“On a gray afternoon I sit in a silent room and contemplate din. In the street a single car passes-a rapid bass vowel-and then it is quiet again. So what is this uproar, this hubbub, this heaving rumble of zigzag static I keep hearing? This echo chamber spooling out spirals of chaos? An unmistakable noise as clearly mine as fingerprint or twist of DNA: the thrum of regret, of memory, of defeat, of mutability, of bitter fear, made up of shame and ambition and anger and vanity and wishing . . . But innerness-this persistent internal hum-is more than lamentation and desire. It is the quiver of intuition that catches experience and draws it to a close, to be examined, interpreted, judged.”
So begins the title piece of Cynthia Ozick’s fifth collection of literary essays, which focus, as always, on the essential joys of great literature in general and the traditional realist novel in particular. Ozick challenges readers to consider and reconsider what is neither the trivial nor second-rate, but the more urgent, more significant among the quivers of intuition in writings that stand out against the crowd.
Ozick’s 18 mazy, meandering, many-threaded essays that fall between a Foreword “On Discord and Desire” and the Afterword’s “An (Unfortunate) Interview with Henry James” achieve a unity of sorts by taking up the “memorable and mottled trail” that Susan Sontag left in her wake. “Taste,” Sontag famously wrote in “Notes on Camp” in 1965, “governs every free-as opposed to rote-human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion-and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is a kind of taste: taste in ideas.” Sontag’s manifesto, Ozick notes in her Foreword, “nearly single-handedly (though she soon had an army behind her) altered the culture. ‘The best that has been thought and said’-Matthew Arnold’s exalted old credo, long superannuated- devolved to ‘Whatever.’” Sontag’s “denigration of history” in the name of “infinite appetite” has “meant the end of the distinction between high and low” and “made a cut in the common understanding” so deep that “oddly, oddly, oddly! . . .[her] newly elitist doctrine of ‘the condition of our senses’ came to resemble the ‘I know what I like’ of the once-upon-a-time philistines and Babbitts.” Ozick recognizes that there is no going back but only the longing to do so, a longing Sontag herself voiced only months before she died when she told interviewers that she wished she had written traditional novels rather than those radical essays that had declared literary realism to be passé and lauded faux French anti-novels for their stringent adherence to an arid metaphysics.
In the name of that longing, out of that common desire she shares with the recanting Sontag to find a different structure, content, quality and importance to the satisfactions derived from the novel than from other kinds of satisfactions, Ozick reads or rereads novelists, essayists, poets: Leo Tolstoy, John Updike, Saul Bellow, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, Helen Keller, Sylvia Plath, Delmore Schwartz, Lionel Trilling, Azar Nafisi, Jonathan Franzen, Philip Roth, Isaac Babel, Gershom Scholem, Robert Alter and assorted others; her goal is to demonstrate in what ways it remains “still possible to separate high from low, the enduring from the ephemeral” and “to aver that the intellect itself (and the ethical life as well) requires the making of distinctions-sorting out, acknowledging that one thing is not another, facing down blur and fusion and the moral and aesthetic confusion of false equivalence, and, in the name of appetite for life, false worth.” Here’s a sampling of what she finds:
“[Helen Keller] was a member of the race of poets, the Romantic kind; she was close cousin to those novelists who write not only what they do not know, but what they cannot possibly know. . . The most persuasive story of Helen Keller’s life is what she said it was: ‘I observe, I think, I feel, I imagine.’ She was an artist. She imagined.”
“Updike’s dialogue is spare and unerring, but nuance and image ride his nouns and verbs in consciously intricate dress; he is far closer to baroque Nabokov than to stripped Hemingway. The themes that absorb him above all others are eros and God; or the mysteries of women and death. . . . What is notable, and curious, in Updike is that his sexual scenes seem as distanced and skeptical as a lapsed seminarian’s meticulously recited breviary, while his God-seeking passages send out orgasmic shudders, whether of exaltation or distress.”
“Fiction is subterranean, not terrestrial. Or it is like Tao: say what it is, and that is what it is not. . . Fiction does not invent out of a vacuum, but it invents; and what it invents is, first, the fabric and cadence of language, and then a slant of idea that sails out of these as a fin lifts from the sea . . . .[Bellow’s] words are unruly because they refuse to be herded into categories of style; they are high, low, schtick, soft-shoe, pensive, mystical, sermonic, eudaemonic-but never catatonic; always on the move, in the swim, bathed in some electricity-conducting effluvium . . . Bellow’s jumpy motor has more in common (while not so fancy) with the engine that ratchets Gerard Manley Hopkins’s lines-that run-run-turn-stop!- than with any prose ancestor. . . It is not the nature of subject matter that defines a novel. It is the freedom to be at home in any subject matter.”
“Sylvia Plath’s posthumous celebrity-her legend-has pitched her into a protean plastic weightlessness. . . She was not a bluestocking or a half-bohemian like the rest of the strenuous literary strivers of her generation. She never went down to the Village to gawk at Auden shuffling along in his carpet slippers . . . Instead she sailed up to Mademoiselle as a fashion-magazine prizewinner and interviewed Marianne Moore as her prize, wearing a double string of pearls and a flat little hat of her own over a polished every-hair-in-place pageboy. She was both Emily Dickinson and Betty Crocker-which is why the journals are inscrutable, and in this respect more shocking than the suicide.”
Although there are those who would have us think that “Ozick may be the last person around to believe that writers are, or ought to be, on the side of the angels” (Dan Hofstadter, Wall Street Journal), or wonder “if she were to have her way, whether fiction could survive her demands, whether she might not intimidate it out of existence”(Anatole Broyard, the New York Times), Cynthia Ozick is a worthy successor of Lionel Trilling and spokesperson for all those who defend the notion that “Art is the criticism of life” against the “perfervid and constantly evanescing succession of rapidly outmoded theoretical movements: structuralism, deconstruction, cultural studies, gender studies, queer studies, postcolonialism,” and whatever “academic piddlings and ephemeral public trivia” next “debase discourse through hollow breeziness and the incessant scramble for the cutting edge.” She understands, as few do, that “downloading specialized knowledge-one of the encyclopedic triumphs of communications technology-is an act equal in practicality to a wooden leg: it will support your standing in the world, but there is no blood in it.”
Ozick is anything but bloodless as she suggests through the “sardonically grim grin” of her concatenating ironies that it is not only possible but desirable “in the name of appetite for life” to read “against the grain of Sontag’s torn banner” and separate “the enduring from the ephemeral”-to pay real attention, for instance, to Philip Roth’s “authoritative prose of matchless literary appetite” without taking much notice of Norman Mailer’s “noisy, nasty, competitive display of . . . self-confessed self-aggrandizement.”
T.F. Rigelhof (Books in Canada)
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[Signature]Reviewed by
Daphne MerkinEver since she first started offering up her fiercely (and often unfashionably) judgmental opinions over three decades ago, the din in Cynthia Ozick's head has been worth listening to—even if you don't agree with her conclusions. "This persistent internal hum," as she characterizes it in her latest essay collection, is set off most memorably by "the individual's solitary engagement with an intimate text," be it John Updike's early stories, Sylvia Plath's journals, or Robert Alter's new translation of the Pentateuch. In our cacophonous Age of Buzz, where eloquent literary reflection has gone the way of Wite-Out, Ozick prides herself on resisting the blandishments of popularity for the highbrow's more discriminating vantage point. "Readers are not the same as audiences," she reminds us sternly in "Highbrow Blues," "and the structure of a novel is not the same as the structure of a lingerie advertisement."Although Ozick is equipped with the kind of intellectual muscle that marked Susan Sontag's strongest writing—the opening essay, "On Discord and Desire," pays qualified homage to Sontag—she also has a rigorous (some might say self-righteous) moral sense and a distrust of radical chic that draws her to burnishing eclipsed reputations, which she does in moving appreciations of Lionel Trilling and Delmore Schwartz, and to upholding classical values, as espoused by Saul Bellow or the Bible. Ozick is most effective when she has more rather than less room to expatiate; the best pieces here are capaciously rendered, like an inspired reconsideration of Gershom Scholem. To be sure, at however exalted an altitude she pitches her criticism, Ozick is not above fretting about the vagaries of celebrity and, indeed, seems never to have accommodated herself to the relative obscurity that attends upon a more elitist calling. I assume it is to this end that we are treated once again to an account of her youthful obsession with writing a Jamesian novel ("James, Tolstoy, and My First Novel")—a miscalculation that clearly preys on her. Perhaps it is her wish to make up for her late start that has led her to include every piece of occasional writing she has done (including a review of Joseph Lelyveld's memoir,
Omaha Blues, that I remember reading the first time around). If this collection is not the strongest of the four she has published, Ozick's is a strikingly independent and articulate voice, one that rises above the noise of the madding crowd with rare clarity and force.
Daphne Merkin is the author of Enchantment
, a novel, and Dreaming of Hitler
, a collection of essays. She is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine
and writes a bimonthly book column, Provocateur, for Elle.
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