Prooftexts

An often painful irony was perhaps Bernard Malamud most distinct feature as a writer of fiction. This essay attempts to view two major features of that irony as it functions in his novel, God’s Grace. The first involves his play with the tradition of the Robinsonade and its treatment of a solitary human being’s attempt to survive alone on a desert island; the second involves his treatment of the Akedah (the binding of Isaac). Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe involved a mariner who not only endured the pains of loneliness but managed to construct a kind of society on his island. During the three centuries since its writing it has become an important myth in Western civilization, raising questions about the values by which we govern our lives. Malamud’s Crusoe, Calvin Cohn, attempts to rebuild a human (in some sense a Jewish) civilization after God’s destruction of humanity following a nuclear war. Malamud’s bitterly comic account takes the reader down the path of hope where there is no hope, of laughter close to tears. In treating the Akedah in God’s Grace, Malamud chooses an even more bitter event, for Abraham is seemingly ordered by God to sacrifice Isaac, his only son, the future of the Jewish people. If Malamud’s version of Crusoe is hopeless, his treatment of the Akedah is even more so, for it is Calvin Cohn who will play the role of Isaac as he is sacrificed by a troop of chimpanzees. Again, Malamud shows himself to be the master of irony in treating the weaknesses besetting the human condition.