Art and Ardor

by Cynthia Ozick

  But also of something worse. We come now to the nullity of death.

  Mill, all lucidity and sanity, is called “prudish” and “ethereal”—words meaning precisely the opposite of what Mill’s essay exhibits to everyone who has ever read it attentively, with the exception of its German translator. Who is the prude—the man who sees the distinction between men and women as “the most significant one that exists,” significant chiefly for reducing women to petlike dependency in “my home,” or the man who refuses to turn distinctions into liabilities? Who is the ethereal thinker—the man who poetizes about tender attributes and adored darlings and miracle-working kisses, or the man who draws up a solid catalogue of palpable discriminations against women? In inventing anatomy-is-destiny, Freud justified his having a household servant all the days of his life. The letter to his fiancée (who appears to have swallowed it all) is not only prudish and ethereal, but also bleatingly sentimental—because that is what sentimentality is: justification, exculpation, a covering-over, a retreat from clarity, prudishness and etherealism concealing real conditions.

  Still, running a household, after all, is not tantamount to death, anguish, or even waste. Decent and fulfilling lives have gone down that road, if fulfillment is counted in pies and sock-washings. And why not? Bureaucrats and dentists are equal drudges and fiddlers, jobs are cells of domesticated emotion, offices are repetitious and restrictive boxes. Both men and women practice housewifery, wherever they are. Hemingway’s early stories are cookbooks. If only “the management of a house” were the whole story! But no: once invoke Nature and Destiny and you are inviting an intensified preoccupation with death. Death becomes the whole story.

  This is simply because all the truth any philosophy can really tell us about human life is that each new birth supplies another corpse. Philosophy tells only that; it is true; and if the woman is seen only as childbearer, she is seen only as disgorger of corpses. What is a baby-machine if not also a corpse-maker? Philosophy—Freud is a philosopher—leads only to the inexorable cadaver, and never to the glorious So What: the life-cry.

  To say anatomy-is-destiny is to misunderstand the So What, that insatiable in-between which separates the fresh birth from the cadaver it turns out to be. To say anatomy-is-destiny is to reverse the life instinct—to reverse not only the findings of Darwin, but civilization in general. If the fish had stuck to its gills there would have been no movement up to the land. Lungs came because a creature of the sea wanted to take a walk, not vice versa. When a previous abundance of water began to evaporate during the breakup of the Ice Age, the unlucky fish had either to adapt to its destiny—air—or die. Air preceded lungs. In the history of evolution, destiny always precedes anatomy, and anatomy conforms by thinking up a convenient modification. In the history of civilization, dream precedes engineering. Imagine walking on the moon, and the artifact to take you there will follow the conception.

  Freud, a retrograde thinker, had it backward. Celebrated for the-orizing on evanescent and gossamer dream-life, he nevertheless limited humanity to the grossest designs of the flesh. In postulating anatomy-is-destiny, he stopped at the flesh; and the flesh dies. It is no surprise that Freud came finally to “discover” what he called the “death instinct.” He divided the mind between Eros and destructiveness, making death as central to his scheme as sexuality. And in choosing the centrality of death, he reinvented as instinct what the priests of the Pharaohs took to be ontology. By putting birth first, he put death before life.

  This is no paradox. The life instinct, insofar as we can define it (and we cannot), is the struggle to dare higher and higher, beyond the overtly possible, and in spite of knowing we will die. “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower / Drives my green age.”

  In the light of Freud’s assertion of the death instinct, it is absolutely no wonder that he distorted, misunderstood, and hated religion—which is to say holiness: which is to say the struggle to dare higher and higher, beyond the overtly possible. Freud’s Selbsthass was of a piece with his hatred for his inherited faith.1 He despised Judaism because it had in the earliest moment of history rejected the Egyptian preoccupation with a literal anatomy of death and instead hallowed, for its own sake, the time between birth and dying. Judaism has no dying god, no embalming of dead bodies, above all no slightest version of death instinct—“Choose life.” In revenge against Judaism’s declared life principle, and to satisfy the urgencies and priorities of the death instinct, Freud—this was the theme of Moses and Monotheism—turned Moses into an Egyptian. It meant he was turning himself into an Egyptian. It is no joke to notice that for mummies anatomy is all the destiny they will ever own.

  3. DEATH (CONTINUED), A LETTER FROM A MADMAN, AND A PRUDISH AND ETHEREAL CONCLUSION

  The being-born belongs to all of us, yet we remember nothing. In the forgetting itself lies the life principle, the glorious So What—you are here, get started, live, see, do, dream, figure a destiny, and make its mold for your little time. This is the meaning of the forgetting. And just as the being-born belongs to all of us, so the giving-birth belongs to no one. It is not a property or a lasting act. The making of the child gets done, and thereafter the child is a person, not a consequence or an ornament, and must be seen to with the diligence and generosity due all persons.

  To make of the giving-birth a lifelong progression of consequences is to make a shrine of an act. It is a species of idolatry. A moment is mummified and consecrated—that very moment which the whole human race cannot remember. We are told that the capacity for childbirth makes a “woman.” Woman, then, becomes the amnesia of the race. She is nullified into an absence.

  But now there is a contradiction. She is not an absence; she represents, above all, the protoplasmic thereness of the human animal. She represents precisely what decays. She stands for dust, being dust-bringer. I took note earlier of that stupendously simple point: whoever creates the babies creates the corpses. Whoever signifies Birth signifies Death. Anatomy—in the case of woman, parturition—is destiny, the uterus is a grave, the childbearer carries death.

  Freud saw woman wholly as childbearer. Seemingly apart from this perception, he came upon the notion of the death instinct. This he related to the killing of the “primal father” by the sons banded together (a curious unprovable fiction on which a great part of Freud’s work rests). He, the great connector, did not connect his perception of the destructiveness and aggressiveness in human nature with the act of parturition. Logic makes the connection. Whoever destroys, whoever is aggressive, has first to be born; the childbearer becomes Shiva the Destroyer. It is the logical product of anatomy-is-destiny. The uterus destines the woman to spew destruction.

  How can this terrible logic, this ultimate reductio which places the whole burden of humankind’s failings on the woman’s uterus, be contravened?

  With great simplicity. Do not define woman solely by the act of parturition, and the demonic structure dissolves. Then the woman bears the baby, but her entry into parenthood—parenthood, that brevity—does not tie off the world. Parenthood becomes a rich episode in a life struck full with diverse and multiform episodes. She is a mother, a worker, a reader, a sailor. She is a judge, a peddler, a druggist, a polisher of shoes, a pilot, a publisher, an engineer. She is any combination of anything. She chooses life. She is not mythologized by a definition: one-who-gives-birth-and-therefore-spreads-destruction-and-creates-graveyards.

  Now it is time to tell about my letter. It is from a madman. The usefulness of madmen is famous: they demonstrate society’s logic carried out flagrantly down to its last scrimshaw scrap.

  My madman’s letter is typed on four long sheets of legal-sized paper, and all in carbon. Many copies of this letter have been broadcast by the diligent fellow, typing day and night on his machine. Here and there, at some especially passionate point, he has underlined with a heavy pencil. I pity him so much labor.

  The reason he has sent the letter to me is clear. I have published some pieces
on woman and society. He must somehow have worked up a list (he is a master of lists, as we shall see)—a list of writers on the Woman Question, and we are his targets.

  “Friend,” he begins, “women will soon be the most hated and despised of all living things. It is your fanaticism for fecundity that is overpopulating the earth and ruining our ecology.”

  Good: my madman is not so crazy after all. He wants to save the environment. And he calls me friend. Already I like him a little.

  But already I notice the Freudian turn in him. He too thinks of woman solely as childbearer.

  “Years ago,” he continues, “the fist was man’s weapon to slay other men. Then the rock and the club were used. Spears and swords followed, with long lances. The bow and arrow preceded the rifle and six-shooter. The machine guns, artillery pieces, tanks, and aerial bombs follow. Finally, the A-bomb.” Another Freudian turn. My madman has discovered the death instinct. But, though mad, he is logical (and here he has underlined with a furious blackness): “The progress of weaponry corresponded with the output of women’s wombs. That sums it up!”

  But apparently the summing-up is insufficient. There is more, much more: “Anyone who has a money-interest in population growth is apt to be against birth control and abortion.” He means us to understand that it is women who are preëminently against birth control and abortions. It follows that women represent the money-interests. But now begin my madman’s lists, and here is a little lapse: his catalogue of money-interests is curiously devoid of women. He lists doctors, diaper manufacturers, morticians, sellers of graveyard space, tombstones, funeral flowers, caskets, chauffeurs who drive hearses and funeral limousines, publishers of schoolbooks, auto firms that sell cars, trucks, and school buses, oil firms, tire manufacturers, road builders, realtors, contractors. “Lawyers, judges, cops, and jailers get their cut too.

  “I don’t mean to be harsh,” he finishes kindly. “But you women will have to assess your priorities a bit better! You women, with your mania to procreate to keep the Pentagons of the world up all through the small hours night after night scheming ways to kill and maim the product of your overworked wombs. Great will be the animosity toward your overwhelming womb-output! Toward your selfish spawning! Soon”—now he begins to underline again, and this makes his saliva flow nastily—“soon pregnant women will be spat on, assaulted, and even killed!”

  So much for Freud’s adored darlings. The death instinct, having given up on the primal father, is ganging up on pregnant women, who always used to be sure of at least a seat on the bus.

  Reductio ad absurdum. My madman is after all a madman. But he is also, observe, a practical logician. Further, he owns the courage of connection which Freud lacked. He celebrates the Logic of the Hole measurelessly extended. Reduce woman to her anatomy—to Womb—and it is death, death, death, all the way; death and death and death, always, endlessly, gluttonously death. The destiny of anatomy is death.

  _____________

  Essay published in Ms., October 1972.

  1 He was joyous when Jung became a disciple—until then, he wrote Karl Abraham, psychoanalysis had seemed like a “Jewish national affair,” but now, with a Gentile attached to it, it would gain in value.

  Justice to Feminism

  The two essays that follow are “out of date”—the first in the most literal way (Vietnam, civil rights, high birthrates), and both in that they are at odds with their times. Each was written against the grain of academic expectation. Though they were composed a decade apart—the very decade that saw the birth and burgeoning of the women’s movement—and though they are united by a point of view that remains steady and unchanged, each essay appears to be out of phase with majority opinion at its own end of the crucial decade. Feminism as a literary issue was absent before the women’s movement, and now that there is a strong women’s movement consciously defining itself through deliberate segregation, it seems to me that feminism is again absent.

  “No one has been serious and passionate, and certainly no one has been argumentative, concerning attitudes about women,” I wrote in 1965, when there was no glimmer of a women’s movement in sight. “The rebels are few.” “Enlightenment has, for women, and especially by women, not yet occurred.” How peculiar all that would sound only a short while later! And not simply peculiar, but offensively whimsical, like a costume not really antiquated enough to have taken on remoteness or indifference. The words grate.

  But in the middle sixties, to write an essay on the exclusion (and self-exclusion) of women was an anomalous and isolating act—as anomalous and isolating as it had been for Virginia Woolf forty years earlier. Even its language (it shames me now) is strangely, unpleasantly formal. The eerie gravity of tone derives not so much from a pretense of authority as from the stiffness of the unused and the unfamiliar: a walk in new shoe-leather. The tone combines temerity and mimicry; it flaunts the sneer that fears a sneer. I was writing from a briar patch on a desert island in the middle of a bog—an uncomfortable and lonely place to be. Feminism was, in those years, a private tenet one held alone, in an archaic voice.

  By 1977, when I wrote my “Dissent” from the headlong development of self-segregation in the women’s movement, I was again alone. I found that the new exclusions and psychological definitions of the shapers of this movement exactly matched the old exclusions and definitions. A politics of sex had come into being only to undermine classical feminism. For writers, regression under the banner of a “new” feminism was especially saddening. In the absence of a women’s movement, the term “woman writer” had shut out, damaged, and demeaned writers; with the emergence of the movement and the direction it has taken, there are now no allies anywhere against reductiveness, and the language of clarity falls more and more into rubble.

  1. Previsions of the Demise of the Dancing Dog

  Young women, . . . you are, in my opinion, disgracefully ignorant. You have never made a discovery of any importance. You have never shaken an empire or led an army into battle. The plays of Shakespeare are not by you, and you have never introduced a barbarous race to the blessings of civilization. What is your excuse?

  VIRGINIA WOOLF, A Room of One’s Own

  No comradely socialist legislation on women’s behalf could accomplish a millionth of what a bit more muscle tissue, gratuitously offered by nature, might do. . . .

  ELIZABETH HARDWICK, A View of One’s Own

  Several years ago I devoted a year to Examining the Minds of the Young. It was a curious experience, like going into theater after theater in a single night, and catching bits of first acts only. How will the heroine’s character develop? Will the hero turn out to be captain of his fate or only of some minor industry? I never arrived at the second act, and undoubtedly I will never be witness to the denouement. But what I saw of all those beginnings was extraordinary: they were all so similar. All the characters were exactly the same age, and most had equal limitations of imagination and aspiration. Is “the individual,” I wondered, a sacred certainty, and the human mind infinitely diversified, as we are always being told? Examine for yourself the Minds of the Young and it is possible you will begin to think the opposite. Democratic theory is depressingly correct in declaring all men equal. Just as every human hand is limited at birth by its five fingers, so is every human mind stamped from a single, equally obvious, pattern. “I have never in all my various travels seen but two sorts of people, and those very like one another; I mean men and women, who always have been, and ever will be, the same,” wrote Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in the middle of the eighteenth century. Human nature is one.

  The vantage point from which I came to these not unusual conclusions was not from reading the great philosophers, or even from reading Lady Mary—it was from a job. I was hired by a large urban university to teach English to freshmen: three classes of nearly a hundred young men and young women, all seventeen, some city-born, some suburban, some well-off, some only scraping by, of every ethnic group and of every majority religion but H
indu. Almost all were equipped with B high-school averages; almost all were more illiterate than not; almost all possessed similar prejudices expressed in identical platitudes. Almost all were tall, healthy, strong-toothed, obedient, and ignorant beyond their years. They had, of course, very few ideas—at seventeen this can hardly be called a failing; but the ideas they had were plainly derived not from speculation but from indoctrination. They had identical minuscule vocabularies, made identical errors of grammar and punctuation, and were identically illogical. They were identically uneducated, and the minds of the uneducated young women were identical with the minds of the uneducated young men.

  Now this last observation was the least surprising of all. Though unacquainted with the darkest underbrush of the human mind (and here it must be emphatically averred that deep scrutiny, at indecently short intervals, of one hundred freshman themes is the quickest and most scarifying method of achieving intimacy with the human mind in its rawest state), I had never doubted that the human mind was a democratic whole, that it was androgynous, epicene, asexual, call it what you will; it had always seemed axiomatic to me that the minds of men and women were indistinguishable.

  My students confirmed this axiom to the last degree. You could not tell the young men’s papers from the young women’s papers. They thought alike (badly), they wrote alike (gracelessly), and they believed alike (docilely). And what they all believed was this: that the minds of men and women are spectacularly unlike.

  They believed that men write like men, and women like women; that men think like men, and women like women; that men believe like men, and women like women. And they were all identical in this belief.

  But I have said, after all, that they were alike in illiteracy, under-education, ignorance, and prejudice.