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tragedy; for one thing, there are very funny moments in
The Shawl.
(Eco's shaggy-dog sarcasm is cut off from extremes of laughter and tears;
it provokes a snicker.) What is classical is the elegant shape of this little
novel , in which Ozick sets before us a world of eloquent excursions and
crisp choices. Both "The Shawl" and its longer sequel, "Rosa," could be
said to be located in hell, but it is a hell ordered by the writer's art. Oz–
ick is everywhere sparing of detail - to luminous effect. As Rosa sees her
child tossed at the barbed wire in the camp, the scene is rendered with
meticulous cubism: urgent, inevitable, fragmented, and rapid at once.
Far ofT, very far, Magda leaned across her air-fed belly, reaching out
with the rods of her arms. She was high up , elevated, riding some–
one's shoulder. But th e shoulder that carried Magda was not coming
toward Rosa and the shawl, it was drifting away, the speck of Magda
moving more and more into the smoky distance. Above the shoulder,
a helmet glinted. The light below tapped the helmet and sparkled it
into a goblet. Below the helmet a black body like a domino and a
pair of black boots hurl ed themselves in the direction of the electri–
fied fence.
In
these two stories there is on ly this one death, a death not even
quite seen or described. There is one shawl, first the starving baby's paci–
fier, then , for the surviving mother, a talisman. Eco would weave a
dozen shawls into a shroud of Turin which he would then painstakingly
and predictably expose as a fake. Nothing in the world of
The Shawl
is
breathlessly catalogued, only to be tossed onto the scrapheap of history.
The baby Magda has been tossed against the fence, but even this life and
death are not lost on or for the hoarding survivor Rosa, who writes
Magda, now a full-grown and beautiful ghost, long letters in Polish.
Letters are to
The Shawl
as The Plan is to
Foucault's Pendulum;
both
works concern written records rather than lived lives, or texts rather than
voices. Rosa 's past suffering has almost destroyed her, whereas Casaubon
and his friends can be said to have sought out their own suffering; but in
both works a single character seems to embody the life force, urging the
preoccupied philosopher out of his or her obsession with the irrecover–
able past. Nubile and warmhearted Lia, Casaubon's girlfriend and the
mother of his child, disappears from Eco's novel for a long stretch;
Cordelia-like, she seems to signity by her eclipse that the forces of evil are
triumphing. Lia's odd analogue in
The Shawl
is Simon Persky, the kind
old man who befriends Rosa in the laundromat, offers her tea, advises her
not to live in the past.
In
Ozick's bright tragedy or dark comedy, it is
Persky who may prevail; the ghost of Magda shyly flees this presence of
the present.
In
Eco's compendium, Lia and the baby would appear to be
