The Ritual of New Creation (18 page)

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Authors: Norman Finkelstein

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BOOK: The Ritual of New Creation
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Page 63
Chapter 4
The Struggle for Historicity: Cynthia Ozick's Fiction
Now, as then, it would appear that even where Jews do not reject history out of hand, they are not prepared to confront it directly, but seem to await a new, metahistorical myth, for which the novel provides at least a temporary modern surrogate.
1
Cynthia Ozick assures her readers that a literature which maintains the Covenant and resists the idolatry of art will approach the liturgical, in which may be heard "a choral voice: the echo of the voice of the Lord of History." Furthermore, "when a Jew in Diaspora leaves liturgyliterary history drops him and he does not last."
2
The self-conscious Jewish writer who remembers, who maintains an awareness of history against the blandishments of the momentary and the immediate, in turn will be remembered, will become a part of (at least Jewish) literary history. Such has been the case throughout the
Galut:
"the tales we care for lastingly are the ones that touch on the redemptive," and such endurance only comes from the moral seriousness of covenanted writing.
3
Granted that it is always a struggle to maintain the Covenant, Ozick's formulation, which has been developing for many years, is strangely simple: acknowledge the distinction between the Creator and the Creation, and the "Riddle of the Ordinary," inasmuch as it can be answered, will become clear. The imagination, which delights in the endless plenitude of the existent, will recall that all such blessings come from a single Source. The imagination will be endowed with memory and judgment. The imagination will be steeped in history.
 
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But could it not be argued that Ozick's covenanted historical imagination is really ahistorical? As a religious formulation, its understanding of history as the temporal flux of circumstance finally is posited upon an event that is beyond history, located at the end of time. It is true that in Judaism, as Gershom Scholem notes, redemption "takes place publicly, on the stage of history and within the community."
4
But even in Judaism, the most historically conscious religion, "the Kingdom of God," as Walter Benjamin observes, "is not the
telos
of the historical dynamic; it cannot be set as a goal. From the standpoint of history it is not the goal, but the end."
5
These words, more severe than even the strongest of Ozick's polemics, present a serious challenge to the concept of a liturgical literature, a Jewish fiction that can maintain both its redemptive potential and its historicity. Perhaps the entire fiction-making enterprise, in that it partakes of historical contingency, is antithetical to the redemptive promise of God's Covenant with the Jewish people. This could be as great a source of anxiety to Ozick, the normative Jew with a forbidden lust for the magic of narrative, as the idolatry of art she so frequently attacks. Not only does fiction demand an idolatrous devotion to aesthetics, it also demands an engagement with the profane stuff of history that may lead it far from the redemptive quest which Ozick imposes upon it. Benjamin's resolution of this dilemma is, I believe, extremely important in understanding the historical dimension of Ozick's art:
just as a force can, through acting, increase another that is acting in the opposite direction, so the order of the profane assists, through being profane, the coming of the Messianic Kingdom. The profane, therefore, although not itself a category of this Kingdom, is a decisive category of its quietest approach.
6
Thus Ozick's career can be understood as an ongoing struggle to secure a sense of historically derived authenticity: in its devotion to history, the essentially profane, even idolatrous work of fiction becomes a Messianic counterforce.
But how can one be assured of the work's historicity? "The true image of the past flits by," writes Benjamin. "The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again."
7
Such "moments of danger," surely recognizable by the novelist as well as the critic or historian, inspire much of Ozick's fiction. Since the Jewish writer must respond to history
 
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as proof of her faith, since she must shape her observations of the past and present into interpretable meaning, then she must continually devise strategies to capture the true image of the past. Despite her endlessly contradictory statments concerning the purposes of literature, Ozick should be taken at her word when she declares that "
What literature means is meaning
"at least in regard to the literature that she herself has produced.
8
Though she is haunted by doubt of the final worth of even her most historically responsive stories, Ozick is impelled to produce, in Benjamin's term, "constellations" which join contemporary reality with the historical conditions which produced it. For the tale to have meaning, and consequentially a redemptive potential, it must have historical resonance; like Benjamin's criticism or Scholem's historiography, it must "rub history against the grain." Against what historical matter must the tale resound? In reading Ozick's work, I seek, if not what Fredric Jameson calls its political unconscious, then at least its historical unconscious. I seek not an ideological critique per se, but a redemptive critique that will still take ideology into account.
Consider
Envy; Or, Yiddish in America
. Historicity in Ozick's work often is felt through the crucial dialectic of marginality and centrality; and nowhere is this social dynamic more poignantly apparent than in the modern situation of Yiddish language and literature, especially in America. The pathetic comedy of Ozick's novella presents the Yiddish writer as isolated, bereft of audience, insanely jealous, and desperate for a translator who will bear him into the memory of his people. As Yiddish literature is marginalized, leaving only Ostrover, the "modern" writer who "speaks for everybody," Edelshtein, Ozick's obsessed protagonist, must face the loss of historicity that comes with the loss of language and community. This loss is compounded by the fact that Yiddish has not died a natural death. As the brooding Edelshtein puts it, "And the language was lost, murdered. The languagea museum. Of what other language can it be said that it died a sudden and definite death, in a given decade, on a given piece of soil?"
9
Horror and guilt as well as envy and self-pity motivate Edelshtein's mad acts, which in turn produce some of Ozick's most extravagant prose, the whirlwind of internal letters, monologues, and dialogues in her protagonist's tortured consciousness. Ironically, Edelshtein's Yiddished English, so magically convoluted in the midst of Ozick's energetic narration, seems less like a ghost than a vital force, a survivor in spite of itself.
 
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This then is Ozick's gambit: to transform linguistic exhaustion and the dregs of emotion into a new literature, a New Yiddish which maintains strong rhetorical as well as cultural links with the Old. Edelshtein's epiphany in the midst of his violently climactic argument with Hannah is perfectly appropriate, given the dialectical logic that controls the movement of Ozick's plot, and not in this tale alone:
He saw everything in miraculous reversal, blessedeverything plain, understandable, true. What he understood was this: that the ghetto was the real world, and the outside world only a ghetto. Because in actuality who was shut off? To whom, in what little space, did God offer Sinai? Who kept Terach and who followed Abraham? Talmud explains that when the Jews went into Exile, God went into exile also. Babi Yar is maybe the real world, and Kiev with its German toys, New York with all its terrible intelligence, all fictions, fantasies. Unreality.
10
Nowhere else in Ozick's fiction is her understanding of cultural identity and hence of historical endurance more precisely articulated than in this starkly dialectical turn. For the Jewish writerfor Jewish culture itselfhistoricity is to be gained through the renunciation of active historical life:
suppose it turns out that the destiny of the Jews is vast, open, eternal, and that Western Civilization is meant to dwindle, shrivel, shrink into the ghetto of the worldwhat of history then? Kings, Parliaments, like insects, Presidents like vermin, their religion a row of little dolls, their art a cave smudge, their poetry a lust
11
The so-called universality of great art, as exemplified by Ostrover's success, becomes a sham in Edelshtein's eyes; only the Covenant and the liturgical art by which it is served can provide authentic meaning to Jewish existence. Edelshtein clings to his Jewish difference, but because Yiddish is now a lost language even among Jews, he must remain forever agonized by his failure to be translated.
The extent to which Edelshtein is Ozick's spokesman is debateable; my guess is that his position is an exaggerated, almost clownish version of Ozick's own. Nevertheless, the point is maintained and

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