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| Bernard Malamud |
Bernard Malamud
The Human Remains
Tony McKibben
January 8, 2018
Bernard Malamud is a hard writer. This is not the same thing as saying he is cold or aloof. His writing can be cruel but never dismissive, harsh but with compassion. He rarely describes a character as they would wish to be described, seeing them in all their physical decay, yet is sympathetic to their mental anguish. “My novels are more moral than philosophical” Malamud says. “I am a novelist, a moralist. Not a philosopher. The notions of hope, of redemption are essential to my characters.” (‘Studies in American Jewish Literature’) His resistance to the philosophical but acceptance of the moral might seem unusual for a post-war writer, and Malamud in this sense is the absolute antithesis of the important French novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet. Robbe-Grillet insists, while “I have no training in philosophy proper”, that he sees his novel The Voyeur and Camus’ The Outsider as “phenomenological novels, insofar as they present a perception of human consciousness that is of a phenomenological order” (Paris Review), as he admits the importance of Hegel and Heidegger on his work. He would clearly prefer the philosophical to the moral. “When a novelist has “something to say,” they mean a message. It has political connotations, or a religious message, or a moral prescription. It means “commitment,” as used by Sartre and other fellow-travelers. They are saying that the writer has a world view, a sort of truth that he wishes to communicate, and that his writing has an ulterior significance.” “I am against this”, he says, “Flaubert described a whole world, but he had nothing to say, in the sense that he had no message to transmit, no remedy to offer for the human condition.” (Paris Review)
