482
PARTISAN REVIEW
Ozick's own fiction, particularly a work like
The Messiah of Stockholm,
whose texture is that of a fable and whose plot appeals to our ap–
petite for irrational enchantment?
In short, Ozick the moralist has put Ozick the artist in the self–
contradictory position of a knights-or-knaves game of logic: she is
the truthteller who says, "Don't believe me, I'm a liar." A skeptic
might say that Ozick's fiction follows a recipe for eating your cake
and having it, too. Putting your art at the service of an admonition
against art leaves you in a cruel metaphysical dilemma: by what dis–
pensation are your works spared from the indictment? The paradox
is complete when we observe that the only legitimate defense of
Ozick's position is one that her own critical principles would require
her to reject. It could be argued that Ozick's fiction needn't conform
to her critical propositions; that if it exposes the limitations of those
propositions, so much the better; that it isn't the responsibility of the
fiction writer to resolve the logical conundrums that preoccupy her,
intractable as they are . Enough it is to explore them in fiction of such
flesh-and-blood immediacy that the writer's more-or-Iess private
obsession turns into a metaphor in which we are all in some ways
implicated. In sum,
The Messiah
oj
Stockholm
doesn't solve the prob–
lem that energizes it, but permissive readers aren't likely to com–
plain . Moral ambiguities are more to our liking than moral
absolutes, after all- especially when the author fulfills, as Ozick
does, the writer's real categorical imperative : to enchant us, whether
with truths or half-truths or supreme fictions.
The Messiah
oj
Stockholm
lends itself well enough to paraphrase,
though a casualty of the exercise is the surface delight of Ozick's
prose. We find ourselves in the literary "stewpot" of Stockholm-a
setting that has the advantage of seeming at once remote from our
Manhattan cauldron yet upon inspection curiously like it. That the
Nobel Prize in Literature is conferred in Stockholm gives us a hint of
the stakes involved in the parable Ozick spins out. Lars Andemen–
ing, an obscure and rather seedy specimen of the literary life , may
seem an anachronistic vestige of an age of idealism ; his bohe–
mianism takes the form of an ascetic ideal . Lars uncompromisingly
devotes his weekly book column to Eastern European writers rather
than to books of topical interest. He is content with his lack of public
consequence, for he is convinced his destiny is worth waiting for. It's
his belief-or is it fantasy? - that his father was Bruno Schulz, the
martyred author of
The Street of Crocodiles and Sanitarium Under the Sign
of the Hourglass.
