Art and Ardor

by Cynthia Ozick

  But the conversion of matter that takes place under the reign of Idolatry—human bone meal for the sake of human bone meal—is not according to the planet’s nature. It is a monstrosity—an abnormality, a deformity, a contortion and a mutilation so stupendous and disordering that it must somehow result in consequences for the ordinary regulation of the planet. It is not surprising that these consequences are still inchoate and unable to be foreseen. A disturbance in nature leads no one can tell where. When mutations suddenly abound, evolution occurs. Yet it was impossible to predict, when the first fish stepped out upon his fins onto dry land, what would happen either to the fish or to the land. Now it is true that we usually tend to think of evolution as positive—as motion, however aberrant, on the way toward complexities of “improvement”; but can anyone know what these mutations of Idolatry may signify for the post-Auschwitz planet? The German aberration murdered millions of human beings—among them some six million Jews, one-third of all Jews—not according to any design of nature (e.g., prey), but according to an original design of Spirit incarnated as “racial purity,” as “the Aryan ideal”: proof of that incarnation being those millions of corpses of Jews. The notion of incarnation is always imposture: but nature knows what is natural, and the planet is undeceived. The malady of the Germans and their helpers—though it may, superficially, parody the normal excesses of a war of ingestion—fails to exemplify prey and its necessary afflictions (Feeding, need, greed). Instead, the German malady points to something not well understood, something that runs against the planet’s grain, though now and again our unhappy world has been host, on a smaller scale, to such aberration.

  The Holocaust—the burnt offering of the Jewish people in the furnace of the German Moloch—is an instance of aberration so gargantuan that it cannot leave wary nature (which understands its prerogatives and guards them against facile mutation) unshaken. Killing for the pangs of hunger, nature always celebrates; killing out of rage or fear or lust, nature often claims; but killing for Spirit, on behalf of the adoration of death, nature abhors. It is for the sake of life that nature allows its creatures to become instruments of death. Jewish bone meal is a slur on a planet given over to life: a disorder that contradicts nature’s means and calumniates its ends.

  What other mutation of the last fifty years has swarmed out of history in order to confront the biological premises of our sad earth-speck?

  _____________

  Essay published in Confrontation, Fall/Winter 1978.

  Innovation and Redemption: What Literature Means

  I. INNOVATION

  A while ago, freed by a bout of flu from all responsibility, I became one of those nineteenth-century leisured persons we hear about, for whom the great novels are said to have been written. In this condition I came, for the first time, to the novels of Thomas Hardy. I began with Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and discovered this: it is possible first to ask the question “What is this novel about?” and then to give an answer. Hardy writes about—well, life (nowadays we are made to hesitate before daring seriously to employ this word); life observed and understood as well as felt. A society with all its interminglings and complexities is set before us: in short, knowledge; knowledge of convention and continuity; also knowledge of something real, something there. Tess, for instance, is thick with knowledge of Cow. What is a cow, how does it feel to lean against, how do you milk, what is the milkshed like, what is the life of a milker, who is the milker’s boss, where does the milk go? To touch any element of Cow intimately and concretely is to enter a land, a society, a people, and to penetrate into the whole lives of human beings.

  The world of Cow, or its current equivalents, is now in the possession of writers like Leon Uris and Harold Robbins—shadows of shadows of Hardy. Post-Joyce, the “real” writers have gone somewhere else. And though we may not, cannot, turn back to the pre-Joycean “fundamentalist” novel, it is about time it was recognized that too much “subjectivity” has led away from mastery (which so-called “experimental” novelist tells us about Cow?) and from seriousness (to which black-humorist or parodist would you entrust the whole lives of human beings?).

  What is today called “experimental” writing is unreadable. It fails because it is neither intelligent nor interesting. Without seriousness it cannot be interesting, and without mastery it will never be intelligent.

  The idea of the experimental derives from the notion of generations: a belief in replacement, substitution, discontinuity, above all repudiation. Who invented “generations,” and when did they come into being? John Hollander, reflecting on children’s literature, notes that the idea of “children” as a classification of fresh innocence is itself a remarkably short-lived fancy, squeezed into that brief pre-Freudian bourgeois moment that made Lewis Carroll possible; before the nineteenth century there were no children, only smaller-sized working people; and then Freud arrived to take the charm, and the purity, out of Victorian childhood.

  There are, in fact, no “generations,” except in the biological sense. There are only categories and crises of temperament, and these crisscross and defy and deny chronology. The concept of generations, moreover, is peculiarly solipsistic: it declares that because I am new, then everything I make or do in the world is new.

  When I was a quite young child, just beginning to write stories, I had an odd idea of time. It seemed to me that because writing signified permanence, it was necessary to address not only everyone who might live afterward, but also everyone who had ever lived before. This meant one had to keep one’s eye on the ancient Greeks in particular, to write for them too; and, knowing no ancient Greek, I got around the difficulty by employing the most archaic language the Green, Yellow, Blue, Red, and Violet Fairy Books had to offer.

  Now if this belief that everything counts forever, both backward and forward, is a kind of paradisal foolishness, it is no more nonsensical than the belief that nothing counts for long—the credo that the newest generation displaces the one before it. The problem with believing in generations is not only the most obvious one—that you excise history, that you cut off even the most immediately usable past—but the sense of narrow obligation it imposes on the young, a kind of prisoner’s outlook no less burdensome than all the following dicta taken together:

  1. That each new crop of mass births must reinvent culture.

  2. That models are unthinkable.

  3. That each succeeding generation is inherently brighter and more courageous than the one before.

  4. That “establishments” are irreversibly closed.

  5. That whatever has won success is by definition stale.

  6. That “structurelessness”—i.e., incoherence—must be understood as a paradox, since incoherence is really coherence.

  7. That “experiment” is endlessly possible, and endlessly positive, and that the more “unprecedented” a thing is, the better it is.

  8. That “alternative forms” are salvational.

  9. That irrational (or “psychedelic”) states represent artistic newness.

  I could make this list longer, but it is already long enough to demonstrate the critical point that more useful cultural news inhabits the Fifth Commandment than one might imagine at first glance.

  The sources of these statements are of course everywhere—they are the bad breath of the times. At best, “experimental” fiction aims for parody: it turns the tables on the old voices, it consists of allusion built upon allusion, it is a choreography of ridicule and satire. It goes without saying that no literature can live without satire; satire nourishes and cleanses and resuscitates. The great satires that have survived are majestic indictments. Our attention now is assaulted by ephemeral asterisks claiming to be satire: when you follow the dim little star to its destination, what you find is another littleness—parody. Parody without seriousness, without, in the end, irony. If the writer does not know what to do with the remnants of high culture, he parodies them; if he does not know what to do with kitsch, he simply invites i
t in. Twenty years hence, the American fiction of parody is going to require an addendum—complete citations of the work and tone and attitude it meant to do in. Whatever seems implicit now because of its currency as memory or tradition will have to be made explicit later, for the sake of comprehension, when tradition is forgotten and memory is dead. (Compare any annotated copy of “The Rape of the Lock.”) And meanwhile, the trouble with parody is that it is endlessly reflective, one parody building on a previous parody, and so on, until eventually the goal becomes ingenuity in the varieties of derivativeness, and one loses sight of any original objective notion of what literature can be about, of the real sources of literature. Redundance is all—and in the name of escape from the redundance of convention.

  One of the great conventions—and also one of the virtues—of the old novel was its suspensefulness. Suspense seems to make us ask “What will happen to Tess next?,” but really it emerges from the writer’s conviction of social or cosmic principle. Suspense occurs when the reader is about to learn something, not simply about the relationship of fictional characters, but about the writer’s relationship to a set of ideas, or to the universe. Suspense is the product of teaching, and teaching is the product of mastery, and mastery is the product of seriousness, and seriousness springs not from ego or ambition or the workings of the subjective self, but from the amazing permutations of the objective world.

  Fiction will not be interesting or lasting unless it is again conceived in the art of the didactic. (Emphasis, however, on art.) The experimental is almost never the innovative. The innovative imagines something we have never experienced before: think of Tolstoy’s imagining the moment of dying in “The Death of Ivan Ilych.” The experimental fiddles with what has gone before, precisely and exclusively with what has gone before; it is obsessed by precedent and predecessors. The innovative, by contrast, sets out to educate its readers in its views about what it means to be a human being—though it too can fiddle with this and that if it pleases, and is not averse to unexpected seizures and tricks, or to the jarring gifts of vitality and cunning. Innovation cannot be defined through mere method; the experimental can be defined no other way. And innovation has a hidden subject: coherence.

  An avatar of “alternative kinds of literary coherence”1 asks us to note how

  the criteria for measuring literacy change in time, so that the body of information and ideas that seemed “literate” in the forties may, because of the sheer increase of knowledge, seem only semi-literate now. Moreover, unless older writers’ minds are open enough to recognize that what a young poet learns today may be quite different from what his predecessors know, they may miss evidences of his learning . . . very rare is the literary gent over forty who can recognize, for instance, such recent-vintage ideas as say, feedback, information theory and related cybernetic concepts. This deficiency partially explains why, try as hard as we might, it is often so frustrating, if not impossible, to conduct an intelligent dialogue with older writers, the most dogmatic and semi-literate of whom are simply unable to transcend their closed and hardened ways of thought and learning. Not only do the best educated young minds seem much better educated than older intellectuals were at comparable ages, but also what a well-informed young writer knows is likely to be more relevant, not just to contemporary understanding, but also to the problems of creating literary art today.

  (Surely the authors of The Waste Land and Finnegans Wake, literary and intellectual heroes of the forties, would count as “older writers”—instances, no doubt, of semi-literacy and hardened ways.)

  Mindful that youth alone may not altogether make his argument, and relying on the McLuhanite vocabulary current a decade ago, the same writer offers still another variant definition of “coherence”:

  A truth of contemporary avant-garde esthetics is that “formless art” is either a polemical paradox or an impossible contradiction in terms, for any work that can be defined—that can be characterized in any way—is by definition artistically coherent. It follows that just because a work fails to cohere in a linear fashion need not mean that it cannot be understood; rather, as recent literature accustoms us to its particular ways of organizing expression, so we learn to confront a new work with expectations wholly different from those honed on traditional literature.

  Or, history is bunk.

  And just here is the danger and the grief—those “wholly different” expectations. If apprentice writers are trained to define away plain contradictions, bringing us at last to a skilled refinement of Orwellian doublethink (incoherence is coherence), if standardized new “information”—though no one doubts that “feedback, information theory and related cybernetic concepts” are the Cow of our time—is to take the place of the idiosyncratic cadences of literary imagination and integration, if “the criteria for measuring literacy” lead to the dumping of both cognition and recognition, if focus and possession are to be dissipated into the pointless distractions and distractabilities of “multimedia” and other devices, if becoming “wholly different” means the tedium of mechanical enmity toward and mechanical overthrow of “older writers,” and if all this is to be programmed through hope of instantaneous dis-solutions, then not only literature but the desire to have a literature will be subverted.

  Culture is the continuity of human aspiration—which signifies a continuity of expectations. Innovation in art is not rupture. Innovation in art is not the consequence of the implantation of “wholly different” expectations. Innovation in art means the continuity of expectations.

  Every new sentence, every new fragment of imaginative literature born into the world, is a heart-in-the-mouth experiment, and for its writer a profound chanciness; but the point of the risk is the continuation of a recognizably human enterprise. “Wholly different” means unrecognizable; unrecognizable means the breaking-off of a culture, and its supplanting. It cannot be true that the end of a culture is the beginning of art. When cultural continuity is broken off—as in the Third Reich—what happens is first the debasement, then the extirpation, of any recognizable human goals. First the violation of art (Mozart at the gas chamber’s door), then the end of art.

  Innovation in art is not the same as innovation in the human psyche; just the opposite. Innovation in art has as its motivation the extension of humanity, not a flow of spite against it. The difference between barbarian and civilized expectations is the difference between the will to dominate and the will toward regeneration. To dominate you must throw the rascals out; to regenerate, you have to take them with you. Spite vandalizes. Innovation redeems.

  As for who the rascals are: there is no predicament that cures itself so swiftly as that of belonging to “the young.” Alice, nibbling at the mushroom, shrank so quickly that her chin crashed into her shoe: that fast is how we go from twenty-three to fifty-four, and from fifty-five to eighty-six. Vita brevis! If writers are to have a program, it ought not to be toward ressentiment, but toward achronology. Younger writers who resent older ones will, before they are nearly ready for it, find themselves hated by someone astonishingly recently out of the pram. Older writers who envy younger ones have a bottomless cornucopia to gorge on: the baby carriages are packed with novelists and poets. The will to fashion a literature asserts the obliteration of time. The obliteration of time makes “experiment” seem a puff of air, the faintest clamor of celestial horselaugh.

  2. REDEMPTION

  At a party once I heard a gifted and respected American writer—a writer whose prestigious name almost everyone would recognize—say, “For me, the Holocaust and a corncob are the same.” The choice of “corncob”—outlandish, unexpected, askew—is a sign of the strong and daring charge of his imagination, and so is its juxtaposition with the darkest word of our century. What he intended by this extraordinary sentence was not to shock the moral sense, but to clarify the nature of art.

  He meant that there is, for art, no such element as “subject matter”; for art, one sight or moment or event is as good as another—
there is no “value” or “worth” or “meaning”—because all are equally made up of language, and language and its patterns are no different from tone for the composer or color for the painter. The artist as citizen, the writer explained, can be a highly moral man or woman—one who would, if the Nazis came, hide Jews. But the artist as artist is not a moral creature. Within literature, all art is dream, and whether or not the artist is or is not in citizenly possession of moral credentials is irrelevant to the form and the texture of the work of art, which claims only the territory of the imagination, and nothing else.

  For that writer, a phrase such as “a morally responsible literature” would be an oxymoron, the earlier part of the phrase clashing to the death with the latter part. To be responsible as a writer is to be responsible solely to the seizures of language and dream.

  I want to stand against this view. The writer who says “For me, the Holocaust and a corncob are the same” is putting aside the moral sense in art, equating the moral impulse only with the sociologically real, or perhaps with the theologically ideal. In literature he judges the moral sense to be an absurd intrusion. He is in the stream that comes to us from Greece, through Walter Pater and Emerson: art for its own sake, separated from the moral life. He is mainly Greek.

  For me, with certain rapturous exceptions, literature is the moral life. The exceptions occur in lyric poetry, which bursts shadowless like flowers at noon, with the eloquent bliss almost of nature itself, when nature is both benevolent and beautiful. For the rest—well, one discounts stories and novels that are really journalism; but of the stories and novels that mean to be literature, one expects a certain corona of moral purpose: not outright in the grain of the fiction itself, but in the form of a faintly incandescent envelope around it. The tales we care for lastingly are the ones that touch on the redemptive—not, it should be understood, on the guaranteed promise of redemption, and not on goodness, kindness, decency, all the usual virtues. Redemption has almost nothing to do with virtue, especially when the call to virtue is prescriptive or coercive; rather, it is the singular idea that is the opposite of the Greek belief in fate: the idea that insists on the freedom to change one’s life.