Art and Ardor

by Cynthia Ozick

  But the rebels are few.

  That is because among us for a long time no one rebelled, no one protested, no one wanted to renovate or liberate, no one asked any fundamental question. We have had, alas, and still have, the doubtful habit of reverence. Above all, we respect things as they are. If we want to step on the moon, it is not to explore an unknown surface or to divine a new era, but to bolster ourselves at home, among the old home rivals; there is more preening than science in that venture, less boldness than bravado. We are so placid that the smallest tremor of objection to anything at all is taken as a full-scale revolution. Should any soul speak up in favor of the obvious, it is taken as a symptom of the influence of the left, the right, the pink, the black, the dangerous. An idea for its own sake—especially an obvious idea—has no respectability.

  Among my students—let us come back to them, since they are our societal prototypes—all this was depressingly plain. That is why they could not write intelligibly—no one had ever mentioned the relevance of writing to thinking, and thinking had never been encouraged or induced in them. By “thinking” I mean, of course, not the simple ability to make equations come out right, but the devotion to speculation on that frail but obsessive distraction known as the human condition. My students—male and female—did not need to speculate on what goals are proper to the full life; male and female, they already knew their goals. And their goals were identical. They all wanted to settle down into a perpetual and phantom coziness. They were all at heart sentimentalists—and sentimentalists, Yeats said, are persons “who believe in money, in position, in a marriage bell, and whose understanding of happiness is to be so busy whether at work or play, that all is forgotten but the momentary aim.” Accordingly, they had all determined, long ago, to pursue the steady domestic life, the enclosed life, the restricted life—the life, in brief, of the daydream, into which the obvious must not be permitted to thrust its scary beams.

  By the “obvious” I mean, once again, the gifts and teachings and life-illuminations of art. The methods of art are variegated, flexible, abstruse, and often enough mysterious. But the burden of art is obvious: here is the world, here are human beings, here is childhood, here is struggle, here is hate, here is old age, here is death. None of these is a fantasy, a romance, or a sentiment, none is an imagining; all are obvious. A culture that does not allow itself to look clearly at the obvious through the universal accessibility of art is a culture of tragic delusion, hardly living; it will make room for a system of fantasy Offices on the one hand, and a system of fantasy Homes on the other, but it will forget that the earth lies beneath all. It will turn out role-playing stereotypes (the hideousness of the phrase is appropriate to the concept) instead of human beings. It will shut the children away from half the population. It will shut aspiration away from half the population. It will glut its colleges with young people enduringly maimed by illusions learned early and kept late. It will sup on make-believe. But a humanist society—you and I do not live in one—is one in which a voice is heard: “Come,” it says, “here is a world requiring architects, painters, playwrights, sailors, bridge-builders, jurists, captains, composers, discoverers, and a thousand things besides, all real and all obvious. Partake,” it says; “live.”

  Is it a man’s voice or a woman’s voice? Students, colleagues, listen again; it is two voices. “How obvious,” you will one day reply, and if you laugh, it will be at the quaint folly of obsolete custom, which once failed to harness the obvious; it will not be at a dancing dog.

  2. Literature and the Politics of Sex: A Dissent

  Women who write with an overriding consciousness that they write as women are engaged not in aspiration toward writing, but chiefly in a politics of sex. A new political term makes its appearance: woman writer, not used descriptively—as one would say “a lanky brownhaired writer”—but as part of the language of politics.

  Now a politics of sex can be very much to the point. No one would deny that the movement for female suffrage was a politics of sex, and obviously any agitation for equality in employment, in the professions, and in government is a politics of sex.

  But the language of politics is not writer’s language. Politics begins with premises; imagination goes in search of them. The political term woman writer signals in advance a whole set of premises: that, for instance, there are “male” and “female” states of intellect and feeling, hence of prose; that individuality of condition and temperament do not apply, or at least not much, and that all writing women possess—not by virtue of being writers but by virtue of being women—an instantly perceived common ground; that writers who are women can best nourish other writers who are women.

  “There is a human component to literature,” according to Ellen Moers, “which a woman writer can more easily discuss with another woman writer, even across an ocean, than she can with the literary man next door.”4

  I deny this. There is a human component to literature that does not separate writers by sex, but that—on the contrary—engenders sympathies from sex to sex, from condition to condition, from experience to experience, from like to like, and from unlike to unlike. Literature universalizes. Without disparaging particularity or identity, it universalizes; it does not divide.

  But what, with respect to particularity or identity, is a “woman writer”? Outside its political uses, “woman writer” has no meaning—not intellectually, not morally, not historically. A writer is a writer.

  Does a “woman writer” have a separate psychology—by virtue of being a woman? Does a “woman writer” have a separate body of ideas—by virtue of being a woman? It was these misleading currencies that classical feminism was created to deny.

  Does a “woman writer” have a body of separate experience—by virtue of being a woman? It was this myth-fed condition of segregation that classical feminism was created to bring an end to.

  Insofar as some women, and some writers who are women, have separate bodies of experience or separate psychologies, to that degree has the feminism of these women not yet asserted itself. In art, feminism is that idea which opposes segregation; which means to abolish mythological divisions; which declares that the imagination cannot be “set” free, because it is already free.

  To say “the imagination is free” is, in fact, a tautology. The imagination is by definition, by nature, freedom and autonomy. When I write, I am free. I am, as a writer, whatever I wish to become. I can think myself into a male, or a female, or a stone, or a raindrop, or a block of wood, or a Tibetan, or the spine of a cactus.

  In life, I am not free. In life, female or male, no one is free. In life, female or male, I have tasks; I have obligations and responsibilities; I have a toothache, being contingent on nature; I am devoured by drudgery and fragmentation. My freedom is contingent on need. I am, in short, claimed. Female or male, I am subject to the disciplines of health or disease, of getting and spending, of being someone’s child and being someone’s parent. Society—which is not yet utopia—tells me to go stand there and do that, or else keep my distance and not do this. In life, I accept those dictums of Society which seem to me to be the same as Civilization, and quarrel with the rest.

  But when I write, what do Society and its protocol mean to me? When I write, I am in command of a grand As If. I write As If I were truly free. And this As If is not a myth. As soon as I proclaim it, as soon as my conduct as a writer expresses it, it comes into being.

  A writer—I mean now a fiction writer or a poet, an imagining writer—is not a sociologist, or a social historian, or a literary critic, or a journalist, or a politician. The newspeak term “woman writer” has the following sociological or political message: “Of course we believe in humanity-as-a-whole. Of course we believe that a writer is a writer, period. But let us for a little while gather together, as women, to become politically strong, strong in morale, a visible, viable social factor; as such, we will separate ourselves only temporarily, during this strengthening period, and then, when we can rejoin the w
orld with power and dignity in our hands, we will rejoin it, and declare ourselves for the unity of the human species. This temporary status will be our strategy in our struggle with Society.”

  That is the voice of the “woman writer.” But it is a mistaken voice. Only consider: in intellectual life, a new generation comes of age every four or five years. For those who were not present at the inception of this strategy, it will not seem a strategy at all; it will be the only reality. Writers will very soon find themselves born into one of two categories, “woman writer” or “writer,” and all the “writers” will be expected to be male—an uninspiring social and literary atmosphere the world has known before. “Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be,” the Poet Laureate Robert Southey scolded Charlotte Brontë. But that was the early half of the nineteenth century. Only twenty years ago, an anthologist of Russian literature, speaking of a Russian writer’s international influence, remarked that “in the case of certain British lady-writers it may be said to have been nothing short of disastrous.” He does not tell us about those British gentleman-writers who were also bad literary imitators. One could raise a mountain of such quotations, all specializing in the disparagement that inevitably emerges out of segregation. The success of feminism inhibited such views, but regression will be made easy once the pure, unqualified, unpolemical, unpoliticized word “writer” begins all over again to refer to only half the writers there are.

  And not only this. The strategy is based on a temporary assumption of an untruth. When the strategy’s utility passes, we are assured, the natural condition of unity will be resumed. But it is dangerous to accommodate to a falsehood even for a single minute. The so-called temporary has an ineluctable inclination to turn into long-range habit. All politicians know that every “temporary” political initiative promised as a short-term poultice stays on the books forever. Strategies become institutions. If writers promise themselves that they will organize as “women writers” only “temporarily,” that they will yoke themselves to a misleading self-definition only for the sake of a short-term convenience, it is almost certain that the temporary will become the long-term status quo, and “convenience” will be transmogrified into a new truth.

  But worse than that. Belief in a “new truth” nearly always brings authoritarianism in its wake. As the temporary-segregation strategy more and more loses its character both as to “temporary” and as to “strategy,” it begins also to lay claim to a full, in fact to the only, definition of feminism. More and more, apartness is perceived as the dominant aim, even the chief quality, of feminism. More and more, women are urged to think of themselves in tribal terms, as if anatomy were the same as culture. More and more, artists who are women are made to feel obliged to deliver a “women’s art,” as if ten thousand other possibilities, preoccupations, obsessions, were inauthentic for women, or invalid, or, worse yet, lyingly evasive. We grow familiar, currently, with the presumption of a “women’s photography”;5 will there eventually arise a women’s entomology, or a women’s astrophysics? Or will only the sciences, in their objective universalism, retain the freedom of the individual mind, unfettered by a priori qualification?

  Art formed or even touched by any inflexibility—any topical or social expectation, any extrinsic burden, any axiom or presumption or political nuance, any prior qualification at all—will always make for a debased culture. Sometimes history gives this inflexibility the name of “dogma”; sometimes “party line”; sometimes, alas, “truth.”

  Classical feminism—i.e., feminism at its origin, when it saw itself as justice and aspiration made universal, as mankind widened to humankind—rejected anatomy not only as destiny, but as any sort of governing force; it rejected the notion of “female sensibility” as a slander designed to shut women off from access to the delights, confusions, achievements, darknesses, and complexities of the great world. Classical feminism was conceived of as the end of false barriers and boundaries; as the end of segregationist fictions and restraints; as the end of the Great Multiple Lie.

  What was the Great Multiple Lie? It applied to all women, and its premise was that there is a “female nature” which is made manifest in all art by women. For imaginative writers, its assertions were especially limiting and corrosive. For example:

  1. It assumed a psychology and an emotional temper peculiar to women.

  2. It assumed a prose or verse style endemic in, and characteristic of, women.

  3. It assumed a set of preoccupations appropriate, by nature, to female poets and novelists—e.g., female friendship, female madness, motherhood, love and romance, domestic conflict, duty, religiosity, etc.

  4. It assumed a natural social community grounded in biology and reproductive characteristics (“sisters under the skin”), rather than in intellect or temperament or derivation or societal experience.

  5. It took for granted the difference (from “male” writing) of “women’s” poetry and “women’s” novels by assuming a “woman’s” separate sensibility.

  6. It posited for intellect and imagination a purely sexual base. It assumed the writer’s gender inherently circumscribed and defined and directed the writer’s subject matter, perspective, and aspiration.

  All this emits a certain melancholy familiarity: the old, old prejudices, after all. Their familiarity in voices hostile to women is melancholy, and usual, enough; but now, more and more, the voices that carry these convictions are women’s voices. With some small modifications (for love and romance, substitute sex; for domestic conflict, substitute home-and-career clashes; for female madness, female rage; and omit duty and religiosity altogether), these ideas make up the literary credo of the new feminism. More and more, there are writers and artists and other masters of imagination who declare themselves freed by voluntary circumscription. “Up till now I was mistaken,” they will testify; “I was trying to write like a man. Then I began to write about myself as a daughter, as a lover, as a wife, as a mother, as a woman in relation to other women; as a self I learned to follow the contours of my emotional life. I began to write out of my femaleness.”

  Thurber once wrote a story about a bear who leaned so far backward that he ended up by falling on his face. Now we are enduring a feminism so far advanced into “new truths” that it has arrived at last at a set of notions indistinguishable from the most age-encrusted, unenlightened, and imprisoning antifeminist views.

  Occasionally one hears of prisoners who decline parole, preferring fences and cells. Having returned, they still continue, sensibly and sanely, to call their comfortable old cages “prison.” Artists who insist on defining themselves as “women” artists may, after a fashion, flourish under that designation, but they should not stumble into the misnomer of calling voluntary circumscription “feminism.” Classical feminism, while not denying the body, while not precluding self-image and self-knowledge, never dreamed of engaging these as single-minded objectives. Feminism means, has always meant, access to possibilities beyond self-consciousness. Art, freed of restrictions, grows in any space, even the most confined. But polemical self-knowledge is restricted knowledge. Self-discovery is only partial discovery. Each human being is a particle of a generation, a mote among the revealing permutations of Society. When you know yourself, when you have toiled through “the contours of emotional life,” where are you, what is it that you know, how far can it take you? Self-consciousness—narcissism, solipsism—is small nourishment for a writer. Literature is hungrier than that: a writer with an ambitious imagination needs an appetite beyond the self. For writers who are women, the “new truth” of self-regard, of biologically based self-confinement, is the Great Multiple Lie freshly got up in drag.

  For writers there are no “new truths.” There is only one very old truth, as old as Sappho, as old as Homer, as old as the Song of Deborah, as old as the Songs of David—that the imagination is free, that the gift of making literature is accessible to every kind and condition of human being, that when we w
rite we are not women or men but blessed beings in possession of a Promethean art, an art encumbered by peril and hope and fire and, above all, freedom. What we ought to do, as writers, is not wait for freedom, meanwhile idling in self-analysis; the freedom one waits for, or builds strategies toward, will never come. What we ought to do, as writers, is seize freedom now, immediately, by recognizing that we already have it.

  _____________

  From Woman in Sexist Society (Basic Books, 1971).

  1 Sometimes the analogy is made not between poetry and childbearing proper, but between poetry and an idealized domesticity. Here is the versifier Phyllis McGinley writing in an advertisement for and in The New York Times: “I know a remarkable woman who is a true artist, domestic version. She creates an atmosphere in which her children and her husband can move with delight and peace, pouring out all the passion which Emily Dickinson might have spent on perfecting a stanza or—to update the comparison—as Joan Sutherland does on interpreting an aria. Her masterpiece consists of her family, her house, her community duties.” But would the gifted McGinley be willing to reverse the metaphor, and compare her witty verses with mopping under the bed? Or match Emily Dickinson’s “I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died” with a good nourishing family breakfast, or a morning on the telephone for the PTA? Or liken rendering an aria to sitting down to an editorial in the Times?