Art and Ardor

by Cynthia Ozick

  Redemption means fluidity; the notion that people and things are subject to willed alteration; the sense of possibility; of turning away from, or turning toward; of deliverance; the sense that we act for ourselves rather than are acted upon; the sense that we are responsible, that there is no deus ex machina other than the character we have ourselves fashioned; above all, that we can surprise ourselves. Implicit in redemption is amazement, marveling, suspense—precisely that elation-bringing suspense of the didactic I noted earlier, wherein the next revelation is about to fall. Implicit in redemption is everything against the fated or the static: everything that hates death and harm and elevates the life-giving—if only through terror at its absence.

  Now I know how hazardous these last phrases are, how they suggest philistinism, how they lend themselves to a vulgar advocacy of an “affirmative” literature in order to fulfill a moral mandate. I too recoil from all that: the so-called “affirmative” is simple-minded, single-minded, crudely explicit; it belongs either to journalism or to piety or to “uplift.” It is the enemy of literature and the friend of coercion. It is, above all, a hater of the freedom inherent in storytelling and in the poetry side of life. But I mean something else: I mean the corona, the luminous envelope—perhaps what Henry James meant when he said “Art is nothing more than the shadow of humanity.” I think, for instance, of the literature of midrash, of parable, where there is no visible principle or moral imperative. The principle does not enter into, or appear in, the tale; it is the tale; it realizes the tale. To put it another way: the tale is its own interpretation. It is a world that decodes itself.

  And that is what the “corona” is: interpretation, implicitness, the nimbus of meaning that envelops story. Only someone who has wholly dismissed meaning can boast that the Holocaust and a corncob are, for art, the same. The writers who claim that fiction is self-referential, that what a story is about is the language it is made out of, have snuffed the corona. They willingly sit in the dark, like the strict-constructionist Karaites who, wanting to observe the Sabbath exactly, sat in the lampless black and the fireless cold on the very day that is most meant to resemble paradise. The misuse of the significance of language by writers who most intend to celebrate the comeliness of language is like the misuse of the Sabbath by the fundamentalist Karaites: both annihilate the thing they hope to glorify.

  What literature means is meaning.

  But having said that, I come to something deeply perilous: and that is imagination. In Hebrew, just as there is t’shuva, the energy of creative renewal and turning, so there is the yetzer ha-ra, the Evil Impulse—so steeped in the dark brilliance of the visionary that it is said to be the source of the creative faculty. Imagination is more than make-believe, more than the power to invent. It is also the power to penetrate evil, to take on evil, to become evil, and in that guise it is the most frightening human faculty. Whoever writes a story that includes villainy enters into and becomes the villain. Imagination owns above all the facility of becoming: the writer can enter the leg of a mosquito, a sex not her own, a horizon he has never visited, a mind smaller or larger. But also the imagination seeks out the unsayable and the undoable, and says and does them. And still more dangerous: the imagination always has the lust to tear down meaning, to smash interpretation, to wear out the rational, to mock the surprise of redemption, to replace the fluid force of suspense with an image of stasis; to transfix and stun rather than to urge; to spill out, with so much quicksilver wonder, idol after idol. An idol serves no one; it is served. The imagination, like Moloch, can take you nowhere except back to its own maw. And the writers who insist that literature is “about” the language it is made of are offering an idol: literature for its own sake, for its own maw: not for the sake of humanity.

  Literature is for the sake of humanity.

  My conclusion is strange, and takes place on a darkling plain. Literature, to come into being at all, must call on the imagination; imagination is in fact the flesh and blood of literature; but at the same time imagination is the very force that struggles to snuff the redemptive corona. So a redemptive literature, a literature that interprets and decodes the world, beaten out for the sake of humanity, must wrestle with its own body, with its own flesh and blood, with its own life. Cell battles cell. The corona flickers, brightens, flares, clouds, grows faint. The yetzer ha-ra, the Evil Impulse, fills its cheeks with a black wind, hoping to blow out the redemptive corona; but at the last moment steeples of light spurt up from the corona, and the world with its meaning is laid open to our astonished sight.

  In that steady interpretive light we can make distinctions; we can see that one thing is not interchangeable with another thing; that not everything is the same; that the Holocaust is different, God knows, from a corncob. So we arrive, at last, at the pulse and purpose of literature: to reject the blur of the “universal”; to distinguish one life from another; to illumine diversity; to light up the least grain of being, to show how it is concretely individual, particularized from any other; to tell, in all the marvel of its singularity, the separate holiness of the least grain.

  Literature is the recognition of the particular.

  For that, one needs the corona.

  _____________

  Conflated from: “Some Antediluvian Reflections,” American Journal, Vol. I, No. I (December 1, 1971). “Where Are the Serious Readers?,” Salmagundi, Summer-Fall 1978. “What Literature Means,” Partisan Review, Vol. 49, No. I (1982).

  1 Richard Kostelanetz, “Young Writers in North America,” The American Pen, Fall 1971. Mr. Kostelanetz illustrates what he means by “alternative kinds of coherence,” and perhaps also by literacy, in part with the following:

  Errect, do it, do it again

  Errect, o take me, have me, let Yourself out

  Errect, o yes, o yess, yesss i’m Out

  The Hole/Birth Catalogue

  I. THE LOGIC OF THE HOLE

  It may be that almost everything that separates women from men is a social fabrication—clothing, occupations, thinking habits, temperament. It may be that when we say “woman” we are invoking a heritage of thought, a myth, a learned construct: an idea. But childbirth is not any of these. “Woman” can be an imagining, a convenient dream of law or economics or religion. But childbirth is an event, the event of the race, and only half the race undergoes it. Is it, for that half, an illimitable experience, endlessly influencing, both before and afterward, an event that dominates until death?

  Everyone is born, everyone dies, and though styles of death are subject to invention and misfortune—getting a bullet through your skull feels different, presumably, from the slow drugged death of the terminal cancer victim—we all struggle out of the birth canal with the same gestures and responses. What happens immediately afterward—who cares for the infant, and how, and where—is all at once the expression of the culture. If anatomy is destiny, technology is also a kind of destiny, and the baby bottle, no less than the jet plane, can alter a civilization. Beds, stirrups, hospitals, doctors, nurses, stitches, bandages, pills, pillows, all the debris of folklore that flies out after every birth with the certainty of the expulsion of the placenta—these are the social impedimenta that clutter the event. They seem almost to be the event itself.

  But the person in childbirth can be alone in a forest, and still the baby’s head will be driven through the hole at the bottom of her torso. It is sensible for the hole not to be covered. The baby is born entirely exposed, either with a hole of its own or with an inseminatory rod. It is attached by a string of flesh. When the string is cut, that is the end of the event.

  Is it the end of the event?

  How long is the event of childbirth? Several hours; it varies with the individual. How long is human life? Here the variation is greater. It is possible to die at birth, to be run over by a truck at thirty, to be bombed at forty, to live to be old. But “woman” is concretely—not mythologically—woman only for the sake of the few hours of childbirth. All the rest of the time
her life and body are subject to more ordinary interruptions, by which she is distinguished very little from anyone else. Childbirth is an appointment (menstruation is the appointment calendar, listing only cancellations; like any negative calendar it requires small attention)—an appointment undertaken nine months before: which, unless nullified by abortion, must inevitably be kept.

  But imagine a lucky and healthful land where a human being is likely to live peaceably until eighty. Imagine one who has experienced childbirth only twice, with the event lasting each time about six hours. For the sake of twelve hours out of a life seven hundred and one thousand two hundred and eighty hours long, this person is called “woman.” For the sake of twelve hours out of a life seven hundred and one thousand two hundred and eighty hours long, this person is thrust into an ethos that enjoins rigid duties on her, almost none of them rationally related to the two six-hour events of childbirth.

  Or imagine, in this lucky and healthful land, a person sixty years old. She is widowed and lives alone in a dark little flat. Consider her. Thirty years ago she spent six hours expelling an infant out of her hole via powerful involuntary muscular contractions. She did it in a special room in a big building. It was a rod-bearing infant, which afterward grew to be somewhat under six feet in height, dressed itself in two cloth tubes cut off at the ankles, and by now has spurted semen up a number of human holes; having settled down in a house in California, it has inseminated one hole three times. The person in the dark little flat thinks of herself as the grandmother of Linda, Michael, and Karen. Which is to say: she thinks of herself as a hole; the Ur- hole, so to speak; and that is very interesting.

  It is also very interesting to look closely at this person who thinks of herself as a hole. She is covered up by a cloth tube cut off at the knees. Why is she covered up by one cloth tube cut off at the knees, instead of two cloth tubes cut off at the ankles? Thirty years ago she expelled an infant out of her hole; that is the reason. Anatomy is destiny, and it is her destiny, because of her hole, to wear one cloth tube cut off at the knees instead of two cloth tubes cut off at the ankles.

  Now look at the hair that grows on her head. Do not look for the hair in her armpits; she has clipped that. The reason she has clipped the hair in her armpits is that thirty years ago she expelled an infant out of her hole. But her head hair: look at that. It is of a certain length and is artificially curled. The reason her head hair is of that length, artificially curled, is that thirty years ago she expelled an infant out of her hole.

  Watch her. She is sitting at the kitchen table sewing another cloth tube. Once in a while she rises and stirs something in a pot. The reason she is sitting at the kitchen table sewing a cloth tube (the kind cut off at the knees), the reason she gets up now and then to stir her pot, is not that she is hungry or is in need of another cloth tube. No: the reason is that thirty years ago she expelled an infant out of her hole, and ever since then she has conscientiously performed the duties that do not flow from the event.

  And if the event had not taken place? She would still conscientiously perform those duties that do not flow from the event that did not happen. The hole in her body dictates her tasks, preoccupations, proprieties, tastes, character. Wondrous hole! Magical hole! Dazzlingly influential hole! Noble and effulgent hole! From this hole everything follows logically: first the baby, then the placenta, then, for years and years and years until death, a way of life. It is all logic, and she who lives by the hole will live also by its logic.

  It is, appropriately, logic with a hole in it.

  2. DESTINY, BIRTH, LIFE, DEATH

  “Anatomy is destiny.” These are Freud’s words, and they have become almost as famous as his name itself. But, ah, fame is not truth; and destiny is precisely what anatomy is not. A hole is not destiny. A protuberance is not destiny. Even two protuberances—a pair of legs, nearly half the human body—are not destiny. If anatomy were destiny, the wheel could not have been invented; we would have been limited by legs.

  Destiny is what is implicit in the very area we cannot speak of because it is not known—the sense of things beyond and apart from shape or dimension or hole or protuberance. There is an armless painter who holds the brush between his toes. Cut off two more limbs and he will use his teeth. The engineering is secondary to the vision. Anatomy is only a form of technology—nature’s engineering. Destiny means, at the lowest, a modification of anatomy, and, at the highest, a soaring beyond anatomy. A person—and “person” is above all an idea—escapes anatomy. To reduce the person altogether to her anatomy is to wish the person into a nullity.

  There is, first of all, the nullity of the servant.

  In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud posits a remarkable anatomical theory for the secondary and dependent condition of woman. The argument begins with the assertion that since fire represents the power of civilization, whoever can control fire can be dominant over civilization. By the “control” of fire, Freud explains, he means the ability to put it out at will. A man can pee on a fire from a little distance. Prevented by her anatomy, a woman cannot. Therefore man is in charge of civilization and woman cannot be.

  Later in the same essay Freud identifies woman as having a “retarding and restraining influence” on civilization. This is because the tasks of civilization require “instinctual sublimations of which women are little capable.”

  But all this is the later Freud. Civilization and Its Discontents was composed after cancer had already begun to ravage Freud’s face, and when Hitlerism had already begun to corrode German civilization. If he was writing, under such circumstances, with a kind of melancholy truculence, it might be instructive to see what Freud’s views were at an earlier and happier time. Consider, then, Freud in love.

  In love with Martha Bernays, Freud translated John Stuart Mill’s essay “On the Subjection of Women” into German. He did not notice its relevance to his fiancée’s position—she had committed herself to a long and chaste engagement, during which she was to idle away years in waiting for the marriage. As for the essay itself, he did not like it. For one thing, he complained of its “lifeless style.” (In a footnote Freud’s biographer, Ernest Jones, a Freudian disciple, explains: “In exculpation of Mill one should mention that his wife is supposed to have been the main author of the book in question.” It is axiomatic that a “wife’s” style is inferior.) Freud’s letter about Mill, written to his fiancee, is long; but worth, one supposes, the attention due genius:

  He [Mill] was perhaps the man of the century who best managed to free himself from the domination of customary prejudices. On the other hand—and that always goes together with it—he lacked in many matters the sense of the absurd; for example, in that of female emancipation and in the woman’s question altogether. I recollect that in the essay I translated a prominent argument was that a married woman could earn as much as her husband. We surely agree that the management of a house, the care and bringing up of children, demand the whole of a human being and almost exclude any earning, even if a simplified household relieve her of dusting, cleaning, cooking, etc. He had simply forgotten all that, like everything else concerning the relationship between the sexes. That is altogether a point with Mill where one simply cannot find him human. His autobiography is so prudish or so ethereal that one could never gather from it that human beings consist of men and women and that this distinction is the most significant one that exists. In his whole presentation it never emerges that women are different beings—we will not say lesser, rather the opposite—from men. He finds the suppression of women an analogy to that of Negroes. Any girl, even without a suffrage or legal competence, whose hand a man kisses and for whose love he is prepared to dare all, could have set him right. It is really a stillborn thought to send women into the struggle for existence exactly as men. If, for instance, I imagined my sweet gentle girl as a competitor it would only end in my telling her . . . that I am fond of her and that I implore her to withdraw from the strife into the calm uncompetitive activity of
my home. It is possible that changes in upbringing may suppress all a woman’s tender attributes, needful of protection and yet so victorious, and that she can then earn a livelihood like men. It is also possible that in such an event one would not be justified in mourning the passing away of the most delightful thing the world can offer us—our ideal of womanhood. I believe that all reforming action in law and education would break down in front of the fact that, long before the age at which a man can earn a position in society, Nature has determined woman’s destiny through beauty, charm, and sweetness. Law and custom have much to give women that has been withheld from them, but the position of women will surely be what it is: in youth an adored darling and in mature years a loved wife.

  “Nature has determined woman’s destiny.” It is, to borrow from Jones, no exculpation of Freud to note that he was a man of his class and era, and that this letter was written before 1890. Mill’s essay is dated 1869; if Freud was, at his own valuation, a judge of human affairs, he was a retrogressive judge. And if he is, at the valuation of his posterity, a genius, his is the genius of retrogression.