Limning The Cannibal Galaxy: Cynthia Ozick's Moral Imagination

Arlene Fish Wilner

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.

1

The Cannibal Galaxy, an elaboration of Ozick's previously published story "The Laughter of Akiva" (New Yorker, November 10, 1980), tells of Frenchman Joseph Brill, whose experience as a refugee from the Nazis resolves him to open a school in America based on a "dual curriculum" that allies traditional Jewish studies with the intellectual legacy of the European Enlightenment. The necessity for struggle is conveyed through the portrayal of Brill, the limited omniscient narrator, and of Hester Lilt, the enigmatic and intellectual mother of the least promising child in Brill's school. Brill's motto, ad astra, is a sad joke: he has given up both his early infatuation with literature and his ambition to be a great astronomer in order to be merely ordinary. In the end, his dreams of leaving a great legacy have come to nothing: his generations of pupils, with the exception of Beulah Lilt, are undistinguished; at the age of seventy-six he is forced to retire; the school he had founded with swelling idealism is stripped of its name and its motto, both redolent of formative experiences in his youth. Brill's vision of a children's Sorbonne "dense with Hebrew melodies, a Sorbonne grown out of an exiled Eden,"(8) is exposed (early to the reader, much later to Brill) as a retreat from ambition, a failure of the will dressed out as a dream of fruitful union that turns out to be an impossible compromise whose only issue is stifling mediocrity. Brill's own spiritual and intellectual potential is never realized because, as Hester bluntly tells him, he "stopped too soon." Seeing his options as "the heights or nothing," he has chosen nothing, yet continues to cultivate the illusion that his little pedagogical fiefdom is aspiring to great spiritual and intellectual heights. Sadly, he projects his own affliction onto the children, assuming like the teacher Gorshak and the school psychologist Glypost that he can "predict and command the future" (46) based on feeble, early signs, which are always inadequate. Hence his pity, mixed with contempt, for what he perceives as the emptiness of Beulah, whom he sees, in his blindness, as impossibly dull despite her brilliant mother. As both man and teacher Brill lives a truncated existence.

It is through the "cannibal" metaphor of the title that the reader is urged to integrate the triple persona of the author as rabbi, feminist, and artist. The "rabbi" is concerned with the annihilation of Judaism by post-Enlightenment culture. When Joseph is spurned as a "Dreyfus" after rejecting the homosexual advances of a classmate (Claude), he finds himself socially and intellectually isolated. Disillusioned to find that even the greatest Enlightenment thinkers, such as Voltaire, were tainted by anti-Semitism, he seeks solace from his religious teacher, Rabbi Pult, who offers instead of comfort a bitter irony: "`Joseph, the Enlightenment engendered a new slogan: There is no God, and the Jews killed him. Joseph, this is the legacy of your Enlightenment'" (16). This irony--"the joke of the Enlightenment"--is bred in the gap between the illusion cultivated by European Jews that an enlightened and civilized Europe is willing to accept them as "men abroad and Jews at home"(9) and the reality of an ineradicable anti-Semitism. As a French Jew, Brill wants to see himself as heir to a double heritage, but the melding of these traditions--what Ozick has elsewhere referred to as "the fusion of secular aesthetic culture with Jewish sensibility"--is only a dream. The rift between the two traditions is long and deep, possibly irreconcilable. Rabbi Pult's library, as rich and concentrated as "a dipper of ocean water" yet has "not a single volume in French" (23). And the Louvre, for all its classical treasures, yet fails even to acknowledge the existence of a different strain of ancient culture: "It was as if there had never been a Hebrew people, no Abraham or Joseph or Moses. Not a trace of holy Israel" (131).

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)

But the tragedy of his great mistake, because it is the basis of his educational philosophy, is not his alone. The pupils in the Edmond Fleg Elementary School also suffer from Brill's failure of vision. Ironically, Brill accuses Hester Lilt of "cannibalizing" her own child by spinning out brilliant theoretical arguments that appear to make a virtue of what Brill believes is the child's "dullness." It is Brill, however, who continues to be self-deceived, in fact developing his own theory of Beulah's needs and motives to avoid confronting his own neediness, hypocrisy, and failure to persevere. It is Brill, not Beulah, who uses others for his own purposes. The narrator is clearly in sympathy with Hester's portrayal of Brill's pedagogy as an analogue to the phenomenon of cannibal galaxies: "those megalosaurian colonies of primordial gases that devour smaller brother-galaxies--and when the meal is made, the victim continues to rotate like a Jonah-Dervish inside the cannibal, while the sated ogre-galaxy, its gaseous belly stretched, soporific, never spins at all--motionless as digesting Death" (69). The last phrase describes both Brill and the Edmond Fleg School. Brill survives parasitically--slothfully--on the dream of a double culture while generating its "atmosphere," but not its substance: "by now everything was memory... he no longer seriously read.... he dozed away nights in the shifting rays of lampless television, stupefied by Lucy, by the tiny raspy voiced figures of the Flintstones; by the panic-struck void" (40-41). Moreover, this emptiness and inauthenticity inevitably inform the philosophy and practice of his school, where the teachers "cannibalize" their students--repressing emerging personalities by identifying "potential" early and inflexibly, forcing them into rigid patterns of conformity, and rewarding predictable behaviors while disparaging those who are not immediate "successes" within the system.

The emptiness of Brill's pedagogy attracts parents who seek style and status rather than substance. Nouveau-riche professionals, mostly physicians, the fathers too are conspicuous consumers who cultivate lives of luxurious ease, dedicating disposable income to expensive recreational pursuits while paying only lip service to culture, tradition, and education. The school needs microscopes, but the parents buy sailboats. Failing to recognize how they reflect each other, Brill and the parents are engaged in an ongoing antagonism: he sees them as greedy, stingy, and lacking in culture; they see him as at best "brilliance gone to seed," at worst a failure both as scholar and pedagogue. Nothing changes because each side has cynically cast its lot with the status quo. The fathers will continue to pay their children's tuition at the Edmund Fleg school to maintain the illusion that their overindulged scions are being taught to aspire to great intellectual heights. Thus each side agrees to use, or cannibalize, the other in order to mask failed aspirations or hollow, parochial values.

2

Brill's deepest contempt, however, is reserved for the mothers of his students. It is a sneering contempt that trivializes these women by reducing their apparently obsessive interest in the academic and social progress of their children to a ferocious hormonal imperative that demands that no child be "ordinary." Brill's motto, ad astra, is meant to suggest a quest for an understanding of humanity's place in the universe, its history and its future; but unlike Hester, whose view of the cosmos as "a long finger tapping" allows for pity, compassion, and redemption, he sees in the galaxies only an "inhuman ... terrible coldness," a detachment that shapes his contemptuous and unforgiving interpretation of human nature and, especially, of maternal behavior.

Ozick's portrayal of the mothers as seen through Brill's eyes is mercilessly revealing not only of their limitations, but also of his fiercely reductive misogyny:

   he saw them as nature's creatures, by which he meant vehicles instinct with
   secretion: the pocketmouth of the uterus, motherhood red in tooth and claw.
   Even when he yielded, he mastered them because they had arrived as
   petitioners, as suppliants, and to yield was to consummate mastery--it was
   the sign of his scepter. The mothers had no humor, no irony, only fury.
   They beat on and on: my child, the other children; the teacher; the word
   lists; the homework. He saw how their anger was stimulated by the mammary
   glands. They were no more than antagonistic reflexes brewed in the scheme
   of the stars. Miniature caldrons of solar momentum. (40)

At first Hester seems totally unlike these other women, but her difference from them is unnerving to Brill. He is disconcerted by her independence and autonomy (where is her husband? who is the father of her child?) and by qualities that defy his epistemological certainties regarding the category of "woman": her resonant voice, her directness, her apparent lack of the usual maternal intensity, her undecorative and hence "masculine" handwriting, her professional ambition. She seems at first to be an amazing anomaly, not subject to the mighty evolutionary and hormonal forces that trick the other mothers with an "illusion of freedom" when they are really at the mercy of "rafts on their own instinctual flood," their frenetic maternal manias ironically an expression of their innate passivity and lack of power. As such an exception, Hester is a threat to him, a reproach for his own failures, his own thwarted ambitions. This constant reminder of his inadequacies, and of the possibilities he has repressed, is both seductive and painful. The alternative, then, is to "discover" that Hester is a typical woman and mother after all, afflicted--and even maddened--by a pathetically distorted view of her daughter's potential for achievement: "So he saw his deep mistake: It was not that she was not maternal. She was nothing else. It was her passion" (92). "She was like the others: nature's trick, it comes in with the milk of the teat. Each thinks her own babe is goddess or god" (101).

But because Hester is renowned for her startling intellect, Brill's anxieties are not completely assuaged by the supposed insight that she is, after all, subject to the usual female brand of maternal self-deception. Feeling threatened by her captivating lecture style and challenging pedagogic theories, he finds relief in an inspired self-deceptive theory of his own that Hester's maternal obsession is both the source of and the reason for her intellectual constructs. These constructs are thereby rendered desperate displays of intellectual virtuosity, elaborate shams carefully crafted to make acceptable a hopelessly inadequate child: "Wherever there's a hole in [Beulah"--a deficiency, a depression, a dent, an absence--you produce a bump. You make up something to suit the hole, to account for it. You compensate for everything. You retailor the universe. You haven't got any ideas. You've only got Beulah" (114). Like the children who are tested for intelligence and initiative upon entering Brill's school, Hester is neatly catalogued, despite her apparent exceptionality. Brill accuses Hester of "cannibalizing" her own child, but, like his accusation of self-deception, this is another case of projection. In fact, his insistence on reductive categories is itself a form of cannibalization of female by male, recalling the treatment Ozick received many years earlier in a graduate seminar where she was amazed that the renowned professor Lionel Trilling could not distinguish her from the only other woman in the class, an outspoken and somewhat eccentric student known as the "crazy lady."(12) Hester, in fact, is neither totally like most of the other mothers (she is remarkable both for her enormous intellect and her patience in attending slowly evolving outcomes) nor totally unlike them (equally devoted to her child as they to theirs, she is capable of conformity to social norms for the sake of her daughter: the birthday party she plans for Beulah is, to Brill, amazingly typical). However, Brill is not able or willing to entertain this sort of complexity; both Hester and Beulah finally remain enigmas to him because he feels compelled to accommodate them to the misguided dogmas upon which he has based his withered life. Projecting onto Hester his own intense egoism and self-absorption, he takes refuge in a rigid biological determinism that allows him to dehumanize the Other--to Brill, women are "lactating beasts" (124).

The reader's reaction to Brill's misogyny is complicated by Ozick's choice of his perspective as the controlling one. On the one hand, the limitations of his assessments of Hester and her daughter are revealed in several ways: by his conversations with the mother, in which his own egoism and insecurity are betrayed; by her lecture on pedagogy, which both fascinates and nonplusses him; and by the story's outcomes, in which certain predictable ironies are realized, validating Hester's theories. But Hester is an exception, unlike any woman whom Brill has ever met. And while Brill's attempts to "explain" her are shown to be woefully distorted and inadequate, such is not the case with his portrayal of the other mothers, who are therefore left unredeemed. Their arrogance and aggressiveness, their "exuberant reformist ferocity" (101), their insistence that each of their ordinary children is exceptional, their extravagant judgments (e.g., an unpopular teacher is called a "fascist" [96])--these and other elements are the stuff of caricature. And because the caricature remains "uncorrected," these women seem as much the object of a wicked satire as a vehicle for betraying the schoolmaster's blindness. The following judgment passed by Brill, for example, uncharacteristically melds the schoolmaster's point of view with the narrator's: "[I]t was as if each of the mothers floated inside a darkened doll's house bobbing in the dark dangerous middle of the Phlegethon, and anyone could come and lift the roof on its silvery hinges and look inside--and inside each house there was a bitterness, a hope never to be resolved, crippled ambition, bad books, querulous old parents outliving the cruelty of their prime, the best table ware, an Oriental rug or two, an antique tobacco box, a tragedy, a tragedy!" (97). Brill, the fearful ruler of this tribe of desperate Lilliputians, is both intimidated by and contemptuous of his subjects, and some of this contempt is shared by Ozick as well. The dollhouse image, of course, recalls Nora, but, whereas Ibsen's heroine elicits sympathy in trying to make a virtue of a terrible necessity, the mothers of the Edmond Fleg School make necessity itself the virtue. Like Brill, they attempt to define the end too quickly, rejecting the natural unfolding of events in time and behaving as though they can foresee and control the destinies of their children through sheer force of desire and assertion of will, what Brill calls "motherhood red in tooth and claw" (40). The bitterness and crippled ambition Brill attributes to them is only partly a case of projection. Brill sees in Hester a "mirror image" but it is the other mothers whom he most resembles. It is because he himself feels "incarcerated" (52) that he perceives the tragedy of the mothers trapped in the little bobbing boxes, dedicated, as he is, to inscribing their own direction and their own fate while actually rudderless and powerless. Furthermore, Brill knows that the mothers know his "tragedy"--his failure as scholar and teacher and the inadequacies of his romantic life. It comforts him to nurture the fantasy that he is immeasurably superior to them, the distance between himself and these women as great as the "abyss" between himself and his heroes--Freud, Spinoza, and Einstein. But he knows this sense of superiority is a sham, and he knows they know. The hostile collaboration between Brill and his students' mothers is the means by which they use--or "cannibalize"--each other, each fostering the other's illusions in order to maintain their own.

3

Hester's brilliance as a writer and lecturer and (eventually) Beulah's stunning international success as an artist add still another layer to the novel's theme of cannibalism. Not only has Brill, in contrast, mired himself in mediocrity, he must also suffer the grievous humiliation of having his Dual Curriculum publicly exposed as not even faintly memorable by Beulah, now a grown and celebrated painter whose once dull eyes literally sparkle in television interviews. Ozick's own attitude toward the position of the Jewish artist has bemused critics: a central question of her work is whether there is a necessary connection between art and idolatry. Her dilemma has been that to be an artist is to be a creator in competition with the Creator and thus to live in violation of the Second Commandment (against idols). For those who may wonder why idolatry presents the gravest moral dangers, Ozick makes the crucial point that it is but a short step from the creation of idols to human sacrifice: "the power of the (powerless) idol--i.e, the powerful imaginations of its devotees--can root out human pity.... Pity, after all, is not `felt,' as if by instinct or reflex. Pity is taught; and what teaches it is the stricture against idols.... In the absence of the Second Commandment, the hunt for victims begins.... Every idol suppresses human pity; that is what it is made for. When art is put in competition, like a god, with the Creator, it too is turned into an idol: one has only to recall the playing of Mozart at the gates of Auschwitz to see how the muses can serve Moloch."(13) While this fear of the horrid potential of "powerful imaginations" left untutored and unchecked may be interpreted as a warning against the moral dangers implicit in a specifically Romantic artistic philosophy, the essay as a whole is rather sweeping in its assumptions that the term "Jewish writer" is a "chimera"--that is, that art and Judaism contradict each other and are "icily, elegiacally, at war."(14) As Harold Bloom and others have observed, however, Ozick's insistence in her essays that literature is an idol is contradicted by her own life of fiction writing. The contradiction, it would seem, is not so much between art and Judaism as between Ozick and herself. The point I want to make here is that the contradiction is largely mitigated by Ozick's later musings, in a way that sheds a good deal of light on the themes of The Cannibal Galaxy. In two essays, "Metaphor and Memory" (1986) and "Bialik's Hint" (1983), Ozick points the way out of the paradox of the Jewish artist--so emphatically, indeed, that Brill's stuntedness, both intellectual and spiritual, can be understood most clearly as a failure of artistic vision.

In "Metaphor and Memory," Ozick argues that literature and the imagination that serves it can in fact be anti-idolatrous, and, as a reflection of a certain kind of "moral seriousness," essentially "Jewish." The logic of this thesis rests on Ozick's pursuit of a favorite dialectic--the tension between Hellenism and Hebraism. According to Ozick, ancient Greek culture and religion lacked the idea of a universal conscience, a system of ethics that would apply to all humanity. Her evidence is their persecution of foreigners and enslavement of many as well as the unprincipled nature of the oracles, which relied solely on inspiration for their "truths." Inspiration is the antithesis of memory, "which is history as judgment." Without the memory of a shared history, the Greeks had no impulse to create an all-embracing ethical system. Without such a memory, they did not cultivate the capacity to "imagine what it was to be the Other, the outsider." And since it is through metaphor that the strange is made familiar, the Other identified with sell one can see how the impulse toward metaphor is an expression of the human capacity for pity: "Without the metaphor of memory and history, ... [w]e cannot imagine what it is to be someone else. Metaphor is the reciprocal agent, the universalizing force: it makes possible the power to envision the stranger's heart." In contrast to the Greek oracle, Ozick posits Exodus 23, verse 8: "`And a stranger shall you not oppress, for you know the heart of a stranger, seeing you were strangers in a strange land.' There stands the parable; there stands the sacred metaphor of belonging, one heart to another."(15) The Jews, then, out of a shared oppression, developed a morality based on a universal human sympathy--a leap of imagination, rooted in an interpretation of history, whereby the gulf between self and stranger is bridged, even obliterated. At the heart of Jewish teaching is the metaphor that identifies self with Other, thus making possible the replacement of enslavement and dehumanization with compassion and respect.

Exactly what this has to do with the role of the artist, and in particular of the writer, is made clear by the next link in Ozick's finely wrought chain of logic: novels are metaphors. "The great novels transform experience into idea because it is the way of metaphor to transform memory into a principle of continuity. By `continuity' I mean nothing less than literary seriousness, which is unquestionably a branch of life-seriousness."(16) Here, then, is the syllogism: metaphoric language grows out of the capacity to imagine sympathetically what is different from one-self and it is this capacity that nurtures humaneness and forbids barbarism. The essence of the novel is the metaphoric imagination, the transformation of "experience into idea." Novels, therefore, as both expression and teacher of the sympathetic imagination, are of God's party after all and not the devil's. It can be no coincidence, then, that in The Cannibal Galaxy Joseph Brill is instructed in the uses of metaphor by the "imagistic linguistic logician," Hester Lilt.

Brill is both puzzled and impressed, for example, by Hester's use of parable in a symposium on pedagogy, in which the illusory freedom of bees, the flawed response of Rabbi Akiva's colleagues to the Destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem, and the existence of huge galaxies that consume smaller ones are all offered as metaphors for deeply misguided educational theorists. Brill, like the others in Hester's audience, is enthralled by her words, feeling himself drawn to the force field of an extraordinary presence, a teacher whose breadth and depth of knowledge are matched by the creative power of her imagination. Her talent appears all the more remarkable in contrast to the scholarly but pedestrian lecture mode of her male colleagues on the dais, whose reliance on abstract nouns reveals their ordinariness. (In "Metaphor and Memory" Ozick wrote that "metaphor is the enemy of abstraction.") The narrator's small joke here is that Hester, in delivering her elaborate and comprehensive talk on pedagogy, "did not stop too soon," but the serious point is that her capacity to blend erudition with the narrative power of anecdote, fable, and parable manifests both the moral and the practical importance of historicity and continuity: her talent for storytelling captivates her audience, and this talent in turn depends upon wide-ranging knowledge and the ability to see subtle but persuasive points of connection. In addition, I would suggest, Hester's natural integration of information with imagination, of erudition with creativity, is cast as a tendency associated more with women than with men. When we are told that Hester "exhausted" every subject she has chosen to incorporate, "exhausted even Akiva, about whom there were ten thousand tales ..., exhausted everything but the little ardent pack of her listeners" (69-70), we cannot help but recall the spellbinding talent of Scheherazade, the archetypal female storyteller whose understanding of both the practical and the moral power of narrative also transformed her audience (and thus literally saved her life and the lives of other women). A critic comments upon "the immense repertoire of Scheherazade's stories," observing that this legendary fabulist "paradigmatically reinforces our concept of female storytellers as transmitters of ancient tales, molded and remolded in such a way as to meet the special needs of the listener."(17) Ozick's description of Hester her amazing range of knowledge, her extraordinary gift for the narrative uses of language, her mesmerizing effect on others--places Hester squarely in this tradition: "She heaped up analogies, allusions, hypotheses--she was frighteningly erudite. What awed [Brill] most were the strange links she wove between vivid hard circumstance and things that were only imagined" (67). Brill sees himself as a special object of Hester's lessons, and he is not wrong. Like Scheherazade (who also does not stop too soon), Hester shapes her language to reshape the perceptions of a man who casually dismisses the value and power of women. Hester's awesome talent is thus portrayed not (as Brill initially thinks) as an aberration from the fact of her femaleness but rather as integral with it.

Brill, as he himself recognizes, is more like the self-important male lecturers--"no more than a chorus behind her"--than like Hester Lilt, proud of his narrow learnedness but uncomfortable with the kind of connected thinking that gives Hester's analogies a profound resonance. Although Brill, because of his training in astronomy, knows more than Hester about the discovery of cannibal galaxies, "he could not have seen, on his own, how the pinwheel cosmos interprets pedagogy. For him the cosmos was inhuman, of a terrible coldness, and far away, even though one lived in its midst. For her it was a long finger tapping" (71). Brill is inadequate to his ambitions because he doesn't pursue the habit of mind that makes meaningful even crucial connections. The reader is reminded of his tendency to "stop too soon" and of the parents who similarly "stopped at the present; scratched at the present; intended to force, to refashion, the imperfect present" (101). Through his encounters with Hester, Brill comes to recognize Europe as a cannibal galaxy and France as Egypt, but he doesn't relate the fate of continents and nations with his own personal destiny or with the destiny of his students. It is a central irony of this novel that Brill, a Holocaust survivor, has not acquired the habit of connected thinking, that is, of imagining how the concrete and the abstract are implied in each other, of transforming experience into idea or of seeing the ways ideas apply to experience.

At the literal and thematic center of The Cannibal Galaxy is a brief but critical dialogue that reveals the significance of Brill's limitation. In a rare unguarded moment, Brill allows Hester to draw from him details about his prewar childhood. He recounts how Rabbi Pult had once advised Gabriel and Loup, Brill's older brothers (murdered in their youth by the Nazis), to "Always negate. Negate, negate." Asked by Hester to explain the rabbi's meaning, Brill at first responds in Latin: "`Odi profanum vulgus'" (that is, the rabbi's advice to Brill's teenage brothers was to disdain what is popular). When Hester finds this interpretation "frivolous," Brill recasts his answer:

      "No, no," he urged, "it was a way of telling them to take for granted
   that most people are trivial."

      "Most people are trivial?"

      "Yes," he said, under the pressure of her repetition; again he felt her
   parody.

      "What became of him?"

      "Rabbi Pult?"

      "Pult."

      "He disappeared."

      "And your brothers?"

      "Disappeared."

      "Then it was a wrong evaluation, wasn't it? If most people are trivial,
   they wouldn't haul off other people. They'd spend their lives going to the
   museum instead."

      This seemed so callous and hard that he did not know what to make of
   her. (82)

In reducing Pult's advice (a warning against the lure of assimilation/ cannibalization? against the tempting slide into nature?) to an excuse for a brand of smug self-righteousness and superiority, Brill circumscribes both his own creativity and his moral stature. To behave as if "most people are trivial" is, as Brill's own experience tragically attests, to abdicate power to those who would exploit--or annihilate--us. It is also, as Brill's unsatisfactory personal and professional relationships suggest, to fail to make essential connections between others and ourselves and thus, as I have suggested, to cannibalize (reduce, objectify, and use for our own purposes) those whom we judge to be merely "ordinary"--or less. The latter failure is, according to Ozick, a failure of the metaphoric impulse, a refusal to recognize the "shocking extension of the unknown into our most intimate, most feeling, most private selves"(18) and thus a failure of moral and artistic vision.

4

Hester's rebuttal is especially painful because it rekindles the childhood guilt of Brill's detours through the Paris streets to visit, in violation of parental prohibitions, the (pagan/Christian) Musee Carnavalet, former home of Madame de Sevigne, celebrated for the beautiful prose of her letters to her daughter, Grignan. Brill's childhood fascination with the portraits of these two women, in addition to indicating his identification with French (Hellenic) culture, foreshadows his adult conceptualization of women in general and his difficulty in taking the measure of Hester in particular. Like the seventeenth-century Frenchwoman, acclaimed for the literary quality and emotional depth of her voluminous letters to her daughter, Hester is a fascinating woman notable for her writing, mother to a daughter who appears far less distinguished than she. The parallels and differences between the two mother / daughter pairs (Madame de Sevigne / Grignan, Hester / Beulah) provide a gloss on the feminist undercurrents of the novel and particularly the theme of woman as artist. At one point Brill, struck by the "lilt" of Hester's vaguely French accent, momentarily merges the two distinguished women in his mind: "[Hester] had the face, the voice, the poise, the enigma of [Sevigne's] character, the brilliance of her written sentences. The only thing missing was the insanity about the daughter.... The daughter was omitted" (53). Brill's assessment mistakes both the essential points of similarity and the real difference between the two women of genius. Both Sevigne and Hester are faced with the demanding task of achieving a harmonious fusion among conflicting roles--woman, mother, writer. As I have noted above, Brill regards women generally as obsessive about their children because of their own egoistic needs and as incapable of "high" art because of the flood of hormones that drive them. Critics have claimed that Sevigne used her daughter as an "essential pretext" for writing; similarly, Brill claims that Hester has developed her brilliant and provocative theories in order to rationalize her young daughter's notable lack of intellect and talent. Like Sevigne, Hester is accused of using her daughter for her own creative purposes, of refusing to respect the otherness of her offspring. The obliterating obsessiveness Brill attributes to his students' mothers (including Hester) is strikingly similar to the cannibalizing tendencies attributed to Sevigne by modern critics: "[Grignan's] letters are everywhere represented [by Sevigne] as life-sustaining, a consolation, a `nourishment,' necessary for her survival.... To see someone obsessively in imagination or to look fixedly at her in reality is, as the figurative expression `drinking in with one's eyes' implies, a form of incorporation, of `taking into oneself' and `filling up an emptiness.'"(19)

Yet the fact that Sevigne's literary self-expressiveness took the form of extravagantly passionate letters to her daughter must be viewed in the context of seventeenth-century French social and cultural mores. As Katherine Jensen has observed, Sevigne's correspondence manifests the one literary genre considered appropriate to women: "the mother's correspondence becomes the pragmatic solution to the paradox of being a virtuous woman/writer"(20) Interestingly, this paradox is a version of the same dilemma to which Brill attempts to reduce Hester. Terrified by the challenge of her learned and provocative writing, awed by her success, he chooses to view her work not as the contribution of an outstanding and original intellect, but as the exploitation of a flawed child by an unnaturally clever mother. Jensen speculates, as Virginia Woolf did before her, that a Sevigne unbound by the limitations of sexist assumptions "would have written something other than letters, something willfully literary, something professional."(21) Ozick's ironic comment here, I think, is that although Hester is free, as Sevigne was not, to express herself as an ambitious intellectual, she is subject to the same charge as the seventeenth-century French woman who confined herself to "women's" writing: she is accused of self-aggrandizement masquerading as its opposite, selfless mother love. Because Brill cannot deny the power of Hester's work, he conjures up a clever attack on her motivation for writing--the need to rationalize her child's apparent deficits--and characterizes the process as cannibalization. Ozick thus asks us to ponder why the motivation or inspiration for writing has been thought to diminish the quality of a woman's work, but is seen as irrelevant to the quality of a man's. Ironically, Brill's ingenious rationalization of Hester's creativity is the most inspired idea he has had in years; sadly, it reflects more about his own narrow vision than Hester's.

Brill's childhood fascination with the Museum's statue of the renowned nineteenth-century French actress Rachel (whom he at first mistakes for the Biblical Rachel) is also rich with thematic implications. The young boy's confusion of Rachel, Mother of Israel, with Rachel Felix, the nineteenth-century theatrical phenomenon of the Comedie-Francaise, invokes the role of the femme artiste, and (as in the case of Madame de Sevigne) the conflict in females between "public" and "private" selves. Like letter-writing, which as a "female" art form is both public and private, establishing connectedness but predicated on distance, acting is by definition a kind of role-playing that is most successful when its artificial or "constructed" character is least apparent, when the audience connects with it in the least mediated way. (It is notable that Rachel at one point hoped her letters might encourage the public to consider her as another Madame de Sevigne.)(22) In the mid-nineteenth century environment that celebrated the genius of Rachel, this paradox of "acting natural" resonated in particular ways for women. Rachel Brownstein, Rachel's most recent biographer, has succinctly assessed the historical gender implications of performance art: "On the one hand actresses were condemned for pretending to be who they weren't--and weakening what characters they had by pretense. They were also rated for merely playing themselves. In the misogynist imagination, actresses are false--artful, artificial, duplicitous, like women in general--and on the other hand excitingly, transgressively true to the passions and the imagination. In a culture that confusedly conceived of female sexuality as an excess of either nature or artifice, they were taken to stand for Woman."(23) The assumptions with which Brill approaches the women in his life, whether teachers or parents, reflect similarly misogynistic and contradictory attitudes: he views the teachers as "a species of low theater folk, vaudevillians" who also wish "to dominate and to crush." Although he is disgusted by what he views as their stupidity, his main hiring criterion is vivacity because the lively ones "made the best impression on the parents" (86-87). As for the mothers, whom he both fears and despises, he sees them as a "would-be gynecocracy" who are themselves ruled by the indomitable power of raging hormones (94). On another level, Brill's attraction to the sculpted form of Rachel portends his own self-limitations and ultimate failure. His sense as a boy that the statue of Rachel is about to come alive recalls the Pygmalion myth, in which the transformative power of human desire rivals that of God.(24) The allusion is thick with irony, given the mediocrity of Brill's educational enterprise and the hollowness of his pretense that the Edmond Fleg School's curriculum cultivates genius and distinction, nurturing and shaping young minds that will ultimately flower dramatically. Indeed, he must acknowledge as he ages that he has cultivated not genius but ordinariness and that he has been guilty, most particularly in the case of Beulah Lilt, of "the sin of withholding his hand." Thus he is a kind of reverse Pygmalion, seeing only dullness where imagination waits to be kindled and refusing to recognize profound potential, including his own.

Still another thematic resonance of the child Brill's awed response to the sculpted Rachel enshrined in the Musee Carnavalet is the complex response to her Jewish "otherness" that enhanced the public's fascination with her while ensuring that she would remain something of a caricature. Brill's confusion of Rachel Felix with the Biblical Rachel is crucial. Famous for her capacity to be all things to everyone, a mutability enhanced by her exotic Jewish "foreignness," Rachel Felix was nonetheless viewed as essentially stained by her heritage. Born to itinerant peddlers (archetypal wandering Jews) the young Rachel became both a commodity to be carefully marketed and a theatrical phenomenon. Her amazing career inspired nineteenth-century novelists such as Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and Henry James, who incorporated in their fictions versions of her life and of her relationship with her exploitative father. In her apparently infinite capacity for role-playing, she seems a kind of embodiment of the Dual Curriculum, representing Greek Tragedy in the works of seventeenth-century French playwrights (one of her most famous roles was as Racine's Phedre) but also playing Esther, savior of the Jewish people. Yet it was the underlying anti-Semitism of French culture, a fascination with the contrast between what George Lewes called "this little Jewess picked up from the streets" and the reine de theatre that she became, that ironically made Rachel's theatrical talent all the more compelling: "`If you wish to form an idea of what Rachel would be without her exquisite intelligence, look at her brother Raphael Felix.... Is he not a vulgar Jew Boy? Can anything wipe out the original stain of his birth? Yet Rachel herself physically is no better; and were it not for the "o'er-informing spirit", she would be no better.'"(25) Lewes could not know, of course, that the sensational case with which his century would close would cast an ominous shadow backward on the casual anti-Semitism of his remarks. The persecution of Alfred Dreyfus, born the year after Rachel's death, looms in the distance, suggesting the fate of cultural "dualism" at the fin de siecle and presaging the twentieth-century consequences of the "birth stain" for Joseph Brill and others similarly tainted: apparently lacking the saving "o'er-informing spirit," they were rounded up in the Vel d'Hiv, a Parisian sports stadium, and made to disappear. Although he was absolved of all wrongdoing in 1906, the name of Dreyfus can still be invoked by the pure-blooded Claude to mark Joseph as an unacceptable outsider, a mark Brill later considers to be a "sacred stain" (75).

Young Brill's confusion of Rachel Felix with the Biblical Rachel chillingly suggests the misapprehension that prevented Parisian Jews from understanding that the round-up at the Vel d'Hiv was part of an attempt to cleanse Paris of its stain. It also suggests his naivete about the possibility that the confrontation of different cultures can be mutually enriching rather than exterminative. The actress is enshrined in a museum whose very name--Carnavalet-- is associated with a kind of linguistic cannibalization,(26) a museum dedicated to the history of Paris, a city itself fraught with contradiction: "Paris the founder and purveyor of fraternite and liberte--catching up eighteen centuries late, Rabbi Pult said ... to the postulates and civilities of Hillel and Akiva." The allusions to Madame de Sevigne and to Rachel, then, intimate the rich historical resonance of Ozick's themes and complicate her portrayal of Brill as both victim and failure, a portrayal that forestalls easy moral judgments of the kind to which Brill himself is susceptible. Although no words are adequate to the evil that afflicted him at the point of his blossoming, he becomes more a pathetic than a tragic figure, limiting the aspirations of others as he has limited his own. While the principal focuses on the stars because he perceives them to be distinct from the claims and suffering of humanity, and produces nothing but mediocre, uninspired students, Hester confounds her audiences with cunning fables of human behavior, shaped by a prodigious intellect and grounded in historical knowledge. Unable to rationalize the seeming paradox of the woman/creative genius/mother, he devises an explanation that serves the dual purpose of diminishing Hester while resolving the apparent contradictions.

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.

In addressing the meaning of originality, however, Ozick is also careful to distinguish creative vision from mere imitation (inherently reductive) and to remind us that the gulf between them is vast. Insisting on an originality that acknowledges the progenitive nature of the highest art, she addresses with equal urgency the difference between creation and mimicry. Perhaps her most explicit treatment of this question is in the short story "Puttermesser Paired," the third chapter in the saga of feminist lawyer Ruth Puttermesser, where the question of artistic and biological reproduction is contemplated from a variety of angles. The story in brief is this: obsessed with George Eliot (somewhat as the young Ozick had been with Henry James), the aging, unattached Puttermesser immerses herself in biographies of and letters by the great Victorian novelist, and resolves to imitate not her art (differing in this from Ozick, who had set out to write a mature Jamesian novel while only in her twenties) but her life, that is, to find for herself a duplicate of Eliot's friend, lover, and soul-mate, George Lewes. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Puttermesser encounters Rupert Rubeeno, who paints precise copies of works by Old Masters and then has his copies (he calls them "reenactments") photographed for commercial distribution on postcards. At first disdainful of Rubeeno's reproductions, Puttermesser comes to see the artist as a "genius ventriloquist" able to "penetrate any style from a petal to an earlobe."(29) As they read together through every available biography of George Eliot, Puttermesser finds increasing satisfaction in imagining herself as the remarkable writer with Rupert as her Lewes. Rupert, however, sees himself not as Lewes but as Johnny Cross, the young rather nonintellectual man who married George Eliot after Lewes's death. Rupert's theory is that like himself, Johnny Cross was a copyist, attempting to reenact for Eliot the life of the deceased Lewes. For Puttermesser, the life of Eliot had always effectively ended with the death of Lewes, and Rubeeno's insistence on both reading out and playing out the role of Johnny Cross leads only to heartbreak for the naive Puttermesser who believes she can recreate in her life, simply by willing it, the kind of "ideal friendship" that graced the life of her favorite novelist. Rubeeno is a "copyist" attracted to other copyists (like Johnny Cross) or would-be copyists (like Puttermesser) because he does not possess the soul, spirit, or intellect of the artist who first conceived and executed the masterpieces he reproduces in miniature. Although he claims originality ("Whatever I do is happening for the first time. Anything I make was never made before")(30) both he and his work are portrayed as a kind of "dwindling," a reduction rather than a production or even a reproduction. Likewise, Puttermesser, who hopes to make Rubeeno into a replica of the extraordinary George Lewes, ends up only with the inadequate Johnny Cross because she will never be even a pale shadow of the Mary Anne Evans who would achieve lasting renown as George Eliot.

The "lesson of the master," as Ozick made clear in an essay on Henry James by that title, is that while writing is--and must be--shaped by reading, one does not become a master by attempting to copy one: "There is this mix-up most of us have between ourselves and what we admire or triumphantly cherish.... To be any sort of competent writer one must keep one's psychological distance from the supreme artists."(31) To do otherwise is to risk exploiting and diminishing the past, as Ozick believes she did when, at the age of twenty-two, she attempted a "cannibalistically ambitious Jamesian novel." The counterpart of this ability to keep one's distance is also essential--that is, discovery of a "flaw" in what one has admired unqualifiedly should not mandate a total alienation: Voltaire's anti-Semitism does not cancel out the liberatory thrust of the Enlightenment; it certainly does not require the abandonment of history and literature, as Brill supposes (Cannibal Galaxy 16). True originality, then, distinguishes itself both from mimicry and from novelty. To reproduce the work (or life) of others is to risk being merely a "copyist," an endeavor associated with "dwindling" or diminution; similarly, to reproduce oneself is the ultimate egoism--or can become so if one views one's offspring primarily as a second chance for self-realization. In both kinds of reproduction the past must root, nourish, and shape the present and the future without subsuming it or paralyzing it. The creative task of both artist and parent requires a delicate balance between discipline and freedom, a balance dependent on constant vigilance. Because Brill lacks both discipline and the freedom enabled by imagination, the fruits of his labors--intellectual and parental--remain unremarkable.

Indeed, the connection between failed artistic creativity and flawed teaching/parenting is made clear in the outcomes of Brill's endeavors in both areas, and both themes merge in the story of Beulah, the unpromising little girl who as an adult defies professional predictions and achieves international renown. Rejecting the possibility that Beulah might grow up to be anything but dull Brill and his teachers not only fail to cultivate her talent, but treat her with thinly veiled disdain mixed with sympathy for what they perceive as her deficiencies. Nevertheless, as her mother had predicted, Beulah turns out to be an "original," a painter whose work captures the imagination of the world. Like her mother's writing, Beulah's painting establishes striking connections between experience and idea, between the concrete and the abstract. Moreover, Beulah's creativity and her mother's are alike in their effect on Brill: "[Hester's] fables were curiously like certain paintings he was to see, and be broken by, in later years" (67). Brill is "broken" by Beulah's startling paintings not only because he has trouble understanding them, but also because they illuminate all of his own inadequacies--his aborted creative and intellectual aspirations, the meaninglessness of the Dual Curriculum ("as dear to him as his son Naphtali"), his drastic misjudgment of Beulah's abilities and of her mother's confident predictions, the unfulfilled promise of clever Naphtali whose greatest ambition is "to give homework." When viewed from a distance, Beulah's abstract painting conjures up "amazing scenes" for Brill, but up close he is relieved to find "only paint." This shifting perspective recalls for him a passage he had read many years earlier in Hester's Interpretation as an End in Itself.' "`[L]anguage without consequence, i.e., the `purity' of babble is inconceivable in the vale of interpretation'" (48). "Only paint," only words--to see only the medium and not the message is to evade interpretation, to fail to make meaning out of experience, to privilege esthetics over meaning, and thus, as Brill learns too late, to trivialize what is, in fact, powerful--powerful because it does have consequence for human emotion, intellect, and behavior. Like Rupert Rubeeno, Brill is a kind of copyist bound by the comfortable predictability of the familiar, avoiding what Ozick has called in another context "risk, the unexpected, the lightning move into imagination."(32)

Yet Beulah's art, although it stands as a rebuke to Brill's failure of imagination, is not, in Ozick's philosophy, of the highest order for two reasons: first, like its creator, it lacks the "sense of indebtedness" to a past that distinguishes the greatest work, and second, as abstract visual renderings Beulah's paintings do not insist upon the sort of consequential interpretations that would forestall a purely esthetic and thus potentially idolatrous response. Elaine Kauvar's observation that "Beulah's luminous forms ... are the achievements of someone in exile from the word"(33) astutely defines the defect in Beulah's originality: separate from the past, her art can have only a suspect and limited influence on the future. Even in her success, Beulah is the unripe fruit of Brill's failed pedagogy. Pointing to the last sentence of the book--"She [Beulah] labored without brooding in calculated and enameled forms out of which a naming nimbus sometimes spread"--Kauvar observes that this "is not the `nimbus of meaning' Ozick accords to redemptive art;(34) it is the nimbus of glory surrounding the head of a pagan god."(35) I would suggest further that the puns implicit in "labor[ing] without brooding" indicate Beulah's detachment from the vexing spiritual and intellectual questions that inspire her mother's writing and also exploit the imagery of childbirth to suggest the barrenness of Beulah's creative efforts. The humanistic potential of Hester's dedication to language--to narrative, story, fable--is far greater than that of her daughter's strikingly novel images, as Ozick has suggested in her discussion of the Book of Ruth: "a short story has a stalk--or shoot--through which its life rushes, and out of which the flowery head erupts."(36) The imagery of root, stalk, and flower recalls the historical continuity, the sense of indebtedness, manifest in great art. Arising ex nihilo, Beulah's paintings will not erupt into flower, will not seed profound ideas. Beulah defines art as a "form without a discernible presence," whereas Ozick's strict monotheism insists on God as a presence without a discernible form. Beulah thus embraces Hellenism, setting her estheticism at odds with the Hebraic Divine Presence.

6

The triumph of its most acclaimed graduate exposes the Dual Curriculum as a sham and forces its dreamy proponent to confront the emptiness of his ambitions. He has envisioned an "illustrious tapestry" of the strands of Jewish tradition interwoven with those of the Enlightenment, but the result has been not a rich fabric but a paper-thin veneer, already chipping away to reveal the insubstantial structure beneath. One might conclude, therefore, that Ozick believes that in the new world any attempt to incorporate Jewish values with post-Enlightenment ones is bound to fail or that any sort of "duality" is bound to end either in mediocrity (the "middleness" of America) or in cannibalism, the imposition of brute strength on the outnumbered. Moreover, Ozick's celebratory portrayal of Hester's talent, including a quality that Brill thinks of as "a majesty of assimilation" (54) appears to be a puzzling departure from her earlier insistence that the term "Jewish writer" is an oxymoron ("The recovery of the Covenant can never [be attained] among the shamanistic toys of literature").(37) However, a reading of The Cannibal Galaxy in the light of Ozick's essay "Bialik's Hint" (1983) reveals both Ozick's optimism about the possibilities of the mutual enrichment of divergent cultures and an underlying continuity in her thinking.

This essay, which Ozick calls a "meditation" on the meaning of the term "Jewish literature" after the Enlightenment, proposes not only the possibility but indeed the necessity for a convergence that draws on the strengths of both traditions without weakening either. The model for such a melding, according to Ozick, is the ancient confluence of Hellenic respect for study with Jewish values and ideas:

   It was the gradual superimposition of the Socratic primacy of intellect
   upon the Jewish primacy of holiness that produced the familiar, and now
   completely characteristic, Jewish personality we know.... It took
   generations--a handful of centuries--for the Socratic emphasis on pedagogic
   exertion [i.e., dedication to text] to infiltrate the Jewish emphasis on
   divinely authored communal responsibility. Undoubtedly it will take another
   handful of centuries--the two hundred that have elapsed so far are plainly
   not enough--for Enlightenment ideas of skepticism, originality,
   individuality, and the assertiveness of the free imagination to leach into
   what we might call the Jewish language of restraint, sobriety, collective
   conscience, moral seriousness.(38)

Modern Jewish writers, Ozick maintains, were "swallowed up" by Enlightenment values and by the political structures with which these values came to be associated (e.g., socialism, Marxism) while attempting to maintain some kind of "Jewish" identity. The result was a literature that aimed for Enlightenment universality in its moral vision but ended up seeming "hopelessly limited and parochial." Such a description is equally applicable to Joseph Brill's Edmond Fleg School, with the legacy of his two tantes ("how poignantly in this word the Yiddish and the French converged") yielding through his pedagogic system not excellence and originality, but dilution, banality, and triviality--"egalitarianism--the lowest in the lead" (Cannibal Galaxy 61). In striking contrast to such pedestrianism are Hester Lilt's timeless parables--creative efforts that are daring, gripping, provocative. From Hester's remarkable intellect and imagination issues language that exhausts everything but her listeners. Such an achievement, I would argue, manifests what Ozick had suggested in "Bialik's Hint" as a "new alternative" for the Jewish artist, an expression of "originality, the brilliance of the unexpected, the explosive hope of fresh form."(39)

This description might be applied with equal aptness to Ozick's own fiction, dense and convoluted stories and novels that have at once fascinated and frustrated critics who wish simply to unravel them. Such artistic experiments, of course, are not uniformly successful. There is some truth to the lament of one critic that some of Ozick's early efforts are "helpless to become finished stories for there is too much in them of unresolved struggle."(40) It is perhaps a reaction to a similar sort of tension that causes Pollitt to temper her high praise for Ozick's essay collection Art and Ardor with the impression that "Cynthia Ozick's three selves do not try harder to make peace with each other because they sense it can't be done."(41) The Cannibal Galaxy, however, is evidence that it can be done. In this short novel Ozick clarifies her anxieties about both cultural and artistic assimilation, suggests a possible resolution, and dramatizes how women can lead the hugely ambitious effort toward a new marriage of creativity and moral seriousness by complementing talent with a determined resistance to "cannibalism" on all fronts. Perhaps the emblem for this achievement is what Hester Lilt, in her lecture on pedagogy,

calls the "unsurprise of surprise," the structure of art--and of life--that first offers an event as shocking and unpredictable but then causes it to seem natural and entirely consonant with the pattern of the whole. In the novel, several outcomes suggest the "unsurprise of surprise"--Brill's marriage, despite his infatuation with Hester, to a quite "ordinary" woman; clever Naphtali's disappointing obsession with lists, with order, with the minutiae of daily existence; Beulah's extraordinary success despite inauspicious beginnings.

But the "unsurprise of surprise" is the pattern not only of art but also of Ozick's career. It is surprising at first to find the great disciple of Henry James denouncing art as idolatry; to find the woman writer shunning the idea of a specifically female sensibility; to find an enlightened humanist castigate Enlightenment values as "parochial"; and then to find all of these positions strangely contradicted. But the pattern of Ozick's work reveals that the apparent contradictions are sometimes resolved (for example, when writing as a "Jew" but refusing to write as a "woman" both become a form of resistance to the sin of Sloth) and sometimes unresolved but fruitful dialectic (e.g., when "Jewish writer" evolves from an oxymoron to a neologism). Perhaps the most unsurprising of surprises, however, is that the little girl from the Bronx, who sought refuge from her unhappy schooldays in a corner of her father's pharmacy, should grow up to be a shining, daring presence in contemporary American letters by complementing her astonishing talent with a dedication to texts of all kinds--and a determined resistance to cannibalism on all fronts.

Rider University

Notes

(1.) Katha Pollitt, "The Three Selves of Cynthia Ozick," review of Art and Ardor, by Cynthia Ozick, The New York Times Book Review (May 22, 1983): 7, 35.

(2.) Michael Greenstein, "The Muse and the Messiah: Cynthia Ozick's Aesthetics," Studies in American Jewish Literature 8.1 (1989): 50-65.

(3.) Sanford Pinsker, The Uncompromising Fictions of Cynthia Ozick (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987).

(4.) Earl Rovit, "The Two Languages of Cynthia Ozick," Studies in American Jewish Literature 8.1 (1989): 34-49.

(5.) Robert Alter, "Defenders of the Faith," Commentary (July 1987): 52-55.

(6.) In Art and Ardor (New York: Knopf, 1983), 301-2; reprinted from The New York Times Book Review (January 21, 1982).

(7.) For a meditation on the "unnaturalness" of living the life of the committed Jew, see Ozick's untitled response to "Is Our Schizophrenia Historically Important?" Response: A Contemporary Jewish Review 6 (fall 1972): 87-93. For a discussion of Ozick's attitude toward the sin of Sloth, see my essay, "The Jewish-American Woman as Artist: Cynthia Ozick and the `Paleface' Tradition," College Literature 20.2 (June 1993): 119-32.

(8.) The Cannibal Galaxy (New York: Dutton, 1984), 36. All further references to the novel are to this edition.

(9.) "Bialik's Hint," Commentary (February 1983): 23. Reprinted in Metaphor and Memory (New York: Vintage, 1991), 223-39.

(10.) Ibid., 23.

(11.) Ibid., 26.

(12.) "`We Are the Crazy Lady' and Other Feisty Feminist Fables," Ms. (spring 1972): 40-44.

(13.) "Literature as Idol: Harold Bloom," in Art and Ardor, 190-91; reprinted from Commentary (January 1979).

(14.) Ibid., 198.

(15.) "Metaphor and Memory," in Metaphor and Memory, 279; originally published as "The Moral Necessity of Metaphor," Harper's (May 1986).

(16.) Ibid., 280.

(17.) Karen Rowe, "To Spin a Yarn: The Female Voice in Folklore and Fairytale," in Fairy Tales and Society: Illusion, Allusion, and Paradigm, ed. Ruth Bottigheimer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 60.

(18.) "Metaphor and Memory," 282.

(19.) Harriet Allentuch, "My Daughter/Myself: Emotional Roots of Madame de Sevigne's Art," Modern Language Quarterly 43 (1982): 125, 131.

(20.) Katharine A. Jensen, "Writing and Mother Love: The Letters of Mme. Sevigne," French Literature Series 16 (1989): 47.

(21.) Ibid., 50.

(22.) Rachel M. Brownstein, Tragic Muse: Rachel of the Comedie-Francaise (New York: Knopf, 1993), 82.

(23.) Ibid., 43.

(24.) On the applicability of the Pygmalion story to Rachel's life, see Brownstein, 91-92.

(25.) Quoted in Brownstein, 236-37.

(26.) The name Carnavalet was a transformation of the "rude consonances" of Kaernevenoi, name of the Breton widow who owned the property in the late sixteenth century. Also pertinent to Brill's attraction to the museum is its association with art and artifacts that memorialize the French Revolution (see "Carnavalet," Dictionnaire de Paris [Larousse, 1964]).

(27.) Cynthia Ozick's Fiction: Tradition and Invention (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993).

(28.) In Fame and Folly (New York: Vintage, 1997), 286; reprinted from Partisan Review 60.2 (spring 1993): 195-200.

(29.) "Puttermesser Paired," New Yorker (October 8, 1990): 56. Reprinted in The Puttermesser Papers (New York: Knopf, 1997).

(30.) Ibid., 50.

(31.) "The Lesson of the Master," in Art and Ardor, 297.

(32.) "Ruth," in Metaphor and Memory, 263.

(33.) Kauvar, 171.

(34.) "Innovation and Redemption: What Literature Means," in Art and Ardor, 246.

(35.) Kauvar, 172.

(36.) "Ruth," 263.

(37.) "Literature as Idol," 199.

(38.) "Bialik's Hint," 27.

(39.) Ibid., 27.

(40.) Mark Schechner, "Other People's Stories," review of Bloodshed and Three Novellas, by Cynthia Ozick, Moment (April 1976): 74, 77.

(41.) Pollitt, 35.

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