Melville criticism considering the reflexive nature of Melville's fiction was initiated decades ago by Charles Feidelson and continues in a long chain of critical history to include Charles Olson, Edgar A. Dryden, Joseph Riddel, Barbara Johnson, and Eric J. Sundquist, among many others.

16. Two critics discuss the sense of resolution at the end: Earl Rovit perceives a “poetic resolution” in Malamud, especially in this story (7). Sidney Richman more acutely observes that “the resolution despite numerous anticipatory clues, offers less relief than a weird shock” (307).

17. See a now-famous discussion of interpretation as play, not exile, in Derrida, (Controversy 264).

18. Bloom states, “There is always and only bias, inclination, pre-judgment, swerve; only and always the verbal agon for freedom, and the agon is carried on not by truth-telling, but by words lying against time” (Anxiety 9). It was Paul de Man, significantly enough in the light of recent controversy concerning his stance toward the Holocaust, who declared that interpretive irresponsibility could not be lightly presumed (245).

19. For a discussion of Malamud in a Jewish-American tradition, see Sam B. Girgus (chap. 2): see also note 9 above.

20. In a recent critical study of Holocaust literature, Alvin H. Rosenfeld uses a title that is especially appropriate: Imagining Hitler. Rosenfeld's book, an “attempt to chart the course of an evolving myth,” studies “patterns of imaginative response to the Nazi mystique” (xix). A study of Holocaust literature by Sidra Ezrachi includes a chapter entitled “The Literature of Survival.”

21. Joining a person named Gruber and the idea of Hitler here, Malamud may well have been playing upon the name often used for Hitler, “Schicklgruber.” Such a denomination was probably derived from the fact that Hitler was the illegitimate son of Maria Anna Schicklgruber. See The New Columbia Encyclopedia (1249).

22. Such play upon the suggestiveness of the name, and the question of whether Hitler ever “really was Schicklgruber,” continues. A letter to the New York Times, published May 6, 1990, uses language uncannily appropriate to this paper in discussing the “case of Hitler's presumed last name” as an effective lie based upon the way that

    “Schicklgruber” sounds more ridiculous than “Hitler” even today. Therefore, the lie lives on, being more preferable than the truth [that at the time of his birth his mother had married and her name had by then become Hitler]. … So, the mundane truth is, Hitler was always Hitler, having been born so. But [the lie's] triumph lives on, for a good lie, it seems dies hard, even in your pages.

    [Eric Leif Davin]

23. Judith Fetterly has used this phrase in her specifically feminist and American book, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (see especially “Introduction, On the Politics of Literature”). Her historicist point is well taken for Jewish readers reading “Hitler,” or for anyone responding to texts, as individuals within some specific and personally understood time, place, hence “political” view.

24. Instead of elegiac consolation, the model of a covenantal poetics that Harold Fisch defines here is useful. Basing his discussion upon biblical poetry, Fisch shows that covenantal writing is anti-elegiac in that it “assumes responsibility for the future” when we respond to its challenge “not as echo or audience” but as “witnesses to a lawsuit” (Poetry With a Purpose 67). Malamud's urban tale thus fulfills the genre requirements set forth by Fisch, as an anti-pastoral that demands response as an act of historical witness. Elsewhere Fisch addresses the case of Malamud's The Fixer, showing that in that novel, too, “Malamud is trying to find a myth of continuance” through the survival of Yakov Bok, who “survives as a witness” (Remembered Future 71).

Works Cited

Beyer, James. “‘A Repetition He Was Part Of’: Bernard Malamud, A New Life, and Dubin's Lives.” Studies in American Jewish Literature 7 (Fall 1988): 189-204.

Bilik, Dorothy Seidman. Immigrant-Survivors: Post-Holocaust Consciousness in Recent Jewish American Fiction. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1981.

Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York: Oxford UP, 1973.

———. A Map of Misreading. New York: Oxford UP, 1975.

Bluefarb, Sam. “The Syncretism of Bernard Malamud.” In Bernard Malamud: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Field and Field, 1975.

Bruns, Gerald. “Stanley Cavell's Shakespeare.” Critical Inquiry 16 (1990): 612-32.

Crane, Stephen. “The Blue Hotel.” 1898. Reprint in Great Short Works of Stephen Crane. New York: Harper, 1968.

De Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.

Derrida, Jacques. “Living On: Beyond the Borders.” In Deconstruction and Criticism. Ed. Harold Bloom et al. New York: Seabury, 1979.

———. “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” In The Structuralist Controversy: The Language of Criticism and the Sciences of Man. Ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1970.

Ezrachi, Sidra. By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1980.

Fetterley, Judith. The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1981.

Field, Leslie A., and Joyce W. Field. Bernard Malamud and the Critics. New York: New York UP, 1970.

———. eds. Bernard Malamud: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1975.

Fisch, Harold. “Biblical Archetypes in The Fixer.” Studies in American Jewish Literature 7 (Fall 1988): 162-76.

———. Poetry with a Purpose: Biblical Poetics and Interpretation. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988.

———. A Remembered Future: A Study in Literary Mythology. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984.

Girgus, Sam. The New Covenant: Jewish Writers and the American Idea. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1984.

Halperin, Irving. “The Theme of Responsibility in Bernard Malamud's ‘The Mourners.’” Judaism 36 (1987): 460-65.

Lasher, Lawrence M. “Narrative Strategy in Malamud's ‘The German Refugee.’” Studies in American Jewish Literature 9 (Spring 1990): 72-83.

Malamud, Bernard. “The Mourners.” 1955. Reprint in The Magic Barrel. New York: Farrar, 1958.

Melville, Herman. “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” 1853. Reprint in Great Short Works of Herman Melville. New York: Harper, 1969.

Richman, Sidney. “The Stories.” In Benard Malamud and the Critics. Ed. Field and Field, 1970.

Rosenfeld, Alvin. A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1980.

———. Imagining Hitler. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985.

Sacks, Peter M. The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1985.

Salzberg, Joel. “Malamud's Last Interview? A Memoir.” Studies in American Jewish Literature 7 (Fall 1988): 233-39.

Soltaroff, Robert. Bernard Malamud: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1989.

Young, James E. Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988.