Biblical Patterns for Sale: Malamud, The Fixer

Abstract

Not all twentieth-century writers surrender to biblical archetypes in the manner of Joseph Roth, Kafka, or Dostoevsky who were in their different ways possessed by the Joban paradigm. Conrad, for instance, strongly responsive though he is to myth-patterns of all kinds, is not seized in this fashion. Marlow in Heart of Darkness is a questing hero who, like Aeneas, visits the underworld there to confront Erebus, son of Chaos, and to behold Phlegethon, the river of Death.¹ There are also arguable traces of Dante’s Inferno in Marlow’s journey up-river.² Kurtz — who is not only an adventurer but also a poet, painter and musician — re-enacts Orpheus’s descent into the region of Hades, there to behold forbidden things and eventually to be torn to pieces by the Thracian women. In “The Secret Sharer,” Leggatt’s deed and subsequent fate explicitly recall the biblical story of Cain and Abel, whilst the relations between Leggatt and the Captain belong to the archetype of the Double.³ In these examples, Conrad is clearly exploring the artistic possibilities of these archetypal stories and myth-patterns. Much the same is true of Hardy. The stories of Saul and David from the first book of Samuel are seriously evoked in The Mayor of Casterbridge, lending a kind of universality and strength to the story of Henchard and Farfrae.⁴