Bloomsday in America

This article was originally published online, in slightly different form, in  ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews  12/28/2020. 

-- By Tom Phillips 

Geography is destiny in two modern masterpieces – James Joyce’s Ulysses (1918) and Bernard Malamud’s A New Life (1961) – but these destinies point in opposite directions. Joyce’s Dublin faces East across the Irish Sea to England; Malamud’s fictional Marathon, Cascadia west over the mountains to the Pacific.  Cascadia is green and fresh, the air clear, nature an “esthetic satisfaction” so overwhelming that art is superfluous.  Dublin is “snotgreen”, reeking of dead men, dead dogs, poor old women, “general paralysis of the insane” all seen through Irish art, the “cracked lookingglass of a servant.”                                                                           

"Poldy"  -- from Joyce's notes 

Enter into these opposite landscapes a single archetype, the wandering Jew -- outsider, observer, “chief critic of everything”. The aim of this essay will be to point out the direct relation between characters and episodes in these two novels – notably Joyce’s Leopold Bloom and Malamud’s Seymour Levin. This link is repeatedly suggested by Malamud, beginning with the epigraph of A New Life, a quote from Ulysses: “Lo, Levin leaping lightens in eyeblink Ireland’s western welkin."  A New Life can be read as another variation on Homer’s Odyssey, a bid by Malamud to extend the epic of human civilization to America’s farthest shore.  Spiced with biblical references, it is also the story of American Jews’ liberation from cyclical tragedy in the Old World, and the hazards of their new life in the New.    

The Pauline Prophecy: Jewish-Christian Relations in Bernard Malamud’s A NEW LIFE

-- By Tom Phillips

Originally published in
ANQ: A QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SHORT ARTICLES, NOTES, AND REVIEWS 1/18/2020

A New Life, Bernard Malamud’s 1961 epic of a down-and-out New Yorker in the Pacific Northwest, is unique among his novels. The story takes place far from the urban Jewish milieu that was the author’s usual setting, and not coincidentally, it is the only work in which he fully develops a critique of American culture. Malamud studiously avoids mentioning religion until very late in the book, and then only obliquely. However a close reading, beginning with the significance of the main characters’ names, suggests an inter-religious dynamic.

Relations between Judaism and Christianity, Jews and Christians, and Jewish and gentile cultures are front and center in much of Malamud’s fiction – notably in The Assistant, the 1957 novel that immediately precedes A New Life. In A New Life these themes are concealed, or implied – probably because it was written while the author was sojourning in gentile territory, where his values came into sharp conflict with those of the dominant culture. A New Life can be read as a satire on American Philistia from a Jewish point of view, but in the end it goes beyond satire. The coupling of Seymour Levin with Pauline Josephson, the wife of his boss and enemy, and their absconding with her children, suggests a prophecy of a new age in which Jew and gentile combine in a generational assault on American values.

In short, the Sixties.