Modern Jewish literature is very diverse, representing one of the richest layers of world literature. A large part of Jewish literature is English-language Jewish one. The Jewish diaspora of America did not suffer in World War II and could accept a number of refugees from Eastern Europe. Thus, after the war, America was practically the only salvation and hope for a new life. Most Jewish writers living in America are descendants of emigrants from the early twentieth century or refugees from the war years. The main problems, themes, and motives of English-language literature – the problem of responsibility, the motive of suffering, the theme of freedom – are important for all literature, as well as the motive of a nationally specific version of alienation.
The central problem considered by English-language Jewish literature can be considered the issue of Self/Other, My/Alien, which are associated with the search for one’s own place in the world. In particular, the problem of the search for national identity is a variant of the search for identity in general, which is conducted by all world literature. A characteristic representative of English-language Jewish literature is Bernard Malamud.
The creative heritage of Malamud is 7 novels and 54 stories. The creativity of Malamud is characterized by allegories, mastery of the art of the narrator. In particular, in 1952, the novel The Natural was released. Critics considered this novel the success of a novice writer: “in his almost entirely successful relation of baseball in detail to the culture, which elaborated it Malamud has made brilliant and unusual” (Syrkin 2). The heroes of Malamud are ordinary people fighting to improve their lives in a world of evil fate. The novel work of Bernard Malamud is an integral part of English-language Jewish literature, which is manifested in the commonality of problems, the appeal to myth. Although The Natural novel is not thematically related to Jewish literature, symbolism is widely represented in it. This book about the fate of a baseball player, ruined by corruption prevailing in American sports, immediately made the author famous.
The life pass of a talented professional athlete with all its ups and downs is one of the favorite topics of American literature. However, few have succeeded in the entire history of the “sports” novel to be compared with the power of The Natural of Bernard Malamud, a psychologically subtle and accurate work that combines the tragic and comic. This is a story of success and failure, love and betrayal, hard calculation and a kind of madness, the story of a strong man, ready to start all over again. It can be called a story of the fate of man and fate playing him.
Malamud is concerned about the topic of moral wisdom acquired in suffering. From the combination of reality and fantasy in his works, a world arises, similar to the one in which we live, and at the same time different from it. Malamud builds the image of his star-crossed protagonist Roy Hobbs with allegories from a variety of mythology elements – the Bible, Arthurian legend, Homer, the myth of the hero, fertility myth (Hershinow 32-39). He also engages conceptual constructs from psychology studies of Freud and Jung. At the same time, the novel uses rather well-known events from baseball history, in particular, the careers of Babe Ruth, Wilbert Robinson, Pete Reiser, Chuck Hostetler, Eddie Waitkus, as well as Black Sox scandal.
Walt Whitman called baseball “an American game,” and Babe Ruth said it was “the best game in the world” (Hershinow 54). Although football ultimately outperformed it as the country’s most popular sport – 41 percent of respondents preferred football and 38 percent chose baseball in a 1965 Harris poll – it cannot be denied that baseball was and remains an integral part of the lives of millions of Americans (Hershinow 55). It is not surprising that the novel resonated with American readers.
However, not only the topic of baseball, but namely mainly mythologism makes the novel of Malamud an interesting object for literary studies. The author claimed in one of his interview that, during his studies in college, learning and interest to myth became a background for presenting baseball in the above-mentioned concept of The Natural: “I transformed game into myth, via Jesse Weston’s Percival legend with an assist from T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland plus the lives of several ballplayers I had read, in particular Babe Ruth’s and Bobby Feller’s” (Carino 67). At the same time, some critics compare The Natural with other Malamud’s works, considering the suffering of Roy Hobbs with that of various Malamud’s Jewish protagonists, and claim about the inappropriateness of using of baseball as an environment, a kind of ‘culture medium’ to depict a person of twentieth-century as a mythological hero. In particular, Edward Abramson expresses doubts “whether baseball, despite its important position as an American ritual, can carry the weight of [mythical] allusion Malamud places on it” (34). Like Abramson, some other critics conclude that baseball does not have enough intellectual broadness and depth to maintain properly the layers of myth implied on the novel.
The main character is a talented and already middle-aged self-taught baseball player Roy Hobbs, who got into a decent team at the age (35 years old) when others are already finishing their baseball careers. From a technical point of view, he really can be called professional player. However, his personal qualities are depicted as rather ambiguous. Having missed 15 years in sports, constantly changing jobs, he remained a teenager in behavior and outlook on life. One can remain a young in soul and body, but life experience should still affect thinking. However, it is not noticed in Roy – he is naughty about his beat, he does not know how to communicate and treat women, he is conceited and irritable, he constantly lives with thoughts about the past, but, at the same time, carefully hides it from everyone. Before his eyes, bright pictures from childhood arise constantly during all the novel. On the other hand, precisely these pictures of the past suggest that Roy is emotionally unstable. Despite the fact that he is an indispensable player, at the same time, he sometimes can not discard his personal issues and concentrate on the game.
The book allows looking from the inside at the world of a sports team and professional sports. Baseball fans can, together with the main character, feel the joy of victory and the bitterness of an athlete’s defeat; however, these external impressions are rather misleading. Sometimes, the author supposedly wanted to show the sensitive side of his hero and from real-life events abruptly switched to images in Roy’s head, which could have some kind of association with the forces of nature, with sounds, smells, people from the past, and then everything returned to reality again. Thus, in order to understand whether this is actually happening or just in the character’s head, the reader needs to read another page or two, which immerses him/her in the world of mythological images and allusions.
It should be noted that the concept of myth as a cultural phenomenon has been actively developed since the mid-19th century. It changed, transformed, expanded its borders and was filled with new functions and meanings. In the 20th century, literature, followed by literary criticism, again turned to the concepts of myth, myth-making, and mythologization. In the literature of postmodernism, another type of myth appears that combines the features of a traditional myth and author’s narrative. The author’s myth as a literary genre is a logical continuation, the development of the tendencies of the mythological novel. It uses mythologization as a tool for the semantic and compositional organization of the text. At the same time, the author’s myth as a genre is characterized by a peculiar duality, which can be traced both at the structural and substantive levels, that is clearly seen in the novels of Malamud, namely especially in The Natural.
Researchers distinguish two approaches of the modern novel to myth – “adopting” and “challenging.” When adopting, from a myth into a novel, a rigid structure that affects the content passes. The challenging method divides the myth into episodes and motives, selects appropriate topics, and weaves them into the context of the narrative. Based on this, two types of narrative structure are distinguished – the type of “skeleton” and the type of “fabric.” With the structure of the “skeleton,” myth becomes the ideological basis of the novel, while the type of “fabric” involves the dispersion of mythological elements throughout the text (Avery 60-66, 85-93). In the author’s myth, both types of storytelling can be found simultaneously. Thus, the myth plays the role of a dynamic structure in the novel, dialogically interacting with the text of the novel. In Malamud, the “skeleton” is determined by the fact that the image of baseball itself rises to a peculiar concept of myth in the minds of fans, and the “fabric” is organically integrated into the text of the novel: “As he was looking, there flowed along this bone-white farmhouse with sagging skeletal porch, alone in untold miles of moonlight, and before it this white-faced, long-boned boy whipped with train-whistle yowl a glowing ball to someone hidden under a dark oak” (Malamud 3).
The way myths are carried into modern literature is explained by the concept of Northrop Frye. The stable categories of comedy, tragedy, satire, and novel described by him correspond to the structure of the “skeleton” and represent a certain system of mythological components arranged in the text (Russel 14-16). The structure of the “fabric,” which is more popular in postmodern literature, allows choosing and combining mythological elements from different narrative categories. Due to this, the author’s myth becomes a plastic and constantly changing literary form. The myth does not constitute the main storyline of the novel; the structure of the mythological “skeleton” can almost never be traced from beginning to end. Mythological fabric can be so diverse that it cannot be considered the main organizational structure. One of the techniques typical for this genre is the use of collage and kaleidoscope methods. This method allows dividing myths into parts and selecting only their necessary elements, which Malamud does in The Natural.
The author’s myth, like the archaic myth, creates a certain world picture. Modern literature often refers to real historical events, and the author’s myth weaves fragments of reality into the context of narrative. In the framework of the author’s myth, fiction is connected with history. However, the author’s myth does not in any way pursue the objective presentation of historical events. The postmodern writer in his/her work is not guided by any specific rules, but as a philosopher seeks and builds own system of categories, so that, on the basis of what was created later, the rules are defined. The author’s myth appeared in the postmodern period, but traditional myths became an inspiration for it, so it combines the features of both ‘poetries.’ At first glance, these traits can often seem mutually exclusive:
- The mythological plot is considered absolutely true, and postmodernism casts doubt on the very possibility of the existence of truth;
- The task of the traditional myth is the integration of human into the world around, and postmodern emphasizes the loneliness and estrangement of the hero;
- The myth takes place in sacred timelessness and is fixed in collective memory, while postmodern refers to historical time and personal memories.
However, the author’s myth creates its own system of rules, which allows it to balance on the verge of an archaic attitude and postmodern narrative. First of all, a certain duality lies in how the author’s myth understands the truth. On the one hand, just like the traditional myth, it does not consider individual morality and rejects the opposition of good and evil. In postmodernism, the truth is many-sided, as it consists of various elements and depends on the situation and circumstances, which is clearly seen in the complex and contradictory nature of the protagonist in The Natural. The author’s myth does not give any estimates and does not try to be objective – on the contrary, it seeks to show the world in all its diversity.
A specific space is created in the author’s myth, which combines several periods of time, draws the reader into action, and makes him a witness not only of the twists and turns of the plot, but also of world history. Thus, there is the possibility of catharsis and a new model of the world, which is not limited by historical chronology and a specific perspective, thus determining the significance and relevance of The Natural novel to current society.
Works Cited
Abramson, Edward A. Bernard Malamud Revisited. Twayne Pub, 1993.
Avery, Evelyn Gross. The Magic Worlds of Bernard Malamud. State University of New York Press, 2001.
Carino, Peter. “History as Myth in Bernard Malamud’s The Natural.” NINE A Journal of Baseball History and Culture, vol. 14, no. 1, 2005, pp. 67-77.
Hershinow, Sheldon J. Bernard Malamud. Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1980.
Malamud, Bernard. The Natural. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.
Russel, Ford. Northrop Frye on Myth: An Introduction. Routledge, 2016.
Syrkin, Marie. “From Frank Alpine to Willie Spearmint.” Midstream, vol. 17, no. 9, 1971, pp. 2-38.