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Limning The Cannibal Galaxy: Cynthia Ozick's Moral Imagination
Criticism, Fall, 1998 by Arlene Fish Wilner
This cultural cleavage becomes a personal one as Joseph is deeply wounded by the betrayal of Claude. Having been branded as a traitor by the young man he had thought closest to himself in intellect and spirit, Brill rejects what he now views as the moral dangers implicit in literature and history and turns instead to the study of astronomy, attracted by its "universality" and by its detachment from distinctly human concerns. However, his experiences during the war--the burning of Rabbi Pult's books; the disappearance of Pult and of most of his own family; his narrow escape from the Nazis and his months of hiding, first in the cellar of a girls' convent school, then in a hayloft; his reading of the old priest's library, including works by the Jewish/Christian Edmond Fleg--inspire him to unite his "two minds" by founding a school based on a double curriculum: "the fusion of scholarly Europe and burnished Jerusalem.... the civilization that invented the telescope side by side with the civilization that invented conscience--astronomers and God-praisers uniting in a majestic dream of peace" (27). Even at his most idealistic, Brill does see the irony of the juxtaposition of Pult's Ta'anit and Proust's Sodome et Gomorrhe. The incongruity of Proust's rare literary gift for revealing the telling detail nestled next to Rav's profound moral seriousness is "a joke" that makes him laugh out loud for the first time during his months of hiding. Nonetheless he decides to make his dream of cultural integration a reality in the new, untainted world of middle America.
The naive attempt to pass on the richness of each tradition, however, turns out to be an abandonment of both. Brill fails to recognize that the depth of the struggle he feels can come only from a deep immersion in and profound commitment to each culture, from hours of patient tutoring by Rabbi Pult alongside the magnetic power of the Musee Carnavalet and the seductive portraits of Madame de Sevigne and her beautiful daughter. In striking out for the virgin territory of "middle America"--described in terms that suggest both unexceptionality and a pathetic kind of "freedom" from tradition of any kind--he retains only the most superficial connection with both his national and his spiritual identities. Ultimately Brill is forced to admit what the reader, through the penetrating ironies of the narrative voice, has known all along: that the attempt to escape cultural cannibalization--that is, the subsumption of the minority or marginalized tradition by the majority or institutionalized one--through simple juxtaposition is doomed to failure. In the process, values become distorted, essential elements lose their distinction in a soup of mediocrity, the dipper of ocean water becomes not enriched, but cloudy and muddied.
The very nature of Brill's impulse toward an inclusive "duality" is, according to Ozick, a movement away from Judaism. In an essay exploring the nature of Jewish accommodation of Enlightenment values, Ozick insists, as she often does, on the necessity for "ultimate distinctions": "Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality tend (more than intend) to break down distinctions, and right conduct can emerge only out of the stringent will toward distinction-making. The rabbinic way is to avoid blur, to see how one thing is not another thing, how the road is not the arrival, the wish not the deed, the design not the designer, man not God."(10) Losing sight of such distinctions, and founding what he sees as a Jewish Sorbonne in a new world "untainted by human adventure," Brill discovers his failures too late. What Brill lacks might be called the messianic vision. Unable to "dream the end," to see himself as part of a necessary continuum of development and change, he chooses stasis and discontinuity. Cutting himself off from his past like the Jewish intellectuals whom Ozick takes to task for having lazily accepted Enlightenment values uncritically, he remains mired in "ennui" and "triviality," giving up reading altogether in favor of mindless television programs.(11)
