Limning The Cannibal Galaxy: Cynthia Ozick's Moral Imagination

Whether she is viewed as essayist (usually lucid and accessible) or creator of fictions (dense with metaphor, allusion, and parable), Cynthia Ozick resists categorization. In the 1983 essay collection entitled Art and Ardor, reviewer Katha Pollitt saw three not entirely friendly coauthors--Ozick the rabbi, Ozick the feminist, and Ozick the disciple of Henry James.(1) The first and last of these--religion and esthetics--have received increasing amounts of attention, and even within these areas she is perceived as indefinable and subtly evolving. Michael Greenstein, for example, sees in The Cannibal Galaxy and The Messiah of Stockholm a movement away from the high Modernism of her earlier works to a postmodern esthetic of deconstruction and anti-signification.(2) Ozick the feminist, however, has not garnered much attention, in part because gender as an issue is rarely seen to loom as large in Ozick's fiction as the oft-noted pervasive themes that thread through her work--the dangerous tendency of artistic creativity and appreciation to become a kind of idolatry; the problem of artistic originality (the "anxiety of influence"); the moral and spiritual obligation of Jews in the Diaspora to maintain their cultural identity and to see themselves within a living history.

Indeed, until the recent publication of The Puttermesser Papers, Ozick's fictions have rarely invited feminist readings or even readings that recognize femaleness as a state of being to be pondered and reckoned with. For one thing, Ozick early in her career, fearing reghettoization, explicitly took a stand against the feminist camp that demanded recognition of the uniqueness of writing by women. In addition, the style of Ozick's fiction writing itself seems a deterrent to those who would seek in it a female--much less a "feminine"--sensibility. An admirer who has studied her work in detail has called her fictions "uncompromising";(3) but other critics are less sympathetic to the intensity, allusiveness, and compression of her writing, which may seem fueled by anger and hostility; or to her imagery, which can be shocking, challenging, or otherwise disconcerting. One critic finds her narrative voices "unfriendly"(4) and an erudite reviewer, in whose eyes she fares poorly when compared with Philip Roth, sees her as "finally too cerebral," too abstract. The latter takes her to task for the "violent extravagance of [her] metaphors--flaming or bursting eyeballs ... a plethora of vomiting, slashing, gouging, battering" as though Ozick were a clever moviemaker relying on ingenious and shocking special effects to titillate the audience.(5)

Ironically, the disjunction between thought and feeling which some feel characterizes her fiction is decidedly absent in her rare personal memoir, "A Drugstore in Winter." Unsentimental, lyrical, and moving, the essay recounts childhood moments recollected in tranquility as the young Cynthia escapes the banal cruelties of early schooldays by losing herself in Lang's fairy tales, borrowed from the Traveling Library, and absorbed within the warmth of her father's Bronx pharmacy. The books "transform" her: "I am a luckless goosegirl, friendless, and forlorn. In P.S. 71 I carry, weighty as a cloak, the ineradicable knowledge of my scandal--cross-eyed, dumb, an imbecile at arithmetic; in P.S. 71 I am publicly shamed because I am caught not singing Christmas carols; in P.S. 71 I am repeatedly accused of deicide.... I am incognito. No one knows who I truly am."(6)

Despite the emotional distancing and intellectual gymnastics that have alienated some critics, Ozick's oeuvre can be read as a continuing quest to define who she "truly is." Of course, Ozick's grappling with questions of identity is not the obviously self-centered compulsion that readers of Philip Roth and viewers of Woody Allen films have come to know so well and either love or hate. Ozick's fictions are neither self-referential nor self-reverential in the way Roth's and Allen's are. Her protagonists and characters are not obvious alter egos. The fact that they are often male increases the difficulty of reading Ozick herself into them. Yet, Ozick's work, no less intensely than that of her male counterparts, engages her readers in the moral and emotional quandaries of divided loyalties, hopelessly imperfect self-knowledge, and intellectual angst. Moreover, the three "co-authors" that Pollitt found in Art and Ardor irremediably estranged from each other coalesce in The Cannibal Galaxy. If her essays suggest to some readers a fragmented trio of personas, her fiction, I would argue, reveals a trinity--the thematic integration of the rabbi, the feminist, and the artist. Ultimately, Ozick does not see a conflict between her dedication to Judaism, her identity as a woman, and her role as an artist; indeed, each role is finally implied in the others, and all of them depend on the same sort of ongoing struggle --a struggle against Sloth, against the "slide into nature" to which we naturally wish to succumb.(7) My purpose here is to show how her short novel The Cannibal Galaxy, not only illustrates this fusion of apparently fragmented identifies but also ambitiously imagines a melding of cultural traditions that seem unalterably at odds.