Art and Ardor

by Cynthia Ozick

  By contrast, then, I come to this place as a pilgrim, to speak in dispraise of Diaspora: I include specifically the Diaspora of freedom. Now it is well known that dispraise of Diaspora is an obvious and popular stance among some Israelis. And indeed it could not be otherwise, since Zionism is an inspiration with two parents: the memory of home its warm mother, revulsion against Exile its stern father. But lately we have seen—particularly at the time of the Eichmann trial we saw—how Israeli rejection of Diaspora becomes not a revulsion against the millennial victimization of the galut (exile) experience, but a revulsion against the victimized Jew himself—his preoccupations, his manners and mores, the very shape of his body. The distastefulness of the portrait, its emphasis on pettiness and cowardice, coincides remarkably with that of the classic anti-Semite—also, more pathetically, with that of the classic Jewish anti-Semite. It is a description frequently in the mouths of some English and American Jews as well, and it might have been partly to counteract such unhappy distortions that George Steiner drew his opposite portrait of the Jew as Luft-mensch, ennobled by otherness, universalized through wandering, gifted in his homelessness by exceptional sight and judgment, made free by unbelonging. If George Steiner has special praise for the human consequences of the two thousand years between Israel and Israel, some Israelis would negate and disvalue that same period as if it never was. Both the praise and the dispraise are partial renderings of root situations—but they are superficial because they are largely social responses: they are told in the language of a kind of rhetoricized sociology. My dispraise of Diaspora means to take another direction: it is centered on a revulsion against the values—very plainly I mean the beliefs—of the surrounding culture itself: a revulsion against Greek and pagan modes, whether in their Christian or post-Christian vessels, whether in their purely literary vessels, or whether in their vessels of Kulturgeschichte. It is a revulsion—I want to state it even more plainly—against what is called, strangely, Western Civilization.

  I have this in common with Steiner: like him, I want to offer myself as a metaphor of Diaspora. Steiner finds his construct of Diaspora appropriate to some aspects of himself; so do I. I say with him, Diaspora, c’est moi: only the view darkly differs. For one thing, I am the ordinary Diaspora animal, and this makes me a better, or at least a more useful because worse, example. Let me tell you what I do and how I live. I am a writer, slow and unprolific, largely unknown, the most obscure of all the writers who have, so far, whether as visitors or pilgrims, addressed this conference. Obscurity is here doubly and triply pertinent, for to be a writer is to be almost nothing; the writer is not a religious thinker, or a philosopher, or a political scientist, or a historian, or a sociologist, or a philologist. To be a writer is to be an autodidact, with all the limitations, gaps, and gaucheries typical of the autodidact, who belabors clichés as though they were sacral revelations. Especially as a Jew I am an autodidact: the synagogue at present does not speak to me, and I have no divine shelter other than reading; at the moment print is all my Judaism, and I crawl through print besotted with avaricious ignorance, happening here and there upon a valley of light. My reading has become more and more urgent, though in narrower and narrower channels. I no longer read much “literature.” I read mainly to find out not what it is to be a Jew—my own life in its quotidian particulars tells me that—but what it is to think as a Jew. Novels and poems no longer appear to address me; even our celebrated Jewish novelists, though I read them all, appear to be in the grip of a sociology more or less gross, more or less revealing; the only Jewish novelist who seems to me purely and profoundly ideational is Saul Bellow—so I sit alone in a wastepile of discarded artists, reading one novelist. But one is not enough to make what we always hear called a Literary Renaissance among American Jews. Until very recently, my whole life was given over to the religion of Art, which is the religion of the Gentile nations—I had no other aspiration, no other commitment, was zealous for no other creed. In my twenties I lived the life of the elderly Henry James. In my thirties I worshiped E. M. Forster for the lure of his English paganism. Fifteen years went into a silent and shadowed apprenticeship of craft and vision. When at last I wrote a huge novel I meant it to be a Work of Art—but as the years ground through that labor, it turned, amazingly and horribly, into a curse. I discovered at the end that I had cursed the world I lived in, grain by grain. And I did not know why. Furthermore, that immense and silent and obscure labor had little response—my work did not speak to the Gentiles, for whom it had been begun, nor to the Jews, for whom it had been finished. And I did not know why. Though I had yearned to be famous in the religion of Art, to become so to speak a saint of Art, I remained obscure.—Diaspora, c’est moi: remember that I speak of myself metaphorically only, and so I do not use the word “obscurity” as having anything to do with personal reputation, but with shadow, with futility, with vanity, frivolity, and waste. I include in this hopeless destiny of obscurity persons of splendid achievement, eminent writers who have performed brilliant summarizing work. I include George Steiner, and Walter Kaufmann who spoke here last year in impassioned disparagement of nationalism; I include the spectacular Leslie Fiedler and the marvelously gifted Philip Roth, who were here seven years ago. At that time Philip Roth said: “I am not a Jewish writer; I am a writer who is a Jew.” I do not know whether he would hold this view today. Nevertheless Philip Roth’s words do not represent a credo; they speak for a doom. I will come back to them shortly.

  But first a brief anthropological excursion through Diaspora: Diaspora, c’est moi—I was telling you how I, a metaphor, live. I live in Diaspora, I work in it, I nurture my child in it, and undoubtedly I shall die in it. Having complained of sociology, I now find a large tract of it lying before me. It is full of humps, but I suppose they must be gotten over. I will tell you about my street and how I live in it; or do not live in it. Far from being universalist, with the capacity to peer over boundaries and shrink oceans between Cambridge and Cambridge, I spend an unvisionary life in a house among houses. On my street mine is the Jewish house: there is an Italian house, a Lithuanian house, a German house, a Scotch-Irish house. Luggiaro, Pozha, Koechlein, Cochran. The names make music but the harmony is superficial. The blacks are seven streets away in a separate enclave, invisible and shut off; when on occasion a black child roams by on a bicycle, stares of anxiety follow him. Still, there is peace. But it is not the trusting peace of universalism or even of pluralism—it is the pragmatic peace of truce. The ordinary Diaspora animal lives side-by-side, not over-and-above. My marginality is not a source of my liberation, but rather a worrisome buzz in the back of the mind. When the neighbor’s mower noisily cuts his grass, I suppose he watches the grass fly up and thinks about that. When I cut my grass I tunnel through the buzz and think of the earth beneath the grass—the grass flies up over something sweet and deep, but borrowed, transient. I will not let myself love the clover too much; not even the clover is allowed to deceive me. Diaspora does not nourish my universalist impulse. Just the opposite: it segments it. Marginality does not free me to the rich subversions of the ironic spirit. Just the opposite: it makes me tuck them away when the neighbor’s Stars and Stripes smothers his porch on Flag Day. I happen not to own a flag; in silence my neighbor notices my omission; in silence I observe his silence. All this—my neighborly silence, I mean—is the ugly accommodation of cowardice. And the reason I am cowardly, I tell myself, is not because I am at bottom cowardly, but because I want to save my powers for the Real Thing, the life of what I once called Art. Read, read, read, and read quickly; write, write, write, and write urgently—before the coming of the American pogrom! How much time is there left? The rest of my life? One generation? Two?

  No Jew I know is shocked at this pessimism, though many disagree with it. They will tell me that I exhibit the craven ghetto mentality of the shtetl; “America is different.” I go to the public library and I find a book by three clergymen—in America it is always three clergymen—a minister, a pri
est, and a rabbi, and the rabbi’s chapter is called “America Is Different.” The rabbi is the author of a study of the French Enlightenment, an authoritative and exhaustive history showing how even Voltaire was not different. The rabbi’s chapter is full of fear masking as hope. Calling it “America Is Different” is probably very polite, but it is about the same as rushing out to buy a flag to even up the street. If you feel the necessity always to be on guard as to your keeping a civil tongue, you are hardly free. Even a rabbi, even a historian, can be the ordinary Diaspora animal.

  But my less nervous friends say: Oh, that is the disease of middle age: America is different now, look at the young. And I look at the young—especially at those young Jews who are so disproportionately represented in the New Left. See? my less nervous friends say—see, no flags for them, except to burn and tear: they have the courage of universalism in the face of your selfish ghetto cravenness. They are obsessed by a vision of peace. But I see in these bright-beaded and garlanded children a ghetto legacy as deep as any of my own, a legacy obsessed not so much by peace as by enmity—the certainty that government is the enemy. This they swallowed whole, though unawares, out of their great-grandfathers’ bellies: it was not to be found in the Reform Sunday Schools that bred their creed. And so, like me, they dream old nightmares of the czars—but without knowing that they dream these nightmares because they are Jews. My Russian-born father had a plain word to signify a certain brand of moral anesthesia: Amerikaner-geboren. I translate it without elaboration as having been autolobotomized out of history, which describes, for instance, our Jewish Yippies. They are a subspecies of the Diaspora animal, but all the same instantly recognizable. The ironies the Yippies yell are ironic in a way they know not of: they think they are the first generation to revile government. Their parents do not, or dare not, revile government; their parents spend the ten dollars for a flag, meanwhile paying dues to the Reform Sunday School to promote the teaching of Jewish universalism. Exhilarated by insurrectionist and treasonable invective, the young imagine themselves to be profoundly new, unheard-of, romantically zany and strange, the first of their kind. Whereas they are only the de-Judaized shadows of their great-grandfathers in the Pale, whom they have excised from memory. “Nikolay, Nikolay, oif dayn kop ikh shpay” was my grandmother’s lullaby to me—Czar Nicholas, I spit on your head.—Not only fear but fearlessness makes the Diaspora animal: show the flag or burn it, cowardice or bold revulsion, it’s all the same in exile.

  The conspiracy trial of the Chicago Seven was a spectacle in two senses: on the part of the law under whose provisions the trial was brought, it was a spectacle of the whipping-down of civil liberties in the United States. But on the part of the Yippies, Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman among others, it was a spectacle in its fully aesthetic meaning. The New Left is sometimes taken as a “Jewish” movement, largely because it seems to be about social justice. But in reality it is less a social or a prophetic movement than an aesthetic one, especially in its Yippie aspects. Allen Ginsberg said of his role as witness in Chicago: “I have not written a poem about the experience of the trial because my testimony itself was the poem.”2 That poem is apparent in what is nowadays called “lifestyle.”3 Up to now I have been talking, as I warned, the language and themes of sociology—these are preoccupying but not critical. What is critical is “lifestyle”: and what is even more critical is poetry. For lifestyle is the exact point of pressure whereat sociology turns into aesthetics; where demonstration becomes description and phenomena are transmogrified into values; where at last we enter into the ancient and eternal rift between the Jewish idea and the world-at-large. In America at the moment the concept of lifestyle is expressed extrinsically in a certain gaudiness of costume and vocabulary, full of the charms of novel shock and novel openness. Explaining to the court what a “human be-in” was—the event in a park near the Democratic Convention that resulted in the conspiracy trial—Ginsberg said that its purpose was “to show some different new lifestyle than was going to be shown to the younger people by the politicians who were assembled; to present different ideas for making the society more sacred and less commercial.” Intrinsically lifestyle implies a hope for revolution to be effected through a community of manners. Manners are endemically and emphatically in the realm of poetry and outside the realm of acts: the poem is the incarnation of the deed, the romance of belief stands for the act. Manners are gesture, gesture is theater and magic. The revolution, then, is really a thrust, first and foremost, of taste and of poetry. The old sex-words, for instance, demythologized of their secrecy taboo, have acquired a half-comical, half-gallant, new mythos of public poetry; their use is sacramental. In Ginsberg’s poetry their use is sacramental. But revolutionary lifestyle incorporates very literally a eucharistic, not a Jewish, urge. What Ginsberg in his testimony called “psychedelic consciousness” is what the Christian used to call grace. At the be-in, a group of ministers and rabbis elevated a ten-foot cross high into a cloud of tear gas thrown by rioting police. When Ginsberg saw this he turned to his friend and said: “They have gassed the cross of Christ.” Perhaps for the first time since Rome an elevated cross was on the receiving end of a pogrom, but the fact remains that for the rabbis who carried it and for Ginsberg who pitied it the cross had been divested of its historical freight. It had been transubstantiated from a sign of the real acts of a community into the vehicle of a moment rich in aesthetic contrast, Christian grace, psychedelic consciousness, theatrical and poetical magic—like that moment in our national anthem when the Star-Spangled Banner waves gloriously through a smoky night of shellfire.

  I do not think Ginsberg would object to this Ku Kluxish equation of Cross with Flag: each is a poem, and a poem has no history. That is why he can recite the mantras, love the cross, and speak of hasidism in the same breath: “allee samee,” he says of all the religions of the world—all the same. He makes no exception of Judaism because—having misread hasidism, and mistaking the hasidic part for the historic whole—he imagines the Jewish vision to be an ecstasy without a history. But you cannot comprehend Sinai and still say “allee samee.” Sinai does not speak out against ecstasy, but against cultishness; it commands deed, conduct, act, and says No to any impulse that would impede a community of justice. Yet ecstasy belongs to cultishness, and cultishness transcends conduct, which is what Isaiah knew when he condemned our feasts and new-moon celebrations and referred us to the Sinaitic commandments. Allen Ginsberg retains the Jewish passion for peacefulness, mercy, and justice, but he imagines that by transcending its Jewish character he will be better empowered to infuse it into all men: an acutely Christian formulation. In transcending the Jewish behavioral character of the vision, he transcends the social vision itself, floating off into various modes of release and abandonment. He recapitulates the Hellenization of Jewish Christianity. He restates the justification-by-faith that is at the core of Pauline Protestantism. In dethroning the separate Oneness of God—the God of Thou Shalt and Thou Shalt Not—he goes farther than little Christianity, even in its Roman plural-saint version. He wades into the great tide of the Orient, where gods proliferate and nature binds all the gods together and the self’s ideal is to drown in holy selfhood until nature blots out man and every act is annihilated in the divine blindness of pure enlightenment. Monism is the negation of monotheism. Ecstasy belongs to the dark side of personality, to the mystical unknowingness of our “psychedelic consciousness,” to the individual as magical repository, instrument, medium and mediator of the sacral. When man is turned into a piece of god he is freed from any covenant with God. The Yippie revolutionaries revive the Indian headband not only because it is redolent of woods and freedom, but because it suggests rite, strange lost religions, occult encampments, divine orgy. It signifies not simply the forest but the darkness of the forest. Poetry is the center, as it was in the Greek religions, as it was in the cult of Osiris, as it is in all cults untouched by the Jewish covenant. Hence the flattery and menace and popularity of astrology, a reli
gion without a role for will or commandment. Hence the random ecstasy of drugs. There is no need for a covenant with God if God can enter flesh. What is going on now in the streets of America is what, in different costume and vocabulary, has always been going on in the churches of America. It is a reënactment, not a revolution. And by no means a new revelation. And by no means Jewish. It is the religion of Art, and just as a Jew feels alien to the aesthetic paganism of a churched America, so now he feels alien to the aesthetic paganism of the streets. Formerly at least the streets were neutral. Now they too are churched.

  As in the streets, so in literature. We ought to have suspected it would come when, thirty years ago, literary idealism was captured by the band styled as New Critics. These were largely Christian Karaites who would allow no tradition to be attached to a text. The history, psychology, even the opinions, of a writer were declared irrelevant to the work and its word. A ritual called explication de texte was the sacrament of this movement. It died out, killed by the power and persuasiveness of biography, but also because of the rivalry and exhaustion of its priests. For the priests of that sect the text had become an idol; humanity was left out. (Some of the best critics of that time and afterward, Lionel Trilling, Philip Rahv, Alfred Kazin and Irving Howe, were Jews; they did not conform, and put humanity back in.) Now again, after a period of vagueness and confusion following the dissolution of the New Criticism, the text has become an idol, though in another form. Now it is the novel that has been aestheticized, poeticized, and thereby paganized. I will try to seize these complexities in the briefest way, by grabbing hold only of the points that stick out the most. The most flagrant point is this: the nineteenth-century novel has been pronounced dead. Since the nineteenth-century novel is essentially the novel, some conclude that the novel itself is dead. Critics now talk of “exhausted forms”—narrative is played out, psychology is played out, and so forth. So what is left? Two possibilities: parody of the old forms, Tolstoyan mockeries such as Nabokov’s; and a new “form” called language, involving not only parody, but game, play, and rite. The novel is now said to be “about itself,” a ceremony of language. This is currently the only sort of fiction receiving the practical attention of serious literary intellectuals in America. How to describe the genesis of this new breed of novel? Its father is the Frenchman Robbe-Grillet, its mother is the impressive American aesthetician Susan Sontag; its diligent foster uncles are two de-Judaized American critics, Kostelanetz and Gilman. Its practitioners are by and large not Jews. Where so many Jews are writers of fiction, this has a certain significance as to temperament: Roth, Bellow, and Malamud, the most celebrated of the Jewish writers, are all accused of continuing to work in “exhausted forms.”