THE ALLUSIVE MODE, THE ABSURD, AND
BLACK HUMOR IN
BERNARD MALAMUD’S GOD’S GRACE
Elaine B. Safer
In an interview in the New York Times in 1971, Bernard Malamud observed: "A Malamud character is someone who fears his fate, is caught up in it, yet manages to outrun it. He’s the subject and object of laughter and pity" (Shenker 34). "The purpose of the writer," Malamud later added, "is to keep civilization from destroying itself." "My premise is that we will not destroy each other. My premise . . . is for humanism—and against nihilism" (Wershba 7). Throughout Malamud’s writings, the. contrary perspectives of human advancement and destruction— as well as the reader response of joy and sorrow—come into confrontation. The positive side continually seems to be countered by a "shadow side" (Salzberg "Burning"), an angry, ironic side that is fraught with absurdist humor. God’s Grace is the most violent and bleak expression of black humor anywhere in Malamud’s fiction.
In God’s Grace published in 1982 (four years before Malamud’s death), all human beings except Calvin Cohn have been destroyed either in a nuclear holocaust (caused by mankind’s machinations) or, following this, in a second flood (created by an angry God). In God’s Grace, perhaps more a fable than a novel, Cohn survives in the womblike bathysphere of the research ship Rebekah Q and eventually makes his way to an island on a raft, with a chimpanzee Buz swimming nearby. With hope for the future, Cohn tries to engage the remaining inhabitants on earth (they are chimpanzees who have been taught to speak English) in a dialogue offering moral teachings. The opposing perspectives of humanism and nihilism are dramatized in the experiences of the absurd hero Calvin Cohn, who is an "object of laughter and pity."
The novel depicts Cohn’s desire to affirm deep religious belief, the ability to place faith in God even if He wipes out humankind. It shows how Cohn stresses the teachings of the Bible, particularly passages from Genesis and Exodus, and plays recordings of ceremonial songs that his father, a rabbi, sang. Concomitantly, the novel seems to parody—and virtually deconstruct—the biblical works that Cohn praises and the Jewish humanism that he stresses.
Cohn’s continual yearning for meaning and purpose comes into confrontation with failure and frustration. This sets up an absurd
104
perspective. It is absurd by Camus’s definition which is based upon a "divorce between the mind that desires and the world that disappoints, [the] nostalgia for unity, this fragmented universe and the contradiction that binds them together" (Camus 37). Cohn’s quest for meaning is a constant reminder of what has been defined as the nature of the absurd:
"The senselessness of the human condition and the inadequacy of the rational approach" (Esslin 6).
Often in absurdist literature, the conflict between the quest for meaning and the upset at finding none creates an emerging tone in which distress and joke, horror and farce collide. This tone has been called black humor, and the works that develop it—novels of Thomas Pynchon, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, John Barth—have been termed black humor comedy. Bernard Malamud is not often grouped with black humor writers. His comedy usually is lighter and more affirming. The Jewish traditions to which he appeals connect to order and meaning and purpose rather than to nihilism.
Malamud explained in an early interview, "With me humor comes unexpectedly, usually in defense of a character, sometimes because I need cheering up" (Stern 63; italics added). "There is comedy in my vision of life," he remarked to Leslie and Joyce Field. "To live sanely one must discover—or invent it" (Field 16). Nevertheless, the tone and the intention of God’s Grace are perplexing. The novel has a black humor tone and an underlying sense of despair more pronounced than in other Malamudian fiction.
Bruce Jay Friedman has pointed out that black humor writing arose, in the United States, as a movement after the Second World War and the Holocaust. To overcome a public insensitivity to details of horror, black humor writers learned to disorient readers, take them off their guard, and then pain them with the details of an illogical world (Friedman vii-xi). Humor in God’s Grace has a similar function, for it is a means of overcoming readers’ rejection of the horrific: a nuclear holocaust followed by a second flood. It gets the people off their guard and enables the novel to impart a warning to twentieth-century readers who may have cause to fear a similar fate.
Malamud, like other black humorists, employs diverse means to disorient the reader: 1. He moves quickly between darkness and laughter, horror and farce, and between a high and a low style. 2. He presents situations that appear bizarre and then makes us aware that we are really looking at a microcosm of our own world and thus share the dilemma of Calvin Cohn at whom we have been laughing. 3. He inverts the traditional allusive mode, exploiting the incongruity between the original work and its reversal in the contemporary text. The reader
105
applies the "‘normal’ system of expectations . . . [and] enjoy[s] the way in which [the] expectations are frustrated." As Umberto Eco explains, the "critical spectator . . . appreciates the ironic ploy of the original quotation and enjoys its desired incongruity" (Eco 171).
In many ways God’s Grace seems to be a parody of traditional biblical exegesis; it is a text that seems to yearn for religious affirmation at the same time that it parodies central biblical passages from Genesis and Exodus. It is a book that sets up alternating perspectives. A tension between faith and pessimism is evident in many works of Malamud, ranging from the early novel The Assistant (1957) to his unfinished novel The People (published posthumously in 1990). In The Assistant there is a major confrontation between Morris Bober, the grocer—an embodiment of the Hebrew patriarch’s attempt to serve as mentor—and Frank Alpine, the corrupt and violent thief. The language of the grocer and that of the thief are at odds. Morris tells Frank: "This means to do what is right, to be honest, to be good. This means to other people. Our life is hard enough. Why should we hurt somebody else? For everybody should be the best, not only for you or me. . . . This is why we need the Law. This is what a Jew believes" (150). The swift movement from Morris’s style of high seriousness, reminiscent of the Bible, to the low language of the street that Frank uses creates comic irony and may even have the effect— for the reader—of deconstructing Morris’s Talmudic ideals. Frank ridicules Morris’s moral emphasis and asserts that suffering rather than an ethical stand is the Jewish experience:
"But tell me why it is that the Jews suffer so damn much, Morris? It seems to me that they like to suffer, don’t they?" (150; italics added)
At the end of the novel, however, Frank—mainly through his love for Helen Bober and his suffering on her account—has learned that one can appreciate and sometimes achieve responsibility through suffering. Frank gains direction for his own life by taking on Morris Bober’s responsibilities, including the responsibility for working in the grocery store in order to pay for Helen’s college education. The novel ends with Frank’s conversion and the prescribed ritual circumcision: "One day in April Frank went to the hospital and had himself circumcised. For a couple of days he dragged himself around with a pain between his legs. The pain enraged and inspired him. After Passover he became a Jew" (297).
These lines of affirmation seem to contain their own self parody. The lines have been interpreted as showing Frank as a "hero of saintly redemption," a man who says " ‘yes’ " to life by saying ‘no’ to self’
106
reversed his selfish, aggressive past, which was exemplified by robbing Morris’s store and raping Helen in the park when she expected his protection. Helen’ s calling Frank a "Dog--uncircumcised dog" can be seen to be counterbalanced by his final conversion to Judaism and his "conversion" to humanistic behavior. The humanism, however, seems to take on elements of black humor. The flat tone describing the ritualistic conversion seems to deconstruct positive interpretation, making the act seem ironic. Ihab Hassan, though calling the act "one of self-purification, of initiation too," points out "it is also an act of self-repudiation, if not, as some may be tempted to say, of symbolic castration" (Hassan 168). In addition, although Frank now has direction in his life, he—by adopting Morris’s code—has ironically entombed himself in the very store that was a prison for Bober.
In The People, Jozip, the Jewish Indian Chief, pleads for the rights of his tribe. For the final chapter Malamud, in his notes, describes Jozip, despite the defeat of his tribe, dancing in the woods. Jozip (in a frenzy of faith and affirmation) dances "a Hasidic dance of the recovered self. . . . He dances for the happiness he felt in his heart on becoming a man." He experiences "a rejoicing of life when the self seems annealed" (The People 98). What seems to be a Hasidic celebration really may mask the anger and bitterness of the author. It seems as though the novel—by stating that the People "were rounded up and given places on freight cars going to a reservation" (People 97)—is counterbalancing the jubilee of the faithful with the image of the Holocaust, thus creating the somber humor of the absurd.
In The People, incompatibility between the interests of the Indians and those of the Whites in power is often played out in dialogues in which contrary ideas jostle against one another, creating grim humor. A colonel, carrying orders from the Commissioner of Indian Affairs in Washington, D. C., says:
"We must therefore affirm our right to this land in the name of our nation, and our inalienable right to direct your next move within this country. If you disregard us we will exercise the right of eminent domain and do with our land what we have to do to fulfill our destiny.
We don’t need any lessons in ethics, my good man," said the colonel. "And preachment won’t put any pork in your pot."
"From pork I am not interested," said (the Jewish] Jozip speaking for himself.
(The People 45; italics added)
Malamud, in his notebooks, describes The People as "another variation of the comic-mythological" tale (The People, Introduction xii),
107
a novel which, like God’s Grace, uses puzzling dialogues whose comic irony wards off the tragic.
Earl Rovit has perceptively commented on Malamud’s dark comedy: "The affectionate insult and the wry self-deprecation are parts of the same ironic vision which values one’s self and mankind as both less and more than they seem to be worth, at one and the same time." Often the characters, continues Rovit, "become grotesque or slightly ridiculous" (Rovit 5, 10). Rovit criticizes Malamud for this inconsistency, but I think that this sense of the "grotesque or the ridiculous," this mixture of pain and humor—the tragic and the comic—develops the black humor of the absurd in Malamud’s work.
Most of the scenes in God’s Grace have a humorous quality even though the novel has a very serious intent. Humorous episodes utilize such devices as slapstick, incongruity, verbal play, and puns. Slapstick humor usually involves the antics of Calvin Cohn, who uses the Bible and its precepts to educate Buz and his fellow chimpanzees. Cohn is repeatedly chagrined when he is unable to communicate a sense of morality to his listeners.
In God’s Grace, major dialogues parody various traditional texts, including biblical dialogues between God and Moses in Exodus, the verbal text of the Passover Seder with its references to Exodus, the dialogues between Abraham and God in Genesis, and the sacred Kaddish, prayer for the dead.
Traditional exchanges between God and man in the Bible are very different from those between God and Calvin Cohn in God’s Grace. When we recall biblical challenges to God, we often think of Moses, who criticizes God’s justice in Exodus 32 when the Israelites broke God’s commandments and practiced idolatry at the very time that Moses was on Mount Sinai receiving the Laws: "The LORD spoke to Moses . . . your people. . . have acted basely. . . . Now, let Me be, that My anger may blaze forth against them and that I may destroy them" (Exodus 32:7-10). Moses asks: "Let not Your anger, O Lord, blaze forth against Your people, whom You delivered from the land of Egypt. . . . Let not the Egyptians say, ‘It was with evil intent that He delivered them, only to kill them off in the mountains and annihilate them from the face of the earth.’ Turn from Your blazing anger, and renounce the plan to punish Your people." Subsequently, God indeed "renounced the punishment He had planned to bring upon His people" (Exodus 32: 11-14).1 The Hebrew word va ’yinahem has been translated as "renounced" or "repented." S. R. Driver has explained that the Hebrew idiom "repent" often attributes "to God the feelings or emotions of a man. God is thus said to ‘repent’ . . . when, in consequence of a change in the character and conduct of men,
108
He is obliged to make a corresponding change in the purpose towards them which He had previously announced" (Driver 352). In dialogue with Moses, God is said to repent, that is, turn from destroying the Israelites. His reasons, however, remain mysterious.
As though it were deconstructing the Old Testament, Malamud’s novel is not shrouded in mystery. Malamud is doing something akin to Heller’s handling of the Bible in God Knows—a kind of sacrilegious response to the Old Testament. In God’s Grace, the Lord does not repent, and the rationale for His catastrophic action is not shrouded in mystery. God blames man for causing a nuclear holocaust. And He follows this destruction with a second flood which wipes out all of humankind except for Calvin Cohn, the son of a rabbi from Manhattan, who survives while carrying out oceanographic studies in a vessel at the bottom of the Pacific. Malamud’s God, in the author’s last novel, does not renounce or repent the punishment of Calvin Cohn, which is death. He offers no hope for mankind’s survival. He does not show "pity"—sometimes translated as "grace"—for mankind in this book titled God’s Grace.
The incongruity between the God of the Bible and Malamud’s God serves to develop a tragicomic tone. That God’s explanations in the novel are not shrouded in mystery—and that he indeed sounds very human—increases the humor. God criticizes man’s many failings: man’s "violence, corruption, blasphemy, beastliness, sin beyond belief." God sounds strikingly like a modern, angry environmentalist: "They tore apart my ozone, carbonized my oxygen, acidified my refreshing rain" (5). At times, Malamud’s God even sounds like an author, not just of the universe but one of a more academic bent, who "liked beginnings and endings" (45), one who has been described as knowing "His way around Comparative Religion" (Rawson 107) ("I am not a tribal God; I am Master of the Universe" [7]). The humor also is developed by the fact that Cohn survives the flood in what can be called a "research institution" (Rawson 107). It is not an ark like Noah’s but a bathysphere of an oceanographic vessel which had housed Cohn and his scientist colleagues.
In Genesis 6, after mankind has defiled itself, God says: "I will blot out from the earth the men whom I created." "But," the Bible continues, "Noah found favor with the LORD" (Genesis 6: 7-8). Malamud’s God, enraged by man who has defiled himself by creating a nuclear holocaust, creates a second, more devastating flood. Cohn argues: "After Your first Holocaust You promised no further Floods. ‘Never again shall there be a Flood to destroy the earth.’ That was Your Covenant with Noah and all living creatures. Instead," Cohn continues in a colloquial tone, "You turned the water on again" (5). Humor mixes with pain as God
109
speaks with casualness about having bypassed Cohn (certainly no Noah) in this devastation: "That you went on living, Mr. Cohn, I regret to say, was no more than a marginal error. Such things may happen" (6). "And that you. Mr. Cohn, happen to exist when no one else does, though embarrassing to Me, has nothing to do with your once having studied for the rabbinate, or for that matter, having given it up. . . . Inevitably, my purpose is to rectify the error I conceived" (4; italics added). "Man," the Lord continues, "after failing to use to a sufficient purpose his possibilities, and my good will, has destroyed himself; therefore, in truth, so have you" (4).
A second set of dialogues in God’s Grace is between Cohn and Buz or his fellow chimpanzees. These dialogues are set in opposition to those of the traditional Passover Seder and its repetition of the story of Exodus. These interchanges, like those between Cohn and God, show that Cohn desperately searches for signs of "purpose" in a universe in which mankind, in a nuclear holocaust, and God, in a second flood, destroyed all human beings but Calvin Cohn.
For Cohn, the ability of the chimpanzees to speak the English language (120) is a miracle that shows God’s goodness, a miracle that should be celebrated at a Passover Seder. The narrator relates Buz’s words to Cohn: "They [the chimpanzees] could learn if they had faith," and "If you hov faith you con hear them talk." Even the narrator seems to be taken in by the miracle, for he continues the account in Buz’s dialect: "Cohn humbly said he hod faith" (121; italics added). Gentle irony is reinforced by Cohn’s decision to praise God’s goodness by holding a Passover Seder on the island even though the fifteenth day of Nisan has probably passed. Cohn reasons that, without calendars, "one could not be held responsible for exact dates" (122).2
The primary theme of the traditional Passover celebration is deliverance of the Israelites. Cohn’s Passover celebration thus seems bizarre because his fellow human beings have been destroyed. In addition, Cohn is in dialogue with Buz and other chimpanzees instead of with his own child or other members of his family. The reader recalls that in Exodus, God commanded that the Passover story be told to future generations: "And when your children ask you, ‘What do you mean by this rite?’ you shall say, ‘It is the passover sacrifice to the LORD, because He passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt when He smote the Egyptians, but saved our houses"’ (Exodus 12: 26-27; italics added).3 In Malamud’s novel, Cohn has no human family and—at the end of the book—leaves no descendants.
Cohn’s blindness to such signposts makes him a ludicrous figure. Cohn exemplifies Henri Bergson’s statement that "a comic character is
110