The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 21 (2010)

What’s Wrong with the Stomach Specialist:
The Ethics of Stomach Disorder in
Bernard Malamud’s “The Magic Barrel”

Masahiko ABE*I.

HATING THE STOMACH DOCTOR

Bernard Malamud was a man of habits and routines. His writerly customs at once reﬂected his lifestyle and formed an integral part of his artistic achievement. An examination of his narratives in the light of suchroutines may, therefore, help us bring to light traits that would otherwise
be left unnoticed, and I believe his short story “The Magic Barrel” will
provide a particularly relevant case. What I aim to show in this essay isthat an investigation into the story from such a perspective will reveal
behind the novelist’s attitude toward food and illness, a complex mechanism of the mind that can be called “ethics.”
In My Father Is a Book, a memoir by Malamud’s daughter Janna
Malamud Smith, the portrayals of the novelist conﬁrm the images one
is likely to have after reading his stories. His life seems to be true to what
we expect from the professional rigor of his style, exhibiting a meticulous attention to detail, a trait that is also registered in his careful revising process (Dessner). A hardworking man, Malamud kept regular hours
and was determined to shut out intruders. Despite his workload at Oregon

Copyright © 2010 Masahiko Abe. All rights reserved. This work may be used, with thisnotice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work may be distributed,
electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without permission from the author.
*Professor, Tokyo University

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MASAHIKO ABEState University, for instance, where he taught freshman compositionand creative writing until he was promoted to associate professor in
1958, he managed to lead a virtually reclusive life, with colleagues curiously eavesdropping to ﬁnd out what was taking place in his ofﬁce. As
one of his friends from Oregon, Chester Garrison, recalls, his timetable
was observed strictly and interruptions of any sort were not allowed.
On Monday, Wednesday, Friday, he taught and had ofﬁce hours. On Tuesday,Thursday, and Saturday, he reached his ofﬁce at 9 A.M. and began to write.
He sat on an upright wooden chair drawn up to a small table or desk. . . . He
has said that from three hours’ work, he was lucky to get one page done.
Members of the staff on either side of him had to accustom themselves tohearing through the thin walls his voice notably raised as he tested out phrasing and dialogue to get them right. The neighbors knew that any interference
would not be appreciated. From time to time they even listened and tried tomake out what Bern could be up to. Also, he kept his door shut tight— probably locked—and his response to a persistent knocker (raider in his opinion)
was through a partially opened door. I think I remember that for a necessarycommunication, I once yelled through the door. (Smith 133)

His carefulness as a writer was thus applied to his daily routine as well.
He knew that steady practice is essential to output, and his daily life wasprogrammed in accordance with this necessity.
This does not necessarily mean, however, that he was unaware of thecare one needs to take of one’s physical and mental condition. In a letter to Arlene Hayman, his mistress who apparently also had a stomach
ulcer, he preached the importance of relaxation.
I’m sorry to hear about the ulcer. It’s clear that you’ve been working much
too hard. . . . You ought to let down at Yaddo . . . even though the place ismassive and lonely at the beginning, and people take to working at night inorder to contain or forget it. If I were you I’d quit at 4:30 at latest and go fora swim. Put on your Bikini and let the boys admire your new slimness. And
don’t work at night—read, go for a walk or to town for a movie, talk to people, play croquet—get someone to teach you how if you don’t know. (Smith203)

It may look as if he is just being sympathetic to his girlfriend and eager
for her to do everything she can to improve her situation. But, in fact,
his “If I were you . . .” contains more than a grain of truth. His own

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account to his friend Rosemarie Beck about his daily routine shows thekind of attention he pays to the state of his health.
You want to know what I do. In the morning half a mile to work: at one I go[to] the college for the mail, then walk home. I eat lunch and look at the paper.
At two I walk to work. At about four-thirty I quit. I do an errand or two andwalk back home. I read the mail and if I’m tired I go sleep. All winter I wasn’t
tired, and now that spring has come I am. We eat: I listen to a record or two;I sit in my chair and read. (Smith 134)

While he admired Hemingway-style masculine boldness, he also knewthat he was not that sort of writer. His daughter calls him a “galoshes
kind of guy,” after an episode in which a lady he was infatuated withmocked him for wearing rubber galoshes on a slushy winter night (211).
Far from being a Hemingway or a JFK—ﬁgures Malamud saw as classic machos—he was a man who would meekly listen to what the doctor
told him to do, even willingly modifying his behaviors around food(245).
It may be interesting to reconsider at this point why, despite his affairs,
Malamud never left his family. The author of the memoir, his daughter,ascribes his restraint to his “sense of virtue”: “Whether or not home held
him fondly enough, had he contemplated a departure, he likely would
have felt daunted by the guilt he’d bear, the stark violation of his senseof virtue” (194). Her view may hold to some extent, but her own phrasing that follows the quoted passage seems to betray what lies behind his
behavior: “He no doubt recalled his experience after moving to Oregon,
when he’d watched his brother collapse and his father die. I imagine that,whatever his feelings, he lacked the stomach to risk initiating such damage again” (195). That “he lacked the stomach” suggests, metaphorically, he did not have the desire or courage to do anything disgraceful;but it may literally mean that his stomach, or his body, was not up tosuch a challenge.
Malamud is known to have suffered from stomach ulcers. His heart
problem, which eventually cost him his life, also forced him to be cautious about what he ate. While it is certainly an exaggeration to say thathe severely suffered from any chronic illness, he was not robust enoughto forget about his physical condition, something more or less reﬂected
in his attitude toward daily routines. We also need to recall that his family had a history of mental disorder.

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In the following sections, I investigate Malamud’s attitude toward illness as represented in “The Magic Barrel,” one of his most celebrated
stories. I particularly focus on issues that relate to eating. There are anumber of eating scenes in the story, while metaphors of food are usedwith ﬁne nuance.1 Of special interest to us is what the protagonist, therabbinical student Leo Finkle, says about the stomach doctor at a critical moment. By examining this statement, we can ﬁnd out how theauthor’s ambivalence about his less-than-robust body is linked to whatmany critics point to as the peculiarly Malamudian quality, shown not
only in “The Magic Barrel” but also in his other works, that is, a subtle
blending of the real and the fantastic.
As Jeffrey Helterman puts it, “almost all of Malamud’s ﬁction is fable.
In such ﬁction all talk tends to become philosophical and all action symbolic. The characters tend to have symbolic dreams, metaphors becomeas real as the things they describe, and actions turn into rituals” (16).
Such mythical illusoriness is often combined in Malamud with quotidian banality, as is vividly shown in “The Magic Barrel” through the eating habits of the marriage broker Pinye Salzman, whom Finkle calls in
to ﬁnd a wife for himself. Many critics agree that Salzman, an ambiguous ﬁgure who behaves like a priest on some occasions and on otherexhibits the greed, misery, and pathos of a money-seeking poor salesman, is “an insoluble mixture of the preternatural and the prosaic, ethereal mentor and plebeian hustler”(Sloan 51).2 Adopting a Jungianinterpretation, Charles E. May sees Salzman as a trickster “who symbolizes the instinctual and irrational, driven by the basic needs of sex andhunger” (94). May argues that “Salzman’s constant hunger for ﬁsh is areﬂection of Finkle’s own libido hunger for sexuality, but no matter how
much Salzman eats he starves, becoming ‘transparent to the point of vanishing,’ until Finkle ﬁnally establishes the level of his real need andaccepts the wholly sexual Stella,” Salzman’s infamous daughter (94).
The argument is convincing, and there is little doubt about Salzman’s
bringing to light some hidden aspect of Finkle’s inner life. But he is not
the only joker. I would like to suggest in the following discussion thatthe stomach doctor, who remains an obscure ﬁgure all the way throughand never really takes part in the main plot of the story, is in fact equally
essential to the Malamudian subtle balancing of the real and the mythical. For the profession of stomach specialist may constitute a key element in the mechanism of the mind that the protagonist struggles within the story.

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FOOD AND HABITS

There is a passage in “The Magic Barrel” where Finkle brings into
focus the stomach, and in a very negative manner. In response to thequery of the marriage broker as to the reason why Finkle does not likethe client he recommends, he replies, “Because I detest the stomach specialist” (138). Since the exchange follows Salzman’s rather disingenuous business practice in which he conceals the client’s problem, some
may say that the reference is a mere passing remark, but I would like toshow that it is much more signiﬁcant than it appears. An analysis of theimplications of the remark will help us understand how, at the deeper
level of the story, the ethics of eating is problematized.
“The Magic Barrel” is a story about an arranged marriage. For Salzman,
the marriage broker, match-making is a business: it has to be carried out
on a thoroughly material basis. The female clients are classiﬁed on cards,
not by their appearance or character, but mainly by the amount of money
they bring with them. On the cards, the information about the client is
itemized.
Sophie P. Twenty-four years. Widow one year. No children. Educated highschool and two years college. Father promises eight thousand dollars. Has
wonderful wholesale business. Also real estate. On the mother’s side comesteachers, also one actor. Well known on Second Avenue. (136)

The itemized information from Salzman’s cards sounds at once objective and heartless; what he provides is a mechanical listing of conditions
that may or may not beneﬁt his client Finkle. But the very lack of humanized interest reinforces the almost prophetic authority of the words. They
are even reminiscent of Grecian oracular messages, in which paucity isconverted into divine impenetrability. The items on Salzman’s cards do
not produce a ﬂuent argument, but sometimes the fewer the words are,the more inﬂuential they sound. Ironically, for Finkle, who is about toﬁnish his course as a rabbinical student, the cards from the commercial
marriage broker take on a mystical aura, while he himself is reduced toa sentimental humanist who asks nonessential questions such as “Do you
keep photographs of your clients?” thus betraying his interest in the person rather than her material conditions.
This is a development not acceptable to Finkle. He resists it by ﬁnding fault with each of Salzman’s clients. The ﬁrst one he does not like

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because she is a widow. The second, because of her age. When they reachthe third one, however, Finkle starts to show interest.
“Did you say nineteen?” Leo asked with interest.
“On the dot.”“Is she attractive?” He blushed. “Pretty?”
Salzman kissed his ﬁngertips. “A little doll. On this I give you my words. Letme call the father tonight and you will see what means pretty.” (137)That she is nineteen appeals to Finkle, though the fact also makes him
skeptical, and he cannot help remarking, “I don’t understand why an
American girl her age should go to a marriage broker.” To this, Salzman’sanswer is the father: “He wants she should have the best, so he looks
around himself. . . . This makes a better marriage than if a young girlwithout experience takes for herself.” But the answer fails to convince
Finkle, who then gives away his belief in romantic love: “But don’t you
think this young girl believes in love?” Now it is the marriage broker,
rather than the future rabbi, who has to point soberly to the communal
principle of love: “Love comes with the right person, not before.” Theirony is clear here, as it is the kind of statement we expect from a rabbi.
The episode is given a further twist, however, when Finkle ﬁnallyinquires about her health. As a matter of fact, the girl happens to have aproblem with one of her legs. Salzman is obviously less than honest in
not informing Finkle about her disability until the moment when they
have almost reached an agreement, and, naturally, Finkle wants to claim
his right to be difﬁcult at this point, not necessarily because the beautiful girl is lame, but because Salzman turns out to be untrustworthy.
Finkle now recalls one of the conditions listed on the card, the fact thatthe girl’s father is a stomach doctor.
Leo got up heavily and went to the window. He felt curiously bitter andupbraided himself for having called in the marriage broker. Finally, he shookhis head.
“Why not?” Salzman persisted, the pitch of his voice rising.
“Because I detest stomach specialists.”“So what do you care what is his business? After you marry her do you need
him? Who says he must come every Friday night in your house?” (138)This is the passage I would like to focus on. Why is Finkle so negative
about the stomach specialist? Indeed, we cannot take literally what heWHAT’S WRONG WITH THE STOMACH SPECIALIST73

says about his dislike of the profession. His remark is a culmination ofa series of exchanges in which Salzman has continued to disappoint
Finkle, particularly the one in which he misleads Finkle by not telling
him everything about the girl’s physical condition. The remark is part ofan expression of Finkle’s exasperation; it can be about anything, provided that it lets him disagree with Salzman. But if it can be about anything, then why does he pick up on the father’s profession? Why does
Finkle suddenly jump to the idea of not liking a stomach specialist?
I would like to suggest that the reference is by no means arbitrary.
There are actually a number of scenes in “The Magic Barrel” in which
the narrative highlights the stomach. The ﬁrst moment comes in the
opening section when Salzman arrives smelling of ﬁsh:
Salzman, who had been long in the business, was of slight but digniﬁed build,wearing an old hat, and an overcoat too short and tight for him. He smelled
frankly of ﬁsh, which he loved to eat, and although he was missing a few
teeth, his presence was not displeasing, because of an amiable manner curiously contrasted with mournful eyes. (134)

Here, Salzman’s habit of eating ﬁsh is linked to his physical meagerness.
In the West, meat eating has traditionally been seen as a masculine act,
while vegetarianism is often considered feminine (Adams ch. 1). Fishdoes not easily ﬁt into such a meat/vegetable dichotomy, and the suggestion of an immigrant background should not be missed, but thedescription above suggests that Salzman’s eating habits are more-or-lessconsistent with his lack of bodily strength. Salzman is presented as
someone who does not put priority on meat, which renders him less masculine than those who do. That he is missing a few teeth may also be relevant, for we do not need to consult the Freudian symbolism of teeth toimagine his possible sexual dysfunction resulting from the deteriorationof his health. And, of course, if you lose teeth, you have problems chewing meat, while the difﬁculty can be less serious with ﬁsh.
Salzman claims he has piles of cards at home with records of important information about his clients, particularly information about thefathers. He selects six from the piles for Finkle, but he never discloses
what the standard is. That one of the fathers is a stomach specialist, while
another is a dentist, may provide a clue as to what the hidden standard
is:

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Lily H. High school teacher. Regular. Not a substitute. Has savings and new
Dodge car. Lived in Paris one year. Father is a successful dentist thirty-ﬁve
years. Interested in professional man. Well-Americanized family. Wonderful
opportunity. (136)This “successful dentist” might be the one Salzman consults for his own
teeth problems, if he visits one at all, but, more important, the dentist canbe part of a larger constellation of metaphors that cluster around the actof eating.
The most memorable scene of eating in the story comes after Finkle’s
successive refusals to accept Salzman’s proposals. After he dismisses
Salzman, Finkle gets depressed for reasons he is not quite sure of. He
manages to recover from his low mood by the end of the day by devoting himself to reading, but Salzman mysteriously arrives at Finkle’s door
as if to answer his need, which only Salzman realizes. The timing seems
to be wrong at ﬁrst, for Finkle is in no mood to listen to the news Salzman
brings. It is at this point that the marriage broker starts to eat:
“Please, Mr. Salzman, no more.”“But ﬁrst must come back my strength,” Salzman said weakly. He fumbled
with the portfolio straps and took out of the leather case an oily paper bag,from which he extracted a hard, seeded roll and a small smoked whiteﬁsh.
With a quick motion of his hand he stripped the ﬁsh out of its skin and began
ravenously to chew. “All day in a rush,” he muttered. (139)This is one of the most detailed descriptions of action in this short story.
Salzman’s handling of his food is described with shrewd observation of
his fastidiousness, which appears as a comical obsession, while the modesty of the package and Salzman’s unexplained determination to eat arealso indicative, when combined, of a certain mystical force. The frugal
meal is not only a sign of meanness and poverty; its simplicity creates
an atmosphere of ritualistic serenity, which is why Finkle feels forced tosit and watch the marriage broker ﬁnish his food.
Leo watched him eat.
“A sliced tomato you have maybe?” Salzman hesitantly inquired.
“No.” (139)The scene is bizarre, with the visitor avidly consuming his own food,
while the host just watches with a quizzical gaze. What actually takes

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place at this moment is a conﬂict between two readings of the act of eating: bringing in a meal to eat in front of his client is a demonstrative gesture that is meant to exhibit Salzman’s priestly power with its association
with the Eucharist, while Finkle, the future rabbi, refuses to acknowledge Salzman’s authority. Salzman wants to elevate eating to something
meaningful, perhaps to a symbolic ritual for reconciliation; but Finkle
resists the offer.
Somehow, however, Salzman has his way, and by the time he has eaten
up what he has brought with him, he seems to have gained the upper handand manages to get Finkle to do what he wants him to do.
The marriage broker shut his eyes and ate. When he had ﬁnished he carefullycleaned up the crumbs and rolled up the remains of the ﬁsh, in the paper bag.
His spectacled eyes roamed the room until he discovered, amid some pilesof books, a one-burner gas stove. Lifting his hat he humbly asked, “A glass
tea you got, rabbi?”
Conscience-stricken, Leo rose and brewed the tea. He served it with achunk of lemon and two cubes of lump sugar, delighting Salzman.
After he had drunk his tea, Salzman’s strength and good spirits were
restored. (139)This is a curiously quotidian scene, but what is working behind it is amanipulative power, and the magic comes from eating. Salzman’s meager food and his fastidious manner of eating may simply seem to markout how suspicious his business conduct is at ﬁrst, but Finkle is now
ready to accept whatever the marriage broker is going to propose. The
ritual has done the trick.
The act of eating is thus given a symbolic role in “The Magic Barrel.”With a rabbinical student at center stage, Judaism is clearly under focus
in many parts of the story, particularly when Finkle confesses to Lily, “Icame to God not because I loved Him but because I did not”(142). The
emphasis here is on the spiritual aspect, but the marriage broker’s occasional references to their Jewish background, through expressions suchas “Yiddish kindler” (140) and “ghetto” (144), direct our attention to thecommunal side of Judaism and remind us of the close relation between
food and religion. Regulations about what one eats often constitute an
essential part of religious practice, and Judaism is no exception. But what
is important to note here is that, while the act of eating quoted above
takes on a semimystical air, there is an inherently comic element in

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Salzman’s eccentric behavior, which is emphasized, for instance, by his
habit of keeping smelly ﬁsh in his briefcase. Eating can be sacred, but it
can also direct our eyes to the sordid reality of our daily life, where foodis associated with dirtier facts, such as human greed, folly, and misery.
This partly explains why, when Finkle discovers that Salzman lied toMiss Lily Hirschorn before he was introduced to her, his despair takes
the form of a daydream ﬁlled with images of food.
Lily wilted. Leo saw a profusion of loaves of bread go ﬂying like ducks highover his head, not unlike the winged loaves by which he had counted himself to sleep last night. Mercifully, then, it snowed, which he would not put
past Salzman’s machinations. (142)

The image of the winged loaves, a parody of Christ’s feeding of the multitude in the New Testament, is not a mere profanation of the sacred.4 As
a matter of fact, only through such a caricature—of food “ﬂying likeducks”—can we capture Salzman’s false priesthood. Salzman desecrates
whatever is sacred to Finkle: he keeps on calling Finkle “rabbi,” when
he is not yet ofﬁcially one, while warning him against a romantic belief
in love by reminding him of Judaic teachings on communal love. At one
moment he insists on the proﬁtability of marriage, while at another heprioritizes the beauty of his clients. His claim of priestly authority is thus
based on willful confusion of the sacred and the secular, a trick that may
well be embodied in the ugly image of the angelic bread that “go ﬂying
like ducks” (142) as well as in the confusion of Judaism and Christianity.
As the story gears up toward the climax, the ambivalent meaning offood is given a further twist. Salzman meets Finkle twice, but neither ofthe sessions leads to a success. The sense of letdown Finkle experiences
after he meets Lily is particularly strong. But Salzman shows up for athird time, this time with a manila packet with photographs of his female
clients. He has lost weight and looks ill. Finkle refuses to listen to him,and Salzman disappears. It is not until some time has passed—probably
some weeks—that Finkle ﬁnally grabs the packet left on the table bySalzman.
On the table was the packet. With a sudden relentless gesture he tore it open.
For a half hour he stood by the table in a state of excitement, examining thephotographs of the ladies Salzman had included. Finally, with a deep sigh heput them down. There were six, of varying degrees of attractiveness, but look

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at them long enough and they all became Lily Hirschorn: all past their prime,
all starved behind bright smiles, not a true personality in the lot. Life, despite
their frantic yoohooings, had passed them by; they were pictures in a briefcase that stank of ﬁsh. (145)The image of the emotionally starving women, who fail to ﬁnd their partner while in their prime, may be conventional; but what makes it a penetrating image is the smell of the ﬁsh.
“The Magic Barrel” is a story about human desires, not only sexual,
but also economic, religious, and even aesthetic. The food metaphor
reveals the inevitable darker side of these desires, for in most cases they
are left unfulﬁlled, condemning people to a state of emotional starvation.
But the stinking ﬁsh suggests more than that. The dichotomy is not only
the one between fulﬁllment and starvation. The stinking briefcase records what happened in the past: the smell is a residue of what was inthere. What stinks is the past, the irremediable time that is already gone
and cannot be retrieved. Food usually goes bad as time passes in a processthat demonstrates how vulnerable we are in the ﬂow of time. The smell
is a warning sign that the food is no longer good. There seems to be anexus of ideas here: the past, rotten food, disease, the sense of loss . . .
and evil. This brings us a step closer to the question of the stomach specialist.
III.

FOOD AND THE MIND

Malamud is known to have been preoccupied with the idea of having
a possible mental disease that he may have inherited from his parents
and passed on to his children. His biographer Philip Davis explains:
Given the mental instabilities in both families, but particularly on the
Malamud side, what were the chances of a child inheriting a tendency for
manic-depression or schizophrenia? One of the reasons that Malamud had
been reading the neo-Freudians, Henry Stack Sullivan and Karen Horney, inthe 1940s was that both of them rejected the idea that the schizophrenia wasbiologically determined and contested the view that little or nothing could
be done by psychiatric means. Malamud had been worried about his own
state; Ann in particular was worried about a future child, with Malamud often
reluctant to talk about it; and before them both was the deteriorating example of Eugene, Malamud’s younger brother. (73)

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Madness was certainly a threat to Malamud, with a number of his family members showing symptoms of mental illness. Even in a short story
like “The Magic Barrel” his preoccupation is manifested in the protagonist’s unsteady mental condition, which often affects his daily life.
Finkle’s hysterical outbursts at Salzman are clearly a result of his excessive expectations, something he does not seem to understand himself.
The ensuing unexplainable depression he falls into may, therefore, be aclassic case of Freudian melancholy, as is explored in “Mourning andMelancholy.” Freud suggests in the essay that clinical melancholy takes
place when the real cause of sadness is suppressed or remains unidentiﬁed and is not appropriately mourned; in such a situation the patient’s
ability to cope with the loss is seriously undermined.
Madness for Malamud, however, was not a purely mental problem. In
fact, it had a complicated relationship with his body. The disease that heofﬁcially suffered from was stomach ulcer; he was even exempted frommilitary service on this basis. But, while the disease might well havecome from the kind of life he led when he worked in his parent’s grocery store and in this sense originates in poverty, it was not unrelated tothe mental state he was in, as Philip Davis speculates.
[His stomach ulcer] was the result of nerves, as well as a long history ofirregular and skimpy meals taken between customers at the back of the store,especially in the years immediately following the death of the mother. But
Malamud was mortiﬁed when the local druggist said to him, out loud for all
around to hear, that his stomach problems might well be psychosomatic. (60)This is a tricky area, since it is almost impossible to draw a clear line
between bodily and mental diseases. And, of course, stomach ulcer used
to be considered psychosomatic, hovering in the borderline area between
mind and body, and even now, despite evidence that suggests that it could
be virus induced, we cannot dismiss mental stress as a mechanism of thedisease, since the immune system of the body is always under the inﬂuence of the psychological element and the function of some organs, particularly digestive ones, are closely linked with the nervous system. Whatis evident, however, is that this kind of sickness must have accustomed
Malamud not only to considering bodily symptoms in the light of mental problems but also, quite naturally, to a way of thinking that takes the
opposite direction: that is, he was forced to understand mental and evenspiritual matters through the language of the body.

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For Malamud the body meant the stomach. For a man who had to livewith his stomach problems, the act of eating was less a pleasure than acarefully regulated practice. Arguably, even his working hours wereplanned according to the way he ate:
His bedsit routine was ﬁrm: bed at 11.30, get up at 8.15; wash, breakfast, read
The Times, being at work by 10 until 12.30; shave, eat, read for an hour, backat work by 2.30; quit at 5, shower perhaps, read or listen to music until 5.40
and then dress to go to teach evening class; back by 10.20, drink milk, readagain, wash and go to bed. (61)

Ironically, Malamud’s rigorous adherence to his routine may be a signof his obsessive disposition and may have been a cause of, rather than asolution to, his stomach problems. Even so, such a routine must havesecured a perspective from which he could see the whole matter in termsof bodily practice. This was certainly a positive turn for him, since thesituation could otherwise have led to his feeling continually under the
threat of an invisible psychiatric disorder, which might or might not becausing his bodily symptoms. By subordinating the mind to the bodythrough practice, Malamud managed to get a sense that he was in control.
Indeed, such a preoccupation with habits and procedures may sometimes have proved an obstacle in his writing. There were a series of
exchange between him and his future wife Ann over his drafts of an autobiographical novel entitled “The Light Sleeper,” and in one of the letters, in 1944, she wrote to him:
As to your obsession with detail—is not that a reﬂection of your own life?
Please try to minimize details—in spite of your diet.
As to the lack of an encompassing emotion, which is reﬂected in thedryness of some of your writing—is that also a reﬂection of your life?
B[ernadette] remarked that your approach to love is “clinical.” Quote andunquote! (63)The novelist’s obsession with “detail” may have appeared almost “clinical” in the sense of pathological as well as highly dispassionate; there
could be something that lies behind all this. What Ann’s letter implies isthat his writing was lacking in some essential ingredient necessary forliterature, just as there was something missing in his life, particularly in
his relationship with Ann. Predictably, his response was harsh:

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If there is one thing that I have learned from sad and bitter experience, it isthat a writer should ask for no opinions until he has completed his ﬁrst draftof his entire novel. For the second time my morale has been smashed, andI’m trying to put together the pieces so that I can go on without trying torecast my idea still another time. (63)

It is remarkable that his emphasis is clearly on self-control, which takes
the form of an independent solitary activity tailored to his own needs.
This also means that he does not want to replace his “clinical” approachwith dangerous “emotion” that may lead him astray. Actually, it may be
precisely because he was suspicious about unreliable states of mind that
he turned to solid “detail” and rigorous control.
The concern with self-regulation is, of course, a peculiarly modern
one, but, more important, this modern idea of self-regulation often has
focused on illness. Combating illness became a great literary theme in
England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; at the center ofconcern was clinical melancholia, which attracted the attention of manyscholars and writers.5 As can be seen in Robert Burton’s inﬂuential
Anatomy of Melancholy, however, melancholy was an extremely complex amalgamation of various illnesses, with different symptoms requiring varying healing regimens. It is understandable that later generations
learned to take a more analytical approach by separating, rather than synthesizing, the conditions.
The mental side of melancholy was gradually taken over by the physiology of the nervous system in the nineteenth century, and by the twentieth century the word “melancholy” was no longer in medical use,
having been replaced by the more clinical term “depression.” Meanwhile, the bodily symptoms of melancholy were succeeded by “biliousness” and “dyspepsia,”6 both of which conditions involved digestive
problems that caused sickness and vomiting, but, as Hisao Ishizuka
explains, the former was under the spotlight in the 1820s, while the latter was brought into focus in the latter half of the century (129). Thomas
Carlyle was one of the ﬁrst authors who “discovered” dyspepsia; hemarked out his digestive problems as a distinct illness and decided thatthey derive from his lifestyle, particularly his eating habits. He is known
to have attempted to control his condition by sticking to a rigorous daily
routine with carefully planned menus (135–40).
By the twentieth century melancholy had become less prominent as aliterary motif, but its heirs could still be found in various forms. Its shadows can be traced not only in depression and neurosis, which are obvi-

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81

ously mental in their symptoms and origins, but also in more bodily
symptoms such as digestive illnesses. Considering that early modern
understanding of melancholy was based on the classical theory of thefour humors, which was based on the proportions of bodily ﬂuids, toexplain both mental and physical conditions, it should be no surprise thatmelancholy is still thought to have a bodily basis.
Such a synthetic nature of melancholy helped to develop its peculiar
hybridity; it denoted actual conditions, on the one hand, while it also
stood for a state of the mind that is sensitive to its own illnesses, better
known as hypochondria. The captivating power of melancholy as a cultural force, typically shown in Burton’s Anatomy, may, therefore, refer
us back to the often-held view about the modern self, that is, that it isformulated as an agent that tries to control its own problems—whether
they are economic, political, moral, aesthetic, or physical—through voluntary actions, which usually take the form of sustained practices. The
hypochondriacal self, alert to its own illnesses and signs of mental instability, turns out to provide a model for the modern self-regulatory subject who is responsible for his or her own health. In fact, the very ideaof modernity may well depend on the idea of the “sick self,” as Susan
Sontag convincingly shows in Illness as Metaphor; and, AIDS and Its
Metaphors.
IV.

FOOD AND ILLNESS“The Magic Barrel” is a story about desires. The characters are preoccupied with money, food, love, and marriage. More speciﬁcally,
Salzman’s appetite, coupled with his poverty, and Finkle’s search for abride, partly driven by a sexual need, are the main driving forces in thedevelopment of the narrative. At a deeper level, however, the story is
also about illnesses. Salzman, whose clients include a stomach specialist and a dentist, probably suffers from both stomach and dental problems. It is evident from his appearance and eating habits that he is notwell fed nor does he keep regular dining hours like Malamud when heworked in the grocery store, though he seems resilient despite these
symptoms. His wife looks no healthier; there is even an inkling of her
having a mental disorder or possibly dementia.
The illnesses Finkle suffers from are harder to determine. His pain ismental; he agonizes over the marriage issue, particularly after his meetings with the marriage broker, which often leads to anxiety and absentmindedness.

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All day he ran around in the woods—missed an important appointment, forgot to give out his laundry, walked out of a Broadway cafeteria without paying and had to run back with the ticket in his hand; had even not recognized
his landlady in the street when she passed with a friend and courteously called
out, “A good evening to you, Dr. Finkle.” By nightfall, however, he hadregained sufﬁcient calm to sink his nose into a book and there found peacefrom his thoughts. (139)

He is thus depicted as a worrying, indecisive man, who is liable to retreat
to private contemplation in the face of difﬁculties.
Typically, his agony comes after the event. The passage quoted above
follows his humiliating session with Salzman, while the one below
shows his state of mind after his disappointing meeting with Lily
Hirschorn:
He gradually realized—with an emptiness that seized him with six hands—
that he had called in the broker to ﬁnd him a bride because he was incapableof doing it himself. This terrifying insight he had derived as a result of his
meeting and conversation with Lily Hirschorn. Her probing questions had
somehow irritated him into revealing—to himself more than her—the true
nature of his relationship to God, and from that it had come upon him, withshocking force, that apart from his parents, he had never loved anyone. (143)The revelation is certainly shocking, but what really makes the blow
unbearable is that it arrives from the past. His realization that “apart fromhis parents, he had never loved anyone” is devastating mainly because
his fate is already sealed and the damage is irrecoverable. Things havealready happened, while Finkle has never known the truth, which means
he has been misreading himself and has been living on an empty, false
model of the self. This proves to be much more painful than an encounter
with a hostile future, as he is caught off guard; this is why he is throwninto panic.
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 of panic,
controlled only by extraordinary effort. He covered his face with his hands
and cried. (143)WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE STOMACH SPECIALIST

83

Though the scene takes place in the middle of the story, it is probably
one of the most emotional moments. It is moving, shocking, and revelatory, and the eloquence of the narrative voice seems to suggest that thisis a climax, even though there are further developments ahead. Perhaps
what is told here is true; perhaps Finkle is really “unloved and loveless.”
But it is also true that Finkle’s agony originates in his act of retrospection. What actually tortures him most is that his problems lie in the
unreachable territory of the past that can never be retrieved.
Preoccupation with the past is a well-known symptom of depression.
Finkle’s tendency to fall into a low mood is clear from the behaviors
depicted in passages we already observed. But there is another illness
that is relevant here, which is likewise past-oriented in nature. What I
would like to turn to is “dyspepsia,” mentioned in the previous section,a condition that refers to various sorts of indigestion. Those who sufferfrom dyspepsia are told by doctors to reﬂect on their past follies, such asintemperate eating, for the origin of their symptoms. A virus or bacteria, an enemy from outside, is not the only cause; a person has to ponder his or her past conduct to ﬁnd the real cause of the sickness, whether
it is choice of food or reckless lifestyle. Thus, it is thought to be a lackof discipline and restraint that burdens the digestive organs, and since itis only after the damage is done that mistakes are recognized, it is not
too much to say that dyspepsia is an illness coming from the past.
According to Gert Brieger, dyspepsia came to the attention of the medical profession in the United States in the period from 1800 to 1920,
chronologically paralleling a similar move in Britain. The symptoms varied, and, as one scholar put it, they included such wide-ranging conditions as “the repleted stomach, the tired stomach, the starved stomach,the painful stomach, the hurrying stomach, the acid stomach, the bitter
stomach, and last, but not least, the windy stomach” (183). While dyspepsia was considered a nerve-related illness, among its principal causes
were rapidity in eating, over-eating, the use of ice water, and the use of
reﬁned white ﬂour (183). It is easy to see from these assessments thatthe illness was regarded as more-or-less controllable by changes in a person’s lifestyle.
Since dyspepsia was not considered fatal, there was lack of clear data
regarding the symptoms,7 and this further blurred the already indistinct
proﬁle of the disease. Yet there also existed a view that “dyspepsia is
one of the most common, most fashionable, and most annoying nervous
symptoms of our modern society” (184), which may be partly explained

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by the wealth and overindulgence American people began to enjoy during this period. But it may also refer us back to the discussion regarding
the genesis of the modern individual. Dyspepsia serves as a convenientmodel for an individual who constructs his or her subjectivity throughan awareness of physical conditions. It typically highlights a lack of selfdiscipline and suggests the possibility of prevention through better daily
practices. Failing to be alert to the imminent threat may result not onlyin actual illness but also in painful recognition of past imprudence.
In “The Magic Barrel” there is no clear evidence that Finkle suffersfrom dyspepsia, but behind his mental state seems to lie the ethics of carethat is essential to the treatment of dyspepsia. Finkle suffers from thehorriﬁc decidedness of the past. He agonizes over the moment of revelation when “his whole life stood starkly revealed.” Even if this is anextreme case, and Finkle, in fact, is often quick to recover from his
despair, it is undeniable that he is a man peculiarly vulnerable to the menace of past mistakes; his sensitivity is reﬂected in his complex mixtureof disgust and sympathy toward the women whose photographs hereceives from Salzman; the women are sad because they all suffer fromconditions that their past conduct engendered, or that is how Finkle
understands it. He is horriﬁed by their apparent despair. That the womenare presented to him as candidates for his future wife is no less disturbing because he is led to imagine a situation in which he is involved intheir fate.
For Finkle it seems natural that the pictures come from “a briefcasethat stank of ﬁsh.” The smell of the ﬁsh is relevant here for the following reasons. First, it is suggestive of a residue of something that is nolonger there but that exerts a continuing inﬂuence. It is a metaphor forthe past that never goes away. But the smell is by no means fragrant; thestinking smell is explicitly negative and is even indicative of repugnant
bodily messes. The association is physical, while the context implies thatwhat lies behind it is spiritual or even moral. Here Finkle—and perhaps
Malamud himself—translates spiritual matter into the language of thebody.
Now we can come back to the question of the stomach specialist.
Finkle rather abruptly expresses his dislike of the “stomach specialist”
in the early part of the story.
“Why not?” Salzman persisted, the pitch of his voice rising.
“Because I detest stomach specialists.” (138)

WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE STOMACH SPECIALIST85

Finkle says he cannot accept the candidate because he does not like thejob of her father. This looks like a mere excuse or a casual gesture ofsabotage at this point, only meant to put an end to the conversation withthe marriage broker. But, in fact, Finkle’s aggressive reaction is part ofa bigger plot of the narrative, and it turns out to have a deeper implication.
“The Magic Barrel” was published in 1953, a date by which dyspepsia was no longer prevalent as a medical concept. But the views about
digestive disorders and, more generally, a person’s eating behavior did
not change so quickly, as is evident from the descriptions of Salzman’s
eating habits. What and how a person eats continues to reveal character.
What is important here is a way of thinking that relates stomach issues
to something beyond, that is, something moral and even spiritual, since,
as discussed, eating habits typically reveal a person’s attitude toward personal discipline and practice. Thus, the narrative close-up of Salzman’s
ugly eating habits suggests Finkle’s moral questioning of the marriage
broker, his suspiciousness about his business practices.
This could mean that the stomach specialist emerges as someone who
exercises moral authority. He can either blame or praise a person according to the way they have regulated their eating habits and controlled theirstomach conditions. His assessments are retrospective: he investigates apatient’s conduct and explains current conditions as inevitable results ofpast folly.
It is against this possible priestly authority of the stomach specialistthat Finkle shows his hatred. He is annoyed, not only because the stomach specialist is likely to question his rabbinical status by offering himself as an alternative moral authority, though that is not irrelevant. More
important, his hatred is directed toward the amphibious nature of the profession, which converts the physical into the mental and vice versa. We
can recall here how Malamud was mortiﬁed when a local druggist suggested that his stomach ulcer might be psychosomatic. A suggestion that
his symptoms might be partly mental was upsetting for him because it
obscured the boundary between body and mind.
In fact, blurring of the boundary is what Malamud resorts to himself,
rhetorically, at crucial moments, as is manifestly shown in a passage like“they were pictures in a briefcase that stank of ﬁsh.” The crossing of theborder between body and mind is actually an inevitable part of “The
Magic Barrel,” a development that Finkle tries to resist but eventually
succumbs to. He wants to separate the physical and the spiritual, which

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is probably why he is not willing to help Salzman consume his packageof food during their sessions and despises his smelly briefcase; but he isby no means free from the way of thinking the stomach specialist relies
on. The stomach specialist would point his ﬁnger to the past deeds of thepatient in a judgmental manner, while authoritatively prescribing selfregulation to prevent a similar occurrence in the future. He shows that
this is how one is supposed to compensate for the loss, that is, by capitalizing on the experience to anticipate and prevent another potential
loss. This is a way of thinking Finkle seems to share, as is shown in his
preoccupation with the irremediable past.
As long as he keeps separate the mind and the body, he will never beable to identify what he has lost in the ﬁrst place. The keys to the cureof his depression can only be found in the border area between body andmind. Just as Malamud’s stomach ulcer could have been caused by mental stress, the depression Finkle falls into may well come not only fromhis resentment against the marriage broker but from his own body, particularly his sexual frustration. When he is devastated after he realizes
he has been “loveless and unloved” all his life, he still does not understand that it is his insistence on the separation of the spiritual from thephysical that may have caused it.
Is the ending of the story a happy one then? It looks as if Finkle has
ﬁnally met a woman, Stella, who fulﬁlls his sexual fantasy. Salzman’s
prayer for the dead is ambiguous in its implication; by yielding to sexual desire, does Finkle now overcome his hatred of the stomach specialist
and ﬁnally unite the physical and the spiritual? Is this a way for Finkle
to control his body and mind? The answer is “yes” for Stephen Bluestone,
who concludes that
Finkle forges a deﬁnitive link between his personal spiritual quest and theerotic life. Though Pinye Salzman may well have “arranged” the outcome,Finkle’s selection of a bride suggests his freely taken ﬁrst step on the road tosexual maturity. (407–8)

I agree with Bluestone on this point, but it is also true that, despite theunion of the man and the woman, and despite the Kaddish chanting, thetone is not necessarily celebratory, since Salzman’s prayer is “for thedead” (149). What we might note is that near the end Finkle continues
to look backward, while not really realizing where the problems comefrom: “Leaving the cafeteria, he was, however, afﬂicted by a tormenting

WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE STOMACH SPECIALIST

87

suspicion that Salzman had planned it all to happen this way” (149). By
thus continuing to blame Salzman for his fate, Finkle fails to have a clear
perspective or a command of his own life, which is why, ironically, thebroker ﬁnds him a good customer and never stop meddling in his affairs.
Finkle is thus destined to be a permanent good patient; he cannot do without a godlike stomach doctor, whom he detests but must turn to in orderto handle his problems for the rest of his life.
NOTES
1
Although in this essay my discussion is mainly about “The Magic Barrel,” eating
scenes abound in Malamud’s works. For instance, Joel Salzberg has focused on how
food serves as a symbol of temptation in “The Girl of My Dreams,” which he reads asa Malamudian experiment with the genre of quest romance.
2
See Sloan (51) for critical remarks on Salzman’s ambiguous nature.
3
See Dessner (254) for how the narrative mixes the language of Orthodox Judaismwith that of Christianity.
4
Compare: “And they say unto him, We have here but ﬁve loaves, and two ﬁshes./
He said, Bring them hither to me./ And he commanded the multitude to sit down on thegrass, and took the ﬁve loaves, and the two ﬁshes, and looking up to heaven, he blessed,and brake, and gave the loaves to his disciples, and the disciples to the multitude./ Andthey did all eat, and were ﬁlled: and they took up of the fragments that remained twelvebaskets full”(Matt. 14.17–20).
5
Literature on the subject abounds, but particularly useful here is Douglas Trevor’s
The Poetics of Melancholy in Early Modern England.
6
Melancholy, which is a result of the increase of “Black Choler,” was considered tocause various bodily symptoms. Herman Boerhaave in Aphorisms: Concerning the
Knowledge and Cure of Diseases (1735) explains how Black Choler affects bodily functions: “[H]ence it extends, gnaws, and corrupts the Vessels by its increased Bulk, its present Acrimony, and continual Motion; hence the like Destruction of the Spleen, Stomach,
Pancreas, Caul, Mesentery, Intestines, and Liver . . .” (Radden 178).
7“As to frequency of dyspepsia, the historian has some trouble in evaluating the data.
In the ﬁrst place, the data are rarely expressed in numbers because the disorder was usually not fatal, not reportable, and was for so long mired in a maze of varying nomenclature” (Brieger 184).

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Brieger, Gert H. “Dyspepsia: The American Disease? Needs andOpportunities for Research.” Rosenberg. 179–90.

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