Moving on from the minor leagues of Baseball's Best Short Stories, we'll begin our work in earnest with the first of five classic baseball novels (or five and a half, counting Delillo's novella Pafko at the Wall) that will constitute the majority of our work this term. Our starting point on this barnstorming tour of American baseball literature, and the earliest book on our reading list, is Bernard Malamud's debut novel, The Natural (1952).
I mentioned in our discussion of Thurber's "You Could Look It Up" as a prefiguring of Eddie Gaedel's (in)famous at bat that there are certain colorful tales in baseball's history — like Gaedel, the Black Sox scandal, "the Shot Heard 'Round the World," or Ray Chapman's death — that have continually captivated the imaginations of writers, and The Natural, loosely based on Phillies 1B Eddie Waitkus, is another such story. Like Waitkus, Roy Hobbs is a young player with seemingly boundless talents whose career is sidelined when he's shot by a mysterious stalker. We catch up with him many years later on his path towards redemption, signing on with the New York Knights as their new right fielder, where he's quickly swept up by forces larger than himself.
Malamud stands, along with Philip Roth (whose The Great American Novel we'll be reading later in the semester) and Saul Bellow, as a major force among Jewish-American authors, as well as mainstream mid-century literature, and so it's not surprising that in The Natural we find not only echoes of the classic Greek tragic hero, but also a fairly detailed and innovative reframing of the myth of the Fisher King. This Arthurian legend — which you might've encountered in T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" or Terry Gilliam's 1991 film of the same name — is centered around a wounded king whose kingdom is falling into disrepair due to his injuries. While many knights come to attempt to heal him, only the chosen, Percival (or Parsifal), is capable of finding the holy grail and restoring order. In The Natural, Knights manager Pop Fisher is the Fisher King, the pennant his grail and Roy his Percival (complete with his bat, "Wonderboy," as an ersatz Excalibur). Asked about his motivation in mixing baseball and mythology in a 1975 Paris Review interview, Malamud observed that:
Baseball flat is baseball flat. I had to do something else to enrich the subject. I love metaphor. It provides two loaves where there seems to be one. Sometimes it throws in a load of fish. The mythological analogy is a system of metaphor. It enriches the vision without resorting to montage. This guy gets up with his baseball bat and all at once he is, through the ages, a knight—somewhat battered—with a lance; not to mention a guy with a blackjack, or someone attempting murder with a flower. You relate to the past and predict the future. I’m not talented as a conceptual thinker but I am in the uses of metaphor. The mythological and symbolic excite my imagination. Incidentally, Keats said, "I am not a conceptual thinker, I am a man of ideas."
We'll read The Natural in three installments, as follows:
- Fri. January 25: introduction, pgs 3-107
- Tues. January 29: pgs 108-185
- Fri. February 1: pgs 186-230
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