COMMENT
Cynthia Ozick
WHAT LITERATURE MEANS
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
