Malamud's Early Stories: In and out of Time, 1940-1960, with Humor, History, And Hawthorne (Bernard Malamud) (Critical Essay‪)‬

Bernard Malamud's humor is always ironic and usually grim, dark, evoking the type of comic image conveyed by a grinning skull. Often his humor evolves from someone's deservedly or undeservedly being victimized--Schwartz the Jewbird, for example, or the mourners Gruber and Kessler--death and implicit death, but in either case the grinning skull looks on unseen. Although in many of his stories a suggestion of tragedy exists behind the humor, in others whimsy predominates, as in "Angel Levine" and "The Girl of My Dreams." Whimsy is a device that Hawthorne also employs, even in stories based on historical accounts. A perfect example is "Wakefield," in which Wakefield leaves home one day and without a word to his wife does not return for twenty years, when he suddenly steps inside the house while walking past it on a rainy afternoon as if he had been gone no longer than a few hours. According to the narrator the story has a truthful foundation, but in Hawthorne's art, as at times in Malamud's, it is pure whimsy. As Malamud's ironic humor, both the woeful and the whimsical, is characteristic of Hawthorne's, so may the same be said of the earlier author's predilection for history as a prominent thematic concern in developing his fiction. History provides a foundation of actuality on which to base even most of their more fanciful stories no matter how far from historic reality the two authors may stray. Eventually the reader's awareness of history will keep the incidents and characters linked to that foundation, grounded effectively enough to make the most preposterous possibilities seem viable and acceptable, at least for the duration of the story. Undoubtedly, it is largely if not wholly for that reason that Poe insisted a short story be limited in length to what can normally be read in a single sitting; a longer story, he believed, would override its effect on the imagination of readers and make it incredible before the conclusion was reached. Like Hawthorne, Malamud rarely if ever allowed that to occur.