Description
Read The american short story: The Magic Barrel, as well as the below article
Bernard Malamud (1914-1986)was both a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and an important short story writer. His writing often combines the realistic and the magical–he is probably most well known for his novel, The Natural, which blends Arthurian romance with American baseball. The story we will be discussing is from Malamud’s first collection of stories, titled The Magic Barrel. It mixes mythic elements from the Bible and other sources with a modern, ironic perspective. This blending of supernatural, otherworldly or fantastic elements with realistic narrative is often described “Magic Realism.”
Magic Realism is associated with traditional “folk” cultures rather than from modern societies that have always seen themselves as having advanced beyond fairy tales and stories of the supernatural. You can see the current interest in Magic Realism (Gabriel Garcia Marques, Salman Rushdie, etc.) as returning fiction to its roots in the world of traditional cultures and the world of folklore, fairy tale, and myth. What makes this kind of story so appealing?
Salzman
Pinye Salzman is this story’s larger-than-life figure. He is the possessor of the magic barrel of the title. An ambiguous figure, who appears and disappears in a supernatural way, he lives in an office described as “in the air” and “in his socks.” He wields a mysteriously powerful influence—it may be, in fact, that Salzman is staging everything that happens to Leo, even arranging the relationship between Leo and his estranged daughter. This is a character who opens the story up to many questions. For instance: Why is he always associated with fish–that is, why is there always “something fishy” about Salzman? How are we supposed to
feel about him? Why can we never be sure of him?
What are we to make of his so-called “magic barrel?” Is it really magic? Why does this mysterious resource of Salzman’s become the title of the story?
Leo Finkle
The story’s protagonist is the rabbinical student Leo Finkle, who goes to a matchmaker not because he is looking for love but for a practical reason–because he is told it will be easier to win a congregation if he gets married. He is quite self-sufficient, with seemingly little interest in love or romance, but gradually this changes. The series of dates Salzman arranges for Leo gradually have an unsettling effect on him. His meeting with Lily Hirschorn, for instance, brings Leo to the realization that “her probing questions had somehow irritated him into revealing–to himself more than here–the true nature of his relationship to God, and from that it had come upon him, with shocking force, that apart from his parents, he had never loved anyone. Or perhaps it went the other way, that he did not love God so well as he might, because he had not loved man. It seemed to Leo that his whole life stood starkly revealed and he saw himself for the first time as he truly was—unloved and loveless. This bitter but somehow not fully unexpected revelation brought him to a point to panic, controlled only by extraordinary effort.
He covered his face with his hands and cried.” What’s happening to Leo?
How do you account for the way his series of dates expectedly change him?
Stella
The woman Finkle ends up with, is, ironically, our matchmaker’s renegade daughter Stella, who her father dismisses as a sign that Leo is incapable of discrimination (“if you can love her, then you can love anybody”), He also tells Leo that he feels at this point that his daughter deserves to burn in hell. Leo is given to understand in no uncertain terms that her candidacy as a potential mate is deemed by Salzman to be a terrible mistake. Or so he says. We can never be sure what Salzman is really up to.
Stella has seen too much of the world, as Leo has seen too little—a prostitute who has sinned and suffered, she is the polar opposite of the virginal Leo, who has always led a prudent and insulated life. And yet, it turns out that for Leo, Stella is the only girl for him. What is it about Stella that has led him to believe that she is “the one?” And what makes Stella believe that Leo is “the one?” And has Salzman in reality always secretly believed that Leo and Stella are a perfect match? Or should be take Salzman at his word—that this match is a terrible idea?
The Ending
This ending has been described as “bravely ambiguous.” Malamud wanted his stories to be open to interpretation, and did not enjoy being asked about the meaning of his work. He once said, “And I don’t like questions of explication: what did I mean by this or that?–I want the books to speak for themselves. You can read?–all right, tell me what my books mean. Astonish me.” True to Malamud’s intention, this story ends in a mysterious tableau featuring the three protagonists deliberately arranged as if by the symbolist/expressionist painter Marc Chagall, and is open to a number of different interpretations:
“Leaving the cafeteria, he was however, afflicted by a tormenting suspicion that Salzman had planned it all to happen this way. Leo was informed by letter that she would meet him on a certain corner, and she was there one spring night, waiting under a street lamp. He appeared, carrying a small bouquet of violets and rosebuds. Stella stood by the lamppost, smoking. She wore white with red shoes, which fitted his expectations, although in a troubled moment he had imagined the dress red, and only the shoes white. She waited uneasily and shyly. From afar he saw that he eyes–clearly her father’s–were filled with desperate innocence. He pictures, in her, his own redemption. Violins and lit candles revolved in the sky. Leo ran forward with flowers outthrust.
Around the corner, Salzman, leaning against a wall, chanted prayers for the dead.”
At the end of the story, Salzman says kaddish, the prayer for the dead. But nowhere in the prayer is death mentioned–instead there are praises to God for the gift of a new life or a continuation of life; or the prayer can be considered an entreaty for the resurrection of the departed. In the meantime, Leo and his flowers seem to levitate towards Stella as the candles and the violins whirl in the sky, suggesting love and romance. This ending raises a number of different questions. For instance, there seems to be a juxtaposition of a funeral service with a wedding service.
Does this mean that Salzman is distressed about Leo’s choice of Stella—that Leo has defied his wishes and his plans for him?
Is he mourning Stella, who he has said is dead to him, or is he mourning Leo, whose marriage to his fallen daughter he believes has ruined him as a rabbi–so that he, too, is as if dead to him?
On the other hand, if Salzman has in reality arranged this marriage to Stella on purpose, why is he reciting Kaddish, as if he is at a funeral?
Are we supposed to consider this marriage a good thing or a bad thing?
Malamud has also said that a short story “packs a self into a few pages, predicting a lifetime”–if this is so, what will Leo’s life hold for him?