BOOKS
481
ART AGAINST ART'S SAKE
THE MESSIAH OF STOCKHOLM. By Cynthia Ozick.
Alfred
A.
Knopf.
$15.95
Cynthia Ozick's new novella is loaded with ironies, big
and little. Lars Andemening, the 42-year-old protagonist of
The Mes–
siah of Stockholm,
writes a book column for a Swedish newspaper, the
Morgontorn .
When writing up Lars's story, Ozick couldn't have
known that she'd soon be similarly employed: last January she
became a regular monthly contributor to
The New York Times Book
Review.
In her first "About Books" column Ozick expressed her
unease with the kind of "postmodernist inconstancy" on display in
such novels as Philip Roth's
The Counterlife
,
whose characters "keep
revising their speeches and their fates ." Yet
The Messiah of Stockholm,
like much of Ozick's fiction, plays fast and loose with narrative rules
and seems positively postmodernist in its determination to keep the
reader off-balance.
l
And to whom is
The Messiah of Stockholm
dedicated? Philip Roth.
This gets us to the largest irony, the profoundest paradox, in
Ozick's enterprise - in the literary journalism collected in
Art and Ar–
dor
(1983) as in her fiction .
If
there's one thing she insists upon, it's
that idolatry is evil and idols need to be smashed. Again and again
she returns to the second of the Ten Commandments, the one pro–
hibiting the worship of false gods and graven images. Ozick widens
the prohibition until it encompasses art itself-or, at any rate, art for
art's sake. As she sees it , the "Attic jug" that announced to Keats that
"Beauty is Truth , Truth Beauty," is itself an idol, speaking false–
hood. Nor are novelists to be trusted . Novelists are deceivers, not
good citizens, she writes in a recent
Times
column. At times she
sounds perilously close to the civic-minded philosopher who ban–
ished the poets from his ideal republic on the grounds that poets
specialize in irrational enchantment. So where exactly does this put
1. I have my doubts about "postmodernism" as a critical term and use it only
because of its currency. The term is more than a little ambiguous, and its use
sometimes implies a measure of disapprobation . There is no such intt'nt in this
review .
