[The] confrontation of text and society is the subject of Bernard Malamud's The Tenants …, which portrays very clearly the nature of traditional romantic beliefs about the reality of the literary text and the breakdown of these beliefs when they are confronted by social realities which directly contradict and confront them with an aggressive urgency and power born out of suffering and a need for help from all institutions, including art. I would not argue that The Tenants is one of the greatest of modern novels, but it is extraordinarily powerful and compelling in its realization of the view that is central to the conception of literature as a social institution: that literature and the arts are inescapably a part of society, and that the central literary values, though they are not totally socially determined, do respond in a dialectical manner to what takes place and is believed in that society.
Bernard Malamud, a writer with a strong investment in the craft tradition and the literary work as object, has dramatized the deconstruction of the literary text in a way which makes clear why it is becoming impossible for the writer any longer to believe that literature can remain independent of the world. Malamud begins with an image of what he considers the present situation of the writer…. [The] House of Fiction built by Flaubert and Henry James, has degenerated in The Tenants into a squalid New York City tenement inhabited as the story begins by a solitary writer. Once there had been a small garden on the roof where the writer often sat after a day's work, looked at the sky and the clouds, "and thought of Wm. Wordsworth."… But those recollections in tranquility have passed, along with Wordsworth's belief that poets make the world in their poetry, and now the garden is sterile, and unvisited. Below the garden, the building is untenanted except for a solitary person, the latter-day writer Harry Lesser, who lives, with many locks on his door, as high up in the building as he can, but without a view. The landlord Levenspiel has found the old-style tenement unprofitable and, in order to tear the building down and replace it with a more economical structure of modest size with stores on the bottom floor, has evicted all the tenants except Lesser, who refuses to go. But he is prevented from carrying out his practical plans by Lesser's refusal, protected by various laws on tenants' rights, to vacate. The House of Fiction has been invaded by the world and has degenerated into a fearsome place of decay and terror. (pp. 76-7)
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