SOURCE: Brown, Peter C. “Negative Capability and the Mystery of Hope in Malamud's ‘The First Seven Years.’” Religion and Literature 29, no. 1 (spring 1997): 63-94.

In the following essay, Brown explores Malamud's “radical dissent from contemporary despair” in “The First Seven Years.”

“Negative capability” is the capacity to register a faithful incongruity or vital mystery. John Keats, who first identified this quality of literary sensibility for us, associated it with a kind of incongruous verisimilitude or self-effacing willingness to let be. In this, he seems to have assumed that “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts” are our native condition—to be preserved by the true poet (and betrayed by the philosopher). However, the post-Romantic temper of our technological age leaves little enough in the shadow, including those shadings of human possibility or hope long associated with the humanism of the West. In particular, the black sun over Auschwitz has cast in sharp relief...