Art and Ardor

by Cynthia Ozick

  Through his placing the critic in competition with the creator, Bloom is often regarded as having committed an act of artistic hubris; but those who look askance at Bloom’s belief that the poem’s interpretation is as much the poem’s life as the “original” ought to be more troubled by the hubris of the poet, which the whole body of Bloom’s work strives to emphasize and even enlarge. The Bloomian transmutation of critic into poet, after all, is not so innovative as it might seem; it is no news that a critic may feel himself to be in a clandestine contest with the creative artist by understanding himself to be still another creative artist. It is true that Bloom has significantly altered the meaning of what it is to be “original”; but whether or not his conclusions are found to be attractive or persuasive, what he has made his originals do can stop the breath. He has vouchsafed them the temerity to usurp the Throne of Heaven.

  Now none of this is to accuse or blame Bloom’s position because it is on the side of this grandest usurpation of all. The Second Commandment runs against the grain of our social nature, indeed against human imagination. To observe it is improbable, perhaps impossible; perhaps it has never been, and never will be, wholly observed. But the Second Commandment is nevertheless expressive of one of the essential ideals of Judaism, and like most of the essential ideals of Judaism—consider in this light the institution of the Sabbath—it is uniquely antithetical to the practices and premises of the pre-Judaic and non-Judaic world. In short, it is the Jewish idiom—with regard to art as well as other matters—that is in its deepest strain dissenting, contradictory, frequently irreconcilable, and for Bloom and others to think of his system as “antithetical” is a sizable mistake. What is antithetical goes against the grain of the world at large, while to work at idol-making is not only not to go against the world’s grain, but to consort with it in the most ancient, intimate, sibylline, and Delphic way. Bloom stands for the most part as defense counselor for those eternally usurping diviners against whom Zechariah inveighed: “For the idols have spoken vanity, and the diviners have seen a lie, and have told false dreams; they comfort in vain.”

  But if there can be such a chimera as a “Jewish writer,” it must be the kind of sphinx or gryphon (part one thing, part another) Bloom himself is, sometimes purifying like Abraham, more often conjuring like Terach, and always knowing that the two are icily, elegiacally, at war. Bloom as Terach: “The Kabbalists read and interpreted with excessive audacity and extravagance; they knew that the true poem is the critic’s mind, or as Emerson says, the true ship is the shipbuilder.” Bloom as Abraham: “The Talmud warns against reading Scripture by so inclined a light that the text reveals chiefly the shape of your own countenance.”

  In an essay called “The Sorrows of American-Jewish Poetry,” Bloom writes: “There is no recovery of the covenant, of the Law, without confronting again, in all deep tribulation, the God of the Fathers, Who is beyond image as He is beyond personality, and Who can be met only by somehow again walking His Way.”

  These words, I think, constitute still another call for misprision; but there is no way they can speak against themselves, or be creatively misread. The recovery of Covenant can be attained only in the living-out of the living Covenant; never among the shamanistic toys of literature.

  Alas, like all the others, we drift toward the shamans and their toys.

  _____________

  Essay published in Commentary, January 1979.

  1 An instance of the Bloomian use of psychology: “I do not think that the psyche is a text, but I find it illuminating to discuss texts as though they were psyches, and in doing so I consciously follow the Kabbalists.”

  2 Bloom, though the most provocative, is not the only successor-rebel in reaction against the New Critics. I here propose to leave the cupboard bare of the others, but for a discussion of Bloom in conjunction with Northrop Frye, Paul de Man, Stanley E. Fish, Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller, Angus Fletcher, and—among influential foreigners—Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes, see Irene H. Chayes, “Revisionist Literary Criticism,” Commentary, April 1976.

  3 According to a midrash, Terach was a maker and seller of idols. One day he left the boy Abraham to watch the shop. After remonstrating with one customer after another, Abraham picked up an ax and smashed all the idols but one—the biggest. When Terach returned, he angrily asked for an explanation. Abraham replied: “Father, the idols were hungry, and I brought them food. But the big god seized your ax, killed the other gods, and ate all the food himself.” “Abram,” said Terach, “you are mocking me. You know well that idols can neither move, nor eat, nor perform any act.” Abraham said: “Father, let your ears hear what your tongue speaks.” The Rabbis’ Bible (Behrman House, 1966).

  4 This law of idolatry is again and again expressed with great precision by Bloom. Writing on the “revisionary ratio” he names “Apopbrades, or The Return of the Dead,” Bloom reflects, “But the strong dead return, in poems as in our lives, and they do not come back without darkening the living. . . . The precursors flood us, and our imaginations can die by drowning in them, but no imaginative life is possible if such inundation is wholly evaded.”

  5 The midrash mentioned earlier also has Abraham asking the age of a man who has come to buy an idol to protect his house. “I am fifty years old,” says the customer, “and have been a soldier for more than thirty years.” “You are fifty,” Abraham scoffs, “whereas this idol was carved by my father only last week. And though you are a seasoned warrior, you ask protection from it!”

  6 The impulse toward evil, related also to the creative capacity; the desire to compete with the Creator in ordering being and reality.

  The Riddle of the Ordinary

  Though we all claim to be monotheists, there is one rather ordinary way in which we are all also dualists: we all divide the world into the Ordinary and the Extraordinary. This is undoubtedly the most natural division the mind is subject to—plain and fancy, simple and recondite, commonplace and awesome, usual and unusual, credible and incredible, quotidian and intrusive, natural and unnatural, regular and irregular, boring and rhapsodic, secular and sacred, profane and holy: however the distinction is characterized, there is no human being who does not, in his own everydayness, feel the difference between the Ordinary and the Extraordinary.

  The Extraordinary is easy. And the more extraordinary the Extraordinary is, the easier it is: “easy” in the sense that we can almost always recognize it. There is no one who does not know when something special is happening: the high, terrifying, tragic, and ecstatic moments are unmistakable in any life. Of course the Extraordinary can sometimes be a changeling, and can make its appearance in the cradle of the Ordinary; and then it is not until long afterward that we become aware of how the visitation was not, after all, an ordinary one. But by and large the difference between special times and ordinary moments is perfectly clear, and we are never in any doubt about which are the extraordinary ones.

  How do we respond to the Extraordinary? This too is easy: by paying attention to it. The Extraordinary is so powerful that it commands from us a redundancy, a repetition of itself: it seizes us so undividedly, it declares itself so dazzlingly or killingly, it is so deafening with its look! see! notice! pay attention!, that the only answer we can give is to look, see, notice, and pay attention. The Extraordinary sets its own terms for its reception, and its terms are inescapable. The Extraordinary does not let you shrug your shoulders and walk away.

  But the Ordinary is a much harder case. In the first place, by making itself so noticeable—it is around us all the time—the Ordinary has got itself in a bad fix with us: we hardly ever notice it. The Ordinary, simply by being so ordinary, tends to make us ignorant or neglectful; when something does not insist on being noticed, when we aren’t grabbed by the collar or struck on the skull by a presence or an event, we take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.

  And this is the chief vein and deepest point concerning the Ordinary: that it does deserve
our gratitude. The Ordinary lets us live out our humanity; it doesn’t scare us, it doesn’t excite us, it doesn’t distract us—it brings us the safe return of the school bus every day, it lets us eat one meal after another, put one foot in front of the other. In short, it is equal to the earth’s provisions; it grants us life, continuity, the leisure to recognize who and what we are, and who and what our fellows are, these creatures who live out their everydayness side by side with us in their own unextraordinary ways. Ordinariness can be defined as a breathing-space: the breathing-space between getting born and dying, perhaps; or else the breathing-space between rapture and rapture; or, more usually, the breathing-space between one disaster and the next. Ordinariness is sometimes the status quo, sometimes the slow, unseen movement of a subtle but ineluctable cycle, like a ride on the hour hand of the clock; in any case the Ordinary is above all what is expected.

  And what is expected is not often thought of as a gift.

  The second thing that ought to be said about the Ordinary is that it is sometimes extraordinarily dangerous to notice it. And this is strange, because I have just spoken of the gratitude we owe to the unnoticed foundations of our lives, and how careless we always are about this gratitude, how unthinking we are to take for granted the humdrum dailiness that is all the luxury we are ever likely to know on this planet. There are ways to try to apprehend the nature of this luxury, but they are psychological tricks, and do no good. It is pointless to contemplate, only for the sake of feeling gratitude, the bitter, vicious, crippled, drugged, diseased, deformed, despoiled, or corrupted lives that burst against their own mortality in hospitals, madhouses, prisons, all those horrendous lives chained to poverty and its variegated spawn in the long, bleak wastes on the outer margins of Ordinariness, mired in the dread of a ferocious Extraordinariness that slouches in insatiably every morning and never departs even in sleep—contemplating this, who would deny gratitude to our own Ordinariness, though it does not come easily, and has its demeaning price? Still, comparison confers relief more often than gratitude, and the gratitude that rises out of reflection on the extraordinary misfortune of others is misbegotten.—You remember how in one of the Old English poets we are told how the rejoicing hosts of heaven look down at the tortures of the damned, feeling the special pleasure of their own exemption. The consciousness of Ordinariness is the consciousness of exemption.

  That is one way it is dangerous to take special notice of the Ordinary.

  The second danger, I think, is even more terrible. But before I am ready to speak of this new, nevertheless very ancient, danger, I want to ask this question: if we are willing to see the Ordinary as a treasure and a gift, what are we to do about it? Or, to put it another way, what is to be gained from noticing the Ordinary? Morally and metaphysically, what are our obligations to the Ordinary? Here art and philosophy meet with a quizzical harmony unusual between contenders. “Be one of those upon whom nothing is lost,” Henry James advised; and that is one answer, the answer of what would appear to be the supreme aesthetician. For the sake of the honing of consciousness, for the sake of becoming sensitive, at every moment, to every moment, for the sake of making life as superlatively polished as the most sublime work of art, we ought to notice the Ordinary.

  No one since the Greek sculptors and artisans has expressed this sense more powerfully than Walter Pater, that eloquent Victorian whose obsession with attaining the intensest sensations possible casts a familiar light out toward the century that followed him. Pater, like Coleridge before him and James after him, like the metaphysicians of what has come to be known as the Counterculture, was after all the highs he could accumulate in a lifetime. “We are all under sentence of death,” he writes, “. . . we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest . . . in art and song. For our only chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life. . . . Only be sure it is passion—that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. . . . Of this wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire for beauty, the love of art for art’s sake, has most; for art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.” And like a Zen master who seizes on the data of life only to transcend them, he announces: “Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end.”

  What—in this view, which once more has the allegiance of the Zeitgeist—what is Art? It is first noticing, and then sanctifying, the Ordinary. It is making the Ordinary into the Extraordinary. It is the impairment of the distinction between the Ordinary and the Extraordinary.

  The aestheticians—the great Experiencers—can be refuted. I bring you a Hebrew melody to refute them with. It is called “The Choice”; the poet is Yeats; and since the poem is only eight lines long I would like to give over the whole of it. It begins by discriminating between essence and possession: life interpreted as doing beautiful things or having beautiful things:

  The intellect of man is forced to choose

  Perfection of the life, or of the work,

  And if it take the second must refuse

  A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.

  When all that story’s finished, what’s the news?

  In luck or out the toil has left its mark:

  That old perplexity an empty purse,

  Or the day’s vanity, the night’s remorse.

  Our choice, according to Yeats, is the choice between pursuing the life of Deed, where acts have consequences, where the fruit of experience is more gratifying than the experience itself, and pursuing the life of Art, which signifies the celebration of shape and mood. Art, he tells us, turns away from the divine preference, and finishes out a life in empty remorse; in the end the sum of the life of Art is nothing. The ironies here are multitudinous, for no one ever belonged more to the mansion of Art than Yeats himself, and it might be said that in this handful of remarkable lines Yeats condemned his own passions and his own will.

  But there is a way in which the Yeats poem, though it praises Deed over Image, though it sees the human being as a creature to be judged by his acts rather than by how well he has made something—there is a way in which this poem is after all not a Hebrew melody. The Jewish perception of how the world is constituted also tells us that we are to go in the way of Commandment rather than symbol, goodness rather than sensation: but it will never declare that the price of Art, Beauty, Experience, Pleasure, Exaltation is a “raging in the dark” or a loss of the “heavenly mansion.”

  The Jewish understanding of the Ordinary is in some ways very close to Pater, and again very far from Yeats, who would punish the “perfection of the work” with an empty destiny.

  With David the King we say, “All that is in the heaven and the earth is thine,” meaning that it is all there for our wonder and our praise. “Be one of those upon whom nothing is lost”—James’s words, but the impulse that drives them is the same as the one enjoining the observant Jew (the word “observant” is exact) to bless the moments of this world at least one hundred times a day. One hundred times: but Ordinariness is more frequent than that, Ordinariness crowds the day, we swim in the sense of our dailiness; and yet there is a blessing for every separate experience of the Ordinary.

  Jewish life is crammed with such blessings—blessings that take note of every sight, sound, and smell, every rising-up and lying-down, every morsel brought to the mouth, every act of cleansing. Before he sits down to his meal, the Jew will speak the following: “Blessed are You, O Lord our God, Ruler of the Universe, whose Commandments hallow us, and who commands us to wash our hands.” When he breaks his bread, he will bless God for having “brought forth bread from the earth.” Each kind of food is similarly praised in turn, and every fruit in its season is praised for having renewed itself in the cycle of the seasons. And when the meal is done, a
thanksgiving is said for the whole of it, and table songs are sung with exultation.

  The world and its provisions, in short, are observed—in the two meanings of “observe.” Creation is both noticed and felt to be sanctified. Everything is minutely paid attention to, and then ceremoniously praised. Here is a Talmudic saying: “Whoever makes a profane use of God’s gifts—which means partaking of any worldly joy without thanking God for it—commits a theft against God.” And a Talmudic dispute is recorded concerning which is the more important Scriptural utterance: loving your neighbor as yourself, or the idea that we are all the children of Adam. The sage who has the final word chooses the children-of-Adam thesis, because, he explains, our common creatureliness includes the necessity of love. But these celebrations through noticing are not self-centered and do not stop at humanity, but encompass every form of life and non-life. So there are blessings to rejoice in on smelling sweet woods or barks, fragrant plants, fruits, spices, or oils. There is a blessing on witnessing lightning, falling stars, great mountains and deserts: “Blessed are You . . . who fashioned Creation.” The sound of thunder has its praise, and the sight of the sea, and a rainbow; beautiful animals are praised, and trees in their first blossoming of the year or for their beauty alone, and the new moon, and new clothing, and sexual delight. The sight of a sage brings a blessing for the creation of human wisdom, the sight of a disfigured person praises a Creator who varies the form of his creatures. From the stone to the human being, creature-liness is extolled.