generally comic in proportion to his ignorance of himself. . . . He becomes invisible to himself while remaining visible to all the world" (Bergson 71). Cohn stubbornly disregards God’s irreversible decision—"Inevitably, my purpose is to rectify the error I conceived" (4). He swears that he will live on. The narrator ironically shows the disparity between the experiences of biblical patriarchs and Cohn: "Once he heard an awesome whirring of wings. . . . Cohn prayed on his knees. No voice spoke. No wind blew" (14-15; italics added).

Cohn’s interchanges with the chimpanzees also show his lack of insight. He focuses on biblical information for his new students, in spite of the irrelevancy of such education for the chimpanzees. He blindly ignores his own rigidity and his own selfish desire for power over the chimpanzees, whom he calls his "brother and sister primates": "I want you all to know I am not in the least interested in personal power; simply I would like to give the common effort a certain amount of reasonable direction" (113). These words turn upon themselves when Cohn, disregarding the sexual desires of Buz and Esau, takes for himself the only young female chimpanzee on the island⁴ and advises "sublimation" as remedy for the chimps (183, 214).

The dialogues in Cohn’s Passover Seder parody those in the Passover Haggadah—the text for the Seder. The Haggadah holds the "Four Questions" that the child asks and the father answers, questions beginning with "Why does this night differ from all other nights?" The child’s words include questions about the eating of unleavened bread and bitter herbs, as well as about eating in a reclined position. The reply to the questions draws upon the Exodus story and biblical commentary that relates a tale of deliverance from bondage to freedom. The response calls to mind the unleavened bread (matzo) baked before the departure from Egypt. The response commemorates God’s striking down the oldest member of each Egyptian household. The speaker repeats Moses’ words: "For when the LORD goes through to smite the Egyptians, He will . . . pass over the door and not let the Destroyer enter and smite your home. You shall observe this as an institution for all time, for you and for your descendants" (Exodus 12: 23-24). The bitter herbs commemorate the difficulties of the Israelites in their ordeal with Moses as they journeyed in the wilderness for 40 years. The response also emphasizes how Moses and the Israelites sang their praise of the Lord: "The LORD is my strength and might; / He is become my deliverance" (Exodus 15:2; italics added).

The grace that follows the Passover meal also is treated with ironic inversion. The prayer has four benedictions: it extols God for his bounty in providing food for all of his creatures, gives thanks for the Land of Israel, entreats for the restoration of "Jerusalem, the city of holiness,"

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and praises God "who art good and do good to all" (Haggadah 85). The exodus from Egypt and also the creation of a new life for the Israelites in the Holy Land are two themes called to mind by the Passover Seder. And they are two themes turned ironic in Cohn’s celebration in God’s Grace.

Cohn’s Seder inverts the traditional progression from chaos to order, from darkness to light. The irony is signaled by the fact that Cohn searches the island for things to put "in place of" those on the traditional Seder Plate. The incongruity creates a humorous tone, particularly the substitution for a shankbone: instead of a shankbone from a recently killed animal, he serves part of a leg bone of a fossil—possibly, he reasons, "distantly related to the thundering equi of the Egyptian charioteers." For unleavened bread, Cohn bakes "crisp flatcakes, according to the tradition of the hastily baked bread of Exodus"; instead of eggs, for "nothing on the island could lay an egg"—he serves pickled red palm nuts. For bitter herbs he serves chunks of cassava root; for apples and nuts (haroset), chopped apricots and nuts; for lettuce and celery, oak leaves; for ritual red wine, white banana wine (125-27). Cohn’s obtuseness and his rationalizations make him an ironic figure.

The Seder starts with what appears to be a reasonable introduction to the "Four Questions": "Our thanks to God who kept us alive and sustained us to this moment." However, the scene quickly becomes a comic inversion of the serious tradition. Buz (who had been educated by the German born Dr. Walther Bunder as a Christian)⁵ crosses himself:

"Do that later, Buz," Cohn said sotto voce. "Whot’s wrong with now?"
"It’s not part of this ceremony. It’s another modality." (129)

Cohn, trying to sound like a biblical patriarch, queries the chimpanzees: "Please state who you are . . . define yourself. . . . Do you think of life as having a particular purpose? What is it?" (131). Malamud swiftly moves to the language of the streets by having Esau crudely respond: "My purpose in life is to slip it to Mary Madelyn as soon as she learns the facts of life. She doesn’t know what she is missing" (137). The interchange becomes farcical as slapstick is introduced. The narrator explains that Buz "had memorized [the questions] before eating the printed page. He loved the taste of paper" (131; italics added). The Seder ends in confusion: George the gorilla rises and upsets the table, causing food and wine to crash to the floor. The traditional progression from darkness to light, from chaos to order, is reversed as the participants race away from the table: "The shrieking, hooting chimpanzees scattered [and] rushed out of the cave into the night

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and hastily disappeared in every direction" (141). The confrontation between Cohn’s expectation for order and purpose, on the one hand, and, on the other, his encounter with disorder creates the absurd, and also what can be called "the comedy of chaos." Emphasizing the disparity between the chaos which ended Cohn’s ceremony and the serious order of traditional ones is the reader’s awareness that throughout these happenings Cohn’s "record" of his father—a rabbi—"singing a hymn in praise of deliverance" (141) continues to play.

The most bitter irony in the interchanges between Cohn and his surrogate son Buz grows out of their parody of the Abraham/Isaac story in Genesis. Attention to the tale is emphasized by the fact that the chimpanzee Buz, to whom Cohn tells Bible stories, repeatedly asks for the Abraham/Isaac tale, a story involving a controlling father and a submissive son—both concerned with carrying out God’s will. When Buz asks for the story, he refers to it as one in which Abraham actually carries out the "knifing" of his son, and Cohn always gets upset by such an interpretation. It is interesting that Buz’s version is supported by some Midrashic commentaries that insist "that Abraham completed the sacrifice and that afterward Isaac was miraculously revived" (Torah 151). Malamud ultimately uses these commentaries and the chimp’s insistence on them for ironic effect. At the close of the novel, it is the son (surrogate son), rather than the father, who uses the knife; thus Cohn, the father figure, pleads for his life:

"Buz," said Cohn, "you are my beloved son, tell me where we are going. I think I know but would like you to say so.

"Pong." [responds the son, who can no longer speak]. . . .

"Where’s this ram in the thicket?" asked Cohn with a bleat. Buz wagged his finger at his dod. (256-57)

We watch Cohn as an ironic inversion of the patriarch Abraham. Added to this image is Cohn as a comic version of Robinson Crusoe on the deserted island, adjusting to using crude implements in his natural surroundings (recording his actions in a diary) and also maintaining a superior position to Buz, reminiscent of the Crusoe-Friday relationship. In Robinson Crusoe, Friday, the cannibal, becomes civilized and loving. On the other hand, in God’s Grace, Buz and Esau become tired of Cohn’s teaching, "mighty sick and tired of eating so much goddam fruit" (223). They revert to their "cannibal" ways and hunt baboons: "The hunt was stimulating and the flesh delicious" (223). Irving Buchen observes: "Malamud’s setting is a cross between Prospero’s magic island of Edenic types and the more mundane but basic survival concerns of a Robinson

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Crusoe confronting atomic rain" (Buchen 24).

Also there are connections between Malamud’s Cohn, who has landed on a tropical island, and Swift’s Gulliver, set on shore of another island, that of the Houyhnhnms.⁶ While Gulliver feels repelled by the female Yahoo who seeks his affection, Calvin Cohn gets involved in a love affair with the female chimpanzee who makes advances toward him. Through ironic punning, Malamud undercuts Cohn’s aspirations for the union: "Monkey with evolution? That much chutzpah?" (194). Buz and the other male chimps are enraged at the loss of their one female. These chimps progress from killing young baboons (a natural behavior of chimpanzees) to killing baby Rebekah, offspring of Cohn and the chimp Mary Madelyn. All this is done on an island which Cohn at first thinks of as paradise, an island with lush vegetation where "trees and flowers blossomed and bloomed," an island that causes Cohn to muse: "Maybe this island was Paradise, although where was everybody who had been rumored to be rentless in eternity?" (49).

At the end of the tale, Cohn acts out the Abraham/Isaac story in reverse. He awaits a transcendent experience as he is led by Buz to his death. He "knelt before the fire, waiting for a nay saying angel who," the narrator interjects, "never appeared. Unless one had come and gone?" "You can’t depend on angels," the narrator continues. Next, the reader is uplifted by what seems to be a miracle. "Blood, to their astonishment, spurted forth an instant before the knife touched Cohn’s flesh." The reader, however, is abruptly disappointed by a series of negative details. In response to Cohn’s question, "Am I to be the burnt offering," Buz answers, "Pong." And after the blood miraculously spurts forth, we read: "‘Pong,’ said Buz, but it came to nothing. Who could tell whether it meant yes, no, or maybe" (257-58; italics added).

Several have argued that the ending of God’s Grace has positive aspects. Gloria Cronin explains that realizing "even before the knife has touched his throat his flowing white beard is flecked with blood . . . [Cohn] finally penetrates the mystery of grace" (Cronin 128); Jeffrey Helterman states: "Perhaps it is God’s grace to let Cohn live long enough to see that though man no longer exists, God does" (Helterman, 123; italics added); Sidney Richman says that Malamud "tests as never before the resources of the redemptive spirit one finds at work in most of his earlier fictions." Richman sees in the "harrowing conclusion . . . an unconditional mark of God’s mercy," The conclusion shows God’s "transcendent and incomprehensible nature." God’s mysterious intention cannot be understood by man, and "it is to this Force that Cohn submits, going to his sacrifice without murmur and with tears of gratitude springing from his eyes." For Richman, God’s Grace is "a tribute to a

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spiritually evolving universe calling forth a theocentric rather than an anthropocentric impulse" (Richman, "Malamud’s Quarrel" 205, 217-18; italics added). Cohn’s statement emphasizes that he still has hope: "Merciful God . . . I am an old man. The Lord has let me live my life out" (258). This is reminiscent of Abraham, who lived to an old age. The narrator tells us, "He wept at the thought. Maybe tomorrow the world to come?" (258)

Richmond argues for a positive ending. However, one can say that George the gorilla’s chanting the Kaddish, a memorial prayer of thanksgiving, while Cohn is the sacrifice, is a parodic act. Malamud insisted, in an interview with Joel Salzberg, that "a gorilla recites Kaddish for Calvin Cohn, and that is indeed a cause for optimism; the prayer itself is a vehicle for God’s grace" ("An Interview" 127)⁷. Here, I believe, we appreciate the frustration of Malamud’s desire to affirm hope, and we see the dark humor that accompanies it. For the prayer is in praise of a God whose people have been wiped out. Malamud may indeed be indicating that God would not be diminished if in fact mankind was eliminated. This is what I would term a view of grim optimism. It is the frustrated desire to affirm this view, I think, that develops the black humor of the absurd in God’s Grace.

Malamud’s view for human beings is a moral and humanistic one.The author is horrified by mass homicide, a nuclear holocaust. Though God’s Grace may not be a hopeful book, with grim humor it fulfills the aim, as Malamud puts it, to be "a visionary tale with a prophetic warning" (Alter 66). The warning is implicit in the novel’s epigraph from Robinson Crusoe: "I came upon the horrible remains of a cannibal feast."⁸
University of Delaware

NOTES

  ¹Biblical citations are from The Holy Scriptures: The New JPS Translation (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1988).
   ²Passover is celebrated on 15-22 Nisan, the first month of the Jewish calendar; the Seders are on the first two nights. The incongruity between a concern for being "responsible" for a calendar date, on the one hand, and, on the other, the gross lack of responsibility of humankind in causing a nuclear holocaust increases the ramifications of the grim irony of Cohn’s remark.
   ³These are Moses’ words to the elders of Israel. See also Exodus 13:8; 13:14-15.
   ⁴Hattie, an "old grandmother chimp" with "teeth worn to the gums" (165) does not interest the males.
   ⁵The narrator relates that Bünder once told Cohn that he "had divorced his wife

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because she had produced three daughters and never a son. ‘She did not look to my needs.’ . . . And he had not remarried because he did not ‘in ezzence’ trust women." It is tragically humorous that the doctor (like Cohn) views Buz as "his little boy" (21-22).
   ⁶See Rawson, 108-111; see also Helterman, 109.
   ⁷lrving Buchen comments on the elegiac tone at the end of the novel as Kaddish is recited, indicating that "mourning may be the ultimate act of a civilized man" (Buchen 33).
   ⁸Salzberg, in his last interview with Malamud, again asked the author about the meaning of God’s Grace. "I had to find a way for man to have a possible future," Malamud enigmatically replied (Salzberg "Last Interview" 237).

A shorter version of this paper was presented at The Conference of the American Literature Association, San Diego, California, June 1992. In preparing this manuscript, I was aided by a University of Delaware Faculty Research Grant.

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