Apparently it is no longer agreed, and the claim is as dated as an old encyclopaedia article tends to become. But whether human sacrifice was actually or only symbolically practiced in Greece, the issue—the concept as applying to the imagination of a civilization—is still very much to the point. In the history of comparative culture, what counts is whether the idea of human sacrifice is present at all, in any embodiment, even that of legend, and what this might portend (since both pity and pitilessness require teaching) in the necessary nurturing of pity.
Consider the nature of the internalization of the same idea at the dawn of Judaism, in its earliest hour: Judaism’s first social task, so to speak. The story of Abraham and Isaac announces, in the voice of divinity itself, the end of human sacrifice forever afterward. The binding of Isaac both represents and introduces the supreme scriptural valuation of innocent life. The sacrifice of Isaac never occurred and was not permitted to occur—the image and the possibility are wiped out once and for all. A heavenly instruction directs Abraham to the ram in the thicket—after which the idea of human sacrifice in the service of the divine is never again broached in the line of Jewish thinking (and without a moment’s regression in a people well known for backsliding).
The ram in the thicket is the herald of metaphor—a way station to the ultimate means of God-encounter, which will more and more distance itself from the altar (a literal-minded device that will finally vanish) to become purely verbal and textual. And metaphor, as I hope to show, is the herald of human pity.
*A parenthetical bemusement. Nowadays much of American literature is included in this Delphic fix. Certain novelists claim that fiction must express a pure autonomy—must become a self-sufficient language-machine—in order to be innovative; others strip language bare of any nuance. These aestheticians and reductionists, seeming opposites, both end inevitably at the gates of nihilism. A certain style of poetry is so far committed to the exquisitely self-contained that it has long since given up on that incandescent dream we call criticism of life. Abandoning attachments, annihilating society, the airless verse of self-scrutiny ends, paradoxically, in loss of the self. A certain style of criticism becomes a series of overlapping solipsisms—consider those types of “deconstruction” that end only in formulae. Insofar as these incommunicado literary movements are interested in interpretation at all, they have their ear at the Pythian tripod.
PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Some of the essays in this collection were originally published in the following periodicals: Commentary, Esquire, Harpers, Ms., The New Criterion, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Partisan Review, and Salmagundi.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
The Ecco Press: “A Short Note on ‘Chekhovian’” by Cynthia Ozick was originally published in The Tales of Chekhov, Volume 5, by The Ecco Press in 1985. Reprinted by permission.
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.: “Ruth” by Cynthia Ozick from Congregation: Contemporary Writers Read the Jewish Bible, edited by David Rosenberg. Copyright © 1987 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.
Johns Hopkins University Press: “A Translator’s Monologue” by Cynthia Ozick from Prooftexts, Volume 3, 1983. Reprinted by permission of the Johns Hopkins University Press.
The New York Times Company: “Talks with the Gods Who Lure Children” (“O Spilling Rapture, O Happy Stoup!”), May 1, 1983; “A Tale of Heroic Anonymity” (“The Sister Melons of J. M. Coetzee”), December 11, 1983; “Farcical Combat in a Busy World” (“What Drives Saul Bellow”), May 20, 1984; “Fakery and Stony Truths” (“William Gaddis and the Scion of Darkness”), July 7, 1985; “Miracle on Grub Street” (“Emerging Dreiser”), November 9, 1986; and “Mouth, Ear, Nose” (“Italo Calvino: Bringing Stories to Their Senses”), October 23, 1988; by Cynthia Ozick from The New York Times Book Review. Copyright© 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1988 by The New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission.
Pushcart Press: “The Function of the Small Press” by Cynthia Ozick from the Introduction to Pushcart Prize Xi, edited by Bill Henderson. Reprinted by permission.
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