Bernard Malamud’s God’s Grace appeared in 1982, right in the middle of the race for nuclear developments between the United States and the Soviet Union. It depicts a future world after a nuclear war; yet to think about a nuclear war is to “think the unthinkable” because a nuclear war has never happened and we have never gone through it. When the unprecedented nuclear war is described, it tends to be related with other preceded images of catastrophe. As a result, its alterity is preoccupied, assimilated, and domesticated in order to invent a fiction of a nuclear war. A nuclear war is, in Jacques Derrida’s words, so “fabulously textual” that it could hypothetically be analogized, with a familiar precedent, and misread and described in dependence on the existing discourses.
The opening sentence of God’s Grace is “This is that story,” which suggests “that story” exists even before “this story;” we should read the narration as well as the story of this novel. God’s Grace is not simply a story of the eschatology (this story) but also a meta-narrative of eschatological discourses (that story). It contains a variety of elements in human history, such as colonialism, patriarchy, rivalries among tribes and religions, and so forth. Necessarily, what the author was able to narrate so as to represent the “unthinkable” world after a nuclear war had to be representations of the existing historical precedents that could be invented only through the existing discourses.
Among many examples of the historical precedents, gender and sexuality play important roles in God’s Grace. The wombs of female characters have much to do not only with the patriarchal system before the nuclear war but also with the binary world system during the Cold War. Reading sexual politics is indispensable to interpret God’s Grace as an eschatological fiction, for it bears on both the extinction and the rebirth of human beings.
The future images in God’s Grace are nothing less than representations of the past from the beginning of the world to the annihilation of human beings. The characters only perform and represent the human history that will end up with the nuclear catastrophe. The repetition of the past seems to be ineluctable. However, the novel’s very last scene suggests a radical change in its textuality and temporality when a gorilla begins to pray. The gorilla’s prayer represents, in a Jewish sense, a return to the past when human errors and wickedness have yet to be occurred. The end of the story is a warning to the present situation in which a nuclear war would be inevitable in the near future.
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