The Ritual of New Creation (19 page)

Page 67

often underscored in Ozick's essays: "Western Civilization" cannot sustain and actually may be antithetical to Jewish culture; as we have seen, the only Jewish literature that lasts is that which "touches on the liturgical" or the "redemptive."
Touches on
such religious groundbut does not dwell therein. For despite her distaste for the aestheticism and paganism of Western culture, Ozick also knows that

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 out 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 flesh and blood, with its own life.
¹²

This wisdom (derived in part from Harold Bloom) forces Ozick into a paradoxical position, but fortunately, as a writer of fiction she is spared the necessity of logical consistency. Rather, the paradoxical struggle of imagination and faith that for Ozick is the unique mark of the liturgical writer provides the thematic drive for much of her best work. Thus in Edelshtein's epiphany, the "miraculous reversal" of ghetto and outside world which guarantees the purity of his Jewish imagination and his disappearance from history produces in turn a great longing for the security and creative potential of Jewish communal life. For Edelshtein, of course, the destruction of a geographical community coincides with the destruction of his linguistic community. For Ozick, the Judaism of the American Diaspora can a produce a new Yavneh, where Jews will speak and write a New Yiddish.

Ozick's desire for a New Yiddish can be understood as a special, richly productive kind of nostalgia. Ozick longs for a shtetlcultural and linguistic if not geographicalin which the countervailing forces of imagination and redemption inhabiting the soul of the Jewish writer can most fruitfully work, one upon the other. This shtetl of the soul will afford the Jewish writer her greatest chance to secure the historicity that a figure like Edelshtein has apparently lost. Traces of this nostalgia can be seen whenever Ozick's protagonists attempt to synthesize an imaginative invention drawn from Western culture (or what Ozick in her harsher moments would call an idol) with a Jewish vision of redemption. The failure of all these attempts proves Ozick's contention that any synthesis of imagination and faith will be essentially unstable. But the saving irony is always found in the

Page 68

telling of the tale; in narrative we can
touch on
the redemptive through the exuberance and delight of unfolding events. As in the tradition of Jewish textuality known as Aggadah, the imagination joyfully puts itself in the service of the Law.
¹³

The first critic to invoke Aggadah in relation to secular literature was Walter Benjamin in his consideration of Kafka. His remarks, originally contained in a letter to Gershom Scholem, are worth quoting at length:


Kafka's work presents a sickness of tradition. Wisdom has sometimes been defined as the epic side of truth. Such a definition stamps wisdom as inherent in tradition; it is truth in its haggadic consistency.

It is this consistency of truth that has been lost. Kafka was far from the first to face this situation. Many had accommodated themselves to it, clinging to truth or whatever they happened to regard as truth and, with a more or less heavy heart, forgoing its transmissibility. Kafka's real genius was that he tried something entirely new: he sacrificed truth for the sake of clinging to its transmissibility, its haggadic element. Kafka's writings are by their nature parables. But it is their misery and their beauty that they had to become more than parables. They do not modestly lie at the feet of the doctrine, as the Haggadah lies at the feet of the Halakah. Though apparently reduced to submission, they unexpectedly raise a mighty paw against it.
¹⁴

Arguably, what Benjamin saw in Kafka's work was the inevitable transformation of the Jewish literary sensibility following the Haskalah. This "sickness of tradition," in which the imagination as a vessel for the transmission of (religious) truth finds itself drained of content and even opposed to the Law, becomes paradigmatic for the secular Jewish writer in the modern age. It may well be that the tension between Aggadah and Halakah has always prevailed; one scholar notes that when we consider the two modes, "We are in the presence of the permanent human agon between restraint and freedom. They are an articulation of the fundamental, universal, interminable combat of obedience and individual conceit."
¹⁵Such a description certainly augments Benjamin's analysis: in the past, the tension between restraint and freedom was found within a carefully guarded religious tradition, but in the work of a modern writer like Kafka, the

Page 69

boundaries of tradition have been broken and this tension determines the nature of the text to an even greater extent.

Here is the necessary theoretical means for an understanding of Ozick's cultural nostalgia. Ozick wishes to bypass the modern gulf between Aggadic transmissibility and Halakhic truth content, returning to a traditional situation in which the Jewish narrative propensity does indeed lie modestly at the feet of the doctrine. That such a situation may never have really existed, and that the post-Enlightenment Jewish author may be the heir to a "permanent human agon" that is exacerbated by the conditions of secular literary productionthis is the knowledge against which Ozick must defend herself. In a recent interview, she offers a new perspective on the problem, one in which faith and imagination can be reconciled:

I no longer think of imagination as a thing to be dreaded. Once you come to regard imagination as ineluctably linked with monotheism, you can no longer think of imagination as competing with monotheism. Only a very strong imagination can rise to the idea of a non-corporeal God. The lower imagination, the weaker, falls into the proliferation of images. My hope is some day to be able to figure out a connection between the work of monotheism-imagining and the work of story-imagining. Until now I have thought of these as enemies.
¹⁶

In the shtetl of her soul, Ozick spins out her extravagant tales, a remote literary descendent of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, who took to telling stories to purify the imaginations of his disciples in preparation for the messianic redemption. And while Ozick certainly is not caught up in any messianic strivings (
The Messiah of Stockholm
can actually be read as a new version of the rabbinical warning against "pressing for the end"), she does long for a humanistic literature of redemption, which, unlike the work of Kafka or Bruno Schulz, would honor the virtues of the Law in the proper fashion of normative Judaism.

Ozick's troubled defense of what could be called the problem of modern Aggadah has a telling effect on the overall generic contours of her work, as well as the shape of her plots and the growth of her characters. Over the course of her career, Ozick zigzags between a relatively straightforward realism and a benignly magical fabulation. The latter work usually takes the form of the parabolic tale variously

Other books

The Enlightened Sex Manual: Sexual Skills for the Superior Lover by David Deida

After Midnight: (A Penguin Special from Signet Eclipse) (Killer Instincts) by Elle Kennedy

A New World: Sanctuary by John O'Brien

The War that Saved My Life by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley

Gudsriki by Ari Bach

Malcolm and Juliet by Bernard Beckett

A Cold Season by Alison Littlewood

Our Daily Bread by Lauren B. Davis

La última noche en Los Ángeles by Lauren Weisberger

The Long Walk by Stephen King, Richard Bachman