A Moral Defense Of Literary Experience

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

For Cynthia Ozick, life is a contest between two qualities of noise. All around us, ever increasing in volume and dissonance, is the distracting noise of the quotidian, the public, the technological: “brute extrusions,” as she calls them, “of the principle of Crowd.” In mapping the province of Crowd, Ms. Ozick is uncompromising, even puritanical. Crowd is what we become at the movies, in front of the television screen, listening to the radio, reading e-mail.All of these pursuits use the magic of technology, not to expand our powers, but to shrink us: “Picture Clark Kent,” she writes, “entering a handy telephone booth not to rise up as a universal god, but to sidle out diminished and stuttering, still wearing his glasses and hat.”


So far, Ms. Ozick might be labeled, and thereby dismissed, as a familiar type of cultural pessimist – the type for whom every housecat is a rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem. But then we come to the second kind of din, the one invoked in the title of her new book of essays, “The Din in the Head” (Houghton Mifflin, 244 pages, $24). Ms. Ozick is too subtle an observer, too committed a modernist – simply, too good a writer – to imagine that, if the outside world is hell, the interior castle must be paradise, all sweetness and light. She does not want to contrast the noise of the world with the silence of the mind, which would be the silence of death. Rather, she urges us to tune out the surrounding din so that we can attend to another kind of din, a more authentic and fruitful chaos: “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. … The non-stop chatter that gossips, worries, envies, invokes, yearns, condemns, self-condemns.”


The self is not a retreat for Ms. Ozick; it is a battleground where the only authentic battles are fought. What troubles her, and provides the ground note of anxiety in her fifth collection of essays, is not the idea that we might lose the interior combat, by failing to master the din in the head.Ultimately,perhaps, we are doomed to that failure. She is more frightened that we will simply forfeit the contest and walk away from ourselves in a state of content distraction.


The insight that drives Ms. Ozick’s criticism is that the one sure sign of such a forfeit,the omen of the end of the self, would be the death of the novel. This is a death that, like Mark Twain’s, has been greatly exaggerated: Several generations have passed since Americans began to worry that no one was reading novels anymore, and somehow novels continue to be read. (Ms. Ozick’s own most recent novel, “Heir to the Glimmering World,” was a best seller.) But while literary obituarists might look on the death of the novel with some combination of regret, nostalgia, and secret satisfaction, in Ms. Ozick it inspires a genuine dread. “If the novel were to wither,” she warns, “then the last trustworthy vessel of the inner life (aside from our heads) would crumble away.”


That fusion of the ethical and the aesthetic is the hallmark of Ms.Ozick’s criticism. “The Din in the Head,” like all essay collections, is something of a miscellany: Its subjects range from Sylvia Plath to Gershom Scholem, and from John Updike to Helen Keller. Readers of the New Yorker, the New Republic, and the American Scholar will be happy to recognize Ms. Ozick’s major essays of the last few years: her consideration of Lionel Trilling’s frustrated ambitions, her grappling with Tolstoy’s idealized picture of the Cossacks, her comical “interview” with the reticent ghost of Henry James.


What unites all these subjects, and gives “The Din in the Head” a polemical coherence, is Ms. Ozick’s passionately moral defense of literary experience. The novel’s exploration of interiority, for her, is an emblem of all the other values founded on the sanctity of the self, including political freedom. This connection is made most explicitly in “The Rule of the Bus,” a review of Azar Nafisi’s celebrated memoir, “Reading Lolita in Tehran.” Ms. Nafisi’s group of Iranian women, clandestinely reading Austen and Nabokov, are freedom fighters after Ms.Ozick’s own heart: “The answer to governmental solipsism, Nafisi determined, was insubordination through clinging to what the regime could neither see nor feel: the sympathies and openness of humane art, art freed from political manipulation.”


At the same time, Ms. Ozick – unlike Harold Bloom, the unnamed target of several of her barbs – recognizes the bad taste involved in making a religion of literature. In her essay on Robert Alter’s translation of the Pentateuch, she carefully marks the limits of what human stories can do. “On their face,” she writes, “the Patriarchal Tales, like all literature that endures, touch on everything recognizable in ordinary human life: crises between parents and children, between siblings, between husbands and wives; hunger and migration, jealousy and reconciliation, sudden ascent and sudden subjugation, great love and great hatred.” Yet she acknowledges that this literary power is not what the Bible claims, and possibly demands; that the canonicity of literature is ephemeral compared to the canonicity of Scripture. “More than a human story,” Ms. Ozick recognizes, the Bible “is God’s story. … God in the Hebrew Bible is Causality, and Causality, unlike Joseph or Benjamin, cannot be a character in a tale.”


This kind of distinction is what matters most to Ms. Ozick and what she does best. If “The Din in the Head” has a failing, it is Ms. Ozick’s tendency to believe that her own solicitude for distinctions – between literature and gossip, literature and distraction, literature and advocacy – is unshared and unappreciated. She suffers from “Highbrow Blues,” to use the title of one essay, and fears that the literary culture she grew up admiring is sick unto death. Her essay on Lionel Trilling concludes with a jeremiad: “Is it possible … that it is not Lionel Trilling who is buried and lost, but rather ourselves?”


But there are still people out there reading Trilling – some of the same people, it is worth noting, who also write e-mails and watch television. A good deal of what Ms. Ozick laments in American culture is not structural decay but superficial change, and some of her alienation is less substantive than generational. The best argument against despair is the fact that a writer like Cynthia Ozick continues to be widely and deservedly admired.


akirsch@nysun.com


The New York Sun

© 2024 The New York Sun Company, LLC. All rights reserved.

Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. The material on this site is protected by copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used.

The New York Sun

Sign in or  Create a free account

By continuing you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use