Metaphor and Memory

by Cynthia Ozick

  And more: poets trivialize novelists, novelists trivialize poets. Both trivialize critics. Critics trivialize reviewers. Reviewers retort that they are critics. Short-story writers assert transfigurations unavailable to novelists. Novelists declare the incomparable glories of the long pull. Novelizing aestheticians, admitting to literature no claims of moral intent, ban novelizing moralists. The moralists condemn the aestheticians as precious, barren, solipsist. Few essayists essay fiction. Few novelists hazard essays. Dense-language writers vilify minimalists. Writers of plain prose ridicule complex sentences. Professors look down on commercial publishers. Fiction writers dread university presses. The so-called provinces envy and despise the provinciality of New York. New York sees sour grapes in California and everywhere else. The so-called mainstream judges which writers are acceptably universal and which are to be exiled as “parochial.” The so-called parochial, stung or cowardly or both, fear all particularity and attempt impersonation of the acceptable. “Star” writers—recall the 1986 International PEN Congress in New York—treat lesser-knowns as invisible, negligible. The lesser-knowns, crushed, disparage the stars.

  And even the public library, once the unchallenged repository of the best that is known and thought, begins to split itself off, abandons its mandate, and rents out Polaroid cameras and videotapes, like some semi-philanthropic Crazy Eddie. My own local library, appearing to jettison the basic arguments of the age, flaunts shelf after shelf prominently marked Decorating, Consumer Power, How To, Cookery, Hooray for Hollywood, Accent on You, What Makes Us Laugh, and many more such chitchat categories. But there are no placards for Literature, History, Biography; and Snow and Leavis, whom I needed to moon over in order to get started on this essay, were neither one to be had. (I found them finally in the next town, in a much smaller if more traditionally bookish library.)

  Though it goes against the grain of respected current belief to say so, literature is really about something. It is about us. That may be why we are drawn to think of the kingdom of letters as a unity, at least in potential. Science, teeming and multiform, is about how the earth and the heavens and the microbes and the insects and our mammalian bodies are constructed, but literature is about the meaning of the finished construction. Or, to set afloat a more transcendent vocabulary: science is about God’s work; literature is about our work. If our work lies untended (and what is our work but aspiration?), if literary culture falls into a heap of adversarial splinters— into competing contemptuous clamorers for turf and mental dominance— then what will be left to tell us that we are one human presence?

  To forward that strenuous telling, Matthew Arnold (himself now among the jettisoned) advised every reader and critic to “try and possess one great literature, at least, besides his own; and the more unlike his own, the better.” Not to split off from but to add on to the kingdom of letters: so as to uncover its human face.

  An idea that—in a time of ten thousand self-segregating literary technologies—may be unwanted, if not obsolete.

  Published as “Science and Letters—God’s Work and Ours,” The New York Times Book Review, September 27, 1987

  Portrait of the Artist as a Bad Character

  Finally there is something new to say about Mona Lisa’s smile. A current theory holds that La Gioconda is a self-portrait—Leonardo without his beard—and that the smile is, in fact, a trickster’s derisive glimmer, a transvestite joke: five centuries of pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes.

  Well, all right, suppose it’s really so: a da Vinci witticism unmasked at last. What would that mean for all those duped dead generations who marveled at Mona Lisa for her harmonious specificity as a woman, or, more romantically, as Woman? If they believed in the innocence they saw, was it a lie they were seeing? Or, because he fooled the ages, ought we to send the hangman after Leonardo’s ghost? And what of us—we who are advantaged, or, conceivably, deprived—in the wake of this putative discovery? In recognizing the artist’s ruse, are we seeing Mona Lisa plain for the first time in the history of her unflagging secret laughter? Or do we tamper with intention when we superimpose what we may now know on that unaccoutered loveliness? Mona Lisa mustached! The graffiti vandal’s dream.

  Moonings like these may be of little use to da Vinci scholars, but they are charged with a certain literary irritation. They prod us to recall that the work of art is in its nature figment and fraud—but figment and fraud we have pointedly agreed to surrender to. If the fraud ends up a screw-twist more fraudulent than bargained for, that is what happens when you strike a bargain with someone dressed up in cap and bells. The Mona Lisa is made out of five-hundred-year-old paint, no matter who the model was, and it’s the viewer who assents to the game of her being there at all. A portrait, like a novel, is a fiction, and what we call fiction is rightly named. In the compact between novelist and reader, the novelist promises to lie, and the reader promises to allow it.

  These are notations so conspicuous and so stale that they are inscribed, no doubt, among the sacred antlers on neolithic cave walls; but they raise somewhat less obvious questions about the writer’s potential for decent citizenship—the writer, that is, of fiction. Literary essayists, critical and social thinkers, historians, journalists, and so forth, don’t in general, or at least not ideally, set out to defraud. The essayist’s contract is exactly contrary to the novelist’s—a promise to deliver ideas and “issues,” implicit in which is a promise to show character. Fiction writers may easily begin as persons of character—more easily, say, than political columnists who are tempted to put a finger lightly on the scale—but the likelihood is that in the long run fiction bruises character. Novelists invent, deceive, exaggerate, and impersonate for several hours every day, and frequently on the weekend. Through the creation of bad souls they enter the demonic as a matter of course. They usurp emotions and appropriate lives.

  As to the latter: “We all like to pretend we don’t use real people,” E. M. Forster once confessed, “but one does actually. I used some of my family. Miss Bartlett was my Aunt Emily—they all read the book but none of them saw it. . . . Mrs. Honeychurch was my grandmother. The three Miss Dickinsons condensed into two Miss Schlegels. Philip Herriton I modeled on Professor Dent. He knew this, and took an interest in his own progress.” That may sound benign, but more often Professor Dent turns out to be sour and litigious, eager to muzzle, maim, or brain the writer into whose inspirations he has been unfortunate enough to fall. Saul Bellow’s ingenious Shawmut, the put-down expert of “Him with His Foot in His Mouth,” a self-described vatic type who stands for the artist, deduces that “I don’t have to say a word for people to be insulted by me. . . . my existence itself insults them. I come to this conclusion unwillingly, for God knows that I consider myself a man of normal social instincts and am not conscious of any will to offend.” Yet Shawmut acknowledges he is in the grip of a manic force—a frenzy—signifying “something that is inaccessible to revision.”

  Good citizens are good—the consequence of normal social instincts— because they are usually accessible to revision; they are interested in self-improvement. Fiction writers have a different program for ego: not to polish it up for public relations, but to make it serve rapture—the rapture of language and drama, and also the rapture of deceit. The drive to rapture is resistant to revision in a big way, and will nail grandmothers and condense ladies no matter what. Professor Dent is right to look sweetly to his progress; he never had a chance to escape it. A well-worked fable is nothing but outright manipulation of this sort, not simply because it is all theater—what seems to be happening never actually happened—but because readers of fiction are forcibly dispossessed of a will of their own, and are made to think and feel whatever the writer commands. The characters in a novel are ten thousand times freer than their readers. Characters are often known to mutiny against the writer by taking charge of their books; readers, never. Readers are docile in succumbing to the responses prescribed for them; or else the book uncompromisingly closes i
ts gates and shuts them out. In either case the writer is master.

  Letters and diaries are not necessarily less fraudulent than works of fiction. It might be worthwhile for a scholar of deception—some ambitious graduate student in American literature, say—to compare a writer’s journal entry on a particular day with a letter sent that same day. “Dear W: Your new poems have just come. Supernal stuff! You surpass yourself,” the letter will start off. And the journal entry: “This A.M. received bilgewater from W; wrote him some twaddle.” But even journals may not be trustworthy; a journal is a self-portrait, after all, and can white out the wens. I once met a young novelist who admitted that he was ashamed to tell his private diary his real secrets. On the other hand, the absence of abashment in a writer’s diary is not the same as truth: who will measure Thomas Mann by the record of his flatulence, or the bite of Edmund Wilson by his compulsive nature pastels (“Mountains stained by blue shade—and, later, the pale brown rungs of the eucalyptus screens all pink in the setting sun”)?

  Storytellers and novelists, when on the job, rely on a treacherous braid of observation and invention; or call it memory and insinuation. Invention despoils observation, insinuation invalidates memory. A stewpot of bad habits, all of it—so that imaginative writers wind up, by and large, a shifty crew, sunk in distortion, misrepresentation, illusion, imposture, fakery. Those who—temporarily—elude getting caught out as bad characters are the handful of mainly guileless writers who eat themselves alive, like Kafka or Bruno Schulz. Such creatures neither observe nor invent. They never impersonate. Instead, they use themselves up in their fables, sinew by sinew. They are not in the world at all, or, if for a time they seem to be, it is only a simulacrum of a social being, and another lie.

  Who will blame Leonardo for fooling us? The work was a sham to begin with. Those granules of chemicals on canvas were never Mona Lisa. She comes to life only with our connivance. And if the artist shows no character at all, and piles a second trick on the first, isn’t he exactly the rascal we know him for?

  Published as “Good Novelists, Bad Citizens,” The New York Times Book Review, February 15, 1987

  On Permission to Write

  I hate everything that does not relate to literature, conversations bore me (even when they relate to literature), to visit people bores me, the joys and sorrows of my relatives bore me to my soul. Conversation takes the importance, the seriousness, the truth, out of everything I think.

  FRANZ KAFKA, from his diary, 1918

  In a small and depressing city in a nearby state there lives a young man (I will call him David) whom I have never met and with whom I sometimes correspond. David’s letters are voluminous, vehemently bookish, and—in obedience to literary modernism—without capitals. When David says “I,” he writes “i.” This does not mean that he is insecure in his identity or that he suffers from a weakness of confidence—David cannot be characterized by thumbnail psychologizing. He is like no one else (except maybe Jane Austen). He describes himself mostly as poor and provincial, as in Balzac, and occasionally as poor and black. He lives alone with his forbearing and bewildered mother in a flat “with imaginary paintings on the walls in barren rooms,” writes stories and novels, has not yet published, and appears to spend his days hauling heaps of books back and forth from the public library.

  He has read, it seems, everything. His pages are masses of flashy literary allusions—nevertheless entirely lucid, witty, learned, and sane. David is not exactly a crank who writes to writers, although he is probably a bit of that too. I don’t know how he gets his living, or whether his letters romanticize either his poverty (he reports only a hunger for books) or his passion (ditto); still, David is a free intellect, a free imagination. It is possible that he hides his manuscripts under a blotter, Jane-Austenly, when his mother creeps mutely in to collect his discarded socks. (A week’s worth, perhaps, curled on the floor next to Faulkner and Updike and Cummings and Tristram Shandy. Of the latter he remarks: “a worthy book, dare any man get offspring on less?”)

  On the other hand, David wants to be noticed. He wants to be paid attention to. Otherwise, why would he address charming letters to writers (I am not the only one) he has never met? Like Joyce in “dirty provincial Dublin,” he says, he means to announce his “inevitable arrival on the mainland.” A stranger’s eye, even for a letter, is a kind of publication. David, far from insisting on privacy, is a would-be public man. It may be that he pants after fame. And yet in his immediate position—his secret literary life, whether or not he intends it to remain secret—there is something delectable. He thirsts to read, so he reads; he thirsts to write, so he writes. He is in the private cave of his freedom, an eremite, a solitary; he orders his mind as he pleases. In this condition he is prolific. He writes and writes. Ah, he is poor and provincial, in a dim lost corner of the world. But his lonely place (a bare cubicle joyfully tumbling with library books) and his lonely situation (the liberty to be zealous) have given him the permission to write. To be, in fact, prolific.

  I am not like David. I am not poor, or provincial (except in the New York way), or unpublished, or black. (David, the sovereign of his life, invents an aloofness from social disabilities, at least in his letters, and I have not heard him mythologize “negritude”; he admires poets for their words and cadences.) But all this is not the essential reason I am not like David. I am not like him because I do not own his permission to write freely, and zealously, and at will, and however I damn please; and abundantly; and always.

  There is this difference between the prolific and the non-prolific: the prolific have arrogated to themselves the permission to write. By permission I suppose I ought to mean inner permission. Now “inner permission” is a phrase requiring high caution: it was handed to me by a Freudian dogmatist, a writer whose energy and confidence depend on regular visits to his psychoanalyst. In a useful essay called “Art and Neurosis,” Lionel Trilling warns against the misapplication of Freud’s dictum that “we are all ill, i.e., neurotic,” and insists that a writer’s productivity derives from “the one part of him that is healthy, by any conceivable definition of health. . . . that which gives him the power to conceive, to plan, to work, and to bring his work to a conclusion.” The capacity to write, in short, comes from an uncharted space over which even all-prevailing neurosis can have no jurisdiction or dominion. “The use to which [the artist] puts his power. . . . may be discussed with reference to his particular neurosis,” Trilling concedes; yet Trilling’s verdict is finally steel: “But its essence is irreducible. It is, as we say, a gift.”

  If permission to write (and for a writer this is exactly equal to the power to write) is a gift, then what of the lack of permission? Does the missing “Go ahead” mean neurosis? I am at heart one of those hapless pre-moderns who believe that the light bulb is the head of a demon called forth by the light switch, and that Freud is a German word for pleasure; so I am not equipped to speak about principles of electricity or psychoanalysis. All the same, it seems to me that the electrifying idea of inward obstacle—neurosis—is not nearly so often responsible for low productivity as we are told. Writer’s permission is not something that is switched off by helpless forces inside the writer, but by social currents—human beings and their ordinary predilections and prejudices—outside. If David writes freely and others don’t, the reason might be that, at least for a while, David has kidnapped himself beyond the pinch of society. He is Jane Austen with her hidden manuscript momentarily slipped out from under the blotter; he is Thoreau in his cabin. He is a free man alone in a room with imaginary pictures on the walls, reading and writing in a private rapture.

  There are some writers who think of themselves as shamans, dervishes of inspiration, divinely possessed ecstatics—writers who believe with Emerson that the artist “has cast off the common motives of humanity and has ventured to trust himself for a taskmaster”: himself above everyone. Emerson it is who advises writers to aspire, through isolation, to “a simple purpose.. . . as strong as
iron necessity is to others,” and who—in reply to every contingency—exhorts, “O father, O mother, O wife, O brother, O friend, I have lived with you after appearances hitherto. Henceforward I am the truth’s.” These shaman-writers, with their cult of individual genius and romantic egoism, may be self-glamorizing holy madmen, but they are not maniacs; they know what is good for them, and what is good for them is fences. You cannot get near them, whatever your need or demand. O father, O mother, O wife, O brother, O friend, they will tell you—beat it. They call themselves caviar, and for the general their caviar is a caveat.

  Most writers are more modest than this, and more reasonable, and don’t style themselves as unbridled creatures celestially privileged and driven. They know that they are citizens like other citizens, and have simply chosen a profession, as others have. These are the writers who go docilely to gatherings where they are required to marvel at every baby; who yield slavishly to the ukase that sends them out for days at a time to scout a samovar for the birthday of an elderly great-uncle; who pretend to overnight guests that they are capable of sitting at the breakfast table without being consumed by print; who craftily let on to in-laws that they are diligent cooks and sheltering wives, though they would sacrifice a husband to a hurricane to fetch them a typewriter ribbon; and so on. In short, they work at appearances, trust others for taskmasters, and do not insist too rigorously on whose truth they will live after. And they are honorable enough. In company, they do their best to dress like everyone else: if they are women they will tolerate panty hose and high-heeled shoes, if they are men they will show up in a three-piece suit; but in either case they will be concealing the fact that during any ordinary row of days they sleep in their clothes. In the same company they lend themselves, decade after decade, to the expectation that they will not lay claim to unusual passions, that they will believe the average belief, that they will take pleasure in the average pleasure. Dickens, foreseeing the pain of relinquishing his pen at a time not of his choosing, reportedly would not accept an invitation. “Thank God for books,” Auden said, “as an alternative to conversation.” Good-citizen writers, by contrast, year after year decline no summons, refuse no banquet, turn away from no tedium, willingly enter into every anecdote and brook the assault of any amplified band. They will put down their pens for a noodle pudding.