버나드 맬라머드의 『신의 은총』에 나타나는 신, 인간과 침팬지들의 환상적 알레고리

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to discuss Bernard Malamud's last fiction God's Grace (1982), focusing on how he depicts this work using a sophisticated and smooth writing style. Malamud presents the reader with allegorical narratives which seamlessly blend themes like atonement and redemption, grace and mercy, freedom and language, the genre of fantasy and the mode of allegory, and explores comedy and tragedy in the human condition. In the outcome Malamud establishes a fantastic society in which God, humans, and animals coexist. The most obvious literary precursors of God's Grace are Robinson Crusoe, Lord of the Flies, and Animal Farm. Malamud creates a post-apocalyptic comic fantasy; a pseudo-biblical fable after the manner of the book of Genesis. God's Grace is divided into six parts: “The Flood,” “Cohn's Island,” “The Schooltree,” “The Virgin in the Trees,” “The Voice of the Prophet,” and “God's Mercy,” which may represent the first six days of Creation. Two of the book's motifs are the story of Abraham's sacrifice of his son Isaac at God's request and the Darwinian of evolution. Malamud uses these motifs to begin to approach the human experience. God's Grace is a modern-day dystopian fantasy, set after a thermonuclear war prompts a second flood—a radical departure from Malamud's previous fiction. The novel's protagonist is paleontologist Calvin Cohn, who had been attending to his work at the bottom of the ocean when the Devastation struck, and who alone survived. This rabbi's son, now a ‘marginal error' in God's calculation, finds himself shipwrecked with an experimental chimpanzee capable of speech, to whom he gives the name Buz. Other creatures appear on their island—baboons, chimps, five apes, and a lone gorilla. Cohn works hard to make it possible for God to love His creation again, and his hopes increase as he encounters the unknown and the unforeseen in this strange new world. Having studied for the rabbinate Cohn teaches his Judaic world-view to the primates but faces opposition from Buz whose previous human companion taught him the principles of Christianity. Cohn tries to recreate the monkeys in his own image, and goes as far as formulating his own set of seven commandments and creating his own addition to the scheme of evolution. But alas, paradise is lost again. Nevertheless, Malamud's God's Grace shows there still may be hope to save our civilization when we confront the wintry devastation of a global doomsday. This book is ultimately a tragedy with a message, when, with our free will, we choose to deny God's mercy.