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Limning The Cannibal Galaxy: Cynthia Ozick's Moral Imagination
Criticism, Fall, 1998 by Arlene Fish Wilner
5
The exploitation of Beulah is not the only sort of cannibalization with which he charges Hester. Paralyzed by an impossible definition of originality that impoverishes his mental and spiritual life by dividing him from others, Brill sees Hester's transmutations of the work of others as "theft" and thus betrays his serious misunderstanding of the highest artistic work. For Ozick, as for Hester, ahistoricism is akin to amorality. As Elaine Kauvar has shown in explicating the literary allusions in Ozick's texts, hers are fictions that do homage to the past, elaborating and diversifying the themes of Plato's dialogues and the Bible, of Homer and Virgil, of Hawthorne and James, of T. S. Eliot and Bernard Malamud.(27) The very allusiveness of Ozick's writing, its insistence that its readers acknowledge the inexorable forces of history and the anxiety of influence--potentially paralyzing but ultimately liberating--locates originality not in a void but in a moral and historical continuum. In a recent essay she called (borrowing an observation from Henry James) "`It Takes a Great Deal of History to Produce a Little Literature,'" Ozick wrote, "the inevitable accompaniment of belles-lettres is a sense of indebtedness."(28) For Ozick the only meaningful kind of originality is not sui generis; rather it manifests its debt to history, to a specific tradition or cultural locus. In "The Riddle of the Ordinary" (first published in 1975) as in much of her writing, Ozick explicitly distances herself from what she sees as the materiality and consequent moral dangers of pure estheticism, rejecting as idolatrous the "enlightenment" philosophy of ars gratia artis. It is notable that Brill feels "weak" when he skims the final pages of Hester's book entitled Interpretation as an End in Itself, an oeuvre that is clearly a response to the modern view of art for art's sake (48). Confusing originality with disjunction from the past, Brill is blind to the value of re-vision (reseeing) as Hester is not. What Hester (and Ozick) regard in great art as intrinsic and necessary indebtedness to the past, he can see only as a kind of "theft" (158) and thus never fully appreciates Hester's creativity.
