BOOKS
485
predicament. The dentist's initial dilemma, for instance, brilliantly
dramatizes the moral implications of Freud's argument in
Beyond the
Pleasure Principle.
In
the man's decision to undergo a life-endangering
heart operation rather than continue to live without his sexual po–
tency, we see - to put it in its most reductive terms - the fatal
alliance of Eros and Thanatos, and we see it as inevitable, irresisti–
ble, the selfs anarchic refusal to subordinate its instinctual desires to
the mandates of civilization.
Ozick, too, stands her characters in the path between opposing
mirrors in
The Messiah of Stockholm.
Here, too, the reliability of the
narrative is in constant doubt. Each of the major characters is, it
gradually unfolds, an impostor, though we're never meant to be en–
tirely clear as to where the real identity of Lars Andemening ends
and his fantasy self takes over. There is something pitiable as well as
grotesque about such a character - and the superb aesthetic effects
that Ozick achieves with her false
Messiah
do not cheapen his
predicament but charge it with intensity. The fixation on Bruno
Schulz, the willingness to be hoaxed, then the astonished and
astonishing rejection of the hoax: the withdrawal from the dream at
the very moment when it appears to be coming true: what else is this
but a parable of the imaginative life, its lure , its limits, and its costs?
Like Roth, Ozick strives to explore, in all its complexity, the in–
terplay between writing as a species of artistic invention and writing
as a way of keeping a sacred covenant. These rival conceptions of the
writer's vocation coexist at best in an uneasy detente. But constant
conflict can yield to periodic acts of reconciliation, as when, in a
single publishing season, books of the imaginative strength of
The Counterlife
and
The Messiah of Stockholm
arrive.
DAVID LEHMAN
FACT AND FICTION
A DARK SCIENCE: WOMEN, SEXUALITY, AND PSYCHIATRY IN THE
NINETEENTH CENTURY. By Jeffrey Moussaleff Masson.
Farrar,
Straus,
&
Giroux. $16.00.
Jeffrey Masson is a man with a mlSSlOn. The story of
Masson's controversial dismissal in 1981 as Projects Director of the
