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| NEWS OF THE SOUL
December 26, 1997NEWSHOUR TRANSCRIPT |
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Essayist Roger Rosenblatt has some thoughts about the relationship between art and the news.ROGER ROSENBLATT: There may be nothing better for an age that depends on journalism than the publication of a great collection of short stories. The great collection recently published is that of the late Bernard Malamud, complete stories, a rich, thick volume of sad, touching, sometimes perplexing tales of mostly Jews leading private lives in mostly New York in mostly the 1940's. They represent the unnoticed moments in cities everywhere, stories of people that are revealed when the walls of their apartments are peeled away and the roofs lifted off. They are almost always about the significance of insignificant lives. They are not novels.
They have no magnitude, Aristotle's daunting word, in the sense of sustained development of character, or the leisurely exploration of a grand theme. It is for this reason that the short story is so good for an era in which journalism has become the most prominent way for understanding people and events, for journalism is really inadequate to that assignment. Like short fiction, the news usually has a limited number of characters, minimizes exposition, skims over a social or historical context, and comes into being only at the end of an event or the climax of an action.
To wit, the short story of the murder of businessman Nelson Gross, or the short story of a pitcher's performance in a crucial game, or of a scandal, or a hurricane. But the news is a series of short stories without the art of short stories. If the art is missing, so is the soul. The short story has been most successful in the hands of writers who were clearly connected to the worlds in which they worked. Chekhov's Russia was the microcosm of that vast, confounding place, Hemingway's America the same. Frank O'Connor's story, "Guest of the Nation," told more about Ireland's war against the British than any story before or since. Eudora Welty, Faulkner, Joyce, Katherine Ann Porter, Flannery O'Connor, J.D. Salinger, Cheever, each knew the current events of his or her territory.
They saw under the events and under the territory, but they also knew that life is generally meaningless or without discernible meaning, and that to take it in in bite sizes is the most we can digest at a sitting. What those writers did then, what Malamud does so beautifully in his collection, is to find the small telling incident at the center of a person's pain, or joy or humiliation or disappointment, the center of his soul. This is what journalism does not do, cannot do, which is why a great book of short stories offers valuable parallel reading in an age that pays so much attention to the news.
Malamud writes of a Russian Jewish grocery store owner in New York City, at odds with his German-American supplier of goods, of his desperate powerlessness as he learns of France's capitulation to the Germans. In the wider world, German tanks are rolling into Paris, but they are also rolling toward the grocer. That is the story's news. Short stories may parallel the news, but they also make the news moral. Some years ago the news told the story of the police beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles. It was all very stark, and it came and went as a matter of fact. The story looked only at the outside and asked who was right and who was wrong.
But for me there was an echo of a different and more probing tail, such as one that Malamud told. In "The Apology," a policeman who has harassed a peddler later helps him to recover his goods. Yet, he is still hounded by the man. The peddler seeks more than his goods; he seeks an apology. Eventually, the policeman apologizes to him. The man goes away, and the policeman misses the man's moral presence in his life. The news of the soul.
I'm Roger Rosenblatt.
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